"Pike could have fired on you."
"Which is why I did not go."
He stared at her for half a second, then shook his head. "I'm beginning to understand why Thomas had to lie to keep ahead of you."
Maeve gave him back his hat. "You are beginning to understand very slowly."
For the second time on the journey, Silas laughed. This time, Maeve joined him.
The Mercer cabin stood three miles west of Silver Hollow beneath a ridge scarred by abandoned prospect holes. Silas remembered visiting it as a boy while Elias tested the ground for silver. He remembered his father lifting him onto the workbench and letting him press the double-crescent stamp into a strip of warm brass.
The door now hung open. Inside, drawers had been pulled out and broken. The mattress had been cut apart. Hearthstones lay scattered across the floor. Someone had searched recently and angrily.
Silas crossed to the fireplace and lifted the stone Elias named in the ledger. Beneath it was a square cavity containing an iron strongbox. The lid had been forced; the box was empty.
Silas sank back on his heels. For twenty years, he had imagined that finding the cabin would bring him closer to his father. Instead, he had arrived days too late.
Maeve examined the floor rather than the box. "Thomas did this," she said.
"How can you know?"
She pointed at the splintered lid. "The pry marks angle sharply leftward. The old injury kept his right palm from closing fully. Whenever he forced one of our jammed gates, he levered the tool from this side. The damage looked exactly like this."
Silas looked at her. She had transformed a detail from an unhappy marriage into evidence.
"If he found the survey, why stay?" he asked.
Maeve walked to the cold stove. Most of the ash was gray with age. A single curled fragment remained black around the edges. She lifted it carefully with the tip of Elias's ledger knife. Three words were still readable: Western assay shaft.
"Because the survey wasn't the only thing inside," she said.
Silas remembered the final line his father had written: If anything prevents me... "He left directions to where they met, and Thomas burned them after reading them."
Outside, a horse moved among the trees. Silas extinguished the lantern. Maeve slipped Elias's ledger into a flour sack and hid it beneath loose boards in the woodbox. Then, she placed an old church account book inside her carpetbag.
"What are you doing?" Silas whispered.
"Giving Thomas what he came for."
Jonas Pike entered first, revolver drawn. A second man followed, then Thomas Callahan stepped through the doorway.
Maeve had imagined this meeting for eighteen months. In some versions, she struck him; in others, she demanded an explanation until he finally gave her one. The reality was quieter: Thomas looked older, thinner, and entirely unsurprised to see her. His thumb polished the face of his pocket watch. For the first time in six years, Maeve knew exactly what that gesture meant: he was afraid.
"You should have taken the train," Thomas said.
Maeve stood beside Silas, not behind him. "You should have answered the court."
"The court gave you what you wanted."
"No, you gave me what I needed when you left."
Thomas's gaze moved to her carpetbag. "Give me the ledger."
"Which ledger?"
Pike raised his revolver toward Silas. Thomas removed a folded paper from his coat and placed it on the table. It was a bank draft for two thousand dollars—more money than Maeve could earn in years at a laundry.
"Take it," he said. "Go to Cheyenne, buy a house, open a shop. Tell anyone who asks that the ring came from my grandmother, and that Silas Mercer approached you because he wanted to steal my land."
Maeve stared at the amount. The offer was not imaginary: it could purchase safety, independence, and every practical thing Thomas had taken from her. For eighteen months, she had lived at the mercy of other people's spare rooms and small kindnesses; two thousand dollars would end that before nightfall.
"Where did it come from?" she asked.
"Money I protected from the creditors."
"Money you hid while they took the ranch."
"The ranch was already lost."
"Not to me."
Thomas's patience thinned. "Do not make poverty into virtue simply because you have become accustomed to it."
Maeve touched the carpetbag. Silas looked at her but said nothing. He did not remind her what his father had lost; he did not ask her to refuse. The choice cost him too much for silence to be easy, which made his silence matter.
"If I give you the ledger," Maeve asked, "what happens to the Mercer claim?"
"It remains mine."
"And Elias Mercer?"
Thomas's thumb moved across the watch again. "He remains what he has been for twenty years: a man who disappeared."
Maeve picked up the bank draft. Thomas smiled.
She carried it to the stove, touched one corner to the lantern flame, and held it until the paper curled black between her fingers.
"You left me with your debts because you thought poverty would keep me quiet," she said. "All it did was leave me with nothing you could buy."
The smile vanished. "The ledger," Thomas said.
Maeve handed him the carpetbag. He opened it, saw the old book, and passed it to Pike. "Burn it."
Pike threw the book into the stove. Thomas watched the pages catch; Maeve watched Thomas.
Only when the binding collapsed into flame did she say, "That was Reverend Hollis's account of hymn purchases."
Silas almost smiled; Thomas did not. "Where is Elias's ledger?"