"Somewhere you will not find before the marshal arrives."
Pike looked toward the window. "You said there wasn't a marshal."
"There wasn't," Maeve replied. "So I sent for one."
Thomas drew his revolver. "Then we finish this at the western assay shaft."
Thomas made them walk. Pike rode behind with his revolver trained on Silas. The second hired man, Caleb Rusk, carried a lantern and a short-handled shovel.
Maeve understood what Thomas intended before the abandoned shaft came into view beneath the moonlight: he did not mean to frighten them away; he meant to make them disappear where Elias had.
The western marker leaned beside a mound of recently disturbed stone. Behind it, boards had been torn from the mouth of an old assay tunnel. Cold air moved from the darkness, carrying the smell of wet earth and rust.
Silas stared into the opening. "You knew where he was." Thomas said nothing. "For twenty years," Silas continued, "you knew."
"Your father should have accepted my offer."
The answer was so close to a confession that even Pike looked toward Thomas. Maeve saw it and pressed. "What offer?"
Thomas kept his revolver on Silas. "The west parcel was worthless when Elias filed on it. Then the assay showed silver beneath the ridge. He had land and no capital; I had investors and no title. I offered him more money than he had ever held at once."
"He refused," Silas said.
"He called me a thief."
"Were you?"
Thomas's jaw tightened. "I had already filed an earlier claim."
"A false one," Maeve said. "That is why you needed his survey destroyed."
"I needed him to be reasonable."
"So you threatened his son."
For the first time, Thomas looked away. Silas took one step forward. Pike raised the revolver.
"Let him answer," Maeve said.
Thomas's voice hardened. "Elias came at me beside this shaft. We fought. He lost his footing and fell."
"Silas asked, 'Did you push him?'"
"I did not push him."
"But you left him down there."
Thomas's thumb polished his watch.
"He was alive," Silas said. It was not a question; Thomas's silence was answer enough.
Pike lowered his weapon slightly. "You told us the old man died in a mine accident before you arrived."
"He did die in a mine accident—after you closed the entrance," Maeve said.
Thomas turned on her. "He would have destroyed everything I had built!"
"So you took his sample case, forged his relinquishment, and used the silver to build another life."
"I took an opportunity he was too stubborn to understand."
Maeve touched the ring beneath her coat. "And twenty years later, you put part of what you stole on my finger."
The sound that followed came from inside the shaft. A timber cracked. Then part of the loose entrance collapsed, exposing a narrow space behind the boards. The lantern light reached a leather case trapped beneath stone; beside it lay the corroded face of a pocket watch. Silas recognized the double crescent engraved on its cover. His father had not left them: he had waited beneath that ridge while his wife died, believing he might have chosen another life.
Silas moved toward Thomas. Maeve caught his hand.
"If you kill him," she said quietly, "he becomes the last decision your father ever makes for you."
Thomas heard her. "Listen to your new wife, Mercer."
Silas stopped. "She isn't my wife," he said. "And unlike you, I don't need her to belong to me before I listen."
Thomas struck him with the revolver. Silas fell against one of the old support posts.
Rusk grabbed Maeve's arm. She drove the heel of her boot onto his foot, twisted free, and pulled the loose support rope hanging beside the shaft. The crossbar dropped between them.
Pike could have fired. Instead, he stepped away from Thomas. "You hired me to recover papers," he said, "not murder a woman and bury her."
"Then take your money and go," Thomas snapped.
Pike looked at the mine entrance, at Elias's watch, and at the man who had lied to him. "I think I'll stay long enough to tell the marshal what I heard."
Thomas fired. Pike threw himself aside; the bullet struck the timber behind him. The rotten support split, and the edge of the tunnel gave way with a roar of earth and wood. Thomas tried to run; a falling beam pinned one leg beneath it. His revolver slid across the ground and stopped at Maeve's feet.
She picked it up. Thomas looked from the weapon to her face.
"Maeve..." For six years, he had relied on that tone: the calm voice suggesting that whatever he wanted was also the reasonable thing to do. "Help me."
Maeve lowered the revolver but did not move toward him.
Silas could have watched Thomas remain beneath the beam; no one present would have blamed him. Instead, he crossed the rubble, braced both hands beneath the timber, and looked at Pike. "Lift."
Together, they freed Thomas and bound his hands with the same rope he had intended to use on them. Silas did not save him out of mercy alone: he saved him because a living prisoner could speak in court, and because Elias Mercer had already lost enough to Thomas Callahan without losing his son's conscience, too.
They waited at the cabin until sunrise. Pike guarded Thomas. Rusk fled during the confusion, but a Deputy United States Marshal captured him two days later at a rail crossing east of Laramie.
Reverend Hollis arrived shortly after dawn with the General Land Office inspector and two armed townsmen. The ledger was still beneath the boards in the woodbox. The inspector compared its entries with the surviving claim file.