You are alive," she sobbed into his coat. "You are alive! " Eli held her. He buried his face in her hair, which smelled of gunpowder and rose water. He shook. The tears came then, hot and fast, a release of the terror he had carried for weeks.
"We lost the barn," he whispered. "We lost the tools. " "We kept the house," Clara said, pulling back to look at him. Her face was stre with soot and tears. We kept the land and we kept us. She took his face in her hands just as he had done for her inside.
I choose you, Eliqincaid, she said. With a barn or without it, rich or poor, I am still here. I am still here, Eli repeated. He leaned down and kissed her. It was not a kiss of passion, but of desperation and relief.
It was a seal on a contract written in blood and smoke. Behind them, the marshall was leading Pike away. The town's folk were beginning to form a bucket brigade from the creek, trying to keep the fire from spreading to the house. The community was returning tentatively to aid the man who had stood his ground. The sun began to dip low in the west, turning the smoke-filled sky a bruised purple.
Later, inside the house, the silence returned. The windows were still boarded, but the door was open to let out the smoke. They sat on the floor, leaning against the overturned table. They were too tired to move the furniture back. Eli had wrapped Clara's hands in clean bandages where the recoil of the shotgun had split her skin.
Pike is not the only one," Eli said quietly into the gloom. "The syndicate is big. They will send someone else. Maybe next year, maybe in 5 years. " "Let them come," Clara said. She rested her head on his shoulder.
"We know how to fight now," Eli put his arm around her. The fear of his own blood, the fear of his father's legacy was gone. He had held fire in his hand, and he had chosen not to burn. "Yes," Eli said. We know how to fight.
The room grew dark. The only light coming from the dying embers of the barnfire outside, casting a warm, flickering glow on their faces. They sat together in the wreckage of their battle. Holding on to the peace they had earned, fade to black. The smoke from the barn hung in the valley for 3 days.
A gray shroud that refused to lift. It settled into the snow that had finally come, turning the pristine white drifts into a dirty, streaked slate. The winter of 1885 was not a season of rest. It was a season of penance. The Concaid ranch had survived the siege, but it was a broken thing.
The blackened skeleton of the barn stood like a rotten tooth against the sky. The supplies were dangerously low. The hay was gone, burned by Pike's malice, and the cattle were growing thin, their ribs showing through their winter coats like the rungs of a ladder. Eli and Clara did not stop. Survival was a rhythm they knew by heart.
Now they worked from the moment the sun greased the eastern horizon until long after the moon claimed the sky. They dismantled the ruins of the barn, salvaging what nails and timber had not been consumed. They rebuilt the corral. They rode miles every day to chop cottonwood branches to feed the cattle, the bark providing just enough sustenance to keep the animals alive until the thaw. Their hands were perpetually raw, cracked by the cold and the work.