Keep the gun close. Do not open the door for anyone but Gus. I will get the judge, she promised, her voice shaking. I will ride to Cheyenne if I have to. They dragged him away, throwing him into the back of a wagon like a sack of grain.
Maggie stood on the blackened porch, watching the dust settle, leaving her alone with a dead boy in the bunk house and a house that smelled of char and ruin. The day passed in a blur of grief and terror. Gus and the remaining hands dug a grave for Billy on the hill. They worked in silence, their faces grim. They were frightened.
They knew that if Eli could be taken, none of them were safe. At dusk, a buggy arrived. Maggie was in the parlor, sweeping up the shattered glass and ash. The wall was scorched black, the wallpaper peeling away in crispy strips. The room smelled of wet ash and disaster.
She heard the boots on the floorboards and gripped the broom handle like a staff. Silas Crane stood in the doorway. He looked around the ruined room, a look of distaste curling his lip. A terrible tragedy. He said, "Get out, Maggie said. " Her voice was low, vibrating with a hatred she had never felt before.
"I'm here to help, Maggie. May I call you Maggie? It seems appropriate given the circumstances. " He stepped into the room, kicking a piece of burnt wood aside. "I can make this go away," he said softly. the charges, the debts, all of it. Sheriff Brady listens to reason, and I am a very reasonable man.
Maggie watched him. She saw the hunger in his eyes. It wasn't just land hunger. It was the same look she had seen on the face of the landlord in New York. The look of a man who sees a woman not as a person, but as a heavily discounted asset.
And what is the price? She asked. Silas smiled. He walked toward her, slow and deliberate. You are a practical woman.
You survived the city. You know how the world works. Eli is finished. He will rot in that cell or hang for negligence. You are alone.
You have no money, no family, and a reputation that is, let us say, fragile. He stopped inches from her. He smelled of bay rum and expensive cigars, a cloying scent that made her stomach turn. Sign the deed over to me, he said. Declare the marriage void.
Fraud, perhaps? Come to town. I have a large house. I have need of a housekeeper. Someone with your specific talents.
The implication hung in the air. Gross and suffocating. He was offering her the position of a kept woman, a mistress in a gilded cage, paid for with her husband's life. Maggie dropped the broom. Silus's smile widened, thinking she was yielding.