Chapter 4

Tacy did not sleep much on the kitchen cot.

She kept seeing the gray cloth tacked over that door and Alva's bent head against the wood.

Every time she shut her eyes she heard the latch she had not turned.

Before the sky turned she pulled on her boots.

The cook was already at the stove, yawning over a cold pan.

"You're up early for a woman with no chores," he said.

"I've got one," Tacy said. "I mean to earn the rest."

Shay came in with his collar up and snow on his shoulders.

"You're thinking about the forge," he said. Not a question.

"Aren't you?"

He took a lantern off its nail and lit it from the stove.

"Count day's Saturday," he said. "Same as the sale."

"If that's how he means to steal them, he'll move them before the count."

"Nine head don't walk off a place this size without a man on a horse seeing."

"Nine head walk off in the dark with the right man on the horse. Put your coat on."

They crossed the yard in the hard black cold.

The crust broke under their boots and the wind cut at their collars.

The forge sat quiet, the fire banked low under ash.

Shay hung the lantern on a hook and stirred the coals up to a red glow.

Tongs lay across the anvil. A rack of good irons hung on the wall.

Tacy took them down one at a time and turned each in the light.

"D-Bar," she said. "D-Bar. D-Bar."

"What are you doing?" Shay said.

"Making sure your rack's honest before I say it isn't."

He didn't like that. He didn't stop her either.

Every iron was a clean D-Bar, the bar straight, the loop true.

Nothing out of place that a man would see in passing.

"If it was done here, it was done at night," Tacy said.

"And a tool like that doesn't hang on the rack."

She went to the corner where the broken crates were stacked.

Shay set the lantern down and helped her pull them apart.

Splinters, old straw, a scatter of rat droppings.

Under the third crate, wrapped in a grain sack, was an iron.

Tacy drew the sack back.

The business end was a bar mark, filed and struck again.

Half a D, a bar, and a new loop burned crooked onto the end of it.

A B, if you didn't look close.

A D-Bar, if you did.

Shay crouched and looked a long while without touching it.

Then he took it out of her hands.

He carried it to the lantern and turned it in the light.

"This is our stock," he said. "Off our own rack, cut down."

"Whoever did it walked in here in no hurry and put it back where he could find it again."

The forge door had no lock on it, only a bar any man could lift from outside.

Half the crew could come and go through it before breakfast and no one the wiser.

Tacy looked at the door, then at the crates.

"He could have thrown it in the creek," she said.

"He could have burned it down to slag and nobody would know."

"So he means to use it again."

Shay's hand closed on the iron.

"Saturday," he said. "Before the count."

He stood a long while with it.

"I'm the one keeps this forge," he said. "I'm the one holds the hours here."

He set the iron on the anvil, slow, like it was hot.

"You understand what this is," he said.

"A year of missing calves, and the tool's in my shop, under my crates."

Tacy looked at the iron on the anvil.

"You'd have had reason to burn it, and you didn't."

Shay's jaw worked once.

"I've been on this place since I was fourteen years old."

He took up the grain sack and wrapped the iron in it again.

"Not a word to the crew," he said. "Not till I know whose hands have been in this shop."

"Alva?" Tacy said.

"She hears it from me tonight, alone. Not at a table with twelve men on it."

He put the sack under his coat and picked up the lantern.

He looked up at her across the light.

"This puts my neck in the noose, not his."