Chapter Thirty
The Chapel on the North Pasture
The gray pony took the last rise at a hard gallop, and the chapel came up white and small against the snow with the bell silent in the belfry and the bay horse blowing at the fence and the man bent at the rose.
He had not heard the cart over his own pick.
Zoe brought the pony up at the chapel gate at a hard stop, set the brake, and was down off the seat with the fowling piece in her hands before she had thought a single clear thought about what she meant to do with it.
The cold air burned at her throat. The snow crust broke under her boots.
The man at the rose looked up from his work and turned at the sound of her, the pick still in his grip, the pale gray eyes set close at the bridge of the long nose going wide and then narrow at the sight of her.
“Miss Preston.” Jameson set the pick head down on the frozen ground and leaned on the haft of it, breathing hard from the digging. “You are a long way from your kitchen.”
“Step away from the rose, Mr. Dawson.” Zoe brought the fowling piece up at her shoulder, the barrel none too steady in her cold hands.
“Step away from it and take your horse and go, and I will tell Mr. Collins you went of your own accord, and the whole of this will be a thing the law can settle at a table instead of at a wall.”
“The law.” Jameson’s mouth pulled at the corner, small and cold.
“You have brought a fox gun and a pony cart to a thing the law has had a fortnight to settle and little troubled itself over. Do you know what is under this rose, Miss Preston? I have spent the night at the dry wash on the word of my dead father, and I have come up at dawn with a pick blunted at red rock and fool’s gold and little else.
I have done the arithmetic a man does at the bottom of a dry hole.
The gold was true. My father read it true.
And it is not at the wash, which means it was taken up, which means it was put down again, and a man does not haul a fortune off into the air.
He puts it somewhere a fool will not think to look.
” He turned his head an inch to the bare rosebush and the white wall of the chapel above it.
The cold came up worse in Zoe’s chest than ever before.
“Your Mr. Collins’s grandfather raised this church the year he bought my father’s land.
I have done the arithmetic, Miss Preston. I have only to do the digging.”
“There is nothing under the rose.” The lie came steady on her tongue, on account of the truth being the one thing she had no intention of handing him. “It is a rosebush at a church wall. You will dig for nothing and stand before the law for it after.”
“Then you have come a long, cold way at a hard gallop with a fox gun to stop me digging for nothing.” Jameson set the pick aside and took a slow step toward her.
“You are a poor liar, Miss Preston. It is the one fault I have marked in you. The rest of you, I have marked as the best thing to come to Bozeman in twenty years. Put the gun down. You have little skill at it, and I have little wish to see you hurt.”
“Step back, Mr. Dawson.” Her hands had begun to shake with the cold and the weight of the gun. “I am asking you once.”
“You are asking me with a fowling piece you have not fired, at a range a fox would laugh at.” He took a second slow step. “Put it down, Zoe.”
“Step back.”
He took the third step.
Zoe pulled the trigger.
The fowling piece went off in the cold air with a flat, hard bark, the barrel kicking up at her shoulder, the shot going wide and high.
The bay at the fence threw its head and screamed.
Jameson, in the half second the smoke hung in the cold, came in low and fast off the third step and had the barrel of the spent gun in his gloved fist and wrenched it down and away before Zoe could react.
The gun went into the snow.
His hand came hard around her wrist.
“Now,” Jameson said, breath close to her face, pale gray eyes gone flat and final. “You will tell me what you know, Miss Preston. You came too fast and too sure and too frightened. Nobody rides that hard to guard nothing. You will tell me, and you will tell me at once.”
Zoe put her free hand to his chest and shoved with the whole of her strength.
The surprise of it broke his grip, and she was loose and running toward the chapel gate and the pony cart when his hand came back around the collar of her coat at and hauled her off her feet into the snow.
The breath went out of her on the cold ground, the bare canes of the rosebush a foot from her face.
“You will not run from me, Miss Preston.” Jameson came down to one knee beside her in the snow, his hand on her coat front.
“You will tell me what you know. Or you will sit at this wall while I dig, and we will both of us learn it together, and your Mr. Collins will come at noon to a thing he will little wish to find.”
The cold of the snow came up through Zoe’s coat.
She had done the very thing Wade had done the night before, only worse.
She had looked at a danger and decided she alone saw it true and gone at it alone with a fox gun and a pony cart and a resolve she had taken for courage and could see now for the pride it had been.
There was no soul in the whole of the world to fault for it but herself, for trusting Wade too little to wait one hour at his side.
Lord, I have been a fool at my own pride.
I have run at a thing alone that wanted the both of us.
Forgive me the running. Keep the child behind the locked door.
Keep the men at the wash. Turn them north.
Turn them north, Lord, and quick, before this man learns the thing my own face has near told him.
The bare canes of the rose moved an inch in the wind above her face.
In the dug earth at the root of it, the corner of a thing rose up out of the frozen ground; a corner of dark wood, iron-banded, no bigger than a bread box, the lid of it an inch proud of the dirt where the morning’s digging had near reached it before the cart came up the rise.
Jameson’s pale gray eyes followed Zoe’s stare. He went very still.
“Well,” he said, the word coming up at the back of his throat soft and ruined and small like a thing breaking. “Well, Miss Preston. It seems my father was the better reader of rock after all.”
He took his hand off her.
He reached for the corner of dark wood at the root of the rose, and his gloved fingers closed around the iron band.
Zoe lay in the cold snow and watched the man pull the fortune out of the frozen ground into the gray October light, fourteen years after a dying man had set it down there and asked his sons to let it lie.