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Part 2 — The Book in the Hem

Gideon did not open the ledger at once. He set it on the table as if it might burn the wood, then washed his hands, a useless habit from a life that had ended in ashes.

Clara watched him from the bunk, gray-faced, the split petticoat in her lap. “Page four is the judge. Page nine is Clear Creek. He wrote the order himself. Bar the doors. Leave no one to testify.”

His jaw worked. He turned to page nine. The handwriting was neat. That was the obscenity. A line for Mercer homestead. A line for the hour. A payment to Levi Stanton, noted as cleanup. Gideon’s wife’s name was not there. Thatcher had not thought her worth a line.

“You sewed this into a dress while he was beating you.”

“While he was looking for it in the desk,” she said. “I am not brave. I am difficult to kill by accident.”

He almost smiled. It did not arrive. “He’ll come when the thaw lets a horse up Devil’s Drop. Stanton will want the body, or the proof there isn’t one.”

“Then we don’t be here as victims.”

“You can’t walk.”

“I can read. I can tell a marshal what the pages mean, if any marshal in this territory isn’t bought. You can walk. That is the division of labor until the splint comes off.”

For three days the storm pinned them to the cabin. Gideon copied the Clear Creek page in his own blunt hand, twice, and hid one copy in the flour tin and one under a floorboard. The original stayed in the petticoat hem, restitched by Clara’s careful, aching fingers. If they were separated, the truth would not be in only one pocket.

On the fourth morning tracks appeared on the ridge. One man. Careful. Not a trapper’s spacing.

Gideon met him at the tree line with the Winchester low. Levi Stanton looked smaller in daylight than the fever-names had made him, and colder. Scarred knuckles. A cigar he did not bother to light.

“Lost a lady in the storm,” Stanton said. “Boss wants her found. Dead’s fine.”

“Nothing here but traps.”

Stanton’s eyes moved to the cabin smoke. “Smoke says otherwise. Thatcher pays for quiet. He pays better for a crazy homesteader who stays crazy and stays uphill.”

“Tell him the ravine kept what he threw.” Gideon did not blink. “Tell him if he sends you again, you don’t get to ride back and report it.”

Stanton studied the rifle, the beard, the lack of shake in the hands. He smiled without warmth. “Spring, then. Boss don’t like loose ends. Neither do I.”

He left. Gideon watched until the trees took him. When he came inside, Clara was upright against the wall, knife in her lap, face the color of ash.

“He’ll tell Bo I’m a rumor,” she said.

“Let him. A rumor doesn’t get a posse in January.” He set the rifle down and finally looked at her the way a man looks when the past has walked onto his porch. “I said I wouldn’t leave you in the snow. That holds. When the pass opens, I take the book to a federal man in Missoula, not Helena. You come if you can sit a horse. If you can’t, the book goes anyway.”

“And you?”

“I spent five years waiting to die brave.” He nodded at the hem where the ledger lay hidden again. “I’d rather live long enough to make that page useless to him.”

Clara closed her eyes, not in surrender. In the first rest she had taken since Devil’s Drop. Outside, Stanton’s tracks were already filling with powder. Inside, the willow tea steamed, the splint held, and a mountain man who had sworn off humanity sat down to clean a gun for a reason that was no longer only grief.