“I thought Ma, she hed done jest thet,” Bully said softly. His fingers began playing again with the box. “Throwed hit int’ the fire, ‘long with airy other thing thet was Pappy’s whin I druv him out. Cain’t figger how the Neills got aholt uv it. Pappy didn’t have it whin . . .”
The young man swallowed. “Whin he left, thet is. And nobody seed him since.”
Ellie got up from the bed and stepped toward her man.
“This box, hit set on the fireboard,” Ransden murmured. “Time t’ time, Pappy took it down and looked inside, but he niver let me nor Ma see what hit was there. . . .”
“Cull, honey—”
The upper portion of the box slipped smoothly for a quarter inch across the hollow base. As if a voice had whispered the secret to him, Bully thumbed down one of the half-round ornamentations now that it could clear the base.
Beneath the ornament was a keyhole.
“Oh, hon,” Ellie Ransden whispered. She reached out as if to touch the box or the man; withdrew her arm and wrung her hands together instead. “Oh, Cull, don’t do thet. . . .”
Bully Ransden inserted the key and turned it. As he did so, a gust of cold air raked through the cabin without disturbing the dim fire. The alcohol lamp flared wildly. The flame touched the thin glass chimney and shattered it an instant before the light blew out.
Silver radiance flooded across Bully Ransden as he lifted the lid of the puzzle box. It was gone in an instant.
Ellie screamed and tossed a knot of lightwood onto the hearth. The pitchy wood crackled into an honest yellow glare.
The box lay open on the table. It was empty. But when the man turned to look at her, Ellie saw a glint of cold light in his eyes.
* * *
Old Nathan woke up when his roan heifer bawled, but he didn’t catch the words. A moment later the cat yowled at the cabin’s front door, “Hey old man! Ye got somebody messin’ round yer shed with a gun!”
Old Nathan swung out of bed. He was wearing his breeches and a shirt. The quilt on his bed with its gorgeous Tree of Life pattern was down-filled and thick, but on a cold night a thin old man didn’t generate enough heat to adequately warm the cavity his body tented within the cover.
His breath hung in the air. He stepped silently to the flintlock rifle on pegs above the fireboard.
“I don’t think thet feller oughter be here,” the black-patterned heifer called, speaking to her roan-patterned partner but in a voice loud enough for all the world to hear.
Spanish King was in the far pasture. The great bull bellowed a question that was almost lost in the wind.
There was a full moon this night, but it rode above the overcast. The sash windows were gray rectangles which scarcely illuminated the dusting of snow that had slipped in beneath the cabin doors.
“Come on, old man!” the tomcat demanded. “He’s markin’ yer patch!”
The hearth was cold, though the coals banked beneath sloped ashes would bring the fire to life in the morning . . . if there were need for a fire.
Old Nathan loaded his rifle with controlled care. He poured the main charge of powder into the bore and followed it with a ball wrapped in a linen patch to take the shallow rifling. Cold had stiffened the lubricant of beeswax and butter, so the cunning man eased the hickory ramrod home so as not to snap it in his haste to have a weapon in his hands.
He replaced the ramrod in its tubular brackets beneath the barrel instead of dropping the lathe-turned stick on the floor to save time. He might need to reload. . . .
Old Nathan’s final act of the operation was to measure the smaller priming charge into the pan. Now it was ready to flash from the sparks the flint struck from the steel frizzen whenever the cunning man pulled the trigger.
When the task was complete, Old Nathan began to shiver with the cold.