Chapter 1
The investigator was a man named Silas Ward, a retired deputy circuit clerk and veteran cattle inspector who had spent thirty years examining brands, ledgers, and men who tried to hide the rot behind polished cedar siding. Ward had not attended the banquet; he did not frequent gatherings where punch bowls were kept cold with freighted ice while line riders lived on salt pork and hardtack. He was summoned to the Double-C ranch house by Clayton’s chief bookkeeper, a nervous man named Miller whose ink-stained fingers trembled as he realized payroll drafts were returning from the territorial bank unhonored.
Miller led Ward down the wide, carpeted corridor of the second floor. The ranch house, which Clayton had modeled after the riverfront mansions of Saint Louis, was suffocatingly hot. Coal stoves burned in every parlor to keep out the October freeze, but in Clayton’s master suite, the stench of sickness overpowered the fragrant pine resin.
Clayton lay propped against four goose-feather pillows, though he had shrunk so profoundly inside his linen nightshirt that the pillows seemed to swallow him whole. His neck was sunken, his skin the color of curdled buttermilk with a sickly yellow cast along the jawline. His hands, which had once broken unbacked colts by main force, lay palms up on the quilted counterpane, twitching with a faint, persistent tremor.
Across the room sat a physician from the railhead town thirty miles west—Doctor Alcott—a man whose black satchel smelled of carbolic acid and laudanum. Alcott looked hollow-eyed and frustrated.
"It is not cholera," Alcott muttered without looking up from his pestle. "Nor is it the black tongue, nor enteric fever. The bowel is seized, the kidneys are failing, the peripheral nerves are firing like hot needles through the soles of their feet, and the pulse crawls like an old mule in mud. And yet, there is no spotted eruption. No lung rattle. Just an inexorable cooling of the blood from the marrow outward."
"And the other four?" Ward asked, stepping closer to the bed.
"Giles is delirious at the livery barn," Alcott replied grimly. "MacIntyre cannot retain a spoonful of boiled spring water. Vance and young Hallowell are lying in the bunkhouse with blankets piled four deep, shivering so hard their teeth have cracked against the rims of tin cups. If this were bad meat, Silas, fifty people would be fouling their beds from here to the county line. The county judge ate three slices of that rib roast; he was at the courthouse yesterday trying a boundary dispute and eating fried eggs for breakfast."