Chapter 3
Kate had not wept after they rode away that night.
She had gone out to her cellar, carrying an oil lamp in her left hand.
The cellar had been dug thirty years earlier by her father, an emigrant blacksmith who had worked the copper and lead mines of Cornwall before following the western trails. In the far corner of that earthen room, beneath three feet of hardpan clay, stood her father’s heavy iron-bound chest. It held no gold, no silver, and no currency.
It held his mineral assays, his crucible tongs, and twelve heavy glass jars sealed with bees-wax and rosin, packed in dry sheep’s wool.
Her father had been a surveyor for the mining companies before the territory had names for its rivers. He had known the red hills to the northwest, where the earth smelled of sulfur and the ground was barren of grass. He had taught Kate that the earth held medicines that could cure the ague, and minerals that could make steel hard enough to cut iron, and elements so patient that a man could walk past them a hundred times without ever suspecting their presence.
Kate had selected a single earthenware pot, no larger than an eggcup. Inside was a dense, slate-colored paste, odorless, tasteless, and insoluble in water, but soluble in rendered animal tallow when heated over a slow flame.
It was not arsenic. It was not cyanide. It was not anything a country doctor with a litmus strip and a bottle of silver nitrate would ever detect in a man’s stomach wash.
It was an ancient, elemental metal refined from the lead-smelter dross—antimony chloride compounded with thallium acetate, the quiet, relentless mineral salt that her father had called "the inheritance powder." It had no sharp burn upon the tongue; it had no pungent odor to warn the palate. It did not strike like a lightning bolt in the gut.
It worked like a slow frost creeping into the roots of a tree. It waited seventy-two hours before attacking the insulating sheath of the nerves, shutting down the peristalsis of the gut, and turning the liver into dead tallow.
And Kate had known something else: a dog’s nose is ten thousand times keener than a man’s tongue. A dog cannot smell the poison itself, but it can smell the faint, bitter trace of the chemical sulfur used to precipitate the salt from the acid bath.