The lantern sputtered, its flame a drowning wick in a pool of gray tallow. Outside, the wind screamed through the cracks in the cabin logs, a high, thin sound like a animal in a trap. Elias didn’t look up from the table. His fingers, cracked and mapped with dirt that no soap could reach anymore, worked a piece of dry pine with a small whittling knife.
Elias set his jaw, threw the heavy wooden bar, and yanked the door open six inches.
No answer. Only the wind and the scratching of branches against the eaves. 8. When We Are in Need
He was lying too. He had seen the fever-grip before, back in the tenements. It didn't break. It wore a person down until they were nothing but a hollow shell, and then it blew them away like ash.
They had been in the valley for six months. They had come for the promise of open land, of a place where a man could breathe without inhaling the soot of the mills. But the valley was a jealous host. It had locked them in early with an October blizzard that had never truly lifted, and now, in the dead of what they guessed was February, the flour barrel was a hollow drum and the tallow was nearly gone. The lantern sputtered, its flame a drowning wick
“Elias,” she whispered. Her voice was like dry leaves scraping over stone. He didn't look up. “I’m here.” “The soup,” she said. “It was good.”
Elias stood frozen, the poker raised. Everything in him—the hard-learned selfishness of survival, the terror for Clara, the emptiness of his own belly—told him to kick the man back into the drifts and bar the door. They had nothing. To share nothing was to split death in half. His fingers, cracked and mapped with dirt that
The stranger was an old mountain man, his face a roadmap of deep weather-lines. His eyes were closed, his breathing a wet whistle.