A CORRUPT BANKER CAME TO TAKE HER RANCH WITH ARMED MEN — Then a Shot Rang Out From the Treeline and a Giant Rode Out of the Mountains With a Fortune in Gold

PART 1

The debt was $1,850.

Serena knew the exact figure the way you know the exact number of days since someone died — not because you count them precisely but because the number has weight, and you feel the weight every day, and the weight teaches you the number.

Thomas had been paying it down. He had been careful, methodical, the kind of man who kept a ledger and reviewed it every Sunday evening and knew to the dollar where the ranch stood. He had borrowed to expand the herd five years ago, when the grazing was good and the market was strong, and had been reducing the debt steadily.

Then the stampede.

A clear night in April with no thunder and no reason for the cattle to run. The herd had gone off the canyon edge in the dark and Thomas had been in the canyon below. Nobody had seen it start. Nobody had seen anything. The town had been very sorry, and Hemlock had been among the first to offer his condolences, his expensive hat in his hands, his face arranged into an expression that had not quite reached his eyes.

The winter had come hard after that.

The drought had come after the winter.

Three payments missed. $1,850 in arrears. The law, as Hemlock had arranged it.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Johnson,” Hemlock called out, stepping down from his buggy. “You’re trespassing, Josiah,” Serena said.

Her voice was steady. She was proud of it being steady.

“Now, Serena, there’s no need for hostility.” That was Sheriff Cobb, not meeting her eyes, looking at his saddle horn. “We’re just here on official county business.”

“Official business,” Serena said. “You mean theft.”

Hemlock sighed — a particular sound, practiced and precise, designed to convey patience in the face of unreasonableness. “The deed of trust states that upon failure to meet three consecutive quarterly payments, the property goes into foreclosure. You owe the bank $1,850, Mrs. Johnson.”

“A debt my husband was paying until he was killed. A stampede nobody saw start, on a clear night, on land he knew like the back of his hand.”

Hemlock’s eyes narrowed.

What Serena suspected but couldn’t prove — what she had been turning over in her mind since the morning the sheriff had brought his hat to her door — was that Thomas had not died because of bad luck. She had no evidence. She had only the wrongness of it, the specific quality of a thing that doesn’t add up when you add it.

“Conspiracies won’t pay your arrears, madam,” Hemlock said, stepping closer to the porch. Behind him, the Miller brothers dismounted. “You have one hour to pack your personal effects. After that, the bank takes possession.”

“I built this house with Thomas,” Serena said. Her voice dropped to something quieter. She raised the barrel. “I buried him on that hill. I am not leaving.”

Cobb cursed under his breath and drew his weapon, his face the face of a man who has made a calculation he doesn’t like but has made it.

Rufus Miller stepped past the sheriff. He had the particular smile of a man who enjoys being given permission to be cruel. “She resists, she’s an outlaw. We can shoot her where she stands.”

Hemlock held up a hand — patient, measured, absolutely in control. “Mrs. Johnson is just emotional. Rufus, Jeb, go up there and disarm her. If she refuses to leave the house, drag her out by her hair.”

Serena’s breath caught.

She was a good shot. She was not good enough to drop three armed men before one of them dropped her. The reality landed on her fully, finally — that the law was here, participating, and there was no higher court available. She had a rifle and a deed and a grave on the hill, and none of it was going to be enough.

Jeb and Rufus started up the porch steps.

“You ain’t got the nerve, little lady,” Jeb said, reaching for the barrel.

The sound that followed was a sound she felt in her chest before she heard it with her ears.

A gunshot — heavy caliber, authoritative, the specific sound of a weapon designed for large targets at distance. The wooden post of the porch exploded three inches from Jeb Miller’s face. He shrieked. He stumbled backward and fell off the stairs into the dirt.

Everyone froze.

The echo rolled across the valley like something that wasn’t finished with them.

They all turned toward the treeline.

He emerged from the shadow of the pines the way something out of the landscape emerges — not appearing so much as resolving, like a shape that was always there and has simply decided to be visible. He rode a massive dark bay draft horse that made the banker’s animals look like toys. He was enormous, broad-shouldered, wearing a buckskin jacket fringed at the sleeves and a wolf pelt across his shoulders. His face was deeply tanned, scarred along the left side from temple to jaw, and entirely, completely still.

In his hands, resting across his saddle pommel, was the Sharps buffalo rifle.

He moved at a walk. Deliberate. He didn’t look at Hemlock, didn’t look at the bleeding Jeb Miller, didn’t look at the sheriff.

He looked at Serena.

“You Thomas Johnson’s wife?”

His voice was deep and rough, the sound of a man who speaks infrequently and means what he says when he does.

“I am,” Serena said. “Serena.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. He was a good man.”

Sheriff Cobb had gone white. He holstered his revolver with shaking hands.

Hemlock, recovering his nerve by several degrees, puffed out his chest. “We are in the middle of legal proceedings. You just fired on my men. Ride on before the sheriff throws you in a cell.”

Tobias Cole turned his head and looked at Hemlock.

The stillness in his face did not change. The temperature in the yard dropped by several degrees.

“You talk too much,” he said.

He swung off the horse. His boots hit the dirt and the impact registered in the ground. He was six feet four and wearing the accumulated evidence of years above the treeline, and he walked through the middle of Hemlock’s men as if they were furniture.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

He looked up at Serena.

“How much does he say you owe, Mrs. Johnson?”

—

PART 2

“Eighteen hundred fifty dollars,” Serena said.

Her voice trembled slightly on the number, the way a voice trembles when it’s been carrying a weight for a long time and someone else has just acknowledged that the weight exists.

Hemlock let out a sharp, mocking sound. “Which she does not have. And unless you have two thousand dollars hiding in those filthy pelts, trapper, this doesn’t concern you.”

Tobias didn’t look at the banker.

He climbed the porch steps, walked past Serena, and set one of his heavy leather saddlebags on the small table near the door. The table groaned under its weight. He undid the leather straps with thick, unhurried fingers.

“Tommy Johnson pulled me out of a frozen river in the Dakota Territory,” Tobias said. His voice carried over the yard, conversational, matter of fact. “I had a broken leg. The cold was setting into my blood. He built a fire, set the bone, and dragged me on a travois for four days to a trading post.” He untied the canvas pouch inside the bag. “I told him I owed him my life.” He dumped the contents onto the table. “He just laughed and said to buy him a drink someday.”

The sound was the sound of gold hitting wood.

Raw nuggets, heavy and irregular, catching the afternoon light. Then the canvas bricks — neat, tightly bound stacks of minted gold double eagles, twenty dollars each.

Hemlock stared.

Cobb stared.

The Miller brothers stared.

“Three thousand dollars on that table,” Tobias said, his voice dropping to something quieter and more dangerous. “The debt is paid. Every dollar she owes. The rest is for her to hire new hands.”

He grabbed a handful of coins and tossed them at Hemlock’s feet.

They landed in the dirt at the banker’s expensive shoes.

“Hand the lady the deed,” Tobias said.

Hemlock looked at the gold. At the giant. At the Bowie knife on the man’s thigh.

He looked at Sheriff Cobb, who had stepped back two full paces and was clearly not going to be any help.

“Hand her the deed, Josiah,” Cobb said, his voice the voice of a man who has done the calculation and arrived at an unambiguous answer. “He paid the debt. We’ve got no legal right to be here.”

Hemlock’s face went through several colors.

He threw the papers into the dirt.

“This isn’t over,” he hissed at Serena. “You can’t hold this land forever, widow.”

“If you or your dogs ever set foot on Pine Ridge again,” Tobias said, and his voice was very quiet now, with the specific quality of stillness that is more threatening than volume, “I won’t shoot the wood next to your heads.”

He let the rest of the sentence occupy the silence.

Hemlock got into his buggy.

The Miller brothers mounted.

Cobb followed, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

They left a cloud of humiliated dust behind them.

Serena stood on her porch in the ringing quiet, holding her rifle, looking at the fortune on her table and the mountain man who had just ridden out of the Bitterroots to put it there.

“Mr. Cole,” she began. “I can’t accept—”

“The ledger is balanced,” he said simply. “A life for a life.”

He looked toward the horizon where the banker’s buggy was disappearing.

“Keep that rifle loaded, Mrs. Johnson,” he said. “A man like Hemlock doesn’t walk away from land he wants.”

—

PART 3

Tobias Cole did not ride away that afternoon.

He moved his horse into the barn with the efficient economy of a man who is making a practical decision rather than a sentimental one, pitched a bedroll near the eastern fence line, and began a circuit of the property boundary that took him until dark.

When he came back, he sat on the porch steps without being invited and drank the coffee Serena brought him without being asked and told her what he’d found: two places in the fence line where the posts had been recently worked, a hoofprint pattern near the creek that didn’t belong to her remaining cattle, and the specific impression that someone had been watching the ranch from the ridge above the south pasture.

“He’ll be back,” Tobias said. Not as a warning. As a weather report.

“What does he want with it?” Serena asked. “A struggling cattle ranch—”

“The railroad,” Tobias said. “Rio Grand Western is surveying a new spur. Easiest path through this valley runs straight across Pine Ridge.” He drank his coffee. “Your land isn’t a struggling cattle ranch, Mrs. Johnson. It’s a right-of-way waiting to be sold.”

Serena looked at her hands. At the land around her. At the grave on the hill behind the barn.

Thomas had known this land. He had known its potential. And Hemlock had known that Thomas would never sell — not for a reasonable price, not for an unreasonable price. Not for anything.

She understood the stampede differently now. Not as a tragedy, not as bad luck, but as a calculation made in a comfortable office in town.

“We need hands,” she said.

“Three,” Tobias agreed. “Men Hemlock hasn’t managed to blacklist or frighten off.”

She knew who to go to.

The next morning she rode to Blackwood, the neighboring town, and came back with Amos Clark — a grizzled, weathered cowboy of fifty-something who had a grudge against Hemlock’s bank going back to a foreclosure on his brother’s farm — and the Harrison brothers, Levi and Caleb, quiet men with good reputations who had been out of work since Hemlock had quietly ensured that anyone who didn’t cooperate with his arrangements couldn’t find employment in the county.

Tobias met them at the gate.

He didn’t make speeches. He showed them the fence lines that needed shoring, the position where someone watching from the ridge would have the best sight line, the two water points where a group of riders could approach the property without being seen from the house until they were already inside the tree cover. He treated them the way he apparently treated everything — as a problem with specific parameters, requiring specific solutions.

They listened.

Over the following two weeks, a different kind of quiet settled over Pine Ridge. Not the heavy, suffocating quiet of a woman alone on too much land, but the purposeful quiet of a place being prepared. Tobias worked alongside the hands with the physical force of a man who had spent years at altitude doing heavy labor without assistance, and the other men fell into the rhythm he set without discussion.

In the evenings, he sat on the porch.

Serena sat on the porch.

They spoke little, at first.

He told her about the Bitterroot range — the specific quality of the silence at high elevation, the way sound travels differently above the treeline, the first winter he had spent there alone after coming west and nearly not surviving it, and the second winter, when he had known better. He told her about the gold strike, found three years ago in a vein nobody else had been patient enough to locate, which he had been living on quietly ever since, buying supplies and spending nothing on luxury because there was nothing up the mountain that luxury could improve.

She told him about Thomas.

Not the grief — she had been living with the grief for fourteen months and it had worn grooves in her that she knew how to navigate. She told him about Thomas the person: the ledger he kept with the Sunday evening review, the way he laughed at his own terrible jokes before he got to the punchline, the plans he had for the south pasture once they paid down the debt, the specific dreams that a man with a ranch and a wife and a piece of good Colorado land accumulates and carries around like something he intends to use someday.

“He talked about you,” Serena said one evening.

Tobias looked at her.

“Once. About a man in the Dakota Territory. A debt he said he’d never be able to collect.” She looked at the fire. “He didn’t tell me the details. Just that he’d done something that mattered and that he hoped the man made it somewhere worth being.”

Tobias was quiet for a while.

“He did,” Tobias said. “Eventually.”

The fire burned down. The night was cold in the way Colorado nights are cold — clear and complete, the kind of cold that makes the stars look closer than they should be.

Serena went inside.

Tobias sat on the steps for another hour, watching the tree line.

—

The attack came on a moonless Tuesday night.

Tobias had been asleep for two hours, which meant he was in the specific light sleep of a man whose body has learned to remain mostly functional while resting, the survival adaptation of years in grizzly country. The snap of a dry branch near the eastern fence line was a particular kind of sound — deliberate weight on dead wood — and he was on his feet with the Winchester before the echo finished.

He moved through the bunkhouse without lantern, his voice low and level: *”Riders. Windows. No lights.”*

He was across the yard and through Serena’s back door before the sound of hoofbeats had fully surrounded the property.

She was already awake.

Of course she was.

She stood in the dark parlor with Thomas’s rifle in her hands and her eyes adjusted to the darkness, watching the yard through the window with the expression of someone who has been expecting this and has made her peace with the fact of it.

“Keep low,” Tobias said. “Don’t shoot until you have a certain target.”

She nodded.

The glass bottle hit the barn wall and orange flame erupted immediately, the kerosene burning with the enthusiasm of something that has been waiting for permission. In the sudden illumination, six masked riders were visible in the yard, holding torches and repeating rifles.

“Burn the house next.” Rufus Miller’s voice, not bothering to disguise it.

Tobias kicked the front door open.

The Sharps roared.

The heavy slug took the lead rider off his horse as he was raising his torch toward the porch roof, and the man hit the ground before the torch did. The bunkhouse windows opened up a moment later, Amos and the Harrison boys laying down a barrage of covering fire that turned the yard into something considerably more dangerous than the hired men had anticipated.

Serena moved to the parlor window.

Her hands were steady.

She had always been a good shot — Thomas had taught her in the first year, practical education, the same way he taught her everything practical. She tracked a man working his way around the south side of the house toward the kitchen entrance, using the shadows, moving low. She took a breath. She exhaled halfway.

She squeezed the trigger.

The man went down clutching his leg, disappearing into the shadows with a cry that confirmed he was hurt but alive.

She reloaded.

Outside, Tobias was moving through the firelit chaos with a specific, terrible efficiency — not the chaos of someone fighting to survive, but the controlled precision of a former soldier who has been in this before and knows that the distinction between panic and focus is what determines outcomes. Two more riders down. Rufus Miller, realizing that the mathematical situation had shifted entirely against him, screaming the retreat.

One of the dismounted riders tried to run. Tobias tackled him.

The man swung a revolver. Tobias deflected it with one forearm and hit the man in the jaw with the other hand, and the man dropped.

The remaining attackers fled.

Tobias and the hands went to work on the barn immediately, Amos organizing the bucket brigade with the rapid practicality of an older man who has fought enough fires to know that the first ten minutes are the whole game. An hour of hard work and they saved the structure, losing only the eastern wall’s exterior — scorched, damaged, but standing.

Dawn came bruised and orange and cold.

Tobias hauled the unconscious man to the porch and threw cold well water in his face.

Jeb Miller came back to himself, looked up at the mountain man standing over him, and apparently found nothing in what he saw that suggested lying was a good strategy.

“How much?” Tobias said.

“Five hundred a man,” Jeb said. “Hemlock. Railroad deal — he said they wouldn’t negotiate while the property was occupied. He needed it empty.”

Serena was standing in the doorway.

She had been standing there from the beginning of the conversation, and her face had been very still, and now Tobias looked at her because he had to say the rest and wanted her to hear it from him rather than from Jeb.

“Thomas,” he said. “Tell her.”

Jeb couldn’t meet her eyes. “Last spring. Hemlock paid us to spook the herd. We fired shots at midnight, up on the canyon rim. We didn’t know your husband was in the canyon. We were just supposed to run the cattle off.”

The silence on the porch was the silence of something settling into permanence.

“He didn’t know,” Jeb said. “Hemlock didn’t tell us anyone was down there. It was supposed to be just the cattle.”

Serena dropped to her knees.

Not from weakness — from the specific physical response of a body receiving information it has been braced against for fourteen months, information that confirms what some part of her already knew, that the wrongness she had been carrying wasn’t imagination.

Thomas hadn’t died because of bad luck. Thomas had died because Josiah Hemlock had decided that the land under Pine Ridge was worth more than the man who owned it.

She stayed on her knees for exactly as long as she needed to.

Then she stood up.

“Amos,” she said. “Saddle the horses.”

Tobias looked at her.

“We’re going to town,” she said.

—

They rode down Oak Haven’s main street at mid-morning.

Serena in front, Winchester across her saddle, her face with the particular expression of a woman who has been through fourteen months of grief and threats and sleeplessness and has arrived at something on the other side of all of it. Tobias beside her on the draft horse, Jeb Miller stumbling at the end of a rope tied to the saddle horn. Amos Clark bringing up the rear.

The town watched from the boardwalks and said nothing.

The news of what Tobias Cole had done to Hemlock’s men two days ago had moved through Oak Haven the way all news in a small town moves — completely, and fast. Nobody who saw the mountain man coming down the main street was in a hurry to get in his way.

Serena pushed through the bank’s heavy oak doors.

Hemlock was behind the teller cage. He looked up and saw Tobias and lost all the color in his face in a single moment.

Cobb was in a chair near the corner. His hand went toward his weapon. He looked at Tobias, then at Jeb Miller, then at the mountain man’s face, and he moved his hand away from his weapon and raised both of them.

“Jeb Miller has confessed,” Serena said. She crossed the floor with her boots loud on the hardwood. “He confessed to the arson. He confessed to the stampede that killed Thomas.” She stopped at the teller window and looked through the bars at Hemlock. “He told us everything about the railroad.”

“A known criminal’s word against a bank president’s,” Hemlock said. His voice was trying to find the confident register it usually occupied and couldn’t locate it. “No judge will—”

“They will when they see the telegram I sent this morning.”

The voice came from the doorway.

A tall man in a dark suit with the silver star of a United States Deputy Marshal. He was the kind of man who had seen enough of small-town corruption to recognize its specific anatomy on sight, and he was looking at Hemlock with the clear, cold assessment of someone who has already made a determination.

“Marshal Craig,” Serena said.

She had asked Tobias, the evening after the attack, how to get past local law. He had said: *federal marshal, Denver, telegraph at dawn, bypass the county entirely.* He had said it the way he said everything practical — as if the answer were obvious once you asked the right question.

Marshal Craig tipped his hat to Serena and looked at Hemlock.

“I received a wire from Federal Judge Moses Howlett in Denver this morning. The Rio Grand Western Railroad executives were quite surprised to learn that Pine Ridge was being violently seized. They had instructed your bank to make a fair market offer to Mrs. Johnson.”

Hemlock’s back was against his office door.

“It’s a misunderstanding,” he said. “A terrible—”

“It’s murder,” Serena said.

Hemlock lunged for his desk drawer.

His hand came out with a Derringer aimed at Serena’s chest.

Tobias moved.

He did not draw his gun. He drew the Bowie knife and threw it — end over end across the room, the throw of a man who has practiced this in solitude for years and has practiced it precisely enough to know exactly where it would land.

The blade buried itself in the solid oak of the desk, across Hemlock’s knuckles, pinning his hand against the wood. Hemlock screamed. The Derringer fell.

Marshal Craig moved forward with the iron cuffs.

“Josiah Hemlock, you are under arrest for conspiracy, arson, and the murder of Thomas Johnson.” He looked at Cobb, who had remained in his chair with his hands visible and an expression of deep resignation. “Sheriff Cobb. You’ll be coming to Denver as well.”

Cobb stood. He didn’t argue. He had the look of a man who had known this moment was coming and had simply been hoping the day of it would keep receding.

Hemlock’s empire came apart with the specific swiftness of things built on false foundations, which is to say: all at once.

—

An hour later, Serena stood on the boardwalk outside the Oak Haven Bank with the deed to Pine Ridge Ranch in her hands, stamped and cleared and legally unimpeachable.

The wagon carrying Hemlock and Cobb had already turned the corner toward Denver.

Tobias came out of the bank behind her, pulling the Bowie knife from the desk and cleaning the blade with the methodical attention of someone performing routine maintenance. He slid it back into its sheath and stood beside her on the boardwalk.

“Your land is safe,” he said. “The railroad will pay you well for the right-of-way.”

“We did it,” Serena said.

He looked at her.

“We,” she said again.

He looked toward the mountains — the distant snowcapped peaks of the Bitterroots, visible on a clear day from anywhere in the valley, the specific geography he had retreated into seven years ago when the world had felt like something he needed to be above.

“You paid the debt,” Serena said. “You fought for this land. For me.” She put her hand against the rough leather of his jacket, her smaller hand against the immovable breadth of him. “You don’t have to go back to the mountains, Tobias. Pine Ridge is a big place. I need a partner to run it.”

He looked at her hand against his jacket.

He looked at her.

The hardness in his face that had been there when he rode out of the treeline — the specific stillness of a man who has made himself impervious to the claims of the human world — was not entirely gone. It would not be entirely gone for a long time, possibly ever. But it was not what it had been. It was the face of a man who has been reminded, by a specific series of events, that the things he retreated from are not the same as the things worth retreating from.

“I reckon,” Tobias said.

The smile that touched his mouth was small and unassuming and entirely genuine.

“I’ve had my fill of the snow,” he said. “I think I’d like to stay a while, Serena.”

—

They rode out of Oak Haven side by side.

Behind them the town resumed its ordinary business, the story of what had happened already beginning to move through the gossip channels that carried everything worth knowing from one end of the county to the other. The corrupt banker arrested. The widow who had stood on her porch with a Winchester. The mountain man who had ridden out of the Bitterroots with a fortune in gold and paid a dead man’s debt because his widow needed it paid.

It would become a story people told for a long time.

But the story people told was not the one that mattered.

The one that mattered was the smaller one — the day-to-day version, which didn’t have a dramatic shape and didn’t require an audience. Amos Clark running the hands with the quiet authority of a man who knows cattle and doesn’t need to be told twice about anything. The Harrison brothers, who turned out to be excellent fence builders and fair shot when it mattered. A roof repaired on the barn. The south pasture cleared and planted with the specific crop Thomas had been planning when he died, because his ledger had the notes and Serena had read them.

Tobias built a proper sleeping quarters for himself in the barn loft, because he preferred to sleep where he could hear what was happening around the property, and because he understood — without either of them discussing it — that Serena needed time before the shape of what was growing between them could be named.

She gave him coffee every morning.

He was on the porch before she brought it, watching the dawn come over the mountains, already having done a circuit of the perimeter that was his version of peace — not stillness, but movement with purpose, the meditation of a man whose body had been put to use for so long that rest requires a different form.

She sat beside him.

They watched the light change across Pine Ridge.

The railroad negotiators came in the spring and made their offer, which was — as Tobias had predicted — substantial. Serena negotiated with the specific, unhurried competence of a woman who has been managing a ranch alone for fourteen months and has learned that patience is a form of power. She got a good price. She used part of it to pay what she owed to the men who had fought alongside her, and part of it to sink a proper well, and part of it toward the debts still on the ranch, and she put the remainder in a bank — not Hemlock’s, which no longer existed in its previous form, but a bank in Denver that had not been involved in the proceedings and therefore had not earned her contempt.

Thomas’s grave on the hill behind the barn she kept as it was.

She went there sometimes in the evening, when the day was done and the work was finished and the light was good. She told him what had happened — the investigation, the arrest, the confessions that confirmed what the part of her that knew Thomas best had always understood. She told him about Tobias. She told him about the gold on the porch table and the Bowie knife buried in Hemlock’s desk and the giant of a man who had looked at her in the middle of all of it and asked, very simply, what she needed.

She told Thomas that she had not stopped grieving him.

She did not think she would stop.

But she had also not stopped being a person. She had stayed, and fought, and kept what was his, and built something on what he had built, and that was as close to honoring a person as the living can get.

One evening in September, Tobias sat beside her at Thomas’s grave for the first time.

He didn’t ask permission. He sat down and looked at the view from the hill — which was, as it happened, the best view on the whole property, because Thomas had chosen the spot carefully — and was quiet for a long while.

“He was a man who did the right thing without needing it to be acknowledged,” Tobias said eventually.

“Yes,” Serena said.

“Good man to owe a debt to,” Tobias said. “Because he wouldn’t have let you repay it until it was actually necessary.”

“He wouldn’t have,” she agreed.

A pause.

“I’m glad it was necessary,” Tobias said.

She looked at him.

He met her eyes with the directness of a man who doesn’t know how to be indirect, who has been alone in the mountains long enough to have lost whatever social mechanism teaches people to approach things obliquely.

“So am I,” she said.

They sat together on the hill until the light went.

The mountains were going to be there in the morning.

Pine Ridge was going to be there in the morning.

And the two of them were going to be there in the morning, which was — when she looked at the year that had brought her here, the grief and the threat and the moment on the porch with her Winchester and the gold on the table and the Bowie knife across the room — the most remarkable thing.

They had stayed.

Both of them.

And tomorrow they would stay again.

THE END