Elias had gone down early with a bucket and a habit older than the ranch itself β to look at the earth before he looked at anything else. Cinder stood cropping wet grass, untroubled. The water ran clear again after the rain. Then, at the crossing where the sisters' cattle came down to drink, the mud told another story.
Three horses. Shod, all of them, and lately.
He set the bucket down and crouched. The prints were deep where a horse had stood a long while, shifting its weight, the hind feet trampling a small crescent into the bank. Not a horse drinking and moving on. A horse held. The other two sets were lighter, spaced wide, as if their riders had walked them slow along the tree line and stopped where the pines thinned and a man could see the cabin, the corral, and the south fence without being seen himself.
Elias followed the sign on foot, keeping off it. One rider had dismounted. Boot prints, the heel dug hard, stood a time beside a cottonwood with a low branch. From there the view opened clean up the slope. He put himself where that man had stood and looked. He could see Maren's garden. He could see the porch. He could see the place where his own bedroll lay rolled in the morning.
A cigarette end, pinched out careful, lay in the wet leaves. Men who meant only to pass through did not carry their caution like that.
He worked the crossing in a slow circle. The riders had come from the north pass road before first light and left by the same way, single file, one horse stepping in another's prints where the ground hardened. Not enough to fool a man who read ground for a living, but enough to tell him they did not want to be read by ordinary eyes.
He filled the bucket because a task left undone would worry Willa, and carried it back up with his thoughts ordered the way he would lay out tools.
Maren was at the corral gate with her father's rifle in the crook of her arm, watching him come. She had learned his face well enough in these days to know when it carried weather.
"Trouble?" she said.
"Sign at the creek," he said. "Come and I'll tell you both plain."
Willa came out from the cabin wiping her hands on her apron, flour at her cheek. They stood on the porch in the bright morning, the air washed clean, and he did not soften it.
"Three riders," he said. "Shod horses. They were at the crossing before dawn, in this morning's mud, fresh after rain. One man stood a long time in the trees watching this house. They came quiet, left quiet, and troubled to hide how many they were."
Willa glanced toward the creek as if she might see them still. "Could they be travelers? Lost off the pass road?"
"Travelers water and go," he said. "They don't stand an hour facing a house with the horse's head pulled round to keep it still. They don't put a smoke out careful in wet leaves so there's no smell on the wind."
Maren's hand tightened, not on the rifle β on the porch rail. "Donner's men."
"I can't put a name to a boot print," Elias said. "But it's the same work as the cut fence. Somebody is learning this place. Where the stock drinks. When the house wakes. How many rifles come out of a morning, and who carries them."
The quiet that followed was not panic. He had feared panic, in Willa at least, and prepared himself to steady it. Instead Willa set her jaw in a way that was pure Maren, and Maren herself looked down the slope to the rising fence, post by post, as a general might count a wall.
"They saw you," Maren said. "Your bedroll. The work."
"They saw a drifter mending fence," he said. "Maybe they'll reckon that's all I am."
"And if they reckon more?"
"Then they've learned one true thing." He looked at the rifle in her arm, then at Willa's unarmed hands twisting her apron. "There's more they shouldn't learn easy. From today we don't leave the garden at the same hour every morning. Stock comes up earlier. And you two need to know how to use what you've got β not just carry it."
Maren understood him first. Her chin came up, half defiance, half something else.
"You mean to teach us."
"I mean you shouldn't be standing in your own yard hoping a gun in your hands is the same as knowing it," he said. "It isn't. Hope's a poor sight picture."
Willa let out a breath that was almost a laugh, frightened and eager together. "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," he said, "if the ground dries."
Three riders was not a raid. It was a promise being measured. Whoever sent them was counting days, and water, and courage β and Elias Vale, who had failed once at counting what mattered in the dark, intended that this house would not be counted unready.
Chapter 12
Lessons: Shooting