Maren stood beside Elias at the corral fence and watched it end. "Two mornings," she said quietly.
"Two mornings," he agreed. "Somebody up there is meaning it."
Chapter 17
A Warning Brought Down
Siki came down out of the foothills in the middle of the following afternoon, riding a lean sorrel that picked its way over the creek stones as if it knew every one by name. Elias saw him from the fence line and set his tools down in the grass, and by the time the boy reached the yard, Maren stood on the porch and Willa was already coming from the garden with her skirts gathered in one hand.
He was perhaps fifteen, dark-eyed and straight-backed, with his hair bound back and a blanket roll behind his saddle. He did not dismount until Maren nodded β the old politeness, observed on both sides so long it had stopped feeling like politeness at all and had become simply how things were done.
"Kasheen sends me," he said. His English was careful and good, better than he usually let on, Willa had once told Elias, because Siki believed a message should arrive exact. "He says to tell you what his eyes have seen, so your eyes can watch the right road."
"Tell it at the table," Maren said. "Willa, the coffee. Siki, there is bread."
He shook his head at the table but took the bread and coffee standing, the way a rider does who means to go back before dark. The message came out of him in order, as if he had set it down inside himself stone by stone on the ride down.
"Three nights now, riders move horses through the north pass after the moon is down. Many horses. Not their own herd walking quiet β horses pushed, and bunched, and some with brands that are not one brand." He glanced at Elias, measuring whether the stranger understood, and decided he did. "My grandfather counts six riders the first night. Eight the second. Last night, more, and two wagons waited on the far side with no lamps. Men do not wagon stolen horses in the dark unless they mean to sell them far and soon."
"Donner," Maren said. It was not a question.
Siki turned the coffee cup in his hands. "The scarred one leads them. My uncle saw his face by a match, two nights past, when he lit his pipe believing the rocks were empty. A scar here." He drew a finger down his own left cheek. "Kasheen says the man has gathered his scattered ones the way a hand gathers dropped sticks. He is strong again. Stronger than the summer, when he only cut fences and watched."
The yard seemed very quiet. From the corral, Cinder stamped once at a fly. Elias thought of the north pass β the road a herd could be moved down in a single night to anywhere.
"Does Kasheen know which way they'll turn?" he asked.
"No man knows another's turning before he turns," Siki said, and there was his grandfather in the sentence, plain as a fingerprint. "But the grass in the pass is eaten down and the water there is low, and horses cannot be held long where there is nothing for them. They will move soon. If they turn south β toward the creek, toward this house β my grandfather will send smoke. Three columns together, in the morning or the evening, whichever comes first after the turning. Watch for three together. That sight you have never seen, because it has never been needed."
Maren's hand had gone still on the porch post. "And if the smoke does not come?"
"Then they have gone north, and you may sleep." Siki said it simply, and then, looking at Elias, added, "Kasheen says also this, for the man who mends the fence. He says a fence can be watched from two sides, and his side is watched already." He set the cup down on the rail beside the little pile of salt. He took the salt β that was the courtesy answered β and put two strips of dried meat in its place, wrapped in cloth, without comment, as if the exchange explained itself.
Willa walked him to his horse. Elias heard her ask after Kasheen's daughter and a baby whose name he did not catch, and Siki's reserve broke into a grin that made him look his age. Then he was up and away, the sorrel's hooves striking small bright sounds off the creek stones, and the foothills took him back.
The three of them stood in the yard a while without speaking. The dried meat lay on the rail where a neighbor leaves a thing for a neighbor, and the warning lay over the ranch heavier than the afternoon light.
"Eight riders, and more gathering," Maren said at last. "Against the three of us."
"Against the three of us warned," Elias said. "That is a different count than the one they are making up there in the pass. They are counting two girls alone in a cabin, the way they counted all summer. Let them keep that count a while longer."