Maren looked at him then, long and considering, and something in her face settled like a gate swinging to. "Then we had best be worth the warning," she said. "Tell us what to do first."
Chapter 18
Preparing the Ranch
They began that same evening, before the light failed, and they began with water β Elias said water was the thing a ranch ran out of first and thought of last. The two barrels by the cabin wall were scrubbed and filled at the creek, bucket by bucket, and a third, long stored empty in the barn, was hauled out, rinsed of dust and spiders, and filled as well and set inside the cabin door. Willa filled every jug and crock in the house besides, and lined them along the wall like a small patient army.
"Stock close," Elias said, and they brought the milk cow and her calf up from the creek pasture and into the corral, and the sisters' two riding horses in beside Cinder, so that no animal the ranch depended on would be grazing out of sight when it mattered. The chickens, after a brief and undignified campaign, were shut in the coop by the barn. Feed for three days went into the barn loft in sacks, and hay after it, forked up armload by armload while the evening went copper and then gray.
He walked the yard slowly then, the way he had once walked a camp's perimeter in another life, and the sisters walked with him and did not interrupt his seeing. Here the cabin windows, commanding the gate and the creek path. Here the barn loft, looking down the north slope toward the pass road. Here the woodpile, good cover between the house and the corral, and here the low stone wall of the garden, where a person kneeling was hidden from the road but could see the whole yard over the top of it.
"Your father's rifle at the cabin," he said. "Maren, yours is the steadiest hand for it, and the front window is yours. Willa takes the back window and the garden wall if it comes by day β the gate and the creek both show from there, and nothing can cross the yard without her seeing it first. I will be in the barn loft with my rifle, or at the gate, depending on what the smoke says and how they come. The Colt stays on me. We keep a lamp unlit but trimmed. No light after dark that we don't choose."
He laid out the rest plainly, because plainness was a kindness now: ammunition counted and divided and set in three places, so no one position could be cut off from it; the axe and the pitchfork by the barn door; a bucket of sand beside the water barrels, against fire; the gate bar oiled so it would move silent and fast. Food for two days cooked ahead β beans, and bread wrapped in cloth β so no one would have to choose between a stove fire and a full stomach.
Then Maren said the thing she had plainly been carrying since Siki rode away.
"We are not hiding in the root cellar," she said. "I want that said out loud before any of the rest of it settles. Whatever comes down that road, Willa and I stand beside you. Not behind a locked door listening to it happen. This is our land and our house, and if it is defended it will be defended by the people whose name is on it too." Her voice did not rise. That was what made it final. "I will not be the thing you failed to save, Elias. I have no use for that arrangement, and neither does Willa."
Willa, beside her, nodded once, with the air of a person seconding a motion she had helped write.
Elias looked at the two of them β Maren with her chin up and her hands steady, Willa with flour still on her wrist from the bread β and felt the old shape of his fear try to rise in him, the shape that said people placed in his keeping were people he could lose. But the shape did not fit anymore. These were not travelers asleep in wagons, trusting a hired stranger in the dark. These were two women who had kept a ranch alive alone for a year and were telling him, precisely, where they intended to stand.
"Beside me, then," he said. "Not behind. I heard you." He stuck out his hand, and Maren took it, and Willa put hers over both of theirs, quick and warm, and the plan was agreed the way contracts used to be agreed, and better kept.
They worked until full dark made the work foolish, and ate the beans standing in the kitchen because sitting felt like pretending the evening was ordinary. Afterward Elias trimmed the lamp and set it unlit by the door, checked the barrels, the gate, the corral, in a round he meant to make a habit of β first round of however many nights the pass road required. The sisters watched him from the porch without comment. He was aware, climbing at last to his bedroll, that the ranch below him in the dark was no longer simply a place he was mending. It was a place he had helped make ready. The difference, he found, did not frighten him the way it once would have. It steadied his hands.