Chapter 21
Riders at the Creek
Dawn came thin and gray over Cottonwood Creek, and frost lay white along the rails of the new south fence. Willa was up before the light was good, a shawl over her nightdress and her boots unlaced, carrying the milk pail toward the corral as she did every morning, as if an ordinary morning could be held to by doing ordinary things. She stopped halfway across the yard.
The gate to the creek pasture stood shut, just as Elias had left it. But the ground before it was wrong.
She set the pail down careful, so it would not ring, and crouched. In the hard mud at the edge of the track she saw the print of a shod horse pressed over the print of her own boot from the evening before. Then another, and another, turning toward the water. The rims still stood sharp. Three horses, she thought, counting the sets the way Elias had taught her in the pines, by the way they fell β one long-striding, one short and choppy, one that favored its off forefoot and set it down light.
Her heart went hard and fast. She did not run. Elias had told her running in the yard was the surest way to tell a watcher he had been seen. She picked up her pail, walked steady to the corral, and only when the barn wall stood between her and the creek did she run for the cabin.
"Three," she said at the door, breathless. "Down at the crossing. Fresh over my tracks from last night."
Maren was already dressed, already reaching for their father's rifle where it stood by the hearth. Elias came in from the porch with his bedroll still creased across his shoulder and his Colt buckled on, and one look at Willa's face told him the rest. He did not ask if she was sure. He asked her which way the prints turned, and how deep, and whether the grass at the ford was broken or only bent.
"Bent," Willa said. "They didn't cross. They stood in the willows, I think. The light one stood longest."
"Then they're still deciding," Elias said.
They went out the back way, through the garden, keeping the cabin and the barn between them and the creek. The air smelled of woodsmoke and cold water. Elias walked ahead with his rifle loose in his hands, not raised, and Maren walked at his shoulder with Thomas Ellery's rifle cradled as naturally now as a bucket, and Willa brought up the rear with the small carbine, her jaw set in a way that made her look entirely her sister's kin.
At the edge of the willows Elias stopped and lifted one hand.
Through the bare branches, in the first flat light on the water, three riders sat their horses in the shallows at the ford. They were not crossing. One held a pair of field glasses Elias could just make out as a glint. Another leaned in his saddle and pointed β not at the cabin, but at the south fence, post by post, as a man might count something he meant to report. The third sat apart, his hat pulled low, watching the house with the patience of a man paid to wait.
They had come to learn, not to fight. That was plain. They wanted to know if the sisters were alone, if the place could still be walked into like an open door.
Maren settled the rifle against a cottonwood, slow and deliberate. Elias glanced at her.
"The post," he said quietly. "The old one at the ford. Not the men."
"I know what I'm about," she said.
She breathed out the way he had taught her on the range behind the barn, letting the air leave until her hands stopped wanting to hurry, and fired.
The shot cracked the cold morning wide. Bark and pale wood burst from the weathered post not six feet from the nearest rider, splinters spitting across the water. The horses shied and wheeled, hooves throwing up fans of creek water that caught the light. The man with the glasses cursed, loud enough to carry. The man who had pointed at the fence stared up through the willows at the drifting smoke, and Elias stepped then β only then β into the open at the bank, his rifle across his body, where he could be clearly seen and counted.
No one spoke. The scouts backed their horses out of the shallows one by one, unhurried now because hurrying would admit fear, and turned up the far bank and were gone into the pinon scrub at a trot that became, once the trees hid them, something faster.
Willa let out a breath she had been holding since the yard. "They'll tell him," she said.