Elias looked down at his torn coat, put two fingers through the hole Donner's bullet had made, and found, against all ten years of expecting otherwise, that he was smiling.
"The coat took it," he said to Maren, who had come to stand beside him. "That's all that did."
Chapter 26
The First Embrace
For a long minute after the irons clicked shut, nobody at the Ellery ranch seemed to know how to move. The deputies went about their work in the yard β Cole Brandt counting rifles, Sam Whitlock cinching ropes β and the captured men sat in a sullen row by the corral with their hands bound, but Elias stood where Donner's shot had found him, by the gate, looking down at the tear in his coat as if the hole were a question he had not yet learned how to answer.
His coat hung open. The bullet had taken cloth and nothing else, a clean rip along his side where, half an inch nearer, it would have taken ribs and blood and perhaps the whole rest of his life. He put two fingers through the tear and wiggled them, stupidly, and that was when the laughter came β not his at first, but Willa's, high and startled from the cabin doorway, the rifle still in her hands and tears standing bright in her eyes.
"He missed," she said. "Elias, he stood that close and he missed everything but your sewing."
Then she was laughing and crying at once, the way people do when fear leaves the body faster than the body can arrange itself, and Maren set her father's rifle down against the wall with great care, as if it had suddenly grown very heavy, and crossed the yard without seeming to decide to.
Elias saw her coming β pale under the dust, her dark hair come loose, her hands not steady. He had never seen her like this.
She did not stop a proper distance away. She walked straight into him and put her arms around him, hard, her forehead against his shoulder, and held on as a person holds to something solid in high water.
Elias went still. For ten years no one had held him so, nor had he allowed the wanting of it. His arms, after a moment that felt longer than the whole fight, came up slow and careful around her, one hand spread between her shoulders, and he felt her shaking and understood that some of the shaking was his own.
"You stayed standing," she said into his coat. "When he fired, I thought β God forgive me, I thought that was the price. That we'd keep the place and lose you at the same gate."
"You didn't lose anything today, Maren."
"Don't." She drew back enough to look at him, her hands still fisted in his sleeves, her eyes wet and fierce at once. "Don't make it smaller than it was. You stood between that man and this house knowing what a gun does. I watched you do it. Let me thank you with the truth of it."
Marshal Tom Reyes, passing with a coil of rope, tactfully studied the horizon. Willa, wiping her face on her apron, made no such pretense and beamed at them through her tears like sunrise through rain.
At last Maren let go, stepped back, and became, by visible effort, herself again β though something had changed in the arrangement of her, as a door changes a room once it has been opened. She picked up her rifle. She checked its load from habit. She said, briskly, that there were men to feed who did not deserve feeding, and prisoners' horses to water, and a haystack still smoldering that wanted watching lest the wind take it to the barn.
They worked the rest of that afternoon in the strange, light-headed quiet that follows survival. Elias helped the deputies rebuild the trampled gate enough to shut. Willa carried water and found, absurdly, that she was humming. Twice Elias caught Maren looking at him and did not look away, and twice she did not either.
Toward evening the wagons were loaded. Donner, bound and furious in the lead wagon bed, twisted round as they started out for San Tomas and shouted that he would not hang alone for another man's paper scheme. Reyes told him, mildly, that a judge would be very interested in hearing him say all of it again, slower, and the wagons rolled out through the gate in a long creak of harness.
When they were gone, the ranch felt enormous in its quiet.
They ate supper inside, the three of them, because the evening had turned cold and because no one suggested otherwise anymore. After, Willa took Elias's coat from its peg with the air of a general seizing a campaign map.