Maren Ellery rose before the light, as she had risen every morning since her father's death, and built up the fire in the cabin's iron stove with the economy of a woman who counts her kindling. She was twenty-four, dark-haired, with her father's long face and her mother's set to the mouth, and she moved about the single room in the gray dawn with no wasted motion: water on for coffee, meal measured from a sack that was lighter than she liked, the rifle β Thomas Ellery's rifle β lifted from beside the door and set within reach of wherever the day's first work waited. It was not fear that kept the rifle near, she would have said, if anyone had asked. It was arithmetic. Two women alone on a hundred and sixty acres, half a day from San Tomas, could not afford to be careless and call it trust.
Willa came awake in the loft bed with her usual unaccountable cheer, seventeen and warm-faced, hair in a braid down her back, declaring to the rafters that she had dreamed of rain. She climbed down in her stocking feet, took the milk bucket without being told, and let herself out into a morning so cold and gold that the frost on the corral rails shone like salt. The mare nickered. The cow lowed in the barn. From the garden behind the cabin came the scratch of the hens Willa had scattered feed for the night before, and she talked to all of them as she worked, softly, the way her mother Sarah had talked to growing things, as if courtesy toward animals and cabbages were simply good manners.
Breakfast was cornmeal mush and the last of the dried apples, eaten standing half the time, because the work of the ranch did not pause for meals. Afterward Maren walked the familiar round that grief had worn into the land, and Willa, bucket in hand, walked a little of it with her. Behind the cabin, under the pines where the ground stayed cool even in August, two graves lay side by side inside a small railed square of stones. Sarah Ellery, who had died of fever in the winter of 1882, singing hymns through her delirium to the end. Thomas Ellery, who in November 1883 had been thrown while breaking a colt in this very corral, and lived long enough to grip Maren's hand and say the place was hers and Willa's now, and to keep it. Nearly a year the sisters had kept it β through calving and drought, through a roof leak and a sick cow, through the slow subtraction of their stores. The flour was low. The salt pork was lower. Winter stood on the horizon like a creditor, and the south fence, down along the creek pasture, let their stock wander and any stranger's riders wander in.
Maren stood at the graves a moment with her hand resting on the top stone, saying nothing, which was her form of prayer. Willa laid a pine cone on each mound, which was hers. Then the older sister turned her eyes, as she turned them twenty times a day, to the work that was failing β the sagging fence, the barn door's broken hinge, the woodpile that would not last February β and did the hard arithmetic again and hated the answer again: two pairs of hands were not enough, and there was no money to hire a third.
It was Willa, going down to the creek for water an hour later, who stopped halfway across the pasture with the bucket banging her knee and stared. Below, under the big cottonwood at the crossing, a man's camp lay in the morning light β cold fire ring, bedroll rolled and strapped, saddlebags hung from a limb. And the man himself stood at the water's edge with his horse, one hand on the dun gelding's neck, watching the ranch. He was tall, still as a post, a Colt on his hip and a hat pulled low, and he did not move or call out, only stood there being discovered, which struck Willa as either good manners or the deepest suspiciousness she had ever encountered.
She set the bucket down carefully, as if noise might spoil something, and backed up the slope to the cabin at something just short of a run.
Maren came out onto the porch with her father's rifle in her hands before Willa had finished the second sentence. She did not raise it. She carried it the way she carried everything, competently and without flourish, and she walked down through the pasture with her sister half a step behind her and her heart knocking against her ribs in a way she would have died before admitting. A drifter by the creek could be a dozen things, most of them trouble. But as she came closer and the man took off his hat and held it, and stood waiting for her to speak first on her own land, Maren Ellery felt β beneath the wariness, beneath the arithmetic β the smallest, most dangerous stirring of hope, and she distrusted that most of all.
Chapter 4
The Offer