Chapter 1
The light went the color of old copper an hour before the sound came.
Elias Crowe worked the forge the way he did everything at Red Hollow β alone, and in no hurry that showed. The forge sat in the lee of the cliffs where the sandstone reared up red and banded behind his cabin, and at dusk the stone held the day's heat and gave it back slow, so that a man could work in shirtsleeves in November while the wind coming down the canyon had teeth in it.
He was shoeing work, mostly. A rancher named Delgado from down the creek had left a mule with a thrown shoe and a note weighted by a stone, because Delgado had long ago learned that Eli Crowe did not come to the door for talk. The money would be left in the tin by the forge. It had been left there for six years, and the arrangement suited everyone because it involved almost no one.
He pumped the bellows and watched the iron come up through cherry to orange. The hammer made the only conversation he required. Ring, turn, ring. His shoulder ached where a miniΓ© ball had kissed it in '64 and decided, uncharacteristically, to be merciful. His wrists ached in cold weather for another reason, and he did not think about that reason at this hour, because this was the hour he had arranged his life not to think about it.
The sound came between hammer strokes.
It was not the wind, though the wind was up, worrying the juniper and worrying the loose tin on the lean-to roof. It was not a coyote; he knew coyote the way he knew his own pulse. It was not the creek. It came from the east, from the fence line, and it had a rhythm wrong for any animal: a sound, a silence, a sound β the pattern of something that had been making the sound a long time and was running out of the strength to keep making it.
A cry, bitten off. Then, while he stood with the hammer raised and the iron cooling, nothing at all, which was worse.
He set the iron in the slack tub β it hissed like a held breath let go β and took the lantern off its nail and his skinning knife off the bench, because a man walking a fence line at dusk in that country carried a knife the way he carried his boots. He left the rifle. He told himself it was because a rifle snagged on wire in the dark.
The east fence ran down from the corral to the creek gate, five strands of wire on cedar posts he had cut and set himself the year he came to Red Hollow, and he walked it with the lantern high and his boots quiet on the frost-hard ground. Pruitt, his gray gelding, stood in the corral with his head up and his ears pricked east, which told him the sound had not been imagination.
At the third post he heard it again, closer: not a cry now, but breath β breath dragged through a throat, the way a person breathes when breathing itself has to be decided each time.
He stopped. He lifted the lantern higher.
"Who's there," he said, to the dark beyond the wire.
The breathing stopped. That frightened him more than the cry had. A thing that stops breathing when it hears a voice is a thing that has learned about voices.
He went on, slower. Fourth post. The wire hummed faintly in the wind, one strand, the top one, tuned by cold. He could smell the creek now, and under the creek smell something else β horse sweat, going cold, and the green-metal smell of blood that has not been flowing long.
Fifth post.
He raised the lantern and the light found her all at once, the way lantern light in that country finds everything, without mercy and without sequence: the post, the wire, the rawhide wound around and around, and the woman bound to the cedar with her hands tied behind her back and the post between her shoulder blades, her head fallen forward so that her hair hid her face, and the lashings drawn so tight that her shoulders had been pulled into a shape shoulders are not meant to hold.
Beside her, roped halter-short to the same post, stood a chestnut mare with its head wrenched down and one foreleg trembling, unable to shift its weight, unable even to stamp.
Eli Crowe stood in the wind with the lantern burning and did not move for three full seconds, because what he was looking at was not new to him. It was only old. It had happened in another state, in another life, to a man in a blue coat, and the post had been a hitching rail in a camp street in Virginia, and he had been the one the rope was on.
Then the woman's head moved β a fraction, all she had β and the sound came out of her again, small and torn.