"My own yard," Sela repeated softly behind him, tasting it.
Pell mounted in the dark and rode for the south road with the gold still in the bag, and Eli and Sela stood in the yard and watched the sound of him fade, and the stars came out over the cliffs one by one, including, low in the west, a very bright one that would not be kept from the good grazing.
Chapter 10
The sheriff came two days later, alone, at the slow end of the afternoon, riding a hammer-headed bay that had clearly been chosen for its opinions about speed, which were that there wasn't any.
Amos Tully was fifty-eight and looked like a man the territory had been leaning on for a long time. He had a face made of ledges and kind eyes set deep in them, and he took his hat off in the yard before Eli could tell him there was no need.
"Crowe," he said. "You know why I'm out here."
"I can guess within a dollar."
"Ward Calloway's sworn a complaint in San Tomas." Tully took a folded paper from his coat and then, pointedly, did not unfold it. "Assault on his foreman, Tobin Rhee, on the north road, three weeks past. Attempted horse theft. There's a description attached." He looked past Eli, politely, at Sela, who had come to the cabin door and stood in it with her hands quiet at her sides. "The description matches, Crowe. That's the hell of it. Descriptions usually do, when a man's careful about which facts he lies with."
They sat on the porch, all three of them, Tully with the complaint folded on his knee, and Eli told it straight, in order: the fence, the fifth post, the rawhide, the wrists, the mare's hobbled leg, the week she could not lift a cup. Sela sat silent through it and at the end, without being asked, she stood and held out her wrists the way she had held them up in Calloway's visit, and Tully looked at them for a long time.
"Those are two months healing, those are," he said at last. "And they weren't made by any fight. I hung a man in '68 — no. No I didn't. I watched one hung, and I know rope work when I see it, and that—" he nodded at her wrists "—that is rope work done by a man enjoying the arithmetic of it."
"Amos," Eli said.
"I know what you're going to ask me, Crowe, so let me walk out to it myself and save you the asking." Tully folded the complaint once more, smaller, and put it away. "Half of San Tomas knows this complaint is a lie. Ines Aguilar is telling it in the store at volume, which for Ines is considerable. The other half doesn't care, because it's about an Apache and Calloway's money spends all over that town like water in a ditch. If I arrest her, she sits in my cell while Calloway's lawyer rides to the capital and back, and whatever's going to happen to her will already have happened in the talk. If I don't arrest her, I'm a sheriff who picks his papers."
"The law's supposed to pick the true ones," Eli said.
"The law," Tully said heavily, "is supposed to do a great many things it can only do when men let it. Here's what I've decided, and it's the edge of my authority and a little over the hem of it. I rode out to Red Hollow on this complaint. I found the place—" he looked around the yard, at the forge, the corral, the mended gate, with enormous deliberation "—and I did not find any such person as the complaint describes. There's a woman here, a worker, name of Sela, who keeps this man's books in mended leather and heals his horses. The woman in this paper—" he patted his coat "—a wildcat who fights men on the north road — I did not find her. She does not appear to exist."
Sela sat down slowly, like a woman whose knees had received news before her mind had.
"But hear me, both of you," Tully said, and the kindness went out of his voice and left the lawman standing there in it, "because I'm not bringing you a pardon, I'm bringing you time, and time is all it is. Paper doesn't die, Crowe. It waits. Calloway can swear another. He can go over my head to the territory. He can come at it sideways — taxes, brands, a stray-horse claim on that mare of hers, any handle he can grab. What I've done today buys you the winter, maybe. Spend it better than I could."
Tully rode back to San Tomas on his slow bay in the last of the light, and that night, at supper, Sela asked Eli what a man does when the law has handed him time like a loan, and Eli said, "He lives in it careful and doesn't waste a day of it," and she nodded as if he'd confirmed an order she'd already given herself, and began, that very night, to mend his winter coat — a job she had pointedly not done for a month, on the grounds that a man who would not ask for a thing plainly could freeze in his principles, which were drafty.