She went in to make coffee and he stayed on the porch a moment, streaming, looking at the yard gone to shining mud, the creek audible now for the first time since autumn, and the cliffs running with a hundred small bright threads of water β and understood, with the same gut-knowledge he had for rain and hunger, exactly how much had nearly been taken from the woman in his kitchen, and how much of it, against every intention of ropes and men, was still in there, undrowned, waiting only for weather.
Chapter 8
They came up the south road on a bright cold morning three weeks after the rain, three riders at a walk that was somehow more insolent than a gallop, and Eli knew the cut of trouble before he could name it: the lead rider sat his horse like a man sitting in a room he owned.
He was big β not tall so much as wide, with a red, weather-cured face and a coat that had cost more than Eli's forge. Behind him, a lean, sallow man with a drinker's ruined nose and eyes that went everywhere except at what he was looking at; and behind him a younger one, thirtyish, quiet-faced, who rode like labor and not like show. Eli stood in the yard with a hoof rasp in his hand and waited, because he had learned at twenty that men like the first one needed an audience and he declined to provide one quickly.
"Ward Calloway," the big man said, not dismounting, announcing himself to the yard like weather. "Three Buttes. You're Crowe."
"I'm Crowe."
"You've got something of mine on your place, Crowe."
Eli glanced around the yard β forge, corral, woodpile. "Delgado's mule went home Tuesday."
The sallow man made a noise that might have been a laugh swallowed, and Calloway's face went a deeper red. "Don't play the fool. You've got an Apache squaw here, a thief and worse. Three weeks back she set on my foreman β this man, Tobin Rhee β on the north road, like a wildcat, and cut him, and ran his horse off. I've come to take her to town to answer for it. Bring her out."
Eli felt his own heartbeat slow down, which is what it did in place of speeding up, a war habit he had never lost. He looked at Rhee. Rhee looked at the cliffs.
"Three weeks back," Eli said, "the woman on my place couldn't lift a cup with one hand. Her wrists were cut to the bone with rawhide β both of them β and she'd been tied to my east fence in the dark by parties unknown, with her mare hobbled to the same post. I cut her loose myself. So unless she cut your man with her teeth, Mr. Calloway, your story has a hole in it the size of the north road."
The younger rider β Pell, though Eli did not know his name yet β shifted in his saddle and studied the middle distance with an intensity that Eli filed away without knowing why.
"Are you calling me a liar on my own errand, Crowe?"
"I'm stating the condition of her wrists. What you do with it is your business." Eli set the rasp down on the bench, slow and deliberate, and wiped his hands. "And I'll tell you the other thing since you're here. She isn't cargo. She isn't hiding. She works here by her own choosing and stays by her own choosing, and if a lawman comes with a true paper and a straight story, she'll decide for herself how to answer it. But nobody's taking her out of this yard like a strayed cow. Not you. Not for a story with a hole in it."
The cabin door opened.
Sela came out onto the porch with a basin in her hands β she had been washing the breakfast things β and stood a moment looking at the three riders with an expression Eli had never seen on her: not fear. Assessment. The way you look at weather you have survived before and are pricing for damage. Then she came down the steps, unhurried, and set the basin on the pump bench, and stood β not behind him. In plain view, her face uncovered and her scarred wrists bare below her pushed-up sleeves.
"That is the woman," Rhee said, too loud, into the silence. "That's her. I know her."
"Then look at her wrists, Tobin," Calloway said, and something in the way he said it told Eli the wrists had not been in the story before. "Show them your wrists, girl."
"My name," Sela said, in a voice as level as a held rifle, "is not girl." She raised both hands, unhurried, and turned them so the yard and the sky could read the ridged white scars circling them like pale bracelets. "These are my witnesses. They say I was tied while your man says I was fighting him. Rope does not lie as well as men do, Mr. Calloway. It only tightens."
"You'll find," Calloway said at last, very quietly, which was worse than the shouting, "that in this territory, Crowe, there are men whose stories get believed and men whose don't. And squaws don't get stories at all. Enjoy your morning."