Levi was in his boots with his coat half on before the words were done. The storm met them at the door like a living thing shouldering to get in — snow going sideways, the whole world past the lantern's reach wiped white and roaring. They found the first of Kaya's steers at the creek crossing, standing in the ice water, too stupid with cold to climb out, and they got it up and turned with a rope and profanity on Diego's part, and followed the tracks — already filling, already going soft at the edges — up over the rise to the Little north pasture.
Kaya was there before them. Nashona was there too, lantern in hand and her shawl pinned over her head against the snow, counting in her own language under her breath like a woman counting beads. Kaya had her husband's old coat on and a rope coiled at her shoulder, and she did not waste one second on surprise.
"The fence is down on the north line," she said. "They have had an hour of this wind at their backs. We have found maybe half." She said it the way a person reports a fire — flat, and saving her breath for the work. "You take the arroyo mouth, Levi. Things bunch there. Diego, the cottonwoods. Mother, stay at the gap and count them through."
They worked in the roaring dark for — Levi never afterward knew how long. Again and again the light would find them: three steers huddled in a draw with snow plastered on their north sides; two yearlings trotting bewildered down the fence line the wrong way, turned with a wave of the lantern and a shout that the wind stole out of his mouth. Nashona at the gap counted them through in Sevani as they passed, her voice never rising, and at the end of it she said something to Kaya in the same tongue, and Kaya's face in the lantern light did the arithmetic Levi had been dreading.
"Two short," Kaya said. "Two steers."
They found the first one in the wash below the arroyo, in the rocks with its leg folded under it wrong, bellowing hoarse and already half gone with cold and pain. Kaya went down the bank on her knees in the snow and put her hand on its forehead and spoke to it in her own language, low, the way you'd speak to anything that was dying and yours. Then she nodded once, and Levi did what had to be done with the pistol, and the sound went flat into the storm and was nothing. The second steer they found a quarter mile beyond, standing dead on its feet against a drift, eyes iced open, gone hours before they'd even known the fence was down.
When it was done they stood in the gap in Kaya's fence, the four of them, while the wind tried to take the lanterns.
Levi lifted his light to the fence line. Two strands of wire and a cedar post, sound as the day Sam set it — except here, where six feet of wire were simply gone, cut out and carried off, and the cut ends shone bright as new money.
"Wire doesn't break like that," Diego said.
"No," Levi said. "It is cut. Cut clean, with nippers, and the piece taken away so we'd hunt the dark wondering if it broke. Paper first," he said, half to himself. "Then wire. He wants you tired, and cold, and short two steers and a night's sleep, when the twenty-sixth comes. He wants you to look like a woman who cannot hold a place."
Kaya was splicing the gap with a spare length of wire, her bare hands working in the storm like the cold was a rumor she had decided not to credit. "Then it is a pity for him," she said, "that I am holding it." She twisted off the splice and stood up, snow to her waist on the drift side, and looked at him down the lantern light. "You found things in town. I can see it on you. Tell me at the door — my mother is freezing standing still, whatever she says."
They walked the herd in and shut the corral gate on them, and Levi walked with Kaya and Nashona to the house through the easing edge of the storm. At the door Nashona went in ahead. Kaya stopped under the lintel, and Levi saw past her, through the window, the lamp Lucy set there every night for her father — burning steady in the room where the child slept.
"She sets it every night," Kaya said, following his look. "Storm or no storm." Her voice did something then — not break, exactly; go quieter, the way a fire goes quiet before it catches. "Tell me what you found, Levi Hartman."
So he told her, there in the doorway: the deed clean, the clerk and his missing page, old Crane and Sam's low-looped L standing against the stranger's hand on the note. She listened the way she did everything — whole, and without flinching.
"Tomorrow I ride to Draper," he said. "I'll offer him his money — all of it, and costs — to sell me that note and call off his notice."
"He will not sell," Kaya said.
"Likely not." Levi looked at the lantern in the window, burning for a dead man in a house full of women who would not run. "Then I'll do the other thing."
She did not ask him what the other thing was. Perhaps she knew. She only nodded, once, and went in to her mother and her daughter, and Levi rode home across the creek alone, with the storm thinning and the whole frozen valley ticking the way cold country ticks after a blow.
Chapter 15 — His Ranch on the Line
Cornelius Draper kept his office over the land company's storefront, up an outside stair, and he received Levi the way he received everyone — rising, smiling — like a man whose conscience and welcome were equally roomy.