"Papa is never out late now, baby," Kaya said gently.
"I know," said Lucy, with the terrible reasonableness of seven. "But if he was. He'd see it and know we kept it lit."
Kaya looked at the small gold square of the window from the yard, where she had gone to fetch the last of the wood, and her daughter's silhouette passed across it, and the light stood steady in the falling snow. Nashona was right, and it was not a comfortable rightness: a home was a thing you kept. She picked up the wood and went in to keep hers.
Chapter 4 — The Man from the Land Company
The buggy came up Levi's lane at the polite hour of ten, behind a matched pair of bays that somebody in San Tomas was paid well to keep curried. Levi watched it from the barn door and knew the rig before he knew the man. Money sat that way in a buggy seat. Money also got down from a buggy that way — unhurried, brushing snow from a good coat, looking around a working ranch yard the way a man looks at a table he means to buy, furniture and all.
"Mr. Hartman." The visitor had a genial, well-fed face and a voice that had been used in a great many rooms. "Cornelius Draper. I hope I find you well, sir. I hope I don't intrude."
"You've come a fair piece in the cold to hope it," Levi said. "Get down, Mr. Draper. There's coffee."
He had not invited the man out of hospitality. He had invited him the way you open a gate to see what a stray dog wants with your yard. Diego, from the corral fence, watched the fine bays a moment, then went deliberately back to work, which Levi understood to be Diego's opinion of the whole visit.
In the kitchen Draper took his coffee standing, hat in hand, like a man too respectful to sit uninvited, though his eyes sat down everywhere. The stove. The empty chairs. The shelf where Mary's blue pitcher still stood, because moving it had never once seemed worth the arithmetic of the grief.
"I'll be plain, Mr. Hartman, because I believe you prefer it." Draper warmed his hands around the cup. "The railroad is coming through the San Tomas valley — if not this year, the next, and that is as certain as anything in this territory gets to be. A railroad drinks water the way a furnace drinks coal. The company I represent is assembling the water it will need, fairly, before the rush makes prices foolish. We have bought, or hold paper on, most of the reliable springs along the creek."
"Most," Levi said.
"Most." Draper smiled. "Which brings me across your creek in a manner of speaking. You know the Little place, of course. Best spring in the valley."
"I know it."
"And you know the — situation — of the woman there." He said the woman there the way a man steps around something on a path. "There is a legal question over the homestead. A note of her late husband's, unpaid. A marriage that was — irregular, shall we say, in the eyes of the law. The company holds paper on the place, Mr. Hartman, but I want you to understand: we take no pleasure in it. A widow. A child. If the matter could be settled quietly, with the family provided for and no sheriff's unpleasantness—" He spread one hand, palm up, the universal gesture of a reasonable man with his hands tied. "Well. That is where a neighbor of standing could do a great deal of good. Speak to her. She respects you, I am told. Help her see the sense of selling while selling is still a kindness we can offer her."
Levi drank his coffee. "And if she doesn't see the sense?"
"Then the law will do what the law does, on the twenty-sixth, and the company will still do right by her — a fair price for the stock, a wagon for her goods. We are not monsters, Mr. Hartman."
"No," Levi said. "I don't expect you are."
Draper set down his cup and named, almost as an afterthought, the other thing he had come to name. The company's assembly, he explained, would naturally be tidier if its holdings ran unbroken along the creek — and the Hartman place bordered the Little place like two hands of the same body. The company was prepared to offer for Levi's ranch a price he then stated, in the level tone of a man laying down a royal flush, which was half again what the land would fetch from any other buyer.
"Generous," Levi said.
"It is meant to be. A man of your years, alone out here — forgive me — might think of a warmer town. Fewer winters like this one." Draper's smile did not move, but something behind it arranged itself, the way a hand arranges in a glove. "And of course, Mr. Hartman, if you were — unhappily — drawn into the Little matter, on the other side, well. Boundary surveys. Water filings. Old claims have a way of being re-examined when a man makes himself conspicuous in a courthouse. I would hate to see your own fences become a question, purely because you stood near a fire someone else lit."
There it was, laid on the table between the coffee cups as neat as a knife beside a plate.
Levi stood, and took both cups to the basin, because his hands wanted occupation and he had learned to give it to them. "I'll think on your offer, Mr. Draper," he said. "It's the least a man can do with an offer that size."
"I ask nothing more." Draper put on his hat and his genial face together. At the door he paused and looked out across the creek, where smoke rose from the Little chimney into the white air. "A pretty place, in its way. It would be a shame for it to come to unpleasantness." He said it almost sadly, the way a man regrets weather.