Chapter 2
He stopped his horse at the edge of the yard the way a man stops at the edge of a church β not from reverence, June thought, but from knowing exactly how far welcome usually extends.
"Evening," he said. "I don't mean to crowd you."
His horse was a tall bay, leg-weary, with a near foreleg that had gone tender. The man himself was tall in the saddle and made taller by stillness; he sat like someone who had learned that sudden movements cost lives. Dust and smoke-grime covered him to the eyebrows. Under it he was younger than she had expected β not yet thirty, with dark hair tied back and a face that weather had begun but not finished. His eyes went once around the yard β barn, corral, cellar door, knoll, river path β quick and total, the way her father's eyes used to inventory a strange camp.
"You've come out of the fire," June said.
"Edge of it. Grass burning up past the Crown Hills, moving east slow. My horse picked up a stone bruise two days back and I've been walking him more than riding." He swung down carefully and stood holding the reins, keeping the horse between himself and the cabin with a casualness that was not casual at all. "Name's Dane Mercer. I trade furs, mostly β winter up the border country, down to Sage Crossing in the spring. I'd pay for a night's barn room and grazing, and pay fair. Or work it out. I'm handy."
June heard the name and filed it where she filed all strangers' names: under suspicion. Mercer. It meant nothing to her. It would not have meant anything to anyone in the valley β there was almost no one in the valley. That was rather the point of the valley.
"I don't take in boarders," she said.
"I'm not asking the house. The barn. One night." He glanced at the sky, which had gone the color of a coal held to the light. "That fire'll shift with the wind by morning. Alone out there with a lame horse, I'd be poor company for the wolves."
"You'd be poor company here too, if you're lying about any of that."
"Yes, ma'am." Something almost like a smile moved in his face and was gone. "I expect I would."
Her father's rules said: send him on. Her father's other teaching said: a person turned away from your door in fire weather is a debt the country collects later, with interest. She looked at the horse, which was the honestest thing present; the horse was tired to the bone and favoring that foreleg like the truth.
"The barn," she said. "You sleep with the door barred from your side and it stays barred. There's oats in the bin β one measure, not two. The well's sweet. You'll eat on the porch when I bring it out, and you'll be gone when the light's good enough to travel, lame horse or no."
"That's generous."
"That's arithmetic. A fed man with a rested horse leaves faster."
He led the bay toward the barn, limping faintly himself in sympathy or from long walking, and she saw that he carried a bedroll, a rifle in a scabbard worn shiny as a river stone, and saddlebags tooled with a border pattern she half recognized and could not place. No furs. A fur trader with no furs, in spring, riding out of a grass fire with a horse worn to the socket.
She brought him beans and salt pork and coffee on the porch as promised, set the plate down, and stepped back out of arm's reach with the rifle's weight familiar against her shoulder.
He ate like a man who had been hungry longer than one day and was too well raised to show it. At the last he said, to the plate more than to her, "Your cookstove's drawing poorly. Flue's choked, most like. I could clear it in the morning before I go β it's the kind of work that wants a second pair of hands on the roof."
"I've managed the flue alone for eleven months."
"Eleven months," he repeated, quietly, and something in the way he said it β not surprise, not pity, but a kind of recognition, as though she had confirmed an arithmetic of his own β raised the hair on the back of her neck.
"How would you know a thing like that?" she asked.
He looked up then, and his eyes in the lantern light were grey and very tired and suddenly careful. "I wouldn't," he said. "Lucky guess. Widow's weeds, no smoke but yours, one set of tracks on the river path. A man in my trade reads sign, miss. It's how we eat."
It was a good answer. It was too good an answer, and June knew it, and he knew she knew it, and the silence between them held that knowledge politely, like a guest neither would name. She took the empty plate. "Bar the barn door," she said, "Mr. Mercer."