It was the place he had been driving toward all along.
Chapter 6
The rider came at noon on the sixth day, when the heat had settled on the yard like a hand.
June saw him top the rise from the south trail β a big man on a roan, unhurried, with the loose, owned look of someone accustomed to being the worst thing in any landscape he entered. She was at the well. Dane was in the spring cellar fetching the smoked side down from its hook, out of sight below the hill's foot, and she understood in one cold instant β understood in her spine, before her mind caught up β that the cellar was where he had to stay.
"Don't come up," she said, low and ordinary, into the cellar mouth, as if commenting on the weather. "Company."
She heard nothing in answer. That was answer enough. She drew a bucket of water with great deliberation and was carrying it toward the cabin, unhurried as Sunday, when the roan came into the yard.
"Ma'am." The man touched his hat brim without removing it. Up close he was older than his size suggested, weathered down to gristle, with a left ear half gone and eyes that moved over her property the way a buyer's moved over a horse. "Fine place. Quiet."
"It suits me."
"I'm looking for a man. Trader. Owes money up the border β owes it to people who send me instead of letters." His gaze went to the barn, the corral, the woodpile's fresh stack. "He'd have come this way ahead of the fire. Dark horseβ no. Bay horse, tall. Man's about thirty, quiet-talking, scar here." He drew a finger down the back of his left hand, and June's heart knocked once, hard, against her ribs.
"Only rider I've seen since winter was a whiskey drummer in March," she said. "He tried to sell me tonic and I sent him off with a sermon. You're welcome to water your horse, mister, but if you're hunting debts, you'll want Sage Crossing. Folks there owe money professionally."
The man's eyes stayed on the woodpile a moment longer than manners allowed. A week's split wood, stacked crisscross. A man's work, recent, and more of it than a woman alone would need in June weather β she saw him see it, and she set her bucket down and folded her arms and looked pleasantly bored, the way her father had taught her a face could be a locked door.
"That's a deal of wood for spring," he observed.
"I burn it in the stove when the nights turn. This valley turns early." She smiled with her mouth only. "My husband β God rest him β always said a full woodpile is a sermon a lazy man can read."
Husband. The word lay down between them like a dog told to stay. She had never in her life claimed one. She watched the claim do its work: a widow alone was a question; a widow whose husband might be expected β whose arrangements showed everywhere a man provided and provided well β was a fact, and facts bored men like this one.
"Well," he said at last, and swung the roan's head south. "If your trader comes by, tell him Proffitt's asking. Tell him the border remembers a debt longer than a winter."
"I'll be sure to mention it to the next soul I see. Likely sometime in the fall."
She stood in the yard until the dust of his going settled. Then she went to the cellar mouth and said, "He's gone," and Dane came up out of the dark with the smoked side forgotten in his hand, and his face was the color of a man who has heard his own funeral described in a stranger's voice.
"You lied for me," he said. "A girl raised by Thomas Callahan lied straight-faced for a man she barely knows."
"I lied for my valley," June said, and her hand was shaking, and she pressed it flat against her skirt to stop it. "Now you'll tell me one true thing in exchange, Mr. Mercer. What kind of debt sends a man like that β a man with a rope's worth of menace and no paper at all? What does Proffitt's master want from you?"
He looked north, where the smoke had thinned to a rumor. "Not money," he said. "Never money. A thing I took. And my name on a list of men he's promised to a graveyard." He turned back to her, and the carefulness was gone out of him, burnt off. "His name is Silas Vane. And if he's sending Proffitt to knock on doors, June, then he's closer than I counted β and the two days I asked you for just got shorter."
That night she set a second plate without being asked, and he ate at her table, indoors, like a person and not a weather event, and neither of them remarked on it, which was its own remarking.