"It's theft with engineering," Stanton said. "And it's the last piece Prescott needs. A man can explain a map as a fantasy and a list as a grudge. He cannot explain a working well on land he doesn't own, capped like a wine bottle he's saving for his own table."
"Then you telegraph tomorrow," Maren said.
"Tomorrow," he agreed. "Tonight we tell Tomás to keep the roan saddled and the rifle by the door. The watch on that well will ride in with a story, and Sloan will have to decide what we are — before we're ready for him to decide it. From here on, Maren, it isn't two months anymore. It's days."
Chapter 18
The Mending
The burns healed the way burns do, in their own time and on their own terms, and by the middle of July Micah Stanton could work a full day without favoring his left side, though the new skin shone pink and tight in the heat and the cut along his ribs had closed into a line like a seam in leather. Maren changed the last of the dressings on a Thursday evening on her porch, with the light going down in bands of copper over the Cerros, and pronounced him, in her best doctoring voice, fit to be shot at again by professionals.
"Those are the first kind words you've had for me," he said.
"They're the only prescription I've got left." The roan, turned out in the corral for the evening, came to the fence and put her head over the top rail, the way she did when she wanted deciding done for her, and Maren scratched the mare's forehead and reflected that much of this whole summer had been conducted by animals with better judgment than their riders. She folded the linen with care. It had become — this tending — a country they both lived in without discussing, the way the whole ranch had quietly rearranged itself around his presence: his plate on the table without question, Tomás consulting him on the north pasture as a matter of course, the roan and her gray in adjoining stalls like an old married couple. She was aware of all of it with an awareness that sat just under her skin, the way you are aware of weather coming.
He was quiet a moment, turning his hat, and then he said the thing she had been dreading in the exact words she had known he would use. "I ought to ride out, Maren. Before it finishes. Sloan's war is with me as much as with you now — older than you, older than this ranch. Beckett was right in his way. If I go, there's a chance he calls off his dogs and goes back to buying you slowly. You'd have time. Time is the one currency—"
"No."
"Maren—"
"You listen to me, Micah Stanton, because I am only going to say this once and I want it heard whole." She set the folded linen down like a full stop. "Thomas died because a man decided his life was a business obstacle. For three years I lived in this house like a caretaker at my own grave. Then you rode up my draw and read my fence, and for the first time since I buried him there is a person in this valley who tells me the truth at my own table. And now you propose — as a kindness — to ride off and leave me alone in the middle of it, with my barn burned and my name in that newspaper, so that Garrett Sloan can have a clear field and an unhurried schedule." Her voice did not rise. It went down, and got harder. "That is not protection. That is abandonment wearing protection's coat, and I have had a bellyful of being left by men who called it mercy."
The porch boards ticked as they cooled. Out in the corral the roan mare stamped once and settled.
"You're right," he said at last, and she could hear that it cost him something true. "It's the only plan I know that doesn't end with you in the middle of a gunfight, so I reached for it like a drowning man reaches for any spar. But you're right. It's your ranch, your name, your fight. I forgot — twenty years of deciding for dead people what risks the living may take." He put his hat on, and took it off again, a man arguing with himself in millinery. "I'll stay, then. If you'll have me. Not as a hired gun — I've been that, and it's a small cold thing to be. As—" He stopped.
"As what, Micah?"
"As a man at your table," he said. "For as long as the table stands."