She looked at the copies spread on her table like a second harvest — three summers of a dead man's patience and one summer of her own — and said, with a calm that she mostly felt: "Then we wait for his morning. And Micah — when it comes, whatever else happens — the papers get read. If I can't read them, you do. If you can't, Tomás knows where the box sleeps. Agreed?"
"Agreed," he said, and they shook on it across the table like partners, which, she reflected, putting the last copy away, is exactly what they had become.
Chapter 20
The Night Before
The word came on a Saturday, carried by the Hendricks boy at a gallop on a lathered horse: Sloan had called in his promises. Riders had been arriving at his ranch all day in twos and threes — railroad men, mine guards, hard cases from Tucson — and the canyon crew had come down in the afternoon with wagons, and Fenn, with his hand still bandaged, had been heard in the Dry Fork saloon telling the room that by Monday morning the Ellison woman would sign or the valley would smell smoke for a week.
"He'll come at dawn," Stanton said, in the yard, with the boy's horse blowing between them. "It's his style and it's good tactics — light behind him, town still asleep, whatever happens done before witnesses organize their memories. He'll bring enough men to make resistance look insane, and he'll offer money first. Men like Sloan always offer first. It makes the rest look like your choice."
"Then we give him witnesses anyway," Maren said.
She sent the Hendricks boy back with three messages, and by dark the Rocking E began, quietly, to fill. They came in ones and twos, by the back trails, without lanterns: Josiah Hendricks with his rifle and his father's; Widow Brandt, who could not shoot anymore and had therefore appointed herself in charge of coffee, bandages, and morale, in that order; the Okafor boys' cousins from the far parcel, who had not sold; the schoolteacher, Miss Adele Fournier, who had taught Thomas's nephews and brought her brother's shotgun and a steady hand; the Reverend Ainsley, unarmed, who said he had come to be counted and to bury nobody if the Lord permitted; Beckett, ancient and immaculate, with a marshal's bearing and a rifle older than his deputies would have been; and Tomás's two sons up from the border, silent young men who took the roof positions without being told.
No one made speeches. Supper was beans and coffee and the last of the spring chicken, eaten on the porch and in the yard, and the talk was of wells and weather and the price of seed — the talk of people who have decided a thing and are simply waiting now for it to arrive, which is a different sound from fear. Maren moved among them with the coffeepot and felt the strangest peace come over her, standing in her own yard in the dark among her neighbors, and understood that whatever happened at dawn, the thing Sloan had spent three years building — a valley of people alone in separate houses, each believing the others would not come — had already failed and died, that night, over beans.
Near midnight she walked the fence line alone a little way — her own fence, the mended line, the place where six horses had come down and a stranger had stepped out of the draw and changed the weather of her life. Thomas had walked this line with her in the first year of their marriage, teaching her to read the dust, and it struck her how strange it was that a fence could be a classroom, a battlefield, and a promise all in one lifetime, depending only on who was standing at it, and whether they were standing there alone. Stanton found her there and did not offer comfort, for which she was grateful; he just stood beside her at the wire, the two of them looking north into the dark where the hills were.
"If it goes wrong tomorrow—" she began.
"It might," he said, with his terrible honesty. "It might go as wrong as things go. But I'll tell you what I've learned in twenty years of aiming at one man across a whole territory, Maren: I never once beat him by being alone and right. Not once. Tomorrow there are twenty people in your yard who are right together. That's not a thing he's ever faced. It's not a thing he knows how to buy."
She took his hand in the dark, without preamble, the way she had taken it at the creek, and this time neither of them spoke of the war for a while. Behind them the house glowed low with banked lamps; ahead of them the Cerros stood against the stars; and somewhere to the north a capped well breathed cold air in the black, and somewhere south of it a rich man lay awake counting his rifles, and the whole valley lay between them in the dark like a held breath.