"Come back in," Maren said at last. "If Garrett Sloan wants us at dawn, he can find us fed."
They walked back to the house together — not ahead, not behind — and the sentries on the roof watched them pass and said nothing, and the night settled over the Rocking E like a hand over a candle, keeping it lit.
Chapter 21
Fifteen Riders
They came at dawn the way Stanton said they would, with the sun at their backs and the dust of their coming hung in the still air like a curtain. Maren counted them from the porch with her rifle across her arms and her heart hammering, and she made herself count twice, slowly, the way Thomas had taught her to count anything that mattered: fifteen riders in the main body, spread in a shallow crescent across her yard, and Garrett Sloan at the center of the crescent on his black gelding, dressed as if for a bank opening, with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket bright in the morning light.
Behind her, the house was quiet in the particular way of a house full of armed people who have agreed beforehand about silence. Twenty neighbors in her yard, her barns, her roofline. Sloan could see only what he expected to see: a widow, a drifter, an old ranch hand, and a ranch beaten thin by a summer of his attentions. It was the last mistake of his education that he believed his own census.
"Mrs. Ellison," he called, and his voice carried beautifully in the morning — it was a voice accustomed to courtrooms and shareholders. "You see the size of my patience today. I've brought witnesses of my own, since you set such store by them. I am going to make you one final offer, in front of these men, and after it there will be no more offers, because there will be no more need. The valley is tired of this, Maren. I'm tired of it. Sell, and we all go back to our breakfasts."
"You've had two months of my answer, Mr. Sloan," Maren said. She had dressed as she would for church — dark dress, hair pinned — because she had decided that if this was the morning she was ruined or killed on, she would not be found in her work clothes like an employee of the event. "It was no in June. It was no when your Mr. Finch came with his leather case. It is no this morning, with your fifteen friends as witnesses, and I thank you for bringing them. Mine were short of an audience."
Something flickered across his face then — the first crack in the performance, because the Gazette, the bank, the injunction had all assured him that the Ellison woman was isolated, friendless, and ripe. "You're alone, Maren," he said, less warmly. "That's the arithmetic you've never wanted to do. One woman. One drifting gunfighter with a twenty-year grudge, which the territory will shortly hear about. One old Mexican. Against—" he gestured at his crescent, with genuine wonder at her obstinacy "—the future, Mrs. Ellison. I am offering you the chance to be bought out of the way of it like a lady, instead of being rolled over by it like a stone."
"The future," Maren repeated. From the barn doorway, very quietly, Tomás racked a shell into his shotgun — not a threat, a punctuation — and three of Sloan's riders heard it and recalibrated the barn with their eyes. "Let me tell you about the future, Mr. Sloan, since you've ridden out at dawn to discuss it. The future is under our feet. There's a river under the Cerros that runs in August — you've drunk from the well you drilled on the Hendricks line and capped like a wine bottle, so you know it's true. The future is that river belonging to the people who live on top of it — all of them — which is what my husband intended to file in Prescott seven months before his horse was tripped in a ravine with a rope."
The crescent of riders stirred. That was not in their brief. Sloan's face went through several expressions at high speed and settled on fury, mastered.
"Your husband," he said, "was a dreamer who killed himself chasing fairy tales, and grief has finished the work. Men!" He raised his voice, addressing his riders and the empty yard in one performance. "You hear a madwoman's ravings. The documents she'll wave at you are a dead man's scribbles—"
From the roof of the house, Harlan Beckett's voice came down, dry and unhurried and terrible, like a page turning in a court record: "Garrett Sloan. Twenty years I've waited to say your name in front of this many witnesses. You remember Moccasin Creek, boy? You remember the two men you left in the water, and the schoolhouse after? Because the territory's coming to hear about it — and these gentlemen you've hired are going to want to think very carefully about whether their wages include dying for a robber who changed his name's clothes."