keep. Cook's work, house work, horse work — more skilled than most, by all accounts including
Slade's, and I don't pay Slade's compliments less because he's a snake; a snake knows horses won't
suffer flattery." He named the thing whole. "Dollar a day. Paid Saturday. In coin, on the table, where you
can count it. Either of us can end it any morning, no reason owed, no hard feeling enforceable. You end
it, I ride you to wherever you're pointed, with your wages and three days' food, and that's final between
us."
"And if the town ends it?" she asked. "If the town says no?"
"Then the town and I will have a conversation we've been postponing for years," Silas said, "and I'll
lose some friends I mostly keep out of habit."
The ghost of something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile. The rumor of one, denied
papers at the border. "You talk much," she said, "for a quiet man. Everyone in the store — the fat man at
the livery told his son, 'Wren never talks.' But you talk."
"The liveryman's son is observant," Silas said. "I store it up."
"Coffee?" Mrs. Lane said, at his elbow, and filled both cups whether they wanted or not, which was
her ministry, and went away.
Naya wrapped both hands around her cup. The wrists had stopped bleeding. In the dining room's
dimness, with food in her and water, she looked less like a figure on a platform and more like what she
was: a young woman a long way from home, doing sums. "I do not have people north," she said,
suddenly, without preamble, and the sentence cost her — he could see her pay it. "Not anymore. The
soldiers — my brother was with us. Little Hawk. Seventeen. He ran at the river, when they took us. I do
not know." She stopped. Recast. "North is a word. It is not a place I can go. Your ranch is a place. I will
see this ranch. One week. Wages. Then I decide again." She set the cup down precisely. "And the paper."
"The paper?"
"The sale paper. You said it is mine. I want it." Her eyes held his. "In my hand. Not in your pocket,
over your heart."
It was a shrewd and terrible request, and it was just, and he took the folded bill of sale from his shirt
pocket — where it lay, yes, exactly there, over the shopping list, a placement he had not examined until
she named it — and laid it on the oilcloth between the plates. She took it, unfolded it, and studied it a
long time. Whether she could read it all, he did not know and did not ask; she read something in it, her
lips still, her finger following the lines, and at the sergeant's signature her mouth tightened. She refolded
it along different creases than his, deliberately, making it hers by geometry, and put it inside her shirt,
against her skin, where such things are kept when a person owns nothing with a pocket that closes.
"One week," she said.
"One week," he agreed.
Outside, the afternoon had begun its long slide. The crowd had thinned to knots of men still arguing
the day like a ball game — Cross gone already, Slade gone to the saloon to be bought drinks by men
who despised him and wanted the story from inside, Whitaker and Hale's crew riding out in a dust of
their own. Doyle met them on the hotel steps, hat in hand this time, and looked at Naya and did a thing
Silas had never seen the law do in Red Hollow: he addressed her first.
"Miss," Doyle said. He did not know what to call her and had clearly decided guessing was better
than silence. "I'm Sheriff Doyle. What happened today was — the law permits a paper, and the paper's
been questioned by nobody with standing, and I certified signatures, which is my office." He turned the
hat in his hands. "I'm not here to dress it up. I'm here to say: any man troubles you from this day, on the
road or in this town, you come to me, and it's my trouble. That's my office too."
Naya studied him with the complete, unhurried assessment she gave to all new instruments. "You
stood there," she said. "With the paper in your hand. You stood there and let them bid."
"Yes, ma'am," Doyle said. "I did that."
"Then your office is a small room," she said, "and you know it is a small room. But a man who
knows his room is small —" she paused, finding the English, or finding the mercy; Silas never knew
which "— is not the worst man to have the keys." She walked past him down the steps, toward the
livery, where a pair of secondhand boots — Mrs. Lane had produced them from somewhere, dead
husband's sister's, take them and say nothing, this town owes more than boots — waited without
ceremony.
Silas, following, heard Doyle say behind him, very quietly, to no one, "Lord, Silas. What have you
started?"
"I don't know yet, Amos," Silas said. "Come out Sunday. Rosa'll feed you. You can watch it start."
Chapter 5 — The Road to Wren Creek
They rode out of Red Hollow in the last of the light, Silas on Biscuit and Naya on the livery's spare mare
— borrowed against a deposit, after an argument with the liveryman that Silas won by the simple
method of paying it twice over and signing for it in a book, while the town watched from doorways and
pretended not to. She had refused, point-blank, to ride behind him on Biscuit. She had said, "I am not a
sack of meal," in a tone that closed the subject for all time, and Silas, who had been about to offer
exactly that arrangement out of thoughtless logistics, had felt the rebuke strike true and filed it where he
kept the day's other lessons, which were accumulating like fence posts along a long line.
She rode well. That was evident in the first hundred yards and undeniable by the first mile: she rode
the indifferent mare as if consulting her, seat easy, hands quiet, reading the ground two bends ahead.
Whatever else had been taken from her, this had not been, because it could not be — it lived in her
bones, not her possessions.
The road to Wren Creek climbed gently out of the valley through creosote and ocotillo, past the
Pritchard place — two black chimneys standing in a field of ash, a sight the whole territory knew and
drove past with its eyes politely elsewhere — and Silas saw her look at the ruin a long time, and say
nothing, and file that away too. He did not explain it. Some other day would hold that explanation; the
first day had held enough.
"You have questions," she said, after the second mile, unexpectedly. "Ask them now, on the road. In
the house I will be tired of questions."
"All right," Silas said. "Is Naya the name you want used?"
She glanced at him, surprised — he saw it — that the first question was that. "It is my name. My
mother gave it. The soldiers wrote it wrong three ways, but it is my name. Use it." A pause. "What I am
called by my family at home — that is not for the road."
"Fair. Second: is there anyone I should send word to? A rider can get north in —"
"No." She cut it clean. "Word travels and becomes soldiers. When I know where my brother is, I will
send my own word. Third?"
"Are you hurt anywhere I haven't seen? Finch — the doctor — he'd ride out. He's a decent man."
"I am hurt in the places that heal by eating and sleeping. The rest —" she flexed her freed wrists,
riding — "heals by being mine again. That is slow medicine. You cannot buy it faster, quiet man, so do
not try."
They rode a while in the cooling air. The desert in the evening did its one merciful trick: the heat
lifted all at once, like a lid, and the light went amber, and the mountains turned the color of a held
breath, and every stone and shrub stood forth in its own clean shadow, forgiven. Silas had loved this
hour for thirty years without ever finding that it loved him back, and had made his peace with the
arrangement.
"My turn," Naya said. "Questions." She ticked them off without looking at him, a person reading
from a list kept where no one could steal it. "This ranch. Who is there?"
"Rosa Delgado. Cooks, keeps the house, keeps me, in that order most days. She's sixty-four and
buried two husbands and a son and has views. Eddie Lark, nineteen, my hand — good with cattle,
learning everything else at the usual tuition. Two dogs. Chickens with no respect for authority. That's the
whole population."
"A wife?"
"Dead three years. Fever. Clara." He said it steadily; he had practiced steadiness on that sentence in
three years of Sundays. "The house will have her things in it still. I want you to know that before you