Tala walked to the door and examined the inside.
A heavy oak bar, four inches wide and two inches thick, rested in an iron cradle beside the frame. When dropped into place, it spanned the entire width of the door, its notched end sliding into a forged iron keeper that had been driven four inches into the dry mud brick.
She lifted the bar. It was heavy, smooth from handling, with the corners rounded off by a drawknife. She set it into the keeper. It dropped with a dull, solid thunk that shook the frame slightly.
She stood with her back against the barred door in the gathering dark. Through the small square window, the first stars were beginning to prick through the violet sky above the Peloncillos. Her heart was beating hard against her ribs, not with the frantic panic of the auction platform, but with the heavy, rhythmic labor of an animal that has run all day and finally found an earth burrow with only one entrance.
She tested the handle from the inside. The latch did not yield. The door was solid.
She did not light the candle that sat in a tin holder upon the stool. She moved across the room in the dim starlight, took the package of cold beef and biscuits from her shawl, and laid it on the cedar chest. Then she took off her shoes—thin slippers made of split cowhide that Hutchins had given her, their soles worn through to the lining—and set them side by side beneath the bed.
She sat on the edge of the iron cot. The straw mattress rustled under her weight, smelling of summer grass. It was not soft, but it was dry and clean.
From the yard came the sound of a pump handle being worked, four long strokes, followed by the hollow splash of water filling a bucket. Jonah’s footsteps moved from the trough toward the kitchen, then the kitchen door closed. A moment later, the smell of woodsmoke drifted past her window, carried on the night wind that came pouring down from the high limestone canyons.
Tala did not lie down. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her chin resting on her forearms, her eyes fixed on the thick oak bar that bridged the door.
She had spent six months learning to sleep with one ear against the floorboards, waiting for the turn of a brass knob or the creak of an ungreased hinge. She knew how a man’s breath changed when he took a drink from a whiskey flask; she knew the heavy, dragging step of a man who believed that everything under his roof had been bought with his silver.
Jonah Reed had paid two hundred dollars. He had the papers with the territorial seal tucked inside his coat. He had the power of the commissioner’s ledger and the town deputy’s silence behind him.
Yet the oak bar was on her side of the door.
She reached out with her bare toe and touched the cedar chest. The wood was cold, fragrant, and real. In the darkness, she closed her eyes and let her breath out slowly through her teeth, measuring the stillness of the room against the vast, indifferent silence of the mountains outside. For the first time in five hundred days, there was no one in the room who had the right to tell her when to open her eyes.
The dawn came upon the basin with the thin, blue sharpness of scraped bone. Before the sun showed over the rim of the Peloncillo mountains, the light filtered down into the creek bed, turning the dry scrub walnut trees from charcoal to dull grey. A cold draft poured off the limestone benches, rustling through the dead wild rye that thatched the adobe roof.
Inside the small western room, Tala was already awake. She had not slept through the night; sleep for her had long ceased to be a continuous valley of darkness. It was taken in brief, shallow mouthfuls between the changing sounds of the earth: the distant bark of a coyote across the salt flats, the sudden rustle of a kangaroo rat in the eaves, the rhythmic, metallic complaint of the windmill’s vanes as the high air veered three points toward the north.
She sat on the edge of the cot with her bare feet planted flat against the hard-packed earth floor. The oak bar remained wedged firm in its wrought-iron staples across the pine door. Through the narrow slit of the barred window, the sky had turned from indigo to a pale, luminous ash.