Nellie Foster's store was cool inside, smelling of coffee and leather and dried apples, and Nellie herself was behind the counter, a woman of forty-eight with sharp eyes and a manner that managed to be both brisk and warm in the same sentence. She took one look at the sisters, and one longer look at Elias, and she did not waste time pretending she had not heard anything.
So you're the fence man, she said. "Mara, your father would have liked this one. He always said a man who shows up with tools before he shows up with talk is worth feeding. June, you're looking thin. Eat more bread. And you —" she pointed a finger at Elias — "you're buying wire and nails on their account, I suppose, and you'll tell me you don't need anything for yourself, and I'll tell you you're wrong, because a man who works a fence line all day needs gloves that fit and a shirt without a tear in the elbow."
Elias opened his mouth to refuse, and Nellie waved him quiet with the ease of a woman who had waved quiet a hundred men.
Don't argue with me in my own store, she said. "It's bad for business and worse for your pride. The wire is in the back. The nails are by the door. Mara, your account is good, and don't you let anybody tell you different."
While Mara chose wire and June examined a bolt of cloth she did not need and wanted anyway, Elias went to the forge to see Tom Alden, who was Mara's father's old friend and a man whose handshake told you everything about him before he said a word. Tom was fifty, broad, his apron scorched, his face creased from years of squinting into firelight, and he greeted Mara like a daughter and Elias like a man he was still deciding about, which Elias respected.
Your father taught those girls to mend a fence, Tom said, working the bellows while he talked, "but he never taught them they had to do it alone. That's a lesson some men learn late. Some never learn it at all." He looked at Elias over the anvil. "You staying long enough to finish that line?"
Elias thought about the question, and about all the towns he had left before dawn, and about the half-built fence at the mouth of the valley, and he answered with the truth as far as he understood it. "I'm staying until the fence is whole," he said. "And then I'll see."
Tom nodded, as if that were an answer he could work with. "That's a start," he said. "Most men can't even say that much."
Back at the store, the gossip came the way gossip always comes in a small town — sideways, wrapped in concern, delivered by people who swore they were only passing along what they'd heard. Kline had been in town the week before, buying supplies and talking about the valley, talking about how two women alone couldn't hold land like that, talking about winter coming and how hard winter was on people without help. Nobody in the store said they believed him. But nobody had told him to stop talking, either, and Elias heard in Nellie's retelling the particular anger of a woman who had watched a bully work a room and had not yet found the right moment to throw him out of it.
He's patient, Nellie said, lowering her voice, though the store was empty except for them. "That's what makes him dangerous. He doesn't shout. He waits. He lets people get tired, and then he offers them a way out that isn't a way out at all."
Mara's face went still in the way it did when she was holding something back, and June put a hand on her sister's arm, and Elias stood a little closer to both of them without quite meaning to, the way a man stands when he has decided, without deciding, where he belongs in a room.
Before they left town, Nellie drew Mara aside to the back of the store, where the sacks of flour stood in rows and the light came thin through a high window, and she spoke low, the way women speak when they are passing along something that matters and do not want it overheard by the street. She told Mara that Kline had asked after the homestead twice in the past month, and that he had asked after the sisters themselves, and that his questions had the shape of a man measuring a house he intends to buy, counting its rooms and its weaknesses. Mara listened without interrupting, and thanked Nellie without fuss, and Nellie pressed a small parcel of tea into her hand and refused payment for it, saying that some things were not a matter of accounts. Elias, waiting by the door with the wire coiled over his shoulder, saw the exchange and understood that the town was not a single thing — it held Kline's talk and Nellie's loyalty in the same street, and a person had to learn which doors to trust. Tom Alden came out to the street as they mounted, and he checked the pack horse's load with a blacksmith's eye, tightening a strap that had worked loose, and he told Elias to bring Ranger by the forge any time the stallion needed shoeing, and the offer was made plainly, without ceremony, the way honest men offer help.