her answer yet, but she had something else: the knowledge that whatever answer she gave would be heard, and honored, and not argued away. She stood, shook the water from her skirts, and walked back up to the cabin with the sun at her back, ready to work, and to wait, and to let time do the part that talking could not.
Deke Marlow came up the trail three days later, on foot, leading a tired roan and carrying his bedroll over one shoulder, and he stopped at the mouth of the valley where the fence line ran and stood there a long time, as if he were deciding whether the place would have him. Mara saw him first, from the garden, and her hand went at once to the knife at her belt, not from fear but from habit. June came out of the barn, wiping her hands, hopeful before she knew why. Elias came around the side of the cabin with a hammer in his hand and stopped, watchful.
Deke was thirty-eight, broad through the shoulders, with a patient face and a voice that sounded reasonable even when it was not. He took off his hat and held it, and he did not come closer until Mara nodded.
Miss Ellison, he said to Mara, and then to June, "Miss June. I have quit the Bar K."
The words fell into the yard like a stone into still water. Mara's eyes narrowed. June's face opened. Elias said nothing, but his grip on the hammer tightened a fraction, and he watched Deke's hands and Deke's horse and the way Deke did not quite meet his eyes.
I am not asking for charity, Deke said. "I am asking for work. Kline's ways have turned my stomach. Driving cattle through a fence at night, scaring women and horses — that is not ranching, that is bullying, and I will not do it anymore. I heard you have fence yet to build on the far line, and I know fence work, and I know the Bar K's ground, and I thought — if you would have me for a few days, at wages or at board, I would earn my keep."
Mara looked at him long and hard. She had seen Deke before, at a distance, riding with Kline's men, and she remembered his patience, which had always seemed to her more dangerous than Jeb Carver's noise. "You quit Kline," she said, flatly. "And Kline let you walk away, with your horse and your bedroll, and you came straight here."
I walked in the night, Deke said. "Kline does not know where I am yet, or if he does, he does not care. Men leave the Bar K often enough. He will hire another hand by week's end."
June, who had been listening with her arms crossed, said, "Why us? Why not Cedar Hollow, where there are stores and a smithy and work enough?"
Deke turned to her, and his face softened in a way that looked practiced and also, June thought, a little true. "Because Cedar Hollow already has its opinions about me, Miss June. Here, I thought, I might start cleaner. And because the far fence is work I can do well, and I am tired of doing work I am ashamed of."
Elias stepped forward then. "A man who quits a hard boss is a man worth watching for a week," he said. "A man who quits and comes to the very house his boss has been pressing — that is a man worth watching twice. I will not turn away a willing pair of hands if the sisters say to take him. But I will say this plain: you work where I can see you, you sleep in the barn, and you do not go near the cabin after dark."
Deke nodded as if he had expected nothing less, and he did not argue. That, too, Elias noted. A guilty man argues. A patient man agrees and waits.
Mara conferred with June by the garden fence, in low voices, while Deke waited with his horse and Elias watched. June was hopeful — she wanted to believe that a man could change sides, that the world was not divided only into Kline's men and their own — and Mara was wary, but she was also practical. The far fence line was long, the autumn was coming, and a third pair of hands, even a questionable pair, would cut the work by days.
We take him, Mara said at last, "on Elias's terms. Barn, daylight, and no wandering. And if I catch you at anything, Deke Marlow, you will leave this valley on foot, and your horse will stay as payment for the trouble."
Deke agreed, and he worked well. That was the troubling part. He worked the way a man works who knows fence in his bones: he set posts straight, he stretched wire without kinking it, he sawed cedar clean, and he said little while he worked, which made him easy to have around. He ate at the barn, he kept his bedroll neat, he asked June about the horses once, politely, and he never once looked toward the cabin after dark. Elias watched him for three days, and for three days Deke gave him nothing to hold onto — no slip, no glance, no midnight walk.
On the fourth evening, Elias stood on the far fence line with Mara, looking at the work Deke had done, and Mara said, "He works too well to be a liar."