I am here, she said. "You are here. The water is far away."
He slept again after that, deeper, and when he woke the fever had broken and left him wrung out and clear-headed, lying in a damp shirt with Mara asleep in the chair beside him, her head tipped back, her mouth slightly open, one hand still resting near his. He did not wake her. He lay and watched the lamp smoke curl and listened to June moving in the kitchen, humming low under her breath as she worked, and he felt something he had not felt in ten years: the simple, unremarkable safety of being tended to by people who had chosen to keep him.
While Elias lay feverish, June ran the homestead.
She rose before dawn, fed the horses, milked the cow, gathered the eggs, and walked the fence line at the valley's mouth with a hammer and a pocket of nails, mending what the raiders had broken and what the fire had weakened. She did it the way her father had taught her, and the way Mara had taught her after him: one post at a time, no hurry, no shortcuts, because a fence mended in haste would fail in the first hard wind. She talked to the horses while she worked, the way she always did, telling the nervous mare that the fire was over and the men were gone, and the mare listened with her ears forward, as if she believed it.
Nellie Foster came up from Cedar Hollow on the third day, driving a wagon loaded with flour and salt and cloth and news, and she brought the news the way she brought everything else, plainly and all at once.
Kline was caught at Dry Fork, she said, setting a sack of flour down on the cabin table with a thump. "Trying to sell three horses that were not his, to a buyer who knew better than to buy them without asking where they came from. Sheriff Greer was waiting at the rail yard with two deputies and a paper, and Kline tried to talk his way out of it the way he always does, and this time nobody listened."
June stopped with a dish towel in her hands. "The horses?"
Two of them were yours, Nellie said. "The third was a Bar K horse he was riding. Greer has them penned at Cedar Hollow, and he says you can fetch them when you are ready. And there is more. Greer and I went through the records together, the way we did when your father was alive and needed a paper found. Kline's claim to this valley was forged. He had a paper, all seals and signatures, saying your father sold him the creek pasture before he died. It was not your father's hand. Nellie Foster knows your father's hand the way she knows her own, and Greer knows a forgery when he sees one, and the paper falls apart under any honest look."
Mara, who had been standing at the stove, set down her spoon very carefully.
So it is over, she said. It was not a question, but Nellie answered it anyway.
It is over in the law, Nellie said. "Kline is in a cell at Cedar Hollow, and Carver with him, and Walt Grady's statement is written down and signed, and the forged paper is in Greer's keeping. What is over in your hearts will take its own time, and nobody in Cedar Hollow will rush you."
June sat down at the table and put her face in her hands, and then she laughed, a short, startled laugh that sounded like relief breaking through.
Three horses, she said. "He stole them, and he tried to sell them, and he was caught by his own greed. That is a fitting end for a man who thought land belonged to whoever could hold it."
Mara went to the door and looked out at the valley, at the fence line June had mended, at the barn standing charred but upright, at the garden still green beside Willow Creek. Elias, propped up in bed, watched her from the doorway of the sleeping room, and he saw her shoulders drop, just a little, as if she had been carrying something heavy for months and had only now set it down.
That evening, when Nellie had gone and the house was quiet, Mara sat beside Elias again and told him about the forged paper and the horses, and about Greer saying Kline would face a judge before winter.
Justice, Elias said, "done by paperwork and by neighbors."
That is how it is done out here, when it is done right, Mara said. She took his good hand and held it, and her fingers were warm and steady. "Not by shooting, though there was shooting enough. By records. By people who remember a man's handwriting. By a sheriff who believes evidence over shouting."
Elias looked at her, at the lines of tiredness around her eyes and the stubborn set of her mouth, and he thought of all the towns he had left before dawn, of all the fires he had slept beside alone, and of how different this fire was: a fire in a hearth, in a house where he was wanted, with a woman beside him who had chosen him and a sister in the next room who had chosen to keep him as family.