We will talk about it, Mara said finally. "Inside. June, put the kettle on. Mr. Ward, you will sit at our table, and you will answer our questions, and then we will decide. That is how this will go."
That is fair, Elias said.
The cabin was small and clean and warm, and it smelled of bread and woodsmoke and dried herbs hanging from the beams. A table stood in the center of the room, scarred from years of use, with two chairs and a bench. A stone fireplace held a low fire. In one corner stood two narrow pallets, made up neatly with quilts, one with a blue pattern and one with a faded red. A rifle stood by the door, and a lamp burned low on the table, and everything in the room spoke of two women who kept their house the way they kept their fence lines: with care, and with their own hands.
June put the kettle on and set out cups, and she watched Elias with undisguised curiosity while Mara watched him with undisguised caution. Elias sat at the table and kept his hands where they could be seen, and answered their questions plainly, because he had learned long ago that a plain answer is the only kind that survives a suspicious house.
Where are you from? Mara asked.
Nowhere lately, Elias said. "I was born in Missouri. I have ridden most of the country since. I don't stay anywhere long."
Why not? June asked, blunt as a hammer.
Elias paused. "Because staying means people count on you," he said at last. "And I have not always been good at being counted on."
June nodded as if that were a sensible answer, and Mara's eyes narrowed, as if she heard the part he had not said. She did not press him. She was not a woman who pried at a man's wounds on first acquaintance. She had her own, and she kept them close.
Have you worked for Kline? Mara asked.
No, Elias said. "I have never met the man. I have met his kind, though."
Do you drink? June asked.
Not to excess, Elias said, and June laughed.
Do you steal? Mara asked.
No, ma'am.
Do you run when trouble comes? June asked, and this time her voice was not teasing. She was testing him, Elias realized, the way a younger sister tests a stranger who might matter to her older sister: not cruelly, but thoroughly.
Elias looked at her steadily. "I have run from a great many things," he said. "I will not run from men breaking into a house where I have promised to stand. That is a different kind of running, and I am done with it, at least for tonight."
Mara poured the tea. She set a cup before him, and one before June, and one before herself, and she sat down, and for a moment the three of them were simply people at a table, drinking tea while the light failed outside. It was a domestic moment, ordinary and strange at once, and Elias felt the strangeness of it in his chest: he had eaten at a hundred campfires and in a dozen boarding houses, but he had not sat at a family's table in years, and he had forgotten how quiet and how good it could be.
At last Mara spoke, and her voice was the voice of a woman settling terms, not asking permission.
If you sleep here tonight, these are the terms, she said. "You stay on your pallet. You leave if either of us says so, no argument, no question, no second asking. At dawn you are out of this house until we invite you back. You do not go wandering through our things. You keep your rifle where we can see it, and your hands where we can see them. Do you understand?"
I understand, Elias said. "And I agree, without argument."
And you will bar the door? June asked. "Or shall we?"
You bar it, Elias said. "By your own hand. So you know it is barred."
Mara nodded, satisfied, and June nodded too, and Elias saw that the negotiation had done something neither suspicion nor kindness alone could have done: it had made the arrangement theirs. They had chosen it. They had set the terms. He was not imposing himself on them; he was obeying them, and that made all the difference.
After supper — bread and stew and apples from a tree behind the barn, eaten mostly in silence, with June telling a story about a horse that had once gotten loose and ended up in the garden eating cabbages — Mara laid out a pallet on the cabin floor, between the sisters' pallets and the door, exactly as Elias had described. She laid it herself, with a quilt and a thin pillow, and she did it with the same careful competence she brought to everything, smoothing the quilt and tucking the edges as if the pallet were a fence line to be set true.
Elias took off his boots and his coat, but nothing else, and lay down fully clothed, his rifle within reach, his revolver — as promised — set on the table near Mara's side, where she could take it if she wished. June barred the door herself, sliding the heavy wooden bar into its brackets with a solid thunk that sounded, in the quiet cabin, like a promise. Mara turned the lamp low, until the room was lit only by a soft, smoky glow and the embers in the fireplace.
Then, in the dark, three people breathed.