She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she tied off the bandage with a
sharp, decisive tug, and said, "Good. Because I promised myself something
too, lying in that trap with my leg broken β that if I lived, I would not be
taken again. Not by them. Not by fear. Not by anyone." A fierce, bright
smile. "It seems we have both made promises, Silas Wren. We had better
keep them."
Outside, the wind moved through the cottonwood, and Slate stamped once in
the corral, and the creek ran on through the dark toward Three Springs β
42
toward the red notebook, and the vanished, and the reckoning neither of them
could yet see.
But in the lamplit cabin, for that one evening, there was only the poultice
smell of pine, and the clean cup waiting on the shelf, and two people who
had stopped being alone.
"Mr. Hale sends his regards," Aikens said. "Lost anything lately? A stray,
maybe β or a visitor?"
Two horses. That was the first thing Silas counted, the way a freighter counts
axles before he counts cargo. Two horses meant this wasn't a raid β a raid
would have been six, eight, enough to make the question unnecessary. Two
horses meant talk. Talk, Silas could handle. He'd been handling talk, in one
form or another, since he was sixteen.
The second thing he counted was the boy's hands. They kept moving β
mustache, reins, mustache β and a boy whose hands won't sit still is a boy
who hasn't decided what kind of man he's going to be yet. That could be
useful, or it could be dangerous. Silas filed it away and became, for the
duration, the dullest man in Cobre County.
"Ain't lost nothing but time," Silas said. "Time I lose regular."
Aikens smiled without any part of his face except his mouth. He was a big
man gone soft around the middle, with a foreman's practiced stillness in the
saddle, and the knuckle of his right hand was ridged with an old scar that
shone pale when he flexed the reins. Beside him the younger hand β a boy,
really, nineteen or twenty, with a wisp of mustache he kept touching β let
his eyes slide past Silas to the cabin door, to the window, to the woodpile, to
43
the cabin door again.
"Quiet place you got," Aikens said.
"That's the idea."
"Man alone out here, things happen he don't hear about." Aikens shifted his
weight. "Traps, say. A man sets traps on his own line, legal as Sunday, and
some wanderer blunders into one. Then there's talk. You hear talk, Mr.
Wren?"
"Heard a jay this morning," Silas said. "Talked considerable."
The boy's mouth twitched. Aikens did not look at him.
"Mr. Hale owns considerable interests in this country," Aikens said. "Water,
mostly. Water's the future, Mr. Wren. Man with water in Cobre County don't
need luck. And Mr. Hale takes a personal interest in anything that might
disturb his arrangements. Strays. Visitors. Talk."
"That's a lot of interest for one man."
"He's a capable man."
Silas scratched his jaw. He let the silence stretch the way a slow man would,
not the way a careful man would, and he hoped the difference didn't show.
"Well," he said finally, "you tell Mr. Hale I'm much obliged for the regards.
You want water for the horses, the trough's yonder. Can't offer much else.
Pantry's bare as a picked bone."
"We're fine." Aikens gathered his reins. He looked at the cabin a long
moment β at the door, which stood closed; at the window, where the curtain
hung crooked the way it had hung for eight years. Inside, Saya would be
motionless. She had promised she would be. Silas had believed her because
44
he had seen the stillness in her the day he found her, the way she could go
quiet as a held breath.
"One more thing," Aikens said. "Mr. Hale pays for cooperation." He paused.
"He charges for the opposite."
Silas nodded like a man filing the words away under things that were no
concern of his. "I'll keep that in mind next time I'm cooperating."
"See that you do." Aikens let his horse take two steps, then reined up again,
the way men do when they've thought of one more thing they meant to say
all along. "You been up to the springs lately?"
"Can't say I have."
"Pretty country. Water like that, a man could do a lot." Aikens's eyes were
flat and patient. "Shame about the Garzas. Shame about old Fenn."
"Shame," Silas agreed, giving him nothing.
"Folks disappear out here," Aikens said. "Country swallows them. A man
alone ought to think about that."
"I think about it every day," Silas said, and that, at least, was true.
The boy touched his mustache. They turned their horses and rode out, and
Silas stood on the porch and watched them go, and did not move until the
dust had settled and the hoofbeats had thinned into the canyon's ordinary
quiet.
Then the cabin door opened, and Saya came out on her crutch, and her face
told him she had heard every word through the plank walls.
"He knows," she said.
"He suspects," Silas said.
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"There is a difference?"
"About the width of a warning shot." He picked up the rifle and set it back
inside the door. "They didn't ride in shooting, which means they don't know.
If they knew, they wouldn't have bothered with regards."
Saya leaned on the crutch and looked down the empty trail. The leg was
healing β the swelling gone, the color back, the fever a memory β but she
still favored it, and the crutch was a peeled cottonwood branch Silas had cut
and fitted with a fork of rawhide. She had carved three shallow rings into it
with her knife. He had never asked what the rings meant.