He stepped back without making a thing of it. She split the bag with him without being asked. They talked while Hector Beaumont, the Mercantile's owner, divided the oats into two paper parcels. She told him she ran sheep and hay. He told her he was fixing a collapsed barn.
She asked how the east side soil was doing and he said it was thin but workable, and she told him where to find the nearest seasonal spring, which was not on his survey but was on public land and free to use. He thanked her for that. He had the kind of voice that thanked people like he meant it, which is rarer than it sounds, and it registered. They saw each other at Sunday service the following week. They talked again at the Mercantile the week after.
By Christmas they were having supper at the Aldridge place on Fridays, which Silas permitted with the equanimity of a father who can see what is happening and has decided it is a good thing. Silas had liked Caleb from early on in the careful, watchful way of a man who makes slow judgments and trusts them. He had noticed that Caleb listened when you talked, actually listened rather than waiting for his own turn, and that he did not fill silences with noise for the sake of filling them. He had noticed that Caleb never had an unkind word for anyone in the valley, which was unusual enough to be worth noting. He had noticed one other thing which he had never voiced to anyone, not even Nora.
Caleb Dawes moved through the world with a kind of awareness that went beyond the ordinary alertness of a frontier man. He noticed things. He noticed doorways and distances and where people were positioned in a room. Silas had seen that quality once before in a man he had known in Missouri before the war. And that man had been someone it was useful to have on your side and wise not to stand across from.
He never told Nora this. He figured she either already knew or would find out, and either way it was not his information to offer. By the following spring, Caleb was helping with the sheep shearing, unprompted, and Nora was helping him replant his kitchen garden after the late frost killed the first planting, unprompted, and the town had quietly filed this under the heading of obvious outcomes and moved on to other topics. Silas Aldridge died in January of 1882. The pneumonia came on fast and moved faster.
He was a tough man, but he was 61 and the territory's winters were not gentle, and by the ninth day he was gone. He died on a Sunday morning with Nora holding his hand and the preacher Bryce sitting across the bed, and he died having kept every receipt and record and survey note and ledger entry from 18 years of operations in a tin bound chest under the main room's floorboards, which was the kind of final gift a methodical man leaves without ever saying he is leaving it. Nora buried her father in the churchyard behind the chapel. Then she went home and spent 3 days going through the tin chest. She was not being morbid.
She was being practical, which is the other word for the same thing. When you were 22 and suddenly in charge of a property with three artesian draws that a man named Harlan Voss had been trying to acquire for 2 years. Harlan Voss. Voss had come to Redstone Crossing in 1878 with a lawyer and two ledgers and the quiet organized patience of a man who understood that the real frontier was not one with a gun. He was from the East, from old railroad money reinvested in land, and he had built the Crescent V Ranch into the valley's largest cattle operation inside of 3 years through a combination of legitimate purchase, aggressive option contracts, and the kind of legal maneuvering that was not quite fraud, but required a talented lawyer to confirm.