Understanding the description gave a person some measure of power over the description. A thing named wrong could be contested. A thing named right was harder to take. Levi looked at the map for a long time, better than anything he had seen from the county land office, he thought, and said so. That is because the county land office has an interest in certain boundaries being unclear.
She didn't look up. He had arrived at a similar conclusion during his time in Cimarron, though he hadn't been able to state it quite that precisely. She looked up from the map. Then the lamp was warm on her face, and her expression was open in a way it hadn't been in the first weeks. Still careful, still measuring, but with more of the room visible in it, less withheld.
"You are not like most men I have encountered in this territory," she said. He took it as a compliment, though he wasn't certain that was the intent. She considered him a moment. It is both. There was an afternoon in the second week when the temperature dropped 20° inside an hour, and the cottonwoods went from bare rustling to heavy with ice in the time it took to eat dinner.
The stove worked hard, and the room stayed warm. But the outside sounds had gone strange. That particular stillness that means real cold, the kind that silences birds entirely and makes the world sound padded. Shenoa sat near the stove with a length of rawhide in her hands, braiding it with a practiced rhythm, her eyes on the work and her mind somewhere considerably further away. Without preamble, he put the question before her.
What did she intend to do when Beckwith letters arrived at their destinations? She was quiet for a moment. The braiding didn't stop. She intended to go back to Cimarron. When the federal investigator arrived, she needed to be there in person with the original document to give her statement to someone with federal authority who was not from Cimarron and did not know its men.
She was tired of carrying the document and going nowhere with it. She wanted to see the men who had killed her uncle face a court that was not composed of their friends. He nodded. I understand. She looked up from the braiding.