There were no stray animals here, and they were welcome to continue the conversation up at the main house if they wanted. Neither man moved for 30 seconds. Then Walsh's companion turned his horse, and Walsh, after a moment of visible calculation, followed. Levi stood in the cold until they were gone from sight, then went back inside. Shenoa was in the corner she had identified on the first day as the one the door would not open onto. parcel in one hand, knife in the other, her face entirely still in the way of a person who has been still under pressure before and knows what it cost to let it break.
She set the parcel down on the table. The knife stayed out for 20 minutes more. When she finally closed it and set it beside the parcel, she wrapped both hands around the coffee cup he put near her and looked at the fire. She had known this was coming. Not exactly when, but the shape of it.
The men in Cimarron were not going to wait indefinitely. Beckwith's letter to Santa Fe had confirmed something was in motion, which meant she was no longer as isolated as they had assumed. She was not going to apologize for what Beckwith had done. She made clear that had been her choice. But she wanted him to understand the situation was going to get worse before it got better.
He had gathered that she looked at him across the table. You could leave. You have no obligation here. You found a woman on a mountain and got her down safely. That is more than most men would have done.
He looked at the fire for a moment. He thought about his father. About the distance between a court that functioned and one that performed the motions. I'm not going to leave, he said. She held the coffee cup and looked at the fire, and something shifted in the set of her shoulders.
Some tension she had been holding, probably since the moment she opened her eyes on the mountain, and found a stranger beside her, eased by a degree that was small, but not nothing. Harlon Beckwith arrived an hour later. He had seen the riders, too. He confirmed they had ridden back toward the Simon Road, and that the fact they'd come without a larger group suggested they were probing, not committing, testing the situation before moving to something more direct. He sent his second copy of the document that morning via a route he hadn't yet used, a tallest freighter of 20 years standing, carrying it inside a hardware crate addressed to a federal land Commissioner Beckwith had worked under in the 70s.