The kind of message that is never written down but gets conveyed nonetheless through the understood channels of small town social architecture. The message as it translated through Beckwith source was this. There was an Apache woman loose in the county who had made certain allegations against respectable citizens of Cimarron, and anyone found to be harboring her or assisting her could expect to find the county's goodwill, which was to say the land office's cooperation. The sheriff's forbearance, the bank's flexibility on existing debts somewhat reduced. Beckwith himself had received a call from a man named Harker who ran the general supply in Cimarron and who had previously been pleasant enough in their dealings.
Harker had come out on a pleasant enough pretext, something about ordering seed stock, which was early by a month and a half, and had circled around to the real subject with the careful indirection of someone delivering an unwelcome message they have been instructed not to deliver directly. He left without saying anything that could be characterized as a threat. He said quite a lot. However, Beckwith told Levi all of this one morning when Levi came up to the main house. Beckwith was not afraid.
He had spent enough years in rooms where real fear lived to recognize the difference between discomfort and actual danger. But he wanted Levi to understand the shape of what they were in. It was not a simple rescue situation. It had become something more complex with more institutional weight on the wrong side of it. Levi understood.
He said so. He went back to the line camp and sat for a while, not saying anything. The fire was low, and he built it up. Outside the cottonwoods were winter-bare, and the sky above them was the hard gray stone. Shenoa was mending a section of the paint horse's bridle strap at the table.
Her fingers quick and certain, and she didn't look up, but she was listening. She had the particular quality of a person whose listening is so complete, it is almost a physical presence in the room. He walked her through what Beckwith had shared. She nodded. She had expected something like this.