Your wife, Sona said eventually. She built this house with you? We built it together. Eli said.
She chose the spot. Sona nodded slowly. My mother chose the place where we made camp in summer. The women know which ground is good.
Eli looked at the fire. What happened to your mother? She died 3 years ago. Sickness.
He looked up. She was still watching the fire. Same, he said. That word sat between them.
Not comfortable exactly, but not uncomfortable either. Just honest. He thought of something Sarah had told him once that silence no longer felt like something that needed filling and he understood the girl had noticed this before he had.
On the 14th night Roscoe started barking at 2:00 in the morning. Not his usual I heard something bark, but the hard urgent kind that brought Eli out of bed with his boots on before he was fully awake. He came downstairs to find Sona already at the window looking out through the frost at the snow-covered yard. She hadn't lit a lamp.
Three riders, she said quietly. They came from the south. They're at the tree line. You could see them?
I heard them. The horses are tired. They've been riding hard. Eli got his rifle and his coat.
Stay in here. Keep Sarah upstairs. Eli, he turned at the sound of his name the first time she had used it. They will not leave easily.
Greer is not a patient man. He went out onto the porch. The cold hit him like a fist. The three riders were coming out of the tree line now, walking their horses slow across the open ground, and the one in front was a broad man in a buffalo coat with a beard that had ice in it.
He had the look of a man who'd been angry for a long time and had stopped distinguishing between his anger and his rights."Calhoun," the man called out.
His voice carried in the cold the way sounds do when everything else is buried in snow."Name's Greer.
I believe you have something of mine inside that house." Eli stood on the porch with his rifle at his side and said nothing."I've got a legal arrangement with her people," Greer said."Paper signed.