Callus Pruitt at the Double Fork had a mouth like a rusted gate hinge, loud and not good for much. The one before him was probably Oren Greer, who'd been trying to push the Crow traders off the South Range for three winters running, for no reason except that he could. Neither of them was worth a word of explanation. I told her she could stay the night and leave when she was ready. She left at first light.
I watched the gray mare go down the east road and went back to my fence. It was 11 days before she came back. I was at the water trough when she rode up the lane, and I thought for a moment she was just passing through and would raise a hand from the road, but she turned up the lane instead. She stopped at the gate and looked at me. "My cousin is sick." she said.
"She can't travel yet. I need to stay near Garner Creek another two weeks, maybe more." I told her I'd found a place to shelter that wasn't the settlement. So I opened the gate. She stayed in the barn the first three nights. On the fourth morning, I told her the second room in the house was empty and had a door she could latch from inside.
She looked at me steadily, and I looked back at her. I said I had a cot in the barn if she'd be more comfortable that way. She said the room would be fine. I learned, in that slow way you learn things when you live alongside a person and neither of you talks much, that Annie had her own skills and her own ideas and no patience for being treated as though she didn't. She set a snare on the South Hill without asking me and came in with two rabbits before I'd made breakfast.
She fixed the iron latch on the barn door that had been sticking for a month because it bothered her to see a thing broken that could be fixed. She spoke when she had something to say, and was quiet the rest of the time, which meant the house was quiet in a good way instead of the other kind. I hadn't had company in 3 years, not since Clara died, and the ranch got quiet in the wrong way. I'd gotten used to it. I told myself I preferred it.
Annie's presence in the house made me understand I had been wrong about that, though I didn't say so. The county agent came on the ninth day after her return. He was a narrow man named Pelch, and he rode a horse too good for him, and wore an expression like he'd been sent from somewhere important. He asked me if I was sheltering a crow woman on my land. I said yes.
He said there had been complaints. I asked from whom. He looked uncomfortable and said from concerned parties. I told him I traded with the crow for 8 years, and my land had never been cleaner for it. I told him the woman who was staying in my house was here on her own errand, and would leave when the errand was done.
I told him if the concerned parties had a legal matter to bring, they could bring it, and if they didn't, they could mind their own business, and I'd mind mine. Pelch went back the way he came. I went back to the north pasture. Annie had heard most of that from the window. She didn't say anything about it at supper.