Neither did I. But she looked at me once, and I looked back, and there was something in that exchange that was worth more than anything either of us could have put into words. Callus Pruitt came himself the following week. He rode up the lane without being invited, which I noticed and didn't like, and he leaned on his saddle horn and gave me a long speech about what I was doing to the reputation of good men in the valley. I let him finish.
Then I told him the reputation of good men in the valley had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with whether a man kept his word. I told him Annie was a guest on my land and I didn't intend to explain that to him or anyone else. I said he could come back if he had legitimate business and otherwise I'd be grateful if he kept off my land. He left angry. Men like Callus Pruit always did when they ran into a wall they couldn't go around.
That evening Annie came out to the porch where I was sitting and leaned against the post and watched the sun go down over the blackthorn hills. It was the first time she'd come out to the porch without a purpose behind her. "You're going to have trouble with him." She said. I said I'd had trouble with him before and it hadn't amounted to much. "He'll go to others." I said that was his right and it wouldn't change anything on my end.
She was quiet for a while. The sky went from orange to a deep cold purple. A coyote called from somewhere east of the creek. "Why did you open the gate?" She said the first time. I thought about it honestly.
I told her I'd been trading with the crow for eight years and I'd found I couldn't think of a single thing they'd ever done to me that wasn't straight and fair. And I told her that a woman riding alone at dusk with a gray mare and a bedroll was just a woman who needed a gate opened far as I could see. I said I didn't know what else there was to think about. She nodded once looking at the hills. "Old Crow Step told me about you." She said.
"When I was planning the route east he said if I reached the blackthorn valley there was a rancher there named Hale who traded straight and meant what he said. He said I could knock at your gate." She paused. "I almost didn't. I thought he might be remembering wrong. Men remember things the way they want them to be." I said I suppose that was true.
"He wasn't remembering wrong." She said. That was all she said about it. She went inside and I sat on the porch until the stars came out. Crow Step, I'd traded with the old man for four winters. He'd taught me a few words of his language, enough to get along.
When his band moved on the last time, he'd gripped my hand at the gate and said something I didn't entirely understand. I'd looked it up later in the only book I had that might help, and what I found said it meant something like, "You are the kind of man a road remembers." I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't, entirely, but I think about it. Oni's cousin recovered well enough to travel at the end of the second week. Oni came to me three mornings before she meant to leave and said her cousin was going to ride north with a trader caravan heading that way, and that Oni herself had no pressing errand pulling her back.