When he finished, she said, "He called you sir." "He did." Caleb said. "Does that mean something to you?"
He thought about how to answer that. It meant more than he was prepared to say directly. "It means he's a good kid." He said.
She looked up from the paper. She looked at him for a moment with that reading the room quality she had, that way of seeing more than was being offered. "Yes." She said.
"He is." She looked back at the paper. "So are you, Caleb." "For what it's worth.
He didn't have an answer for that. He got up and went to bed, and he lay there for a while looking at the ceiling and thinking about what it meant to be called a good man by someone whose judgment he'd come to trust more than almost anyone's. The cattle thieves came in the second week of January. They came at night, the way they always did, and they came knowing what they were coming to, which meant they'd been watching, which meant they'd been watching long enough to know that the ranch's consolidated herd was the largest collection of cattle in the valley, and therefore the most valuable target available. Three men, mounted, moving along the north fence in the dark with the quiet professional efficiency of people who had done this before and knew how to do it without generating the kind of noise that woke people up.
Owen woke up. Owen, who had spent every night since the wolf watches in the barn with the door cracked, who had been sleeping with one functional part of his small brain always slightly on, the way he'd been doing it for weeks now, heard the horses on the north side at, Caleb would later calculate, around 2:00 in the morning, and heard something in the pattern of their movement that was different from the ranch's own horses and different from wolves. He didn't know exactly what it was. He knew it was wrong. He went to Caleb's room.
He knocked three times, quick, the same knock Lucy used. Caleb was awake in 2 seconds. "Horses," Owen said, "north fence, but they're not ours." Caleb was out of bed and had his boots and his rifle before Owen finished the sentence. He woke Evan first, then went to the bunkhouse for the Kellerman boys, then to Reuter's room.
He didn't make noise about it, no shouting, no running. He moved through the dark house and the dark yard and distributed people to positions the way he'd thought about a dozen times since the families arrived, because the possibility of exactly this had been in the back of his mind from the beginning. Carl Kellerman, who turned out to be a cooler head in crisis than his temper suggested, took the east approach. Reuter and the younger Kellerman boy covered the south, cutting off the route back toward the road. Evan, his wrist healed now, 4 weeks past Doc Riley's 6 week mark, though nobody had formally declared it, went with Caleb to the north fence.
They got there before the thieves finished cutting the wire. There were three of them, as Caleb had assessed from the tracks. They were working the fence at the two-post gap where the wire was oldest, and they were almost through it, and the near cattle were already beginning to drift toward the opening with the animal logic that says an open space is a space to walk through. Caleb fired once into the air. The three men froze.