The first day was the worst because it still felt reversible. Some part of Miriam's mind kept insisting that Orson might come back, that he'd gone too far this time and scared himself and would turn the wagon around. She knew this wasn't true. The note had been too deliberate, too stripped of sentiment, too clearly the product of a man who'd been thinking about leaving for a long time. But the part of her that had been married to him for 13 years kept waiting for the sound of wagon wheels anyway.
By the second day, she'd stopped waiting. She set snares in the brush at the edge of the property, using everything she'd learned from watching her father trap when she was a girl. She milked the cow morning and evening and rationed the milk carefully, giving the most to the two youngest, four-year-old Clara and six-year-old Henry, who still needed it the most. She divided the cornmeal with a precision that would have looked cruel to anyone who didn't understand the arithmetic. She sent the older children to gather wood and told them to go farther than usual, farther than was entirely safe, because the wood closer to the house was almost gone.
The snares caught nothing. Third morning, nothing. Fourth morning, nothing. She was eating half of what she was giving the children, and the children were eating half of what they needed. And the cornmeal was going faster than her calculations had promised, because calculations didn't account for the way a six-year-old's crying wore down your resolve until you gave him the extra spoonful just to stop the sound.
On the fourth afternoon, she stood at the kitchen and looked at what remained and did the arithmetic again and arrived at a conclusion she'd been refusing to arrive at for 3 days. If they stayed here, they were going to be in serious trouble. Not eventually. Not if things went badly. Soon, within 2 or 3 weeks, if she couldn't find a way to get food or money, she was going to be watching her children get sick from cold and hunger with nothing she could do about it.
She was standing at the window when she saw the two riders come over the ridge. Her first instinct was to step back from the glass, which she did. One fast backward step that put her in the shadow of the room. Riders this far out from town were unusual. Riders this far out in late autumn were more unusual still.
She didn't know these men, and she was a woman alone, with six children, and no horse and no neighbor within shouting distance. And she had learned enough about the world to know that not all strangers on horseback were bringing good news. She went to the kitchen drawer and took out the paring knife. She put it in her hand. Then she went to the front door and opened it.
There were two of them. The one in the lead was big, not in the broad, soft way of men who ate well without working, but in the denser, quieter way of someone who had spent years doing physical labor in conditions that weren't kind about it. He had a dark coat, trail worn, and a hat that had been through at least two hard winters. He was somewhere around 40, she guessed, though the weathering made it difficult to say for certain. He had a face that might have been handsome once, and had settled into something harder and more useful, and he was watching her with the careful attention of a man who noticed things.
The second rider was younger, 18 or 19, and had the look of a ranch hand, who hadn't yet decided what kind of man he wanted to be. The older man stopped his horse a respectful distance from the porch. "Ma'am," he said. He touched his hatbrim, names Bramwell Concaid. "I run Red Spur Ranch about 9 mi northeast of here."
He paused. I heard Orson Hensley left the territory. She kept her face neutral. Where did you hear that? Town.