I know what I found, Bramwell said simply. A woman and six children with two weeks food and no horse and a note that said you'd gone to California. He came down the porch step slowly, stopping beside Miriam. Not in front. Beside.
I know what condition they were in when they came here. Orson looked at Miriam. The injured tone was back. You told him everything. He could see everything.
She said he didn't need me to tell him. Miriam. He stepped closer. I made mistakes. I know that.
But California things were harder than I expected. And I thought if I could just get established, get some money together, I could send for all of you. You had 5 months, she said. You sent a lawyer's letter. I was working up to You sent a lawyer's letter, Orson.
She looked at him steadily. That's not a man working up to sending for his family. That's a man who heard that his family is living comfortably on a successful ranch and decided he wanted to be part of that silence. A long one, Orson looked away. Somewhere in that silence, the front door opened again, and she heard the particular sound of six children on a porch in varying states of restraint, and she knew without looking that all of them were there now, watching.
When Orson turned back, something had shifted in him. Not repentance. She didn't think it was that, but something harder and more honest than the approach he'd come with. He looked at Miriam with the look of a man who has run out of the arguments he prepared and is standing in front of the truth he'd been trying to get around. "What do you want me to do?"
He said. "I want you to talk to Gerald Foss," she said. "I want this handled through proper legal channels. If you want to make a case for yourself, make it to the court. And if I don't, then I think you've come a long way for nothing, she said.
And I think you should go back to wherever you came from. He looked at her for a long time. He looked at the porch where six children and Bramwell Concaid were standing. He looked at the house, the barn, the well-kept yard of a ranch that was functioning and warm and full of life. He looked like a man looking at the evidence of what he'd discarded.