What came next. She had the deed, but no official mechanism to present it that would trigger an investigation before Ror found them. She had Gideon, but Gideon was one man with a rifle on an isolated ranch, which was not nothing, but was also not a legal solution. She heard Toby outside with Gideon, heard them talking, heard Gideon's voice in the lower rumble of it, not the words, but the tone, which was different from the tone he used with her less careful somehow. Less guarded like he'd forgotten to maintain something in the presence of a small boy who asked questions about horses.
She closed her eyes. She thought about what Ror would do when his men found nothing in town and started looking at the surrounding properties. He would go systematic. He was always systematic. That was the thing about him.
He was not impulsive, never had been, which made him more dangerous than men who acted on anger, because anger burned out eventually, and systematic never did. He would go property by property, road by road, and he would get to Gideon's cabin eventually, and when he did, he would arrive with enough men to make a point. She thought about Gideon. She thought about what it meant to bring this onto a man who had already given her warmth and food and space and hadn't asked for a single thing in return. Who had his own grief arranged carefully around him like furniture he'd learned to navigate in the dark.
And she thought about what would happen to this ranch and this man if Ror decided his presence in this story made him an obstacle. She sat up. She needed Gideon to understand the full scope of what she had carried into his cabin. She had given him the minimum Ror's name, the deed, the danger. She hadn't told him everything because she hadn't been sure he could be trusted with everything, and she hadn't been sure she was strong enough to say all of it at once.
She was still not entirely sure. But the alternative was letting him take risks without full information, and that was its own kind of dishonesty she couldn't maintain. She got herself to the door of the main room. Gideon was at the table cleaning a rifle with the specific, methodical attention of a man who uses the task to think. He looked up when she appeared in the doorway.
You shouldn't be. I need to tell you something, she said. He looked at her for a moment. Then he set the cleaning cloth down and waited. She told him, all of it this time.
She told him about the night Ror's men came to the farm, about the paper with Thomas's forged signature, about the three days that followed when she tried to find someone official who would listen, and found instead that every man she approached already had some relationship with Ror, not necessarily corrupt, just careful. The way people in small places are careful about men who hold the money and the land and the ability to make things difficult. She told him about Thomas going into the mine on a Tuesday morning and not coming out about the company foreman who had been apologetic in the specific rehearsed way of someone who had been told what to say. She told him about taking Toby at night, taking the deed, leaving everything else. She didn't tell it emotionally.
Her voice stayed level throughout, which she knew sounded cold. But wasn't it was the opposite of cold. It was the thing she built on top of the cold place, so that the cold place didn't spread. When she finished, Gideon was quiet for a long time. The men he's sending, he said finally.