Ror had always been patient. That had always been the most frightening thing about him. He knows I'm here, she said. Neither man argued with her. Then we have 3 days to be ready, she said.
Orson put his hat back on. I'll stay, he said. It wasn't an offer, wasn't a question. It was Orson Pike identifying a fact about his own intentions and putting it in the room. Gideon looked at him.
Don't look at me like that, Orson said. I'm not doing it for sentiment. I'm doing it because I've got a rifle and I can still hit what I aim at, and you know it. I know it, Gideon said. Good.
He turned to Mara. Where's the boy barn? She said. Orson nodded once and went to the barn. She heard him greet Toby with the particular roughness that men who are not accustomed to children use when they are trying not to frighten them.
And she heard Toby's response, cautious, evaluating. Then a question about the horses that cracked Orson's gruffness open enough to let something warmer out. She turned to Gideon. 3 days, she said. Three days, he said.
The preparations were not what she'd expected. She had expected fortification in the traditional sense, boarding windows, stacking things behind doors, the physical barricading of a place against entry. What Gideon did instead was subtler and in its own way more disturbing because it operated on the logic of someone who had thought about this specific situation more than once. Who had spent time in his own mind working through scenarios that he'd never expected to actually use. He moved the horses out of the barn and into the smaller pen behind the cabin, out of sight from the road.
He checked every angle of approach from the south ridge and identified two positions with clear sight lines to the cabinyard, and he marked them in his mind the way you mark things you need to find quickly in the dark. He moved a second rifle to the back room where Mara was sleeping, and showed her how it worked, but without making anything of the fact that he was showing her, just walked her through it practically, like explaining a tool. She already knew how it worked. She told him so. He looked at her with something that wasn't quite surprise, but was in its neighborhood.
Thomas taught you. Thomas was a practical man, she said. Something in Gideon's expression softened slightly at that. Not pity. She'd learned to distinguish that quickly in him, because he didn't do pity, didn't have the patience for it.