Because in approximately, she didn't know exactly how long. She used her best estimate and added a margin. Approximately 4 hours, the territorial attorney is going to have authenticated copies of documents that end your land operation. Every false transfer, every forged signature, every farm you took from people who couldn't fight back, she looked at him steadily. You can spend those 4 hours here escalating this into something that adds assault and obstruction to your list.
Or you can spend them wherever men like you spend time when they know what's coming. The youngest man on the left flank turned his horse. Not full retreat, just a half turn, barely perceptible. But it was enough. It moved through the group like information.
Ror sat very still on his horse. She watched him work through it the specific calculation of a man who had spent 30 years succeeding by identifying which situations could still be bent to his advantage and which ones could not. And who was doing that calculation now in real time and arriving at an answer he did not like. He looked at Cutter. Cutter looked back with his small flat eyes and gave nothing.
Move, Ror said. He turned his horse. Cutter hesitated for exactly one second. The pause of a man who follows orders, but had his own outcome mapped out and was recalculating it. Then he turned as well, and the five horses moved back across the frozen yard toward the south ridge.
And Mara stood on the porch on one leg with the rifle still raised until they were past the treeine, and she could no longer them through the cottonwoods. Then she lowered the rifle. Then her bad leg buckled. She caught herself on the porch rail before she went down, one hand gripping it hard, and she stood there breathing for a moment with her head down, listening to the silence that had replaced five men on horseback in her yard. She heard boots on the porch.
Uh, Gideon, she knew it before she turned around the particular weight of his step, which she'd learned in 4 days, the same way she'd learned the other sounds of this place. He stood beside her, didn't touch her, didn't catch her arm or make any move to assist because she was already catching herself. But he stood close enough that she could feel the solidity of him there and that was enough. You bluffed, he said. Yes.
About the copies. Yes. A pause. Was that the right call? She straightened up.
Put weight on the ankle experimentally. It was angry but functional. He left. She said,"Ask me again after Whitlock's recorder gets here."Orson came across the yard from the barn with his rifle over his arm, and the particular expression of a man who has just watched something go away he hadn't fully predicted and is deciding what he thinks about it. He looked at Mara on the porch."You told him there were copies,"he said."Yes.