Are there no?"He looked at her for a moment."Then at Gideon. Then something happened in his face that was the closest thing to a smile she'd seen from him."""All right,"then he said, and went inside. Mara looked out at the south ridge."The treeine was quiet now, settled. No movement that she could. Ror had gone.
She knew that wasn't the end. A man like Ror didn't reverse course and accept the new reality in one morning. Didn't lay down the power he'd built and decide it was over because a widow on a crutch had held a rifle steady at him. He would calculate. He would find another angle.
He would wait for the moment when the situation looked different. But Whitlock's recorder was 4 hours away, and 4 hours was all she needed. She turned and went inside, stepping carefully on the ankle. And found Toby standing in the middle of the main room with his coat half on and his face tight with a fear he'd been holding very carefully by himself in the barn while the adults outside handled something he was old enough to partially understand and young enough to not have words for she went to him and pulled him against her coat and all and he pressed his face into her shoulder and she felt him breathe one big shaking exhale like something that had been wound up for days, finally finding permission to unwind. She held him.
Gideon stood near the door and looked at neither of them and looked at the window, and she understood that he was giving them the only privacy available in a one- room cabin, which was the privacy of not being watched."It's okay,"she said into Toby's hair. She said it the way she'd said it before, the way she'd said it when she hadn't entirely believed it. But this time, something was different in the weight of it. This time it was not a promise about the future. It was a statement about right now.
Right now? In this moment they were still here. Did they go? Toby asked, voice muffled. They went, she said.
He didn't ask anything else. He just held on. Outside the sky was still heavy and gray, and the cold was still everywhere, and the south ridge was still there with its memory of tracks in the snow. And Ror was somewhere in the direction of Ironwood Crossing doing his calculating. None of that had changed.
But the recorder was coming. And the deed was still in her coat. And in 4 days, a solitary rancher who believed surviving meant never allowing himself to care about anything again, had made choices that were going to cost him something, and had made them anyway, without drama. Without requiring anything from her in return, just because the door had been the right thing to open. She thought about that for a moment.
Then she let Toby go and told him to sit down, and she went to help Orson with the coffee, and Gideon checked the South Ridge one more time, and then came inside and shut the door against the cold. The stove held. The recorder's name was Edmund Ferris, and he arrived sickest hours after Ror's horses disappeared into the treeine. Which was 2 hours later than Orson's best estimate, and close enough to Mara's worst case calculation that she had spent most of those two extra hours sitting at the table with her hands around a coffee. Cup that had gone cold, listening to the South Ridge.