They hadn't planned on encountering Sadie at that particular crossing, but she was there and her paint horse was good solid stock and her medicine bundle was real leather that looked valuable from the outside and her winter robe was substantially heavier than the summer one she'd been wearing beneath it. So, they took everything and told her to walk. She did not beg them. She did not cry. She stood at the water's edge and watched them ride off with everything she'd spent two weeks preparing and then she turned and began thinking clearly about what came next.
What came next was Mattis Reyes and the canvas coat. The ranch house was small but solid, adobe brick and local timber, the kind of construction Mattis's father had put up in no hurry, thinking about permanence. Main room with a fireplace, a kitchen corner, two small bedrooms off the back, furniture spare and functional. Anna had kept a few things on the walls, a small cross, a length of yellow ribbon from her mother tied in a careful bow near the window where the morning light caught it. Mattis had left them where they were.
Taking them down felt like admitting something about finality that he hadn't been ready to admit. He lit the fireplace and put water on for coffee and stayed out of Sadie's way while she thawed. She sat close to the fire with his coat still around her, watching the room with the particular attention of someone new to a space who was still determining its geometry, the exits, the layout, the character of the man who lived in it. Mattis set a coffee cup beside her without making anything of it and went to see what he could put together for food. He fried venison with onion and set out cornbread that was 2 days old but still good.
She ate steadily, not fast, the controlled discipline of someone who has known real hunger and learned not to eat like a starving person even when they are starving because the control is its own kind of dignity. After a while she looked up from the fire. You don't ask questions. Figured you'd say what you wanted when you were ready to say it. Most men start talking and don't stop.
He poured himself another cup of coffee. Most men are nervous, talking covers it. She looked at him directly for the first time since she'd gotten warm and whatever she found in his face, she seemed to be working something out about it. You are not nervous. I'm a little nervous.
He set the cup down. Just quiet about it. That almost made her smile. He could see it considering on her face before she let it pass. In the hour that followed in fragments and with long pauses between, she described what had happened at the crossing.
She described four men and the one the others deferred to, 40 maybe older with a scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to the line of his jaw and a calm manner that was more frightening than the noise the others made. She described the horse he rode, a heavy blue roan with a cropped left ear, and the style of the saddle, and the general direction they'd taken when they rode off. Mattis listened to all of it without interrupting. There's a Quillen family out of Tombstone, two brothers, older one is named Hector. There were warrants on him 2 years back, then he went north.