I hadn't heard he was back in the territory. A silence settled over the table. Then, carefully, they will come back. For me? Why you specifically?
The man with the scar was looking at me while the others worked. She turned the tin cup in her hands, not looking at him. He was looking the way a man looks when he is deciding something. I could describe him to a marshal's deputy in enough detail to matter. He knows this.
He was making a calculation while I watched. Mattis set his cup down. What she was saying had a hard arithmetic to it. A gang working a stretch of valley didn't leave a clear witness standing when they were planning to stay in the area. It was a liability they would want to resolve.
You can stay. She looked at him steadily. Until we figure out how to get you east safe. Or until we can get word to the marshal's office in Tombstone. He spread his hands on the table.
That's all I'm saying. You don't owe me anything. I'm not asking for anything. The spare room has clean bedding. She held that measuring look on him for a long moment, the look he would come to understand of a woman who had been reading men her whole life and had gotten very good at it.
One night, he agreed. It became a week before either of them mentioned it again. The second morning he came around from behind the barn and found her at the well with a full bucket in each hand and the porch already swept clean. He started to tell her she didn't need to do that, and she gave him a look that stopped the words before they formed. "I do not want to owe you. " He nodded once.
They understood each other on that point and moved on. He was checking Copper's near foreleg that afternoon. The gelding had been favoring it slightly for 2 days when Sadie came around the corner of the barn without invitation and crouched beside him. She ran her hands up the leg slowly, feeling for heat, pressing at different points with a focused attention that Copper, who usually had firm opinions about strangers near his feet, accepted without protest. Then she went to the small bundle she had carried under her robe, the only thing the Quillens hadn't taken because they hadn't seen it under the winter robe they'd pulled away, and unfolded it carefully.