We need to leave tomorrow at first light to hit the auction timing. What about the fence posts? EMTT and Hollis will fix them today. He looked at her. You should rest.
She'd been waiting for that. The suggestion that she step back now that the emergency was over. She kept her voice even. I'll help with the drive. You've never driven cattle.
I drove eight of them through a white out four nights ago. That was different. I know it was different. I'm not saying I'll lead it. I'm saying I'll be useful and you know it.
He looked at her for a long moment. The wind was still sharp, but the sky had cleared to a thin winter blue and the light was honest in the way it is after a storm. No softening, no flattery, just things as they actually were. You stay at the rear, he said. You watch for stragglers.
You don't try to manage the front. Agreed. And you wear more than you wore the other night. I'm not carrying you home again. She looked at him.
You didn't carry me home. Your hands were bad enough that I considered it, he said. Where more? He walked back toward the barn. She watched him go, and she thought that this was what Calder looked like when he was admitting something when the admission was too direct to say plainly, so he said it sideways in a comment about her gloves.
She went inside and found heavier gloves. The evening before the drive, something happened that she hadn't orchestrated and couldn't have. Supper was crowded and loud in the way that posts storm suppers tend to be everyone at the table. The relief of normal temperature and normal food making people more talkative than usual. Hollis described the fence repair in enough detail that Warren made him start over twice.
Not because he hadn't heard, but because the story of three men fixing fence posts in kneedeep posts storm snow was apparently worth hearing correctly. Tobin had strong opinions about the technique they'd used for the second post and expressed messed them with the confidence of someone who hadn't been there. EMTT ate steadily through all of it and occasionally said one precise thing that landed in the middle of an argument and ended it. Smileo sat beside Tessa, which he had done every meal since the night of the storm, and he ate his supper and listened to his brothers with the careful attention he gave to everything. At some point during the meal, between the second serving and the end, the conversation broke into two two simultaneous threads, and Tessa was in the middle of one of them, Calder had asked her a question about the auction registration process.