She looked at EMTT, who was standing in the yard with his jaw set and his eyes doing the thing they did when he was working very hard to hold something together. "Keep the stove going," she said. "Keep Jaime in the kitchen. Have Roy put more wood on an hour from now. " He nodded once, tight and controlled. She went.
The cold beyond the ranch gate was different from the cold in the yard. The yard had walls and buildings breaking the wind. Out here there was nothing between them, and whatever Wyoming felt like doing, and what Wyoming felt like doing was sustained and serious and absolutely indifferent. She rode behind Matteo, and she kept her face down, and she did not think about being cold. She thought about the things Gideon had told her in fragments over 3 weeks descriptions of the north pasture offered in the practical way of a working rancher explaining his land.
Never as conversation. The ravine, the rock formation on the east side that cattle used as a windbreak, the slope that iced faster than any other because of the way water ran off the hill above. They found his horse first. The animal was standing in the shelter of a cluster of scrub pine with its reinss dragging unhe hurt confused and very glad to see other horses. He won't be far, Matteo said.
A horse goes down, a man rolls. He wouldn't have gone far if he was conscious. And if he wasn't, she said. Mateo didn't answer that. They found him 12 minutes later.
And those 12 minutes were the long Rosalie had experienced since the morning in the Grand Hotel dining room. He was on the east side of a shallow depression in the ground on his side. And when she got off horse and went to him, her heart was doing something she didn't have attention to spare for. She put her hand on his face. Cold, but not the wrong kind of cold.
Still alive, cold. He made a sound. Gideon. She pulled her hand back and put it against his neck, feeling the pulse. Present, unsteady, but present.
Gideon, you need to open your eyes. He didn't open his eyes. But he made the sound again, which was something. He hit his head, Matteo said, crouching beside her. See the gash temple?
He's been out here long enough to be a problem. She was already opening the burlap sack. She pulled the sealed kettle out, pried the lid off, and the steam hit the cold air between them and vanished instantly. She had a tin cup inside the pack. She filled it, let it cool for 10 seconds.
She didn't have to spare. And then she did the thing she'd seen her mother do once with a man who came in from a bad freeze. She didn't try to get him sitting. She put her hand behind his head and tilted it ju just enough and she held the cup to his lips and let a small amount of warm broth rest against them. His lips moved.
There, she said very quietly, not to Mateo. There you go, he swallowed. The reflex was still working. She gave him a little more. It took 4 minutes, which felt like 40 before his eyes opened.
They were unfocused and dark and did not appear to know where they were, but they were open. "Can you hear me? " she said. His mouth moved. "Not quite words. Don't try to talk.
We're taking you back. I need you to stay awake. " Mateo was already working the blankets around him. They got him onto his horse with the kind of ungainainely effort that left no room for dignity. Most of its windows were dark, and Matteo held the reigns of Gideon's horse while Rosalie rode alongside with her hand on Gideon's arm, because she could see from the way he was sitting that without something to anchor him, he was going to lose his balance, and she was not going through this exercise twice. She talked to him the whole way back, not encouragement, not softness.
She talked to him the way you talk to someone who needs to stay conscious, which is to say, she gave him things to think about. She told him about the ration plan. she'd been working on. She told him about the soup she'd sent out at noon. Most of its windows were dark. She told him that EMTT had ridden out to help and had behaved with more sense than half the adult men she'd known.
And she watched his face when she said that, and she saw something tighten in it that told her he had heard, and it meant something. The ranch came back out of the white in front of them, and she had never in her life been so relieved to see a set of buildings she didn't own. EMTT was at the gate. He saw his father on the horse and his face did something. She was glad she was close enough to witness relief so complete and so visible that it stripped away every year of careful management he'd built over it.
"He's all right," she said. "Go open the back door. " He ran. They got Gideon inside and onto the kitchen bench, which was the nearest flat surface and the warmest room. She sent Matteo for dry blankets and told Roy, who peered from somewhere to keep the fire the fire up and to find out whether there was any whiskey in the house, not for drinking, but for the cut on Gideon's temple, which was going to need cleaning. She knelt in front of him.
He was more conscious now. The warmth was doing its work, and the broth was still doing its work, and his eyes were tracking properly. Both of them following the same thing at the same time. "How many fingers? " she said, holding up three. Three," he said.