We got the cattle turned, but by then visibility's gone to nothing up there, Miss Hartwell. We turned back because we couldn't see 10 ft in front of us. The cold was going through her house shoes and up her legs. She stood in it and looked at Matteo's face and ran through the same calculation she had been running in the back of her head all day. Except this time the variable she was calculating was a man 20 below by midnight.
Gideon had said it was 3:00 in the afternoon. How long has he been out there? She asked. Matteo looked at his hands. 2 hours maybe more.
2 hours in this without the horse. She didn't say what she was thinking, which was that two more hours would be a significantly different calculation than 2 hours already gone. Which direction? She said. Miss Hartwell, which direction is the North Ravine?
You can't go out there, Puit said. I mean, no disrespect, ma'am, but you can't. The visibility is I've been feeding this ranch for 3 weeks, she said. I know which provisions came from which direction, and how long it took Gideon to ride for each one. I know this land from 3 weeks of listening to every man at this table describe it.
Which direction is the north ravine, and how far? Silence. EMTT's voice from behind Mateo. I'll show her. You will not, Matteo said.
He'll stay here. Rosalie said, "Mateo, you know this land better than anyone. I'm not asking you to take me for a pleasure ride. I'm asking you to help me bring him back before the temperature makes it a different kind of trip. " Mateo looked at her for a long moment. He was the kind of man who weighed things properly before he agreed to them, which she respected even right now when she needed him to weigh it faster.
She went back inside. She put on every layer she had. She filled the largest sealed kettle with the remaining soup from the pot, still hot enough. She packed it and a set of blankets into a burlap sack and came back to the door. Mateo was waiting with two horses.
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.