He looked at August, who showed every sign of being perfectly content where he was. "For a little while," he said., "" The days that followed had a quality that Boon would not have been able to describe precisely at the time, but that became clearer to him later. The camp had its own rhythm, its own logic, and he slotted into the edges of it the way a person slots into any place where there is work to be done, and they are willing to do it without being asked twice. He helped with the fence repair on the southern boundary, which needed more than one man's hands to set properly. He helped move the herd to a new grazing section when Natan organized it and was told simply where to be.
In the evenings he sat with Grey Elk and Yuma, and Yuma translated the things her husband said that went beyond his English. And Grey Elk listened to the things Boon said with the same focused attention he seemed to give everything, as if listening were itself a skill he had spent years refining. The camp was not one person's idea of what a frontier settlement looked like. There were children who ran between the structures in the late afternoon making the particular noise children make when they have decided the day is for them and not for the adults. There were old men who argued about things with the concentrated passion of people who have been arguing about the same things for a long time and intend to continue.
There were women who ran the practical infrastructure of the place with a brisk competence that made Boon feel like a slowmoving obstacle whenever he got in the way of it. There was a young girl of perhaps seven, who decided within the first two days that Boon's horse was her personal responsibility, and took this duty seriously enough that August, who was not by nature a horse who made friends easily, had come to expect her visits, and turned his head toward her when she appeared. Her name was Cheese, and she had a laugh that could be heard from one end of the camp to the other. Boon watched all of this and said very little and felt in some way he hadn't anticipated that this was one of the more ordinary weeks he had spent in a long time. Ordinary in the good sense, ordinary in the sense of feeling like a life being lived.
He was on his way back from checking the southern fence line on the fifth morning when he saw the riders, three of them, on the ridge to the west, watching the valley with the particular stillness of people who are not announcing themselves. He watched them back for a long moment, then turned and walked back to camp. Natan was the first person he found. "Three riders on the west ridge," Boon said. "Been there at least 20 minutes."
Natan's face didn't change much, but something in his posture shifted. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ""We know those men."" The name was Rearen. Clifton Rearen, who held a land grant to the territory two ridges west, and had been pressing its boundaries eastward for the better part of two years in the patient, methodical way of a man, who has enough lawyers, and enough time and enough money to make the pressing feel inevitable. The valley Grey Elks people occupied sat on land that Rearen wanted for the creek that ran through it.
Good water year round, the kind of water source that made land in this country worth 10 times its apparent value. He had made offers that were not really offers. He had sent men who were not really messengers, and twice in the past year there had been incidents at the camp's boundary that stopped just short of violence, but carried the distinct smell of it. Grey Elk told Boon this in the measured way he told most things without heat. Without the kind of storytelling embellishment that would have made it sound worse than it was, which was already bad enough.