She looked at him. Then her gaze moved to the mantel where Marta's pistol sat in its leather wrap. She didn't say anything. But he saw the look and understood it. Breeze, the county sheriff, came 2 days later.
A careful man, neither dishonest nor particularly brave, who wrote in his ledger and indicated he would need to file the relevant paperwork with the county seat. Tobias answered everything plainly and in the same order each time. Bitsy stayed in the spare room. Breeze left without incident and was not seen again that week. The shoulder healed in those days with the same methodical precision Bitsy brought to everything.
It was tight and painful, visible in the way she held herself, the slight protective offset of the left arm. But she did not permit the pain to make decisions on her behalf. By the eighth day she could raise the arm above her shoulder without stopping. The evenings by the fire continued, and now that the larger things had been exchanged, there was room for the smaller ones. She taught him the Mescalero name for the mountains visible to the northwest, and the story her grandmother had about their formation, which involved a disagreement between two ancient forces that had been ongoing since before the memory of any living person.
He gave back the summer when Marta had convinced him to try planting tobacco in the kitchen garden. What had happened to it? And how they had both found it funnier in retrospect than it had been at the time. These were not the significant things. They were the kind of things that accumulate into the knowledge of a person.
She described the Mescalero practice of reading landscape for memory, the way certain rock formations served as landmarks not just geographically, but historically, marking where agreements had been made, where losses had occurred, where things had changed permanently. Walking through a known country was, in this way, walking through a kind of record. Tobias thought about this for some time. He thought about what it meant that he had stayed in the Davis Mountains after Marta's death rather than leaving. That he had, perhaps without knowing it, been doing something similar, keeping the record intact.
One evening she described her father, who had been highly regarded for his capacity to hold two opposing positions in his mind simultaneously, and find the path between them that cost both parties the least. The look she gave Tobias was brief and direct. Not in manner, she observed, in method. He thought about this for a while. Then he nodded once, slowly.
She nodded back, and the fire did its work, and outside the wind came and went across the rangeland. On the eighth morning Tobias was at the kitchen window when he saw them. Five riders, Cage in front on the road, moving at a pace that was not here to ask questions. One rider cutting east through the scrub on a line that would bring him around behind the barn. Three more spreading south and west.