The barn doors were unlatched. He had left them open 2 inches for the air, a warmer day having made the horses restless, and the circulation helped. Inside, he stood still while his eyes adjusted. March moonlight came through the slat gaps in pale geometric bars laying themselves across the hay and the packed earth floor. Frank had gone completely motionless in the near stall, which meant he had already taken in the scent of whatever was behind the water barrel.
Ish was collapsed against the far wall, right arm pressed flat across her chest, left arm lowered, back against the planking. She had not made a sound when he entered. She made none now. Her dark eyes found him in the near dark with a directness that was entirely different from fear. He raised the rifle.
She did not move. What he registered in the 3 seconds before he lowered the gun was her face. There was no fear in it, none at all, not hidden, not controlled, simply absent. What it held was something more careful, a precise attentive calculation, the expression of a person reading multiple variables at once, measuring the angle of the rifle against the set of his jaw, against the fact that he had come in without a lamp and without shouting. Her left hand rested on the straw a few inches from her belt, near something but not on it.
He registered the distinction without thinking about it. He lowered the Winchester. He leaned it against the stall post. He went back to the cabin. At the stove reservoir, he filled a basin.
He took the clean flour sack cloths from the kitchen drawer. He brought the lantern turned down low and a box of matches. When he returned, she was exactly where he had left her, unchanged except that the blood had moved a little further down her arm. He knelt at what he calculated was a non-threatening distance and pushed the basin across the straw toward her. She looked at the basin, then at him, then with the slow deliberateness of a person who has decided to manage pain rather than surrender to it, she took a cloth with her right hand and pressed it to the wound.
The lantern between them drove shadows up the barn walls. He sat back on his heels. Whoever shot you will come looking. One flat fact, nothing extra on it. First ranch south of the draw, anyone tracking from the Presidio road would stop here first.
Nothing from her. I'm not going to turn you in. He kept his voice the same way he kept his hands, steady, not forcing anything. There's a reason for that. But I want to know what you're carrying before I make a decision I can't undo.
She held his gaze for a long count, then with the careful controlled motion of someone working around a badly damaged shoulder, she reached her right hand across her body, unlatched something at her left hip, and raised a satchel. Leather, dark, well-made, army issue stitching, a Presidio County Transit stamp on the flap. Every working rancher in the Trans-Pecos knew that stamp. Tobias had seen army payroll satchels twice. Once during a Fort Davis courier run when the soldier stopped at his place for water.