Once when a rider heading south had opened one with more pride than judgment. He looked at the satchel, then at her face. She was holding it out without releasing it, and the posture was clear. This exists. It matters, but the decision about what happens to it is mine.
He did not need to touch it. "All right." He stood, taking the basin and the cloths. "There's a pallet in the loft. You can sleep there.
The horses are used to company." He went back to the cabin. At the mantel, he paused at Marta's pistol, wrapped in its leather, where it had lived since the afternoon he brought her home from the Lajitas Road. He checked the load, left it where it was. He did not sleep.
At first light, he brought a plate of cornbread and a tin cup of black coffee and left them on the third rung of the loft ladder. An hour later, the plate was clean and the cup empty, and she was awake in the loft with her back against the boards, watching the barn below with the focused attention of someone who has learned vigilance from instruction rather than instinct. He climbed up to look at the wound. The bleeding had slowed. When he parted the cloth, she permitted this without comment or expression.
The damage was a through-and-through, high on the deltoid, clean entry and exit, nothing vital damaged. He had treated worse on himself, and once on Frank after a fence wire incident he still thought about with some embarrassment. "I need to clean this, or it's going to turn on you." He went for hot water and turpentine and came back and worked as carefully as he could and she made no sound through any of it. When he tied off the last knot of the bandage, he sat back and gave her his name.
There was a long pause, long enough that he thought perhaps the night had been the limit of what she was willing to exchange. Then, in English, as unhurried and clear as his own, and there was something in the way she produced it that suggested she had been deciding whether to for some time, she gave him hers, Bitsy, and then, without drama, she knew who he was. Everyone in Presidio County knew Tobias Vance, the rancher from the Davis Mountains whose wife had been shot on the Lajitas Road 3 years ago, who had gone to the inquest and walked out and gone home and not spoken publicly about it since. He stayed very still. Her brother was named Natan.
He had been Mescalero, 26 years old, exceptionally good with horses in the way that some people are gifted at music, not through learning, but through some combination of instinct and patience and quality of attention that animals responded to without requiring explanation. He had worked at a relay station near the Pecos Crossing breaking horses for the stage line and had built enough of a name that the station manager had left him to manage 4 months of work essentially alone. He had never taken anything that was not his. He had never raised his hand against anyone in his adult life as far as anyone who actually knew him would testify. Though by the time of the trial, the number of people willing to testify to anything on his behalf had become very small.
The charge was murder. A freight courier named Hatch found dead on the Alpine Road with his strongbox emptied. The evidence, a paper knife with Natan's initials scratched into the handle found near the body. Natan had sold that knife to a man named Purvis who worked at the relay station two years before the crime. Purvis was not called to give evidence.