She could name the visible stars and the seasons they marked. She could read ground the way that some people read faces. He told her about Frank's stone bruise and the fence wire incident that had caused it. She told him about a particular buckskin gelding at the relay station that had convinced six different riders it was impossible to saddle before Nathan spent three days proving otherwise. They talked about horses the way people talk about anything they love without quite knowing they are confessing something.
One evening, she asked about Marta. He told her what he could, not all of it at once, but enough. The kitchen where they had learned each other's rhythms over years, the hearthstones they'd laid on a hot August Saturday, Marta insisting on placing the cornerstones herself and getting it right on the first try, the river photograph taken by a touring daguerreotypist who had stopped at the ranch for water and offered to make the image as payment, the specific acoustics of a house where only one person is breathing. He described the inquest and Cage's face during it, and the tax collector in El Paso, and the three years that had produced nothing but more of themselves. She listened without making any of it smaller.
When he finished, there was a quiet between them that had some weight to it, the weight of something heard and held with appropriate care, not reduced or reframed or moved past quickly. She sounds like someone who wasted nothing. Bidzi said it with precision, the way she said most things. That's exactly right. They remained by the fire until it burned low.
Outside the wind moved through the scrub land in long slow passes, and the horses were quiet in the barn, and it occurred to Tobias, sitting in the same room he had sat in alone for 3 years, that the room no longer had the specific resonance of an empty space. Whether that was because of the past week's events or because of the woman sitting across the fire from him, thinking her own private thoughts, he could not entirely separate. He did not try to. On the sixth day, Del Wood Cage came to the ranch. Tobias was at the east fence line driving a replacement post when he heard the approach.
At least two horses, possibly three, from the Presidio cut, moving with purpose. He kept working. He drove the post with the steady rhythm of a man with nothing on his mind but the next stroke. And when Cage came over the low rise with two hired riders behind him, Tobias straightened up slowly and shaded his eyes and looked at them with the mild expression of a man whose morning has been interrupted by something routine. Cage rode the grella with the left stirrup set a notch shorter than the right.
He swung down and the left leg caught him in the cold air. The hitch more pronounced than it had been at the inquest 3 years earlier. The accumulation of time on it. The two riders behind him stayed mounted. Cage moved through the pleasantries with practiced ease.
His face arranged into the expression that worked in these situations. Concerned, cooperative, fundamentally reasonable. There had been trouble at Presidio, a theft from an army payroll courier. Significant amount. Apache woman believed responsible.