She said, in a perfectly level voice, "It is an old thing. The pan is fine. Supper will be on time." He stood there.
He said, "Maren." She said, "Supper will be on time." And he went out because that was the only thing he knew how to do with a door that had just been closed in his face, and because a part of him that he did not like to look at was suddenly very much afraid of what was under that sleeve. He did not ask her.
For 11 days, he did not ask her. He watched her. And he watched himself watching, and he told himself that a man is entitled to his own past, and that whatever had marked her was hers to keep. And that would have held.
Maybe. It might have held all summer. But in the second week of August, Ollie Dade came back from a supply run to Cheyenne with a load of wire and a mouthful of news, and by supper the whole bunkhouse had it, and by the next morning Silas Crane had it, too. There had been a fire in Cheyenne three years back.
The Vanning boarding house on the East End, gone to the ground in under an hour, two people dead in it, and there had been a woman working the laundry there who had been named for it in every paper in the territory. A woman with burned arms who had left town the week after and had not been seen since. And the name that had been printed under those stories was Maren Hale. Ollie did not tell it to be cruel.
He told it because he was 80% tongue and had been all his life. But by noon, there were two hands who would not eat what she cooked, and one who said out loud in the yard that a man does not keep a firebug on a ranch that has already burned once. Silas heard it. Silas came into that kitchen with his hat still on.
He said, "You are going to tell me what happened in Cheyenne." She had a knife in her hand and a pile of onions in front of her, and she set the knife down very carefully the way you set down something you do not trust yourself with. She said, "You have already heard it. Every man out there has heard it."
He said, "I have heard what the papers said. I have not heard what you say. And I am asking you in my own house to say it." For a moment, she did not answer.
Then she unbuttoned her left cuff. She pushed the sleeve up past the elbow and turned her arm over in the window light and let him look, and she did not soften it for him and she did not cry. The scar went from the back of her hand to above the elbow on the left. On the right, it was worse, a broad marbled sheet of it that ran up under the shoulder of her dress and did not stop.