Chapter 1 #3
"To see what she was." Charter said it without apology.
"You learn more about a person in the ten seconds after you disrespect them than in ten years of being polite. Most folks get loud. Some get small."
He nodded at Kindra. "She did neither one. She got quiet and she got a gun level and she asked me a question I couldn't answer, which told me she'd been thinking about the answer before I ever showed up."
"That's a hell of a way to conduct yourself."
"It's a hell of a world."
"Don't do it again."
"Fella, I don't believe I'd survive doing it again."
Kindra spoke, and her voice had not warmed a degree.
"I want to be clear with you about something, Mister Charter."
"Chip."
"Mister Charter. I was twenty when I had McKenzie. I was twenty two when I married him. I have heard every version of what you said out there, from my mother, from a loan officer in Bozeman, from a woman at a church potluck who thought I was his daughter."
She holstered nothing, because she had no holster; she simply lowered the GP100 to her side and left the hammer down.
"I stopped caring about the age of it a long time ago. What I have never once tolerated is a man deciding out loud, on my own property, what I am and what I know."
"Yes ma'am."
"You will not say the word dumb to me again."
"I will not."
"And you will not ask to touch me, or joke about touching me, or look at me the way you looked at me at that fence. Not once. Not as a compliment, not as a test, not ever."
Charter took his hat off again, and this time it was different.
"Ma'am," he said, "I have been alone so long I forgot how to be around people without poking at them. That's my failing and it's a poor excuse. I'll keep it behind my teeth."
"See that you do."
Tom stood there a moment with two revolvers behind him on a chopping block and a stranger in front of him and his whole life stacked up in the yard.
He thought about the six fires.
He thought about eleven empty houses along thirty miles of river, and about a little girl's dress gone gray on a line.
"Kenz," he called.
The cabin door opened four inches. McKenzie had the .22 and she had it pointed at the floorboards like she'd been taught.
"Bring out the small pot and a cup," Tom said. "And a piece of the elk. The thin end."
"Dad."
"It's all right. Do it."
She looked at Charter for a long three seconds with a twelve year old's absolutely merciless assessment, and then she shut the door.
"That one's going to run this valley someday," Charter said.
"Don't talk to my children."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Tom turned to the chopping block, picked up the SP101, opened the loading gate and rolled the cylinder.
Five rounds. All of them .357, factory jacketed hollow points, primers unstruck.
He closed it and held it out butt first.
Charter looked at the gun and then at Tom's face.
"That's a considerable amount of trust."
"It's not trust." Tom kept holding it out.
"It's math. If you're lying, I'm already dead tonight whether you've got that or not, because you've seen my smoker and my cellar and my open river side. And if you're telling the truth, then there's more of them than there are of me, and I need every gun on this mountain pointed the same direction.
"
Charter took the Ruger. He seated it on his right hip without looking at it, the way a man does with a thing he has carried ten thousand miles.
Tom handed him the Smith next, and the old man crossed it into the left holster butt forward and let out a breath that seemed to come up from his boots.
"Woodshed's yours," Tom said. "There's a stack of hides on the east wall, use them. Fire in the pit out front, small, and you douse it at dark. We don't burn where it can be seen after sundown anymore."
"Smart."
"Water from the spring box, not the river. You eat what we eat and you work what we work."
"I'll earn it."
"You'll earn it or you'll leave."
"That's fair."
McKenzie came out with the pot and the meat. She set it on the flat rock outside the fence, six feet from Charter, and stepped back, and did not turn her back on him walking away.
Charter watched her go and said nothing at all, which Tom noticed and filed.
"One more question," Tom said.
"Ask it."
"Last night, somebody whistled down by the river. Two notes, rising. Somebody up the meadow answered."
Charter had been reaching for the elk. His hand stopped.
"Say that again."
"Two notes. Going up."
"What time?"
"Near midnight."
The old man straightened all the way up, and every bit of the easy went out of his shoulders, and he looked past Tom, down the bench, toward the gray water and the cottonwoods and the brush hedge McKenzie had spent all morning weaving.
"Fella," Chip Charter said, "that ain't a signal they use for coming."
Tom felt the cold start at the back of his neck.
"What is it?"
"It's what they whistle when they've already been somewhere and they're done looking." He turned his head slowly toward the woodshed, and the root cellar, and the smoker chimney with its thin clean thread of blue. "Two notes rising means the count's finished."