Chapter 7
Rufus held the reins loose and let the brown mare set her own pace up the road, because he wanted the buggy ride to last a little longer than the road itself was going to allow.
Cordelia sat with her gloved hands in her lap.
At the station she had held her own hands, one over the other, as though giving the lower one a piece of comfort.
She was holding them that way now. She had not spoken since they had left the platform.
He had not pushed her. He let the wheels go around, and he let the country show itself to her on its own terms.
"That hill there," he said at last, "is the one I wrote you about. The one with the cottonwoods."
"It's taller than I'd pictured."
Her voice came out testing, like a foot put on new ice. He wanted more of it, so he kept talking, which was not his habit.
"Most things out here are taller than people picture. Then a year goes by, and you stop noticing, and a visitor comes up out of the train and asks how high the hill is and you have to think to say."
"And how high is it?"
"Nine hundred feet from the creek. Give or take."
She made a considering sound, which he liked. Until it came, he hadn't known how much he was listening for any sound from her at all.
"Mr. Barclay… about that man at the platform."
"Albert Drew."
"He believes your boy stole that money."
"He does."
Beside him she went quiet, the kind of quiet with work going on inside it.
She let that sit a moment. "Is your boy at your house?"
"He is."
The wheels went around twice before she spoke again.
"I won't press you on it now," she said. "You'll tell me what you wish to tell me when we're inside. I only ask one thing."
He looked at her, steady and calm.
"Tell me whether I am to be afraid."
Rufus took the breath he had been saving for this exact question.
"No, ma'am."
"You're sure?”
"I am sure. The trouble is real. The danger to you is not.
Boone Keaton has been on my place fourteen months and hasn't so much as raised his voice.
He won't be a danger to you under my roof or off it.
The town is unhappy, and it'll go on being unhappy until the sheriff finds his man.
I'll keep you out of the worst of it. I'm sorry it's the first thing I have to put in front of you. "
Cordelia looked at him. He did not look back, because he had a horse to drive and because she was examining the side of his face, and he hadn't been examined that way in some years, and he wanted to be examined honestly.
"Thank you," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
She sat straight without being stiff. A woman who could hold herself that way on a swaying buggy road might not find the frontier as foreign as he had feared.
They came up over the rise where the road bent.
The Ferris flat fell open below them in a long pale wedge of grass, the creek running silver through the middle of it, and his own roof red at the far end.
She drew a breath beside him. He kept his eyes on the road.
Her shoulder was two inches from his, and this was what it would be, to share a seat with someone again.
He let the country do the talking for the first time in a quarter mile.
Then a figure broke from the willow brakes, a boy running the creek bank at an angle to their road, dipping in and out of the brush, coming hard. Rufus knew the run before he had finished placing it. Boone.
"Mr. Barclay."
"I see him."
The mare felt the change in his hands and slowed. Boone came up out of the last of the willows at a dead run, took the rail of the buggy, and vaulted up onto the running board on the off side. Cordelia didn't cry out. That was unusual. The thought came even before the boy had got his breath.
"Mr. Barclay. Sir. Drive on. Drive fast."
“Boone?"
"Please, sir."
Rufus clicked his tongue. The mare moved off again, faster now. Boone hung on at the board, hat in one fist, his shoulders going up and down with his breath.
"You went into town?”
"Yes, sir." The mare's ears swiveled back at the boy's voice.
"After I told you not to."
"Yes, sir."
No excuse offered. Rufus set one hand-width of credit against the boy's account.
"Were you followed?"
"I don't know, sir."
Rufus glanced back at him once, then put his eyes on the road again. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you take anything from Sippy Wardell's store?"
"No, sir. No, sir, I did not."
The second no came up from somewhere deeper than the first. Rufus let his shoulders ease a fraction.
"Then climb up properly before you fall and break your fool head."
Boone climbed up. He didn't sit on the seat.
He sat down on the floor of the buggy at Cordelia's feet, with his hat in his lap and his head bent.
Then, after a second, he understood himself to be in the presence of a lady and he clambered over the seat back to the narrow board that ran along behind.
Rufus didn't stop him. He let the boy find his manners on his own. Then he spoke without turning his head.
"Miss King. This is Boone Keaton. He works for me. Boone, this is Miss Cordelia King, late of Cottonwood, New York. She's just got off the train. She’s going to be my wife."
"Pleased to meet you, ma'am." Boone's voice came thin from the back. "I'm sorry, ma'am, that this is the way."
Cordelia turned her head a fraction. She did not turn her body.
"Mr. Keaton."
Then she faced forward again. Rufus drove on.
She had a question. He could read it in the line of her jaw, in the tight fold of her hands.
He had a question of his own and he wasn't asking it either, because he wasn't going to ask a fifteen-year-old in the back of his buggy why he had broken the only promise he had been given to keep, not in front of a woman who had been on his road for less than an hour, and not on a road where Albert Drew might be riding back along behind them at this very minute.
He would ask Boone in the barn, without a witness.
The boy would either tell him or he wouldn't, and Rufus would make a second decision after he had the first answer.
In the meantime he drove. The Ferris flat opened up.
The creek ran silver. Cordelia sat with her hands quiet in her lap, and the boy on the back board kept his head down, and Rufus listened, one ear at a time, for the sound of a horse on the road behind them.
He heard nothing. He wasn't sure that was a comfort.
She had gone quiet again, and he let her. He understood that he had no time to court her. He would have to ask her, instead, to choose him.