Chapter 8
Cordelia stood on the porch of a white cottage on the hillside above the Barclay ranch and tried, because her Sundays had taught her to, to be enthusiastic about the view.
It was not, in the end, hard. The view needed no selling.
The flat below her ran out in a pale green wedge with the creek bright through the middle and the home buildings clustered red and grey at the far end of it.
Beyond the home pasture the ground lifted into low hills the color of dry sage, and beyond those a further ridge, and beyond that nothing at all but a great clean line of sky.
"I can see four fence lines from here, and not one house but yours."
"I'm glad. I'd meant to put you up at Mrs. Newland's guesthouse in town for the week. The way the town is at the moment, I thought you might be more comfortable up here. I had Mrs. Letts air it out yesterday."
"Up here is better."
It was true twice over. Up here had a view, and up here was a polite quarter mile from a man she had not yet decided about.
"I think so too."
The cottage held two rooms. An iron stove, a bed under a window, a clean wood table, a chair, a round rag rug in the colors of the country outside.
Cordelia had spent a quarter of an hour inside it and had come back out here because Rufus had been standing on the porch the whole time, his hat in his hand, patient as a man who would not allow himself, yet, into the rooms where his bride would be sleeping.
She set her hands on the porch rail.
"Will you tell me now, please, Mr. Barclay?"
He did not pretend he didn’t understand her. He set his hat on the rail beside her hands and put his own hands in his pockets and looked off down the flat.
"Boone Keaton came up to me out of Albany the winter before last. He was fourteen. He had run from a stepfather who used his fists, came onto my place asking for a meal and a barn floor for the night. He got a meal, and he’s stayed in the bunkhouse since.
He's worked hard, and hasn't lifted a finger against me or any man on this place. "
"And the money?”
"Sippy Wardell keeps a lock-box at the back of his store. Half the families in Fox Hollow keep wages and accounts in it.”
“Instead of a bank?”
“He’s got a system. When the drummers come through, selling goods, like nails, or pocket knives, or barbed wire, Sippy uses money from the town to buy stock, then, as that stock sells, he shares the profit with the people who invested in those goods.
It’s not a big profit for most, but it might pay a wage here, or a chit there. ”
“I see.”
“Last night somebody fired two pistol shots out front. Somebody pried open the box. About four hundred dollars are gone."
Below them a calf bawled once and went quiet.
"And four people saw Boone running?”
"Four. One of them is Shea Wardell, Sippy's son, and he’s put Boone in front of the box in everybody's telling."
Shea Wardell. She set the name where she could find it again.
She turned from the view to the side of his face. "Did Boone do it?"
"No."
"You're very certain."
"I'm certain enough to put my name on it in front of the sheriff this morning."
"On what basis?"
He turned to look at her, without taking his hands out of his pockets, and the lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. He was answering a question he had been answering, in some form, all day.
"On the basis that I know him. I've watched him work.
I've seen him kind to the brown mare and patient with a calf that didn't want to nurse.
I've seen him, in his early months, cry into his arm at the table because he hadn't done what he was asked.
I have not seen him lie. I'm telling you, Miss King, with the only authority I have, which is the authority of fourteen months of an ordinary roof, that boy did not pry a box. "
"Why was he in town?"
"He won’t tell me."
"And you take that?"
"For now. I take it because the alternative is to break him in half over my knee to find out. He's not lying about not stealing. I'm sure of that. He's hiding something else."
She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. It tasted like copper.
"Mr. Barclay. May I ask you something hard?"
"Yes."
"My best friend Alma was arrested eight days ago. She had let her beau hide in her back room after he committed a robbery. She knew he had done it. She knew, and she let him stay. She was arrested for harboring."
He went still.
"I'm sorry, Miss King."
"She knew." Cordelia's hands had not let go of the porch rail. She made them. "That's the part I'm turning over. She knew. She told me herself, plain. She didn't say she'd been fooled. She said she had heard the truth and made room for it."
He nodded slowly.
"And you're wondering whether you've come west to a man who's doing the same?”
"I'd be lying to you if I told you I wasn't."
He took his hat off the rail. He turned it in his hands a few times, as though the brim were a thing his thoughts had to walk around.
"I've known the sheriff who came up the lane this morning for sixteen years.
I trust him to find the man and to do the work.
The boy in my back buggy seat is not the man, and the sheriff will come to that on his own, in time.
The town just wants somebody to blame today.
I don't intend to give them the wrong somebody before the sheriff has finished. "
She looked at him a moment. Then she nodded once.
"All right, Mr. Barclay."
"That is not yes."
He'd read her exactly. The accuracy of it was unsettling, and not entirely unwelcome.
"It is not yes. It is all right. I'll stay in the cottage tonight. I'll eat with you tomorrow. I'll keep my eyes open. I will not run on you over a sheriff and a lock-box, and I won't lie to you about what I'm thinking either."
"That's more than fair."
He set the hat on his head. He looked at her one more time, with the unguarded look she had seen for an instant on the platform, and then he stepped down off the porch and walked off down the hill with his shadow long behind him in the late sun.
She stayed on the porch and watched him go.
The last of the sun caught the grey in his hair.
She hadn't let herself notice it before, and she didn't know why she was noticing it now.