Faster. No hesitation. He's the fastest horse in camp by two lengths on any terrain. Then Flint goes south tonight with the rest. Seth looked at her.
I need a fast horse to get to Tucson and back. Not Flint, but something close. Dawn was quiet for a moment. Why Tucson? Because there's a federal judge there named Warren Cole who has been after Holt Briggs for 2 years on a federal murder charge and who has the authority to arrest him in a way that sticks.
Not just drive him off, arrest him, try him, put him somewhere permanent. Seth, let that sit. If we drive Briggs off, he comes back in 6 months with a different angle. If a federal court puts him away, his operation is finished. Dawn looked at him with the particular expression of someone recalculating a set of assumptions they'd been comfortable with.
"You worked this out already," she said. "I started working it out in dry fork three weeks ago. When I heard his name in a conversation I wasn't part of. He paused. I didn't know it would turn out to be relevant, but you kept it.
I keep things that seem like they might matter later. Dawn looked at him for a long assessing moment, not the quick evaluation from their first meeting. This was slower, the look of someone revising an early conclusion. There's a horse named Creek, she said. Grey Mare, 8 years old, second fastest in the herd, and she travels better on rough terrain than Flint does.
She'll get you to Tucson in two days if you don't stop more than you need to. I wasn't going to stop more than I needed to. No, Dawn said. I didn't think you were. The day passed in the particular compressed way that days passed when there was too much to do, and the time to do it was already shortening.
Seth walked the herd twice more, not to manage them, but to know them individually, because in the event things went badly in the next 7two hours, he wanted to know which animals would be predictable under stress, and which would need handling. He spoke to the man who managed the corral daily, a barrel-shaped, cheerful person of about 45 named River's Edge, who communicated primarily in gestures and the occasional Spanish word, and who, Seth established within 20 milesnutes, was one of the most naturally skilled stockmen he had ever encountered. River's Edge had the quality that the best handlers always had, a physical stillness around animals that read to the animals as the absence of threat. Seth and River's Edge spent two hours developing a shared shorthand that required almost no common language because horses were the common language, and it turned out to be sufficient. Dawn appeared periodically throughout the day, checking in at the edges of his various activities, not supervising, but tracking.
Each time she appeared, she had done something. Organized the North Watch rotation on a new schedule that would read, "As normal from the ridge, but was randomized enough to be unreadable, brief the warriors on the bait herd strategy, arrange the supplies for the South Valley move. " She worked with the efficiency of someone who had been thinking about worst case scenarios for long enough that the scenarios no longer felt worst case. They just felt like eventualities requiring plans. Seth found he had been wanting to talk to the old woman since that morning and had not found the right moment. Partly because the right moment had not arrived and partly because he was aware that Elder Mary represented a kind of knowing that required its own kind of approach.
You did not rush toward people who saw clearly. You arrived at them correctly. Elder Mary looked at him when he approached and did not look away. Her face was the face of a person who had spent a very long time paying close attention to things. And the accumulated attention had settled into her features the way weather settled into rock, not destroying it, but changing its contour.
Her eyes were dark and bright and completely without performance. She saw him. He had the clear and unsettling sense that she saw him in a way that was not related to what he was wearing or where he was from or what he had said to anyone. He sat down across from her. Dawn remained where she was.
Elder Mary spoke in Apache. She spoke for nearly a minute, her voice even and unhurried with the cadence of water moving over familiar ground. When she finished, she looked at Seth and waited. Dawn translated and Seth noticed that she was careful about it, not paraphrasing, but reaching for the actual words. She says, "A man who carries grief the way you carry yours is either going to be made smaller by it or made larger. " She says she has seen both.
She says she cannot tell yet which one you are, but she says the fact that you looked at our horses before you looked at our people tells her something about you. She wants to know if what it tells her is correct. Seth thought about this seriously. What does it tell her? Dawn asked.
Elder Mary answered. That you see value where others see only what they can take. Dawn said translating. And that you have been in places where things with value were not protected. And it did something to you.
The camp sounds moved around them. The particular late afternoon texture of a community finishing its day. Seth looked at Elder Mary and found it was easier than he expected to hold the look because she was not asking him to perform anything. She was just looking. "She's right," Seth said about all of it.
Elder Mary nodded once with the finality of someone striking something off a list. Then she reached into the pouch at her hip and took out a turquoise and silver bracelet and said something to Dawn. "Dawn's expression did a complicated thing. She wants you to have this," Dawn said. Her voice was slightly different.
Controlled in a new way. The way you controlled something that had surprised you. It was my mother's. Seth looked at the bracelet in Elder Mary's extended hand and then at Dawn, who was looking at something above his left shoulder. I can't take your mother's.
She's not asking you, Dawn said. She's telling you. He took the bracelet. It was lighter than he expected. The turquoise stones were the pale blue green of certain shallow desert water.
And the silver was worked in a simple pattern that repeated without announcing itself. He turned it in his fingers. "Wear it on your left wrist," Dawn said, still not quite looking at him. That's how she wore it. He put it on his left wrist.
It fit as if it had been made for him, which it obviously hadn't been, but the fact of it fit sat in his chest in a way he didn't immediately examine. Elder Mary said one more thing and then stood up and walked away at a pace that suggested she had other things to attend to. Seth looked at Dawn. What was the last part? She said the river knew what it was doing.
Which is what she always says when she's made a decision. A beat dry as the canyon wall. She also said your mismatched boots indicate a good sense of priorities. I like her. Seth said everyone likes her.
Dawn said she's terrifying and everyone likes her. They sat with that for a moment. I need to leave tonight. Seth said after the herd moves south. I can't wait until morning because every hour Briggs is on.
That ridge is an hour he might decide to stop waiting. Dawn turned to look at him directly. Two days to Tucson. Two days there. The judge needs to travel.