"I'll keep it."
"I know you will."
He kissed her and went out, and she heard him go down through the cottonwoods, and then the dog sighed and lay back down, and that was all.
She had not told him about the child.
She had meant to. She had been nearly sure since the first week of September and certain since the twentieth, and she had sat beside him in the dark that whole night with it on her tongue, and every time she opened her mouth he had been telling her something that she needed to hear and she thought: not now, not tonight, he has enough to carry up that mountain. When he comes home. When he's done. I'll tell him at this table in the daylight, and I'll watch his face.
On the fifth of October, a Wednesday, the posse came in down the canyon road with his body tied across the saddle of a borrowed horse, and Dell Harlan, the bank's head cashier, who had led them out, stood up in his stirrups in the middle of the plaza and told the gathering crowd that they had come on the outlaws at Piedra Lumbre with the payroll and the smoke still hanging, and had run them, and had brought one down as he fled. Shot in the back, running. One of Hask Pruitt's own. And Ambrose Whitcomb had come out on the steps of his bank and said that the bank's standing reward of five hundred dollars for any member of the Pruitt gang, dead or alive, would be paid to these brave men in full, in a public ceremony, as an example to the Territory.
Nora had been at the well in the plaza, with a bucket. She had set it down very carefully on the curb of the well, and she had not let it spill.
* * *
On the night after her trip to town, the dog woke her.
It was an old yellow dog that had come with the Archuleta place, called nothing but Perro. He did not bark. He stood at the closed door with his hackles up and growled in the back of his throat, a long, low sound like a saw going through wet wood, and she lay in the bed and listened and heard a horse blow out in the yard, and then the creak of a saddle as somebody got down.
She got up without a light. Eli's shotgun stood in the corner behind the door where it always stood, an old Parker ten-gauge with the bluing worn off the barrels, and she broke it and felt for the brass of the shells with her thumbs and closed it again, softly. Then she stood beside the shuttered window with the gun across her body and waited.