A man was coming out of the aspens on foot, leading a horse.
He was coming the hard way, up the trail rather than the road, and he was coming slowly, the horse plunging chest-deep in places where the drift had filled the cut. He had a scarf wound over the lower half of his face and a hat tied down over his ears with a strip of blanket, and he was tall, or seemed tall, and thin under the bulk of his coat. He did not look toward the cabin. He looked at his feet and at the horse and at the next ten yards of snow, the way a man looks when the next ten yards are all he has left in him.
She watched him for perhaps two minutes. In that time he fell once, got up, and stood for a while with his hand on the horse's neck before going on. When he was a hundred yards from the cabin he stopped and lifted his head and looked at the chimney smoke, and she saw him straighten a little, as if the smoke had told him something he had been afraid to hope.
Sabra opened the door and stepped out onto the porch with the rifle held across her body, not pointed at him, not pointed anywhere else either.
"That's far enough to talk from," she called.
He stopped. He was close enough now that she could see the frost on the scarf where his breath had frozen it, and the ice in his eyebrows. He raised one hand, slowly, palm out.
"Mrs. Hale?" His voice was cracked and dry. "Mrs. Eben Hale?"
"Who's asking?"
"My name is Tallis Marten." He coughed, turned his head away to do it, turned back. "I've come up from Leadville. I've got a letter for you, ma'am. I said I'd put it in your hand, and I'd be obliged if you'd let me do that before I fall down again, because I don't know that I'll get up a third time."