"Mrs. Hale," he said. "I don't know how to put this, so I'll put it plain. I've got a farm and a mother, and I'll be there for the wheat. But Thankful and Zebulon have been talking of taking on the place, now that it's settled about Lem, and if they do, I'll be free come fall, for the first time since I was fourteen. And I've a mind to see the mountains again when I'm not looking for anybody in them." He stopped. "I wondered if, should I come through Corbel, I might ride up and see how the claim did. That's all. I'm not asking anything else. I know you've the Denver business, and I know you've only just got your quiet back, and I'd not want to take it from you. I only wondered."
She looked at him. He was looking at the hat.
She thought of the bench above Silverthread in the morning, with the snow scraped clean and nobody asking where she was going. She thought of how it had felt, those two years, to hold the quiet like a cup she was afraid to set down, and how it had felt since Christmas to set it down and find it was still there. She thought that she did not know what she wanted, beyond the claim and the cabin and the light through the four panes, and that for the first time in a very long while that did not frighten her, because whatever it was, she would be the one to choose it, in daylight, with her eyes open.
"The trail's cut through the aspens," she said. "Seven miles from town. You'll know it by the blaze on the big spruce at the creek." She gathered Deacon's reins. "Mind the crossing. It's easy to fall."
He looked up then, and she saw him understand, or understand as much as she did, which was not everything, and was enough.
"I'll mind it," he said.
She mounted. He put his hat on, and touched the brim, and went back across the wet grass to the wagon, and climbed up beside Zebulon Wex, and the wagon rolled out of the cemetery gate and down the muddy main street of Corbel toward the Buena Vista road, with the oak box riding steady in the bed under its tarpaulin and Tallis Marten not looking back, which she thought was right, and then, just at the bend by the Bettis store, looking back, which she thought was right too.
Sabra Hale turned Deacon's head toward the mountain. Nimrod, who had been lying in the road with his chin on his paws, got up and shook himself and ran ahead. The snow was going off the lower slopes in long brown stripes and the creek was loud with it, and up on the bench, eleven miles by the road and seven by the trail, the cabin was waiting with the stove banked and the door unbarred, not for anybody, only because it was spring and she liked the air. She had a claim to work, and a letter to send to a man in Denver, and a great deal of daylight in front of her. She did not know yet what she would do with all of it. She rode up into the aspens to find out.