"Did you see him?"
It was not the question she had expected. She felt it go into her somewhere below the ribs, a cold, thin, exact thing, like a needle.
"I saw him," she said. "What there was to see."
"And it was him."
"It was his coat. His watch. His boots, that he'd had resoled in Corbel that fall. His knife. His horse was found dead in the drift below the shack." She heard her own voice, level and flat. "The face was gone. The animals had been at him, and the stove had burned through the wall and the roof had come down. Mr. Hurd said it was him. I said it was him. We buried him."
Tallis Marten looked down at the coffee in his hands.
"Then somebody buried the wrong man," he said.
The wind threw snow at the window. Nimrod, by the door, lay down with a long sigh and put his chin on his paws.
Sabra sat with the rifle across her knees and found that she could not feel her hands. It was a curious thing. She could see them, lying on the stock and the receiver, the knuckles red and cracked from the cold and the lye soap, but she could not feel them at all, and she thought, very clearly and from a long way off, that if he moved now she would not be able to shoot him, and that she ought to be more frightened by that than she was.