“Hey Bully!” the sheriff called. “Them books, they’re yours now too.”
Ransden ignored him. After a moment, Tillinghast began calling out the next lot, a pair of European chairs on which the Neill clan had whittled with their knives.
Bully Ransden unhitched his horse and mounted. He blinked in surprise when Ellie finally caught his attention by tugging on his leg. He pulled her up onto the crupper behind him, then turned the horse’s head toward home.
“Cull, sweetest?” Ellie asked in a small voice. “What’s the box thet ye wanted hit so bad?”
Ransden carried his prize instead of giving it to the woman to carry as he would normally have done. He said nothing for a moment, then admitted, “I don’t know quite what hit is. But it war my pappy’s box en the thing he loved afore all others. And I reckon I’ll larn why soon enough.”
* * *
Two cardinals were plucking pokeberries near where Old Nathan sat with his back against a warm rock overlooking the valley. “Waal, is she goin’ to make trouble?” one bird demanded of other.
“How ‘n tarnation ‘ud I know?” the second bird answered in the same harsh, peevish tones; not that anybody was likely to mistake a cardinal on the best day of his life for a songster. “Don’t guess she is. They ain’t ginerly, humans ain’t.”
Old Nathan turned his head. The outcrop was in the way of him seeing anything behind him unless he stood up. If the birds hadn’t said “she,” the cunning man might have been concerned enough to rise. As it was—he didn’t much care to be disturbed, but he didn’t guess any woman was likely to try for his scalp when she found him here.
From the outcrop on which Old Nathan sat, he could see the smoke of six chimneys. The valley was open and sunlit. The cleared fields had been harvested, and much of the foliage had fallen from the woodlots and thickets.
“Hmph!” said a cardinal. “Don’t even look et us. Does she think she’s sech a beauty herse’f?”
Old Nathan’s thoughts had been meandering down pathways in which alternate pasts shimmered as if behind walls of glass; untouchable now because of the decisions the cunning man had made, and the decisions fate had made for him. Some beautiful, some bleak; all void, and after seventy-odd years, all too many of them stillborn.
He didn’t want to move, but if someone was coming, he had to. He rose to his feet, straightening his lanky limbs; carefully, because he was an old man and stiff, but with a certain grace yet remaining to him.
Sarah Ransden, coming around the rock with her head lowered, gasped and drew back at the motion.
“Hain’t a bear, Miz Ransden,” the cunning man said dryly. “En I was jest leavin’ anyhow.”
” ‘Sarah’ was a good enough name sixty years ago, Nathan Ridgeway,” the old woman snapped, embarrassed at her instinctive surprise. “Reckon hit still might be.”
She looked down into the valley. Sarah Ransden—Sarah Carmichael as she’d been when she and Old Nathan were children together—was a tall woman, though age had made her stoop. She had never been beautiful, though she might have been called handsome and indeed still was. Sarah hadn’t married in her youth, which was a pity; and late in life she’d wed Chance Ransden, which was far worse.
The old woman shivered and drew her blue knitted shawl more closely about her. “Hit’s goin t’ storm, I reckon,” she muttered.
Old Nathan frowned. The only clouds were some wisps of mare’s tails standing out against a background of high-altitude haze.
The cunning man’s index finger drew a figure in the lichen of the outcrop. He kept his eyes on the simple character as he muttered a phrase beneath his breath, then gestured Sarah’s attention upward toward the sky.
Clouds shifted and began to chase one another with mad enthusiasm across the heavens. Light pulsed into darkness and gleamed again. The mare’s tails thickened into a mackerel sky, ridge after ridge of gray-white against pale blue; but that cleared with a rush eastward toward the foot of the valley, leaving the air with a sheen as smooth as that of a knifeblade when the racing images darkened again.