What-The-Snow-Keeps
By the third day the fever broke, and the young man could sit up against the wall and tell her what he'd done. His name was Elias. The wound he'd carried across forty miles of snow had come from the marshal at Two Forks, and the marshal had been within his rights to fire it.
"I killed a man," Elias said. He said it plainly, the way you confess a thing you've turned over so many times it has gone smooth. "Card table. He drew on my brother — had the pistol out and laid across his arm. I had a knife and I used it. The man I killed was the marshal's cousin." He looked at the fire. "The law there is his family. They won't hang me legal. They'll do it on a tree somewhere between here and the county line and call it the law because they're the ones holding the rope."
Hannah said nothing for a while. Outside the wind had dropped to a mutter. The eaves had begun, faintly, to drip.
"You hear that?" she asked.
He listened. His face changed. "Thaw."
"Day, maybe two." She set down the shirt she'd been mending — his, the bullet-hole rinsed and stitched. "So here's the size of it, Elias. Some men are riding here to kill you, and they call themselves the law, and maybe by the paper they near enough are. And I'm one woman with a rifle and a dog and no neighbor inside a day's ride. If I turn you out, I keep my place and my name and likely my life. If I don't, I've set myself against the men