He rode into our valley in the summer of '89, a slim man, dressed in black. "Call me Shane," he said. He never told us more.
There was a deadly calm in the valley that summer, a slow, climbing tension that seemed to focus on Shane.
"There's something about him," Mother said. "Something . . .[...]
"I had lain in my bed thinking of our visitor out in the bunk in the barn. It scarce seemed possible that he was the same man I had first seen, stern and chilling in his dark solitude, riding up our road. Something in father, something not of words or of actions but of the essential substance of the[...]