Red Hawk took the rifle, and he took the coin, and even as he took them he felt shame settle on him like a cold weight, because he knew the trail to the spring was not his to give, and he knew the horses were not his to loose, and he knew that the men who tended them trusted him to stand his watch and not to sell it. But shame, once swallowed, does not always stop a man. Sometimes it only makes him quieter, and more careful, and more determined to finish what he has started so that he will not have to look at the beginning again. He told himself that Tanner's men would only cut a fence and make a show of strength, that the council would negotiate, that no one would be harmed, and he repeated those excuses until they sounded almost true, though they never quite became true.
On the evening of the raid, the camp was settling into its ordinary rhythms, the way a place settles when it believes the night will be like other nights. The cooking fires burned low, the horses stood in the corral with their heads down, the children were called in from the creek bank, and the watchers took their places along the paths with the unhurried competence of men who have done this work a hundred times. Red Hawk took his own place, and his hands shook as he touched the corral gate, and he thought of his mother, and of Nash, who had taught him to ride, and of Iron Elk, who had spoken to him as a young man of promise, and for a moment he almost turned back. Then he thought of the rifle, hidden in his lodge, and of the coin, heavy in his pouch, and he told himself it was too late to turn back, which is the lie men tell themselves when turning back is still possible but would cost them their pride.
He cut the rope that held the corral gate, not cleanly but with a hurried, guilty sawing, and he left the cut end where it would be found, because some part of him, the part that had not yet been sold, wanted to be caught, wanted the alarm to be raised, wanted someone to stop what he had set in motion. He showed Tanner's men the night trail, walking ahead of them in the dark with his heart hammering, pointing out the turn where the path dipped below the ridge, the place where the spring-house stone showed pale in the moonlight, the gap in the fence where a man could slip through without breaking a board. And then he slipped away himself, back toward the camp, his breath short, his face wet with sweat despite the cool night air, and he hid the rifle under a blanket in his lodge and sat in the dark, listening.
Nash found the cut rope at dusk, as the last light left the red peaks and the first stars came out over the canyon. He had gone to check the corral before full dark, as he always did, and his hand found the gate loose, and his fingers found the frayed, freshly cut end of the rope, still smelling of hemp and of haste. He knew at once what it meant, because a rope does not cut itself, and a gate does not loosen itself, and the camp had not been careless with its horses in living memory. He shouted the alarm, loud and clear, and men came running from the lodges and the fire ground, and Ayasha was already saddling Night, and Elias was already reaching for his coat and his boots, and Iron Elk was already giving orders in a voice that did not rise but that carried.
But the alarm, for all its speed, came too late to stop the first riders.
Ayasha, mounted on Night, rode hard for the upper path to cut across the riders' line, while Elias, still pulling on his boots as he ran, took the lower trail toward the spring-house, shouting to the watchers as he went. The moon gave them enough light to see shapes but not faces, and the shouting from the corral mixed with the sound of hooves on stone until no one could tell, for a breathless minute, whether the alarm was ahead of the raiders or behind them. It was behind them. That was the bitter truth Nash understood as he vaulted onto his horse, and it hardened his face into something grim and determined. Even as Nash shouted, Tanner's men were already moving along the night trail, already past the ridge, already at the fence, their horses' hooves muffled with cloth, their shapes dark against the moonlit stone. The camp's riders mounted in haste, and the corral horses, loose and frightened by the shouting, milled and scattered, and the night filled with the sounds of alarm and confusion and running feet. Red Hawk stood in the shadows of his lodge, watching it all,
He thought of the rifle again, hidden and useless now, and of the coin, which suddenly felt less like wealth and more like a weight he would carry in secret for a long time. He wondered whether confession would ease it or only spread the shame wider, and he could not decide, and so he stood frozen, watching the riders he had betrayed his people to help, and wishing, with all his heart, that the night could be unwound. and the shame he had swallowed came back up in him, bitter and complete, and he understood, too late to undo it, that he had sold a trail and a gate for a rifle and coin, and that the price of those things was the safety of his own people. The first riders were already in the canyon, and the alarm was ringing behind them, chasing a deed that had already begun.