The trail led them down through a narrow wash and into a box canyon, a place of high red walls and a single narrow mouth, where the stolen horses stood bunched together in the shade, stamping and blowing, guarded by only two men who looked less like raiders than like hired hands who had already begun to doubt their wages. Elias recognised the quiet one at once — Cole Marsh, Tanner's hireling, the man who had always said the least and watched the most. Marsh was sitting his horse at the mouth of the canyon with his rifle across his knees, and when he saw Elias and the riders come down the wash, he did not raise it. He looked at them for a long moment, and then he looked at the horses, and then he did something Elias had not expected and would never forget. He lifted his hand, not in surrender exactly, but in a plain signal to stand easy, and he swung down from his horse and walked to the rope that held the herd, and he untied it himself.
Take them, Marsh said, and his voice was tired rather than defiant. "I am done driving other men's horses for other men's paper. I did not sign to dam a creek and leave families dry."
The other hired man stared at him, then at Elias, and then he too stepped back, his hands open. There was no pitched battle, no shouting, no wild charge. Elias dismounted slowly, so as not to startle the horses, and spoke to Marsh as one man to another, asking if he was hurt, if he wanted water, if he wanted to ride out of the canyon country and be done with Tanner for good. Marsh nodded, and his face, which had always been closed, opened a little, as if a weight had been set down. He told them, briefly and without boasting, that Tanner had promised pay for a night's work and had not said the work would include a dam across a camp's water, and that he had lain awake after the raid listening to Nash shouting in the dark and had decided he would not do it again. Elias believed him. He had heard that same decision in his own voice once, on a road out of Missouri, when he had turned his back on a war and chosen a quieter kind of life.
They brought the horses home the long way, walking them slowly so as not to lame them on the rough ground, and the sun climbed and warmed Elias's back, and the canyon opened before them like a place returning to itself. When they rode into camp, Ayasha was waiting at the corral with her hands on the fence, and her face changed when she saw Night among the herd, unhurt and stepping high, and then Sage beside her. Little Elk ran out before anyone could stop him and threw his arms around Nash's horse's neck, and then, remembering himself, stood back and tried to look solemn, though his grin gave him away. Nash, watching from his lodge door with his arm in its sling, nodded once at Elias, a short, hard nod that meant more than any speech. And Cole Marsh, who had ridden in behind the herd, kept riding, past the camp and toward the open country to the west, without looking back, a man leaving one master's pay behind him for good. Before they left the box canyon, Elias walked the herd himself, slowly, running a hand down each horse's neck and legs, checking for lameness and for the cuts that a panicked night drive can leave. One young gelding had a scrape along its flank where it had brushed the canyon wall, and Elias cleaned it with water from his canteen and spoke to the animal until it stopped trembling, because a horse that has been stolen in the dark remembers the dark for a long time, and kindness is the only way to teach it otherwise. The riders watched him work, and one of them, an older man with grey in his braids, nodded in a way that told Elias he had passed some test he had not known he was taking. Nash's riders were not men who praised easily, and Elias did not ask them to. He only did the work in front of them, the way Ayasha had taught him to do it, and let the work speak.
On the ride home, Marsh's words stayed with Elias, turning over in his mind like a stone in a creek. He thought about the men who do another man's dirty work for pay, and how many of them tell themselves that the pay is the whole of it, until one night they hear a man shouting in the dark and realise that the pay has a price they did not agree to. He thought about his own years after the war, when he had ridden west with nothing but a horse and a stopped watch, and how easy it would have been to hire himself out to the first man who offered coin for a strong back and a steady hand. He had not done it, not out of virtue, but because he had seen what hired guns become when the hiring is done, and he had wanted something cleaner for himself. Marsh, it seemed, had reached the same place by a harder road, and Elias wished him well on it, wherever it led.
Elias watched him go until he was a small shape against the red peaks, and he thought that some victories are not won by fighting, but by a man deciding, quietly, to stop.