water. Toward the only help in six miles of empty country, which happened
to be a poor horse-breaker with a defect in his fence.
She woke near noon, all at once, the way wild things wake — out of the
sleep in one motion, eyes open and hunting. He was across the room shelling
beans into a pot and he stopped with his hands in the beans and did not
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move, because he knew that look from the mare. Her gaze went to the door,
to the window, to the knife's absence from her hand, and then to him, and
before he could speak her good hand had come up off the bed and caught his
wrist as he leaned in with the water cup — caught it and held it with a
strength that came from some country past pain, her fingers like wire.
"Listen," she said. Her English was plain and accented and entirely clear.
"You listen to me, horse man. White riders fell on my brother's party in the
rocks — many horses, a trade — they shot us for the horses. I am the one
who got away. They will come looking." Her grip tightened, and her eyes,
dark and fever-bright, held his with an effort that cost her visibly. "They will
not ask you questions first. They will ask the town. And the town — " the
breath went out of her in something that was nearly a laugh and nowhere
near one " — the town will point at your door."
Then the strength left her all at once, the way it had come, and her hand fell,
and she was asleep again before her fingers had finished uncurling. Wade
stood there a long time with the water cup in his hand and her words going
around in him like a horse in a corral, looking for the gate.
He did not find one. What he found, going about the rest of that day, was the
simple shape of the thing: a wounded Apache woman in his bed, white men
hunting her, a town six miles off that he owed money in. It did not occur to
him to be rid of her — not even to be rejected. It simply was not among the
furniture of his mind. She was his charge now, the way the mare was and
Roach was and the trough was, and the only questions available were
practical ones: how to keep her alive, and how to keep the world from
finding her while he did it.
He buried the bloody rags beyond the corral. He took Roach and rode a wide,
careless-looking loop south into the greasewood and back, dragging a brush
8
harrow of cedar across the drag marks where they came in over open ground,
so that if any man later asked the ground what had crossed it, the ground
would say: a horse-breaker, harrowing his claim, nothing more. He washed
her knife and put it on the shelf where she would see it when she woke,
because a person ought to know where their knife is. And he made broth —
thin, from the salt pork and an onion — and he cooled a cloth in trough water
and laid it on her forehead, and began the long arithmetic of other people's
survival that was to be his life for the days ahead.
The fever took three days to make up its mind, and Wade lived those three
days the way a man lives in a house with a fire in the walls — in pieces, alert
to everything, resting in the cracks between alarms.
He spooned broth into her and most of it came back and he spooned it again.
He changed the cloth on her forehead until the trough water in the bucket
went warm and he had to fetch more. He changed the dressing twice a day
and watched the wound the way he would watch a sky he didn't trust — for
the red streaks that meant the poison was walking, for the swelling to climb.
It climbed a little the second night and he sat up with her until it stopped, his
hand flat and light on her good shoulder, talking the low schoolroom talk
because there was nothing else in him to offer. A woman whose name he did
not yet know fought her fever in his bed with her teeth set and never once
cried out, not even when he cleaned the wound, which he knew hurt past
bearing because his own hands shook doing it.
She talked in her sleep in Apache, whole sentences of it, urgent and pleading
and once — once only — laughing, a young girl's laugh that undid him
worse than the moaning. Names came up out of it that he half-caught and
could not hold. One word came again and again, a name or a place, shaped
like a plea. He had no way to know what any of it meant. He only knew the
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sound of a person arguing with death in her own language, and that his place
was to be the wall between her and it until she finished the argument herself.
On the second day he heard horses.
They were far off — two or three riders, by the spacing, coming up the draw
from the direction of town at an unhurried pace. Wade was at the trough
filling the bucket and he did not run. Running is a thing that can be seen from
a long way off. He set the bucket down, walked — walked — to the shack,
and got her down into the root cellar in under two minutes, pallet and all,
blankets over her, a sack of potatoes dragged against the trap, his heart
slamming like a thing trying to get out of a pen. She was too deep in the
fever to understand and too weak to fight, and that was the mercy of it. He
was back at the corral with a brush in his hand and his hat on and his
breathing wrestled down to ordinary by the time the riders topped the rise —