cellar, an empty table, an empty road. He did not call out. There was no one
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left in the draw to answer, and the one who had gone was already too far into
the dark to be called back by anything as small as his voice.
He rode out before moonset, while the yard still held the blue end of the
night and the windmill stood over the draw, and he did not waste a lamp on
the house behind him. The concho was gone from the table. He had stood a
full minute looking at the clean ring it had left in the dust of the pine board
and understood it for exactly what it was: not a keepsake and not a farewell,
but a weight she had set down so that no one could say he had kept her.
Enola had gone out of his cellar the way she had come into his life, on foot
and in the dark, and she was walking to Fort Stanton to give herself to
Lieutenant Osborn's detachment before the territory could make a rope of her
rescue.
Wade saddled Roach in the dark by feel. The gelding stood to it the way he
stood to everything, patient as furniture. Wade put the silver concho in his
shirt pocket over his heart, where it knocked once against his ribs when he
mounted, and he rode out of the yard without looking back.
There was no trail to follow in any honest sense. What sign a woman in
moccasins leaves crossing rock and hardpan in the hour before dawn would
not fill a thimble, and the moon was a thin horn going down behind the
Capitanos, giving light enough to kill a man's night sight and not enough to
read ground by. He rode by instinct instead, and by the map of her that he
had been drawing without permission for weeks. She would not take the
wagon road where any rider could see a mile of her. She would not take the
creek because the creek ran past the Malone place and then Barlow range.
She would walk the Stanton road's shoulder, in the draws below the grade
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where the road's own dust could not betray her, keeping the telegraph poles
in sight the way a sailor keeps a lighthouse. He let Roach pick the pace and
watched the low ground, and twice he dismounted and stood still in the
draws, listening, before he found the first true thing: the print of a moccasin
toe in the one soft place where a seep crossed the draw, already drying at the
edges. An hour old. Maybe less.
He caught her two miles short of the Army camp, where the road came down
off a long grade and the draws opened like hands. The sky in the east had
gone the color of wet ash. She heard Roach before she saw him — she was
too good a walker not to — and she stopped and turned and faced him in the
middle of the road with her bundle on her back and her chin up, and Wade
felt the concho knock against his ribs again and understood that everything
he had rehearsed on the ride was worthless, because she had rehearsed too,
and her rehearsal had a grave in it.
"You will go back," she said. It was the first thing. Not his name. "You will
go back now, Wade Sutter, and you will let me walk the rest of this."
"I've ridden four miles in the dark to be told to ride four miles back in the
light. That's poor economy, Enola."
"It is your life I am spending. Not miles." She came two steps closer, close
enough for him to see what the walking had cost her — the dust on her to the
knees, the tear in her skirt hem worried by brush, the steadiness in her that
was not calm but something built on top of fear. "Listen to me, because I will
say it once and then I will walk. If I am taken from your house, they will call
it harboring. They will try the horse-breaker in San Tomas and they will hang
him in the square where the freight teams water, and in one year no one in
that town will remember the name of the girl he died for. I have seen this
arithmetic, Wade. My mother could do it. Any woman of my people can do
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it. A white man's kindness is a debt the town collects from the man, not the
girl."
"And if you walk in there alone? What's the sum on that side?"
"On that side I am a runaway from the reservation agency with a story no one
is required to believe, and I am alive to tell it to the lieutenant, who is at least
required to write it down. On your side there is a rope." She shifted the
bundle higher on her back. "I am not a debt you owe. I will not be the cause
of your hanging. Go home. Break your horses."
Wade dismounted. He did it slowly, the way you move around a horse that
has not yet decided about you, and he let Roach's reins fall and stood in the
road dust with his hat in his hands like a man at a church door.
"Then we'll change the arithmetic," he said.
"It is not yours to change."
"It's mine to refuse. There's a difference, and it's the only one I've got." He
could hear his own voice going rough and did not care. "You think if you
walk into that camp, the town forgets me? Enola, the town has already
decided what I am. Barlow's seen to the deciding. If you surrender, they'll
say I turned you in for the reward of being believed, and if you don't, they'll
say I'm harboring you, and either way the sum comes out the same for me —
the only difference is whether you're standing in a cell when they add it up. I
won't be saved at the price of you. I won't wear that."
"Then you are a fool with a gift for sentences."