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 β
and then they were only two of Barlow's cowhands driving strays back
toward the B-Bar line, who touched their hats and rode on, and Wade stood
in his corral with the brush in his hand and shook, briefly and uselessly, with
reaction and fury at his own heart.
After that the cellar pallet stayed made up, ready, the way a man in that
country keeps a rifle cleaned and loaded β not from expectation, but from
respect for the speed at which the world changes its mind. He worked out the
rest of the discipline as he'd have worked out a training schedule for a
difficult horse. No lamp in the window. Her things β the torn dress washed
and folded out of sight, the beadwork wrapped in cloth β nothing where a
casual eye through a doorway would trip on it. He stopped going to town.
The mare's work he did at dawn and dusk, quickly. His supplies burned down
at twice the rate β broth and rags and whiskey and lamp oil β and he
watched the flour sack slump and did the arithmetic and went on, because
10
arithmetic had never once, in his whole life, fed anybody.
He did not sleep properly. He dozed in the chair with his boots on and woke
at sounds that were nothing β the windmill, Roach stamping, a night bird β
and each time, before anything else, he looked at the bed. Sometimes her
breathing was so shallow he had to cross the room and bend close to be sure
of it, and he would stand there in the dark listening to it go in and out, in and
out, a small sound, his whole world narrowed to it. If she died, he thought,
with the plainness that comes at three in the morning, he would have a grave
to dig in secret and a story he could never tell. He found he could not stand
the thought β not the danger of it, but the loneliness of it, a girl dug into his
draw like a secret, with no one knowing her name, not even him. He doubled
the broth. He talked more. He told her about Rome, which was absurd, and
about his mother, which was not, and about the mare, who was, he said, the
only other female of his acquaintance currently refusing all help on principle,
so she was in company.
On the third night the fever broke.
It broke the way his mother had described fevers breaking when he was
small: all at once and with a sweat that soaked the blankets through, and then
a sleep that was different from the fever-sleep β deeper, quieter, the face
slack and young and unguarded for the first time. Wade sat in the chair with
his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and breathed, and the
windmill ticked, and Roach stamped once in the corral and was still, and he
understood that the first fight was over and that all the other fights were now
free to begin.
She was still sleeping, the true sleep, when the riders came the next afternoon
β and this time there was nothing accidental in their coming at all.
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There were three of them, and they came up the draw in the heat of the
afternoon at a walk, spaced like men who do not expect to have to hurry.
Wade knew the lead rider before he could see his face, the way you know a
man by how he sits a horse: Deke Ransome, foreman of the B-Bar, who rode
as if the horse were a chair he was slightly disappointed in. The two behind
him were younger, hands named Colly and Brandt β Wade knew them by
sight from town.
He had her down in the cellar before their dust reached the rise. She had
woken an hour before, weak and clear-eyed, and when he told her riders
were coming and put his arms under her she understood instantly and helped
him with her good arm, and did not make a sound on the ladder though the
jarring of the bad shoulder must have been a white-hot thing. He laid her on
the cellar pallet and met her eyes for one second in the gloom. She nodded.
He closed the trap and dragged the potato sacks over it and put the kettle on
the stove, and was standing at the trough with his sleeves rolled, washing his
face and forearms like a man cooling off from work, when they rode in.
"Afternoon, Sutter." Deke swung down without being invited, which was its
own kind of statement, and led his horse to the trough. The others followed.
Horses drank. Men looked around. "Hot enough for you."
"Hot enough," Wade said. "Coffee's on, if you've a mind."
It was the thing you did. It also bought a man time and put cups in hands and
made everyone, for a little while, into guests. Wade poured, and his hands
did not shake, and he was quietly proud of that all the rest of the day β the
way you are proud of a horse that stands under a tarp in a hailstorm: not
because it feels nothing, but because it does the job anyway.
Deke drank standing, with the cup small in his hand, and let the silence fill
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up. "We lost forty head two nights back," he said at last, conversational as a
man discussing rain. "Cut out of the horse pasture in the night, slick as you
please. Two of my boys found the sign at daylight and followed it, and the
raiders shot them off their saddles for their trouble. Both dead, Sutter. Boys I
hired. So we're riding the country, all of us, asking." His eyes were mild and
his eyes were everywhere. "It was Apaches did it β Mescaleros, out of the