Besh put a hand on Chinche's horse to steady it. "We rode back as fast as the horses could bear," he said. "There is nothing west. Whatever we do, we do not do it by going back that way."
The chief nodded, once. He did not ask questions that had no answers. He ordered water โ one cup each for the scouts, from the ration, though it pained him to watch it go โ and sent Chinche to rest, and told the women to prepare what food there was. The camp settled into its evening work with a heaviness that was not quite despair and not quite anything else, the kind of heaviness that comes when people have borne bad news before and know they will have to bear it again.
It was then, as the sun touched the top of Red Mesa and began to slide behind it, that one of the sentries on the western edge gave a low call. Not an alarm. A question.
A shape was moving on the horizon.
At first, in the thick evening light, it looked like an animal โ a low, shambling thing, moving slowly, its head down. Then it resolved, as it came closer, into a man on a horse, and the camp's breath caught, because a lone rider in this country, at this hour, could be many things, and few of them were good. Three warriors raised their rifles. Others reached for their bows. Women pulled children behind them. The chief stepped forward, his hand raised, not in greeting and not in warning, but in the gesture of a man who would see before he decided.
The rider did not turn away. He did not spur his horse into a run, and he did not raise his hands in surrender, either. He came on at a walk, steady, as if he had expected rifles and had decided, long before, how he would meet them. As he drew near, the camp could see him plainly. He wore a faded brown hat, its brim bent and sun-bleached, and a dust-covered coat that had once been a better colour than it was now. His boots were worn thin at the soles. His dark hair was graying at the temples, and his face was sun-browned and lined, the face of a man who had spent his life outdoors and had not spent it easily. His horse was a dun mare, nine years old or thereabouts, her head lowered with tiredness, her gait uneven, favouring one front foot. She was a good horse, anyone could see that, but she had been ridden hard and far, and she was near the end of what she could give.
He stopped at a distance the rifles would allow and sat still for a moment, looking at the camp โ at the shelters, at the empty basin, at the faces watching him โ and then he spoke. His voice was quiet, but it carried, because the evening was still and everyone was listening.
I don't want trouble, he said.
No one answered. The rifles did not lower.
My name is Ethan Cole, he said.
He waited, as if giving them time to weigh the name and find nothing in it to fear. Then, slowly, deliberately, so that every man watching could follow the movement, he lifted his rifle from its place by his leg, leaned down from the saddle, and laid it on the ground. He stepped his horse back, away from it, and then dismounted, and stepped farther away still, until the rifle lay between him and the camp like a line drawn in the dust, and he stood on the far side of it with his hands open at his sides.
I've been riding north three days, he said. "My horse lost a shoe, and I've been off the road ever since, picking my way. I was trying for the Old Trading Road."
He looked past the rifles then, directly at the chief, and his eyes were not the eyes of a man begging, nor of a man boasting. They were the eyes of a man stating a fact he had already measured.
You're out of water, he said.
It was not a question. It was not mockery. It was simply true, and the truth of it, spoken aloud by a stranger, landed harder than any of the camp's own silence had.
But I may be able to help.
The rifles did not lower. But something in the camp shifted โ not trust, not yet, nothing so generous as trust โ only a strange, thin attention, the way people listen when a man says something they have stopped expecting to hear. The chief looked at the rifle on the ground, and at the man who had put it there, and at the tired dun mare with her head lowered, and he did not speak. The sun went down behind Red Mesa, and the cold began to come up out of the earth, and the stranger stood in the gathering dark with his hands open, waiting to be told whether he would live through the night.
The chief did not have the stranger bound. He did not have him driven off, either. He had him brought to the fire in the centre of the camp, with warriors on either side of him, and his rifle left where it lay in the dust, guarded by a boy who was told not to touch it and who stared at it as if it might move on its own. Ethan Cole walked between the warriors without hurrying and without dragging his feet, and when he reached the fire he stopped, and waited to be told where to stand.