way she'd watched it a hundred mornings, only this was the first morning in
weeks that the quiet felt like waiting instead of hiding.
Then she went inside, barred the door, checked the rifle's load the way Silas
had taught her, and sat down to wait, with her medicine pouch in her lap and
her brother's knife β the one Dokan had pressed into her hand before riding
out β across her knees.
The cabin was half a day behind them by the time the sun cleared the ridge,
and Silas Wren had already decided that riding with Dokan was like traveling
alongside weather β silent, certain, and impossible to hurry.
Slate picked his way along the trail with the steady patience of a horse that
had hauled freight through worse country than this, and ahead of him
Dokan's paint mare moved like water over stone, never disturbing anything
she passed. Twice in the first hour Dokan raised one hand without turning
around, and twice Silas reined up to find the reason a moment later: a
rattlesnake coiled in the shade of a fallen log, a slope of loose shale that
would have taken a horse's leg if they'd hurried it. The man read ground the
way Silas read a freight manifest β completely, and without needing to
explain himself.
"You ever make a sound when you ride?" Silas asked at midday, when they
stopped to water the horses at a seep.
Dokan considered this with the gravity of a judge. "The horse makes enough
for both of us."
"That right."
63
"Your horse sighs like an old man."
"Slate's earned his sighs."
They rode on. The country opened eastward into long rolls of grama grass
and scattered juniper, and the sky did the enormous blue work it always did
out here, unbothered by anything underneath it. Silas found his thoughts
circling the way they always did when his hands were busy and his mind was
not β back to the cabin, to the doorway, to Saya on her crutch with the
morning behind her.
Come back.
She had said it first in her own language, the words shaped like something
half-sung, and then in English, plain and unadorned, as if she wanted no
possibility of misunderstanding. He had nodded because his throat had
closed on every other answer. Dokan had not looked back at all, which Silas
was choosing to interpret as confidence rather than indifference.
That night they camped in a dry wash under cottonwoods, and Dokan
produced jerked venison and a small bag of parched corn from his
saddlebags, and Silas built the fire the freighter's way β small, hot, and
smokeless β and they ate without much talk. Afterward, to fill the quiet,
Silas taught Dokan seven-up with a greasy deck he'd carried since his
freighting days, explaining the rules twice and losing three hands in a row to
a man who had never held cards before in his life.
"You cheat," Silas said.
"I watch," Dokan said. "You look at your cards when you are happy and at
the fire when you are not."
Silas threw a twig at him. "That's cheating with extra steps."
64
Dokan's smile was brief and real, and it changed his whole face, and Silas
understood suddenly and completely why Saya trusted this man with her life.
There was nothing in him that needed to be anything other than what he was.
Dokan dealt another hand, and Silas asked the question that had been sitting
in him since the canyon.
"Two seasons, Saya said. You searched two seasons."
Dokan nodded, eyes on his cards. "After the trap-line took her, I found blood
on a chain and nothing else. I asked at the fort. I asked at the mission. I asked
men I would rather have shot." He laid down a card. "A trapper's boy told me
men took a healer east in a wagon with bars. I followed that story through
three towns until it went cold at a ranch that wasn't a ranch."
"And now?"
"Now I take her home." Dokan looked up. "What will you do, freighter,
when the book is copied and the law is done?"
Silas was quiet for a while. The fire settled. Somewhere out in the dark a
night bird called once and didn't call again.
"Eight years ago the Piedra rose in a spring storm," he said finally. "Took my
wife Martha. Took my Lucy β she was six." He said it plainly, the way you
set down something heavy. "I rode to warn the families downstream instead
of staying. The water came faster than the warning. I've lived at the mouth of
CaΓ±on Seco ever since, talking to two graves under a cottonwood."
Dokan didn't offer pity, which Silas was grateful for. He said, "Grief is a
country. You have lived there a long time."
"Getting to be time to leave it."
"And the graves? You still talk to them?"
65
"Every Sunday." Silas poked at the fire. "Less often, lately. I think they'd
understand."
Dokan nodded as if that were a reasonable travel plan, and dealt another
hand.
Later, lying in his bedroll with the stars doing their slow arithmetic overhead,
Silas's hand found the small buckskin pouch in his pocket β willow bark
and feverfew, pressed into his palm at false dawn by a woman on a crutch
who'd said, for the road, in case the copying takes all night and your head
aches. He held it a moment, and thought about the promise he'd made her in
the shelter β then we find out who's behind those traps β and then,
unmistakably, Dokan's breathing evened out into the soft ripping snore that
followed it. Silas grinned into the dark, and fell asleep with Saya's pouch still
in his fist.
In the morning he told Dokan about it, in detail, with embellishments.
Dokan listened to the entire performance without expression. Then he said,