Something moved in her face β surprise, or something older than surprise
β and she looked away quickly and told him to grind the poultice finer.
They worked through the morning like that, and by noon the leg was cleaned
and poulticed and re-wrapped in bandages that met, if not her approval, at
least her silence. She ate a little jerky. She drank a full canteen. Color came
back into her face by degrees, like watercolor.
"You left your rifle with me," she said suddenly. "Last night. When you went
for water."
"I've got my revolver."
"You trust me with it?"
He shrugged. "I trust you not to shoot me without a good reason."
"And if the men come?"
14
"Fire a warning shot if you can. I'll come running."
She considered the rifle, leaning against the rock where he'd left it. Then she
looked at him with the first real amusement he'd seen in her. "I would not
waste a bullet warning them."
He paused. "That sounds like something we should discuss."
But she was already smiling, and despite everything β the leg, the fever, the
riders in the canyon β Silas felt something crack in his chest like spring ice
on a creek, and he laughed, and she laughed, and the overhang filled with a
sound he hadn't made in eight years without bitterness in it.
She slept until past noon, and woke clear-eyed and demanding water, and
then, to his surprise, demanding conversation.
"Tell me about the cabin," she said. "The one with the clean cup."
He stared at her. "How do youβ"
"You talk in your sleep too," she said, with the ghost of a smile. "Not as
much as I do. But some."
He didn't remember dreaming. He decided not to ask what he'd said.
"It's just a cabin," he said.
"It's a cabin with one cup nobody uses," she said. "That's not just a cabin.
That's a shrine."
He looked away, into the fire. "My wife's."
She was quiet a moment. Then: "How long?"
"Eight years."
"Do you still talk to her?"
15
The question was so direct it nearly winded him. "Sometimes," he admitted.
"When I'm mending fence. She always had opinions about fence."
Saya nodded as if this were the most natural thing in the world. "My mother
died when I was sixteen. I still ask her about poultices. She hasn't been
wrong yet."
It was such an ordinary exchange β two people trading their dead like
recipes β that Silas felt something loosen in his chest, and it frightened him,
and he changed the subject the way he'd change a bandage: quickly, and
hoping the patient wouldn't notice.
"Your people will be looking for you."
"My brother," she said, and her voice changed, went warm and certain all at
once. "Dokan. He never stops searching. Not for a day. Not for an hour.
When I was twelve I got lost in a box canyon for two days, and he walked
the whole drainage on foot until he found me, and he didn't even scold me.
He just said, 'You are hard to lose, little sister,' like it was a compliment."
She smiled at the memory, and then the smile faded. "That was a long time
ago. But some things about a person don't change."
"He sounds stubborn."
"He is worse than stubborn," she said. "He is Dokan."
Silas found himself smiling. "Then I hope he finds us before the fever
finishes what the trap started."
"He will," she said simply. And she believed it, utterly, the way a person
believes in sunrise. Silas envied her the certainty and didn't say so.
She slept again after that, and he whittled a tent peg out of juniper just to
keep his hands busy, and the afternoon wore on, gold and still.
16
In the afternoon he went down to the spring to fill the canteens, leaving her
the rifle again. The day was bright and the water ran clear over the stones,
and he was crouching to fill the second canteen when he saw the tracks.
Three horses. Fresh β last night, maybe the small hours. One of them had a
damaged rear shoe, the print broken at the outer edge. They had watered here
and moved on west, and by the depth and spacing Silas judged they'd passed
within a hundred yards of the overhang in the dark.
He followed the sign a little way, careful, quiet. Found another cigarette stub
near a trampled patch of grass, same expensive tobacco. He wrapped it with
the first one in a scrap of paper and put them both in his vest pocket.
And standing there with the stubs in his pocket, a memory surfaced that he
had buried almost as deep as the graves under the cottonwood.
Years ago β before Martha, before Lucy, when he was still running mule
teams for anybody with freight and coin β a man had stepped out of a fine
black carriage on the main street of Juniper Flats and crooked a finger at him.
Ambrose Hale. Even then the richest cattle broker in Cobre County, with his
tailored coat and his easy smile and his foreman standing behind him like a
shadow with scarred knuckles.
Hale had offered him fifty dollars. Cash, on the spot. All Silas had to do was
take his team the long way around for one afternoon and not notice Hale's
hands driving three hundred head across the Barlow graze, which belonged
to another man.
Silas had looked at the money. He had looked at Hale. And he had said no β
not out of virtue, particularly, but because his father had raised him to
believe a man's word was the only thing that couldn't be repossessed, and he
hadn't yet learned how little that belief was worth.
17
Hale had smiled like the refusal was a curiosity, folded the money away, and
said, "Pity. A practical man would have taken it." He'd never bothered Silas