They carried him between them into the lamplit barn as the last light went off the granite, and behind them the bay horse put its muzzle down at last into the full trough and drank, and the windmill turned, and complained, and turned.
Chapter 2 — A Bullet and a Warning
They laid him on the workbench in the barn, on a folded horse blanket, because the bench was high enough to work at and the hayloft above kept the lantern heat from rising straight out of the roof. Tomás Ibarra came in with the kettle and the needle kit and looked at the man on the bench for a long moment before he said anything else.
"Apache," Tomás said. He set the kettle down. "Kahlin, by the beadwork on that shirt. Or what is left of the beadwork."
"You know them," Caleb said. It was not a question. Tomás had known everybody in this country since before there was a country here to know.
"I know some of their tongue. Enough to trade. Enough to say I am sorry and I come in peace." Tomás rolled his sleeves with the unhurried air of a man who had sewn up friends before and buried a few anyway. "The graze on his ribs — that is a bullet. A long shot, or a lucky one, it kissed him and kept going. The arm is a knife. A man does not get one of each walking to church, Caleb."
"No," Caleb said. "He got them running from something. His horse is rode near to death and he's two days dry. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to run from on a dying horse with holes in him."
Sadie held the lantern. She had washed her hands at the pump without being told, and now she threaded the needle with boiled gut and set out the clean rags in a row, neat as ledger entries. She was better at this part than either of the men; her hands did not shake, and blood did not hurry her.
"Hold his shoulders, Papa. Tomás, the arm first. The ribs can wait, they're not pumping."
The forearm cut took six stitches. The man came up out of himself at the third, bucking, and Caleb put his weight across the young man's chest and talked to him the whole time in the slow, low voice, nonsense mostly — hold on, hold on, we've got you, near done — and Tomás, at the elbow, spoke in the Kahlin tongue, rusty and careful, and something in the familiar sounds reached through the fever, because the struggling eased and the man's eyes, when they opened, found Tomás and stayed.
He spoke then, in a rush, a string of words through cracked lips, looking not at Tomás but past him, at something none of them could see.
"What'd he say?" Caleb asked.
Tomás frowned, turning it over. "Some of it I lost. He said — men. White men. A box, I think, or a chest. He said a canyon." He leaned closer, coaxing, gentle as a man defusing something. "Ask him slow," Caleb said. "Names can come later. Ask him if anyone's behind him."
Tomás asked. The answer came back in fragments, between breaths, and with it the fever began to take the man in earnest, shaking him in waves. Sadie wrung a cloth in cool water and laid it on his forehead, and for a while there was nothing in the barn but the work: water, cloth, the kettle, the horses stamping in their stalls.
Later, the young man's eyes came open clear. That was the frightening thing, how clear they were, all at once, like a man surfacing. His hand shot out and caught Caleb's wrist with a grip that had no weakness in it at all.
He spoke in English. Broken English, each word pried up out of somewhere deep, but English, learned God knew where, and he spent what strength he had to make sure it was understood.
"At first light," he said, "they will come."
"Who will come?" Caleb said. "Soldiers?"
"No." The grip tightened. "My people. My uncle. They follow my horse." His eyes burned up at Caleb, fever-bright and utterly certain. "They think — you have hurt me. They think the white men — " A spasm of pain took the rest and he rode it, teeth set, and came back to finish, because finishing mattered more to him than the pain. "Do not run. Running is — " he searched for it, "— a confession. Do not shoot. You shoot, everyone dies. I die. You die. All."
"We're not running," Caleb said. "And nobody's shooting anybody off my land over a misunderstanding. You sleep. I'll be here at first light, and we'll sort it standing up, like men."
The young man's eyes searched his face for the lie that wasn't there. "You — gave water," he said, as if he were still turning it over, as if it contradicted something he knew. "At the trough. You did not know me."
"Didn't need to know you," Caleb said. "You were thirsty."
Something changed in the young man's face then, something old and considering, a door opening an inch in a wall. His grip loosened. "Asto," he said. "My name — Asto."
"Asto, then. I'm Caleb Rourke. This is my place, and you're welcome in it while you're mending. Now sleep, son. That's an order, and you're in no shape to argue with it."
Asto slept — or fell, which is different, the fever taking him down into country none of them could follow. Sadie covered him with the second blanket. Tomás stood at the bench a while with his cigarillo unlit between his fingers, looking down at the young face, slack now, suddenly very young without the will holding it up.
"Kahlin," Tomás said at last. "Chief Makya's people. If that boy is who the beadwork says — Makya's sister's son rides with the scouts — then at first light, my friend, it is not a war party that comes to your gate. It is a family. A family with every rifle it owns."