"You will have your answer by noon," Erik said. "One way or the other, you will have it from me."
He did not yet know how he would get it. He only knew the farm had stopped being a farm sometime in the night. It was a hinge now, and everything in the valley was about to swing on it, one way or toward blood.
Chapter 10 — Two Fires
The pastor came up the farm lane at a trot an hour later, with his black coat flapping and his hat in his hand, and Erik knew before a word was spoken that the second fire had been lit.
There were two fires in the valley that morning. The first was the little cook-fire on Erik's hearth, ordinary and innocent, with Mila sitting near it at the table resting her arm, her bead pouch open and a strip of smoked hide across her lap, working a pattern in blue and white with the patience of a woman mending time itself — her good hand busy, her hurt one still, her whole face given to the small work as if war were a rumor. The second fire was the one being kindled in Prairie Center, out of fear and lies and one man's ambition, and Pastor Lindberg had ridden out from the edge of it with soot on his news.
"The militia meets at ten," he said, in the yard, refusing coffee with a shake of his head that meant there is no time for the decencies and I am sorry for it. "Captain Alcott is calling the rolls. They mean to march at noon, Erik — noon, up the creek to the Red Willow camp, to take back the settler horses 'at whatever cost.' Those were the words used. At whatever cost. There are sober men among them trying to cool it, but something has been poured on this town for two days running, like kerosene on a woodpile — stories upon stories, and always the same conclusion. Someone wants this fight. I do not say who. I say the fight is being fed."
"Can they be held?" Erik asked.
"An hour. Two. A preacher can talk an hour out of most men, especially men who are not as sure as they are loud." Lindberg's lined face was grim. "But I cannot talk a whole day out of them, and if I ride back alone with a story of a wounded woman and a peaceful council, half of them will call it priest-talk and the other half will ask why the Halvorsen place shelters the very people who robbed them. It wants a settler's voice, Erik. A man with land. A man they know."
Both of them looked at Erik. Erik looked, through the open door, at his brother, who had come to the threshold with his hat already in his hand — because Nils had known, the way brothers know, before the words were found.
"Nils," Erik said.
"Nei." Nils said it in Norwegian, hard. "Nei, Erik. I am not leaving you here alone with —" he gestured at the rim, at the house, at the whole impossible morning — "with all of this. If shooting starts it starts here. My place is here."
"Your place is where I send you, and I am sending you to town." Erik kept his voice down and level, the older brother's voice, the one from the old country that had authority in it older than either of them. "Listen to me. If the militia marches at noon to the camp, there is a war, and it does not matter where you are standing — we lose everything either way, all of us, both peoples. The only battle today is the one for time, and it must be fought in Prairie Center, by a Halvorsen, with the pastor beside him. You will tell them what you saw with your own eyes. The woman at the well, dying of thirst. Her wound — a white man's bullet, and you will say I dressed it with these hands. Her father on the rim since dawn and not one shot. You will tell Captain Alcott that Gray Elk asks him to come to this well and sit down and hear the council before God, and that the Red Willow will wait until noon and keep the peace of this yard until then. And you will make him hear it, Nils. You are the only man alive who can."
The boy stood a long moment with his hat twisting in his hands. Then he put it on, hard, like a man putting on a helmet.
"Ja," he said. "I will make him hear it." He looked past Erik into the house, where Mila sat at her beadwork, and something crossed his face — the hot-headedness burning down into something steadier, older. "Tell her—" He stopped. "No. Nothing. I will tell them myself when I come back with the captain."
They rode out together, the pastor and the boy, down the lane and onto the town road at a pace that would save the horses and spend the minutes like coins. Erik watched them go until the dust settled. The rim of riders watched them go too, in that great disciplined silence — and Erik understood that Gray Elk had let them pass because Erik had asked for the sun's height and the old chief was keeping accounts of promises, his and Erik's both.
Inside, Mila's needle went in and out of the hide, in and out, the beads catching the firelight one at a time like small cold stars being set in a row. She did not look up. But she said, to the work in her lap, quietly:
"If your brother speaks as you speak, Erik Halvorsen, there will be no war today."
"And if he does not?"