"Then there will be." The needle went in, and came out. "So. We will see what kind of men your town is made of. By noon, we will know."
Erik stood in his own doorway with the sun climbing and the whole rim of the valley watching his farm, and he put the coffee on again — because it was a morning chore, and because the hands must have work while the heart waits — and the windmill turned once, slow, in a breath of wind off the prairie.
Chapter 11 — The Foreman's Face
She was sitting up when Erik came in from the chores, her back against the wall of the sod house and a blanket over her knees, and in her lap, held close against the bandage on her left arm, there was a strip of buckskin and a little heap of beads, blue as deep water. Her fingers moved slowly and stopped often, but they moved with knowledge.
"You work already," Erik said.
"It is something my hands can do sitting down." She did not look up. "My father waits outside. He will want to know when I can tell it straight, all of it, without the fever in between."
"Tell me first," Erik said. "I am the one the militia will ask."
She set the beadwork aside then, careful as a woman setting down a sleeping child, and he saw that telling it cost her more than the walking had. She began with the night itself: the herd grazing the creek bottom, the guards in pairs, the moon not yet up. "We were not careless," she said, and there was an old anger under the words, banked like coals. "My brother set the watch the way our father taught him. I had the far side, where the bottom narrows, because my ears are good and my horse was quiet. The herd was restless before ever a rider showed — the smell of strange horses on the wind, I think now. I had just sung out to Mato across the dark when the first shot came."
Then riders where no riders should be, on the herd's far side, and the shooting — not aimed at men, she said, but into the air and into the ground, to bunch the horses and break the guard apart.
"They did not want to kill," she said. "They wanted the horses running and us scattered. When my horse went down I rolled clear, and that is when the ball grazed me" — she touched the bandage — "from the leader's carbine, I think, fired at the sound of me. I crawled into the willows and lay still, and they passed so close I could have taken hold of a stirrup leather."
"Close enough to see a face?"
"Close enough to know his mother." A ghost of something that was not quite humor crossed her mouth and was gone. "There was a lantern on a pole, for the work at the corral gate. He rode into its light to shout at a man who was slow with a rope. A big man, red in the face even in that light, with a scar cut through his eyebrow — the left one — like a white worm lying in it. He swore in English and gave one order in Dutch, or German, I do not know those tongues apart. Another rider called him Dutch. Not a name his mother gave him, I think. A name men use."
Erik sat down on the stool by the stove, and the name settled in him like a stone in deep water.
"Dutch Kramer," he said.
"You know him."
"Every man in the valley knows him. He rides foreman for Obadiah Flint." He turned it over, slow, the way he turned a furrow. "Flint of the townsite plats. Flint who has a map in the land office window with streets drawn on land he does not own — your father's creek bottom, Mila. Streets, and a depot, and 'Flint City' in letters big as a fence rail. He set survey stakes down there this summer, white stakes, before any railroad has so much as promised him a siding."
She was very still. "If the band is driven off as thieves—"
"Then nobody asks whose land it was. The band goes to the agency under guard, the bottom stands empty, and Flint's stakes become a town before the snow is off the ground." Erik looked at the window, where the gray light stood. "A stolen herd makes the band look like raiders. A dozen settler horses in your camp makes the town sure of it. And the only eyes that saw the true riders are in this room, with a bullet's kiss on the arm."
Mato had come to the door while he spoke — Mila's brother, grave as his father, his rifle grounded outside the threshold by the farm's new law before Erik had even spoken it into words. Mila spoke to him in Lakota, a long sentence, unhurried, and Erik heard his own valley's names come back in her mouth: Kramer. Flint. The stakes. The bottom land.
Mato answered in English, for Erik's benefit, and his voice was flat as a frozen lake.
"My sister's word is good. But it is one woman's word against a town of paper. The captain of the militia will say she lies to save her people."
"He might," Erik said. "Men say easy things at noon that they are sorry for by dark. That is why we will not ask him to believe a word, Mato. We will ask him to believe a horse's hip. Words blow away. A brand stays where the iron put it."
"One thing more," she said. "At the corral gate, when the lantern swung, I saw the horses they had already cut out for the camp — settler horses, fat ones, with brands I did not know. They drove them in after us, into our own camp, like a man sowing seed he wants found in another's field. I did not understand it in the dark. I understand it now, and the understanding is worse than the wound."