Kramer was a day late reporting. That was all. A day was nothing. But Obadiah Flint had not built his life on paper by ignoring the smell of a thing going slow, and he took his hat down from its peg and went out the back way, toward the livery, to send one more man riding — just, as he told himself, to look at the Halvorsen place from a distance, and be sure the talking there stayed only talking.
Chapter 13 — The Parley Ground
They came at noon with the sun standing straight up in a white sky, thirty-odd men in a column of dust, and Erik watched them from his well with the windmill ticking slow overhead and counted carbines the way other men counted storm clouds.
Nils rode in at their side, not of them, and Pastor Lindberg beside the captain, both gray with the road. Along the creek, and up on the bench behind the sod house, the Red Willow people sat their horses in a silence that had weight to it — Gray Elk at their center in a blanket coat, his face carved out of the same stillness. When the militia reined up at the farm gate the two silences met, and in the space between them a meadowlark tried a note and thought better of it.
Alcott swung down stiffly and started forward with his hand up near his shoulder strap, and Erik stepped out from the well curb and set the farm dipper down on the stone, handle toward the newcomers, the way a man lays out a tool for another man's use.
"Captain. You are welcome to my farm. Your men are welcome to my water. But we will make one rule before any talking, and it is the only rule I will ever lay on a guest." He let his voice stay low and let it carry. "No guns past the well. A man comes to the trough to drink or to talk, he comes with empty hands. Rifles stay at the wagons, under a guard of his own side. That holds for red men and white the same, or this parley ends now and God sort with us."
A laugh started somewhere in the militia line and died. Alcott looked at the dipper, at the trough bright with water in a year when half the valley's wells had gone to mud, and then, long and hard, across the yard at Gray Elk.
From the bench the old chief dismounted — slowly, a man whose knees had opinions — and handed his rifle across to Mato without a word, and came down the slope alone with both hands open at his sides. He stopped at the far edge of the well's shadow and waited, and the whole farm seemed to breathe out at once.
"Stack them, boys," Alcott said at last, and there was gravel in it. "Stack by the wagons. Tom Bixby, you'll stand over them, and any man reaches for iron without my word answers to me before he answers to God."
It nearly broke there all the same. Halfway down the militia line a young rider — a Swede boy from the north farms, more frightened than fierce — saw the band's line shift on the bench and threw his carbine up to his shoulder with the hammer coming back under his thumb. The sound of it clicked loud in the stillness, and fifty men heard their lives change key. Then Nils Halvorsen, who had ridden in beside the column and knew the boy from threshing season, walked his horse three unhurried steps sideways, right across the muzzle, and said, "Easy, Anders. You'll want that shot back someday, and it doesn't come back," — and the carbine lowered, slow as a setting sun, and the hammer eased down on a shaking thumb.
Alcott unslung his own carbine last and laid it across the wagon bed with care, like a man disarming himself in church. Then he came forward and took the dipper, drank, and handed it back. "You drive a hard welcome, Halvorsen."
"I drive a thirsty one, Captain. It is the only kind this year."
The talking began at the trough with the water going hand to hand, and Mila came out of the sod house onto the bench step to carry the words both ways, her bandaged arm held close, her voice level as a plumb line. Alcott laid out the town's case with a heavy fairness: horses stolen from three farms, tracks to the band's camp, a dozen branded horses found there at daylight — what was a captain to think?
Gray Elk answered through his daughter, and the answer had no hurry in it. His people had found the settler horses driven among their lodges at dawn, strange horses, frightened horses, and had held them untouched, waiting for the light to explain them. His herd — his people's winter lives — was gone the other way in the same night, taken by riders with a lantern, and his daughter, who had been with the guard, lay three days on the prairie for her telling of it. "A thief does not drive his theft into his own camp and wait beside it to be hanged," Mila translated, and then, in her own voice, lower: "That is my father. Now I will tell you what I saw, Captain, when the council is ready for it."
Erik watched her carry the words and marveled, not for the first time, at the steadiness of her. Three days afoot, a ball's graze still bound on her arm, and she stood between two armed peoples making each side's anger intelligible to the other, and left her own out of it like a coat hung by a door.
Alcott heard the chief out with his hat off, which some of his men noticed, and some of the band.