They drove home in the long evening with the two horses tied behind the wagon, stepping high and strange in the settled country, and Erik's heart was as quiet as it had been in years — the quiet of a man whose ledger, for once, balanced in every column he knew how to count.
Chapter 29 — The Return
The band came up the valley on the ninth day, in the late light, the way Mila had said they would.
Erik heard them before he saw them — not noise, exactly; the absence of the prairie's ordinary noise, birds lifting off the creek bottom in ones and twos, and then the low, ground-felt tremor of several hundred horses moving at a walk. He and Nils went down to the creek road and watched the Red Willow band pass onto its own bottom: the horse herd first, flowing around the coulee mouth like water finding its level, then the travois and the wagons, the women calling the dogs in, the children up on the loads among the lodge poles, and in the middle of it, riding a sorrel horse with a rifle slung quiet on her back and her left arm bare and brown in the spring sun, Kimimila — who raised one hand to the two men at the fence, gravely, the way you greet a house you mean to visit properly later, and rode on with her people.
By full dark the camp stood on Red Willow Creek in good order, fires small and many, the herd grazing the bottom under its guards, exactly where a treaty said it might be and a speculator's paper had said it might not. Erik stood on his own porch and looked across the dark valley at the cook-fire sparks rising on the far side of the creek, and it seemed to him that the valley was the size it was supposed to be again — big enough for everybody's fire to be a light and not a signal.
She came at dusk the following evening, while there was still light enough to read a brand by.
He heard the horse on the lane and was at the gate before she reached it. She rode the sorrel, unhurried, with her father's knowledge — she told him that first, the way a person sets a thing straight on a table before sitting down.
"My father knows where I ride," she said. "He said: the well kept faith with us. Go and see that it is still sweet. Tell the men there the Red Willow band camps on its creek tonight and harms no man's fence."
"Tell your father the fence thanks him," Erik said. "And come down from that horse. We are at supper, and Nils has been practicing his manners on the dog all winter."
He had put the vest on when he heard the hoofbeats. He had not decided to; his hands had decided downstairs, the way hands do. She saw it when she came into the lamplight — the red willow branches across his chest, the one blue drop at the center like a held breath — and stopped one step inside the door.
"It fits the man it was made for," she said.
"It has been waiting since November for a day that deserved it," Erik said. "It appears the day has come in the door."
Supper was ham and potatoes and the last of the dried-apple pies, and Mila ate with the appetite of a woman who had ridden point on a herd all day, and asked Nils about his claim, his shanty, his team — and laughed once, out loud, at Nils's account of teaching the bay gelding who was master, an education still in progress. Then, when the plates were cleared and Nils had gone out to the barn on an errand that took him a tactful long time, she asked Erik to walk with her to the well.
The night air was soft with the creek's smell and the smell of new grass. The windmill turned slow over them, creaking its one familiar note. She drew the bucket up hand over hand — he let her; it was her errand — and drank from the dipper, and poured a little back, the way her people did, a courtesy to the water itself.
"Still sweet," she said. "The agency wells are iron and mud by spring. My father says a well is like a promise. It shows what the keeper is."
"Your father is generous with compliments for a man he met at gunpoint," Erik said.
"We did not meet at gunpoint," she said. "That is the whole of it, Erik Halvorsen. Everyone else in this valley met us at gunpoint, or behind a fence, or through a lawyer's letter. You met us at a well, with a dipper." She hung the dipper back on its nail. "Tomorrow we move at first light. The summer grounds are three days. In the fall we come down past your gate again, and next spring, if the grass is kind. That is the road now."
"It is a good road," Erik said. "It goes past a well."
She untied the sorrel as the first stars came, and would not let him walk her down the lane — a chief's daughter rides her own road home, and besides, she said, Nils would never forgive being left out of the farewell twice. At the gate she gathered the reins and looked back once at the little sod house with its lamplight and its windmill standing over it, and at the man in the beaded vest in the yard.
"First light," she said. "Before we move. I will come to the well."
Then she was gone down the white lane at a lope, into the dusk and the sound of the camp across the creek, and Erik stood in the gate a long while, listening to the valley settle — the herd quieting, the windmill turning, the water far below his feet in the dark earth, sweet and patient and his to keep.
Chapter 30 — Water at First Light