For a moment he thought she would not answer. Then: "Kimimila," she said. "My father is Gray Elk, of the Red Willow people." She drew a breath that shook. "And you should bar your door tonight, white man. Not against me. I was not the only one walking."
Chapter 4 — Three Days Afoot
She slept then, the deep collapsed sleep of the rescued, with the quilt up to her chin and the dressed arm laid across her body like something she was still guarding; and Erik and Nils ate their supper at the table in whispers, with the lamp turned low, and the woman asleep four feet away in Nils's bed, which Nils regarded the way he might have regarded a cougar asleep there — fascinated, and not entirely sure the arrangement was wise.
"She said others were walking," Nils said. "What others?"
"I do not know," Erik said.
"She said horses, before, when you carried her in. I heard her. Horses and riders."
"I heard her too."
"Then we should ride to Prairie Center," Nils said, and leaned forward, and his voice had the bright, reckless certainty of nineteen in it. "Now. Tonight. Get the sheriff, get Captain Alcott and the militia — if there's raiding going on, if the band's fighting somebody, we're sitting in the middle of it with a wounded—" He stopped. "Erik. She's the chief's daughter. Gray Elk's daughter. What if the band comes looking for her and finds her here? What if it looks like we—"
"Sit down," Erik said, not unkindly. "Eat your bread."
"Erik—"
"Sit down, Nils." He waited until his brother sat. "Listen to me. She has been three days afoot with a bullet's work in her arm. She came to my well because it was the water she could reach. She will sleep tonight, and tomorrow she will tell us what she can, in her own order, and then we will know what to do. No one rides anywhere tonight. Not to town, not to the sheriff. A frightened man on a dark road with half a story is how wars get started in this country — I have read the newspapers from the south, I know how it goes. Half a story, Nils. We have got perhaps a quarter of one."
He rose and took the bowl of broth he had been keeping warm at the stove's edge, and when the woman woke — as she did near midnight, surfacing suddenly with a gasp and her good hand groping — he was there, and he fed her broth, spoon by spoon, and she drank it like a person relearning the world.
"The horses were taken in the night," she said, between spoonfuls, not as if she were telling him so much as finishing a sentence she had begun three days ago in the dark. "All of them. The whole herd. I was with the guard — my brother Mato's guard. They came without sound, many men, and they fired — not to kill, I think, to scatter — and the herd went like a river going out." Her eyes found his and held. "I saw their faces in the muzzle light. White men. I knew none of them, but I would know them again. One—" She stopped.
"Rest," Erik said.
"There were too many to fight and it was not a fight they came for," she said. "My brother's guard is six. They fired over the horses' heads and into the ground, and the herd did their work for them — four hundred horses running in the dark need no driving. I was on the herd's far side with two of the guard. I saw one man clear, close, when his shot lit his face — and I heard another curse a horse in English, in a voice—" Her hand tightened on the quilt. "They were not hungry men stealing to eat. They were paid men doing a piece of work. There is a difference. Paid men finish what they are sent for."
"I ran to warn the camp," she went on, as if he had not spoken. "They shot after me — that is the arm. Then the dark. Then walking. The moon was wrong — no. I was wrong. I walked away from my own people for three days and came to your well like a dog to a door." Her mouth trembled once, with a fury that was all for herself. "My father will think I am dead. Or taken."
"Then he will be glad to be wrong," Erik said. "Tomorrow we will send word. Tonight, you sleep."
"Why do you do this?" she asked him, sudden and direct, with a clarity that cut through the fever and the broth and the lamplight. "I am nobody to you. My people are nobody to you. In town they say—"
"In town they say a great many things," Erik said. "You were thirsty at my well." He said it in his careful English, as if he were setting a stone. "Where I come from, that is the whole of the law. Sleep now, Kimimila."
She slept. Nils, watching from his chair with his rifle across the room unloaded and useless, said quietly, "You know Father would have done the same."
"Father," Erik said, "would have fed her first and asked her name second and never gotten around to the questions at all. We are slower than Father." He banked the stove for the night. In the dark beyond the sod walls the windmill creaked and turned, and somewhere far off a coyote tried the night with one long note and thought better of it. Erik sat a long while at the table with his hands around a cup gone cold, listening to the woman breathe in his brother's bed, and tried not to think about how many riders, exactly, might come looking for a chief's daughter at first light.
Chapter 5 — The Night Watch at the Farm
They took the night in turns, Erik first and Nils after, two hours apiece, sitting in the chair by the window with the rifle across their knees — unloaded, by Erik's order, which Nils had protested exactly once.