"A man with a loaded gun and no sleep shoots at shadows," Erik said. "We are watching, not fighting. If someone comes in the night to my farm they will find a man awake and a lamp lit, and that is worth more than a bullet in the dark."
So he sat. The night arrangement of the farm arranged itself around him the way it always did: the windmill turning overhead with its slow iron complaint, stopping when the wind stopped, starting again with a shudder he felt in his teeth; the horses in the corral shifting and blowing; the chickens murmuring once in the coop and settling; Bjorn asleep across the doorway with his chin on Erik's boot, rising now and then to lift his head and test the wind and lie down again, satisfied. A coyote came close in the small hours — Erik heard the pad of it, heard Bjorn's low growl start and die as the thing thought better of the yard — and went away toward the creek, and its going left the night bigger and quieter than before.
Kimimila slept badly and woke twice. The first time she woke calling out in her own language, sitting bolt upright with her good hand raised against something in a dream, and Erik spoke to her from his chair — "It is the sod house. You are at the farm. The well is outside the door" — until her eyes found the lamp and she lay back down, shaking. The second time she woke quiet, and watched him a while across the room, and said, "You sit with a gun you will not load."
"It is a listening gun," Erik said. "It helps me listen."
That won from her, in the dark, a sound that was nearly a laugh. "My father has such men," she said. "Old ones. They say the ear is the first weapon." She was quiet a moment. "What will you do when my people come?"
"They will come at first light, I think," Erik said. "If they come. A chief's daughter does not vanish for three days without a search, and your trail leads to my well as plain as a road. I will go out to them unarmed—" he heard her breath change, and went on evenly—"because a man with a rifle explains nothing to men who have come for their daughter, and because you will be standing in my doorway behind me, on your own feet, where they can see you. That is the whole plan, Kimimila. It is not a good plan. It is the only honest one I have."
"You would do this for a stranger," she said.
"You are not a stranger. You drank at my well." He turned the lamp down a fraction, against the waste of oil. "I will tell you something my father told me, in Norway, when I was Nils's age and twice his fool. He said: a man's judgment of a story should wait until he has heard the whole of it from the mouth of the one who lived it. Half a story has killed more men than any fever. So I will hear you whole, Kimimila — not the town's piece of you, not the militia's piece, not even my own fears' piece — before I judge any of it. That is my rule. It has kept this farm alive three years in a hard country."
She lay back. "Then sleep when your brother watches, Erik Halvorsen," she said, "and I will tell it whole when the sun comes. All of it. Beginning at the night the horses went."
When Nils took Erik's place at the window at the deepest hour, he sat a long time silent, turning his hat in his hands, and at last he said what had been on him since supper. "If they come at dawn and it goes wrong — if one young fool on their side or ours fires — what then, Erik? We are two men and a wounded woman against the whole rim of the world."
"Then it goes wrong for everyone," Erik said, "and the well will still be here when the smoke clears, and men will still need water. That is the thing about a farm, Nils. It outlasts the worst morning you can imagine for it." He laid his hand flat on his brother's shoulder. "But it will not go wrong because of us. We will be awake, and we will be calm, and the chief's daughter will be standing on her own feet in my door. A man does not shoot a parley he can see with his own eyes. Most killing is done at a distance, in the dark, on a story somebody else carried. We are going to be close up, in the light, with the story standing in front of them breathing. That is the safest place on this prairie tomorrow, little brother. Stranger as it sounds."
Nils nodded slowly, and settled into the chair, and took his turn at listening.
Erik slept after that in his clothes on the floor pallet with his boots by his hand, and dreamed of Norway — of green water and his mother's kitchen and a ship's rail — and woke before dawn to Nils's hand on his shoulder and his brother's voice, low and strangely steady.
"Erik. Erik, get up. Come to the window. Don't make a sound."
The east was the color of a coal held under ash. Erik stood at the window with the rifle forgotten in its corner and Nils breathing beside him and Kimimila awake behind them in the bed, propped on her good elbow, and he said nothing at all, because there was nothing to say that the prairie was not already saying for him: the whole gray rim of the world, from the creek bottom to the far fence and around again, was filling, silently, horse by horse and rider by rider, with the Red Willow band.