"My daughter has spoken. The herd of the Red Willow was taken by white thieves, and my daughter's blood is the proof of it, and this man's roof is the proof that not all white men are thieves. Now the council will hear the rest of it — what was found in our camp at daylight — and then we will decide together what is to be done. Bring the councillors down to the well. We will sit in this man's yard, and we will keep our rifles on our backs, and the water will be in the middle of us."
Mila swayed, then — only a little, and only Nils, watching her like a hawk, saw it — and she set her feet wider in the gravel of the yard and stayed standing, a chief's daughter, in the middle of the ground.
Chapter 9 — The Planted Horses
The council sat in Erik's yard in a rough half-circle, the well between them and the house, and Erik sat where Gray Elk had placed him — not above anyone, not below anyone, a man whose ground it was, hearing things that would decide whether his farm stood here next winter.
Mila translated where her father's English gave out, sitting straight on a stump with her bound arm in her lap, and the councillors listened to their chief the way bankers listen to a ledger.
"At daylight," Gray Elk said, "the morning after the herd was taken, my scouts came back to the winter camp ground. We had left it empty when we moved the old people to the creek bottom, before the snow. In that empty camp, in the corral my sons built with their hands, there stood horses that are not ours."
He let that sit.
"Twelve horses," he said. "Fat horses. Farm horses. With the brands of the white farms on them — I know the marks of my neighbors as a man knows faces. They had been driven in during the night and the corral gate shut on them, and the ground was cut up with the tracks of the thieves' horses, going away toward the white men's country, plain as writing for any man who can read ground. My scouts followed those tracks until they were lost in the rocks. No tracks of my people's horses came into that camp. None. The horses were put there, farmer. Put there like a knife is put in a dead man's hand."
Erik felt the whole design of it stand up in his mind at once, the way you see a whole field's drainage in one look from a hill. The theft alone was a crime. This — this was carpentry. Someone had built a thing: steal the band's herd, so they cannot move to the agency and cannot hunt; drive stolen settler horses into their empty camp, so the settlers come armed to take back "their" horses and find them in Indian hands; and then whatever happens next — shooting, flight, a war in the snow — the bottom land on Red Willow Creek sits empty, with survey stakes already in it, waiting for a town that exists so far only on paper in some man's saddlebag.
And his farm stood in the middle of the design, with the only deep well in the valley, and now with the stolen herd's only witness sitting on a stump in his yard with a bandage on her arm.
"You kept the horses," Erik said. It was not a question, but the chief answered it as one.
"We kept them. We fed them from our own hay that we had cached — hay for our own horses, that we do not have now." Something moved under the old man's composure, a grief so large it had to be carried quietly or not at all. "What were we to do? Turn them loose to die in the dry coulees? Drive them to your town, my young men riding white men's horses into a town that is already saying our name with the word thief? We kept them, and we waited, and we sent our fastest riders to find my daughter, who knew the truth of that night — and the trail of her blood and her walking brought us to your well."
"And now the town," Erik said.
"Now the town." Gray Elk's mouth set. "Word came to us in the night from a half-breed trader who owes my son a debt and paid it in warning. Your Prairie Center is raising its militia. They meet this morning with their rifles oiled. They have heard of the horses in our camp — oh, the story travels fast when someone carries it — and they have heard nothing of the theft of our herd, because the men who took it told that story first and told it their way." He looked at Erik with those weathered, unblinking eyes. "They will march to our camp to take back their horses by war. And my young men, who have lost everything they own and been called thieves for it, will meet them as young men meet such things. I am sixty years old, farmer. I have kept my people alive through worse men than these. But I cannot hold two hundred angry boys with both hands if the white men come shooting."
Nils had come quietly out of the house and stood by the fence, and Erik saw his brother's face and knew the same sum was being done there.
"What do you ask of me, Chief?" Erik said.
"I ask the sun's height," Gray Elk said. "My people will sit this rim until the sun is straight above us. If by then your town's captain will come here — here, to this well, where the truth has been spoken — and sit down and hear all of it as my council has heard it, then the Red Willow will talk instead of shoot, and we will find these thieves together, yours and mine. If the militia comes to my camp instead, with guns —" he spread his hands, an old man's hands, and the gesture was not a threat, it was a tired man showing the size of a thing — "then what happens will happen, and God will sort it, as your people say."