The Fifth Post: A Rancher, an Apache Woman, and the Home They Refused to Surrender

He went to his knees in the frozen dirt and got the knife out.

"Easy," he said. "Easy now. I am going to cut."

Chapter 2

The rawhide had shrunk as it dried, which is what rawhide does and why men who tie with it in the wet season are either ignorant or cruel. These had not been ignorant.

He worked the knife under the wrist bindings first, sawing in small strokes, talking while he worked in the voice he used for frightened horses, low and unhurried, mostly words that meant nothing strung together so that the sound of a man would not stop suddenly and frighten her worse. The hide had cut her wrists to the quick. When the last strand parted her arms fell like things unstrung and she could not lift them; the blood coming back into her hands made her gasp once, hard, through her teeth, and she did not cry out.

"That'll burn awhile," he said. "Means they're yours again."

He cut the lashings at her waist and shoulders and caught her when she came off the post, because her legs had gone the way her arms had. She weighed less than a woman her height should. He set her down against the post with her back to the wire and went to the mare, because the mare was making a thin sound now and he could do the horse first and fastest and because, God forgive him, the horse was easier to look at.

The halter rope had been shortened until the chestnut's head was drawn down and sideways, and the near foreleg — the rope had been run around it too, a hobble of spite — was swollen at the fetlock and hot, with a rope cut weeping at the pastern. He cut the hobble first, then worked the halter loose knot by knot, easing her head up by degrees so the neck muscles would not cramp her to the ground. The mare blew out a long breath and shifted her weight off the bad leg and stood, shaking, with her head hanging at its natural height like something returned from a far country.

"All right," he told her. "All right, girl."

When he turned back, the woman had got her hands into her lap and was looking at them as if they belonged to somebody she used to know. Her hair had fallen back. She was younger than the post and the dark had made her seem — middle twenties, maybe a year more, with high bones in her face and a scar through her left eyebrow and eyes that had gone somewhere flat and far. Her dress was a trader's calico gone to rags at the hem and there were bruises coming up on her upper arms in the shape of hands.

She was watching his knife.

He saw her see it. He wiped the blade on his trouser leg, folded it, and set it down on the ground between them, open-handed, and then — because a folded knife still reads as a kept knife — he nudged it with his boot toe a foot farther from his own feet, closer to hers than to his.

Her eyes went from the knife to his face.

What she said then, she said in English, careful English, each word placed like a stone set down rather than thrown. Her voice was raw from the hours of deciding whether to breathe.

"Do what you want, cowboy," she said. "I will not fight."

And then she closed her eyes, not in sleep, not in fainting — in the terrible arithmetic of a person who has done this sum before and been taught, by teachers with hands and rope, that surrender is the cheapest coin a body has.

Eli Crowe looked at her sitting against the post he had cut and set into his own ground with his own hands six years ago, and the lantern flame shook, because his hand was shaking, because something in him had come up out of a place he had spent six years walling off with work and silence and distance from every living soul.

Not at her. Never at her.

At the teachers.

"Ma'am," he said, and his voice came out rough enough to scare her, so he stopped and breathed and began again, quieter, from farther down. "Ma'am. Hear me, because I am only going to say it the once and then you can decide if it's true by watching."

She opened her eyes.

"I cut you loose because you were tied. That's the whole of it. There's nothing owing and nothing coming. When you can walk, the mare can carry you or not, and every direction out of this hollow is yours, including the ones that never come back past my fence."

He picked up the lantern. He did not pick up the knife. He left it lying in the dirt where she could reach it first, and he turned and started the slow work of getting the mare moving toward the ranch, limping, one careful step at a time, and after a while — he did not look back to check, because looking back would have been its own kind of rope — he heard her get to her feet against the post, and follow.