And Kaslin, who had cut a hundred ropes in his life and had every reason of pride and grievance to let this white man's plan fail in the dark, stood at the mouth with his own hand on the second rope — the alarm line tied to the lean-to — and when Wade's blade came up in the starlight, Kaslin chose. He cut his rope first. Silent. Clean. The alarm line fell dead into the dust, and then Wade's rope parted, and the pen stood open, and the two of them moved the twelve Bar M horses out into the night like water poured from a cup, slow and without a splash.
Chapter 19 — Kaslin's Choice
They brought the dozen down the way smugglers and saints both travel, in the dark, at a walk, with the stolen-back horses strung nose to tail and the canyon covering their sound.
It took the rest of the night. Twice they froze while something moved on the benches above them — once a deer, once a thing they never identified and did not wait to name. Once, at the bad crossing, the cracked-shoe gelding balked and minced, and Kaslin was off his horse and in the water to his knees, leading the animal through by the halter with a patience Wade had not, until that hour, believed the young man owned. Nothing was said. By the time the sky thinned, the twelve stood in the valley herd among their own kind, heads down, home, and the count of the Bar M stood at forty for the first time since the flood.
Wade did what a man should do before anything else. He found the chief.
But Kaslin was before him, and that was as it should have been.
The camp was stirring when Kaslin walked into the council ground alone, unarmed, his hair wet to the shoulder from the crossing, and stood before his chief in the hearing of the old men and half the waking lodges. Wade, arriving at the edge of it with his report ready, stopped where he was. Some things a man does not interrupt.
"I was sent to track the white man's horses," Kaslin said, in a voice that carried the way camp voices are meant to carry. "I report what I did on the sending. I found the twelve behind the miners' camp, in a box canyon, fed on the miners' corn, in a rope pen the miners keep. I cut the alarm rope with my own hand, so that they could be taken without blood. The horses are in the valley herd. That is the work."
He stopped, and the hardest part visibly stood in front of him, and he walked into it the way he had walked into the cold water at the crossing.
"More is owed. For two years I have let my father's words about the chief's daughter stand in this camp as if they were my words. They became my words, because I wore scorn in public to hide my shame in private, and silence is a kind of speaking. I do not ask the council to mend what I broke. I report myself as a man who hid. It is finished. Let the camp judge my work from today — I am done being judged for hiding, because I am done hiding."
He did not look at Tali's lodge. He did not ask for pardon, or praise, or a wife, or anything at all, and Wade, standing in the cold dawn with his hat in his hands for the second time that week, understood that he was watching the hardest thing a proud man can do, which is to tell the plain truth about himself in public with no bargain attached.
Tazlo regarded his young warrior a long time. Then the old chief said, "The camp has heard. Go and eat, Kaslin. There is soldier-work coming, and I need men who stand where they stand."
That was all, and it was everything. By the time the sun was up, the story had been through every lodge in the valley twice, and Wade heard it in its new shape from Weshka, who brought him broth and the news with the same ladle. The whisper about Tali — the returned one, the rejected one — had not died, exactly; whispers do not die. But it had been joined, and outweighed, by a plainer story: that the shame in that old business had never lived in the daughter's lodge at all, but in a young man's silence, and that he had carried it back to its right address himself, in front of everyone, before breakfast.
The camp looked at Tali that day with different eyes, and more importantly, with the same eyes it had started to use when its sick children were carried to her door — and Wade saw her cross the camp at noon with her head up and her stride unhurried, neither flaunting nor hiding, a woman whose name had been set down in its proper place at last.
That evening the herders counted the Bar M aloud at the corral for the pleasure of the number. Twenty-eight. Twelve. Forty. Wade stood in the dust with the count washing over him and thought that a man's capital could be restored to him by flood's undoing, but a woman's good name had to be restored by a man's courage, and that of the two restorations, his was by far the cheaper.