He thought about his stores in the barn, the grain that would last until March if he was careful. He thought about what the people in Redcliffe would say if they knew he had let Apache shelter on his land, how Bucker would ride from ranch to ranch with the news, and how the whispers would start that Elijah Tanner had finally lost his mind. He thought about his father, dead now 12 years, and buried on a hill overlooking the valley. And he heard the old man's voice as clear as if he were standing right beside him. Hunger does not care what language a man speaks.
A man can survive a hungry belly, but a man cannot survive a hard heart. Then Elijah Tanner set down his rifle on the porch railing where anyone watching could see that he was choosing not to hold it, and he lifted the lantern higher so its light would reach farther into the yard. "Come inside," he said. "All of you, we will figure the rest out come morning. Tonight you will be warm and you will eat what I have to give." The old man looked at him for a long moment.
His dark eyes searching Elijah's face for the trick that must surely be hiding behind such an offer or the cruelty that would show itself once they were inside and helpless. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find something that satisfied him. Because after a moment he turned and spoke quietly to the others in a language Elijah did not understand. Then they began to move toward the cabin slowly, painfully like people for whom every step was a victory against a body that wanted nothing more than to lie down in the snow and stop. The people of Redcliffe learned what Elijah Tanner had done before the week was out.
A man named Harlon Bucker, who ran cattle on the next spread over, and who had never liked Elijah for reasons that probably had more to do with an old dispute about a fence line than anything else, had ridden up to borrow a harness pin, and noticed that the smoke from Elijah's chimney was rising thicker than any one man alone would need. He rode around the back of the barn where he could see without being seen, and what he saw there made him turn his horse around and ride home without bothering to ask about the harness pin. By nightfall, the whole town knew. By the next morning, a group of men was standing in front of the general store, their breath rising white in the freezing air and their voices rising too with the particular heat that comes when men are scared and looking for someone to blame. What Tanner has done, Bucker said, pacing back and forth on the wooden porch with his hands jammed in his pockets, is put every man, woman, and child in this valley at risk.
Those people are killers. Their fathers burned out half the territory before the army put them down. And now he has a whole band of them camped on his place eating food that should be keeping white families alive. Someone needs to ride out there and set him straight. There were nods around the circle.