Like a man stepping across a frozen river and testing each patch of ice before he trusted his weight to it. "We have walked many days," the old man said. His voice was weak, but steady, the voice of someone who had given up on strength, but not on dignity. "We have walked from the south where the soldiers came, and we have nothing left. We do not ask you to love us.
We do not ask you to trust us. We ask only that our children do not die in your snow. The words hung in the cold air between them, visible as mist, and then gone. Elijah Tanner did not answer right away. He looked at the old man, whose name he did not yet know, and he looked at the woman holding the crying child.
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.