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.
Someone said that maybe Tanner had gone soft in the head from living alone too long. Someone else said that it did not really matter why he had done it, only that he had to stop before the consequences caught up with all of them. A few men mentioned things they remembered from the old days. Raids and fires and the sounds that came from cabins that no one reached in time, and the fear grew thicker with every word. Samuel Crew, the storekeeper who sold flour and coffee and ammunition to everyone in the valley, cleared his throat and said what everyone else was thinking, but no one had wanted to say out loud.
If those Apache get through the winter strong enough to walk, he said, "What is to stop them from remembering where the ranches are? What is to stop them from coming back in the summer with their cousins and their horses and doing what their people have always done when they find weakness? It was an ugly thought, and it hung in the cold air like the smoke from their breath. Some of the men looked away because they did not want to be the ones caught agreeing with it. But others nodded harder, their jaws set and their eyes narrow.
And someone suggested that maybe they should ride out there armed and give Tanner a choice. Send the Apache back into the snow or face the consequences. But before anyone could fetch a horse or a rifle, a voice from the back of the group cut through the murmur. It was old Clara Hicks, the widow who lived in the smallest cabin at the edge of town. She had not said 10 words to anyone in public since her husband died in the chalera outbreak of 74.