A small girl maybe four or 5 years old whose cry had gone thin and greedy with exhaustion and cold and hunger. The child was not crying the way children cry when they want something they know they can have. She was crying the way living things cry when they do not know if they will still be living when the sun comes up. It was the sound of a life that had been pushed past every limit and was running on nothing but the simple refusal to stop existing. Elijah stood on his porch and looked at them.
And they looked back at him with eyes that held no hope and no fear. They were past both of those things. They had walked past hope somewhere in the mountains and left fear behind somewhere else. And what remained was just the bare fact of being alive and the question of whether that fact would continue. They had reached the end of something and they knew it.
And they were waiting to see what kind of man stood on this porch and what kind of choice he would make. One of the men, the oldest of the group, a man whose hair was gray and whose face was creased with more years than Elijah could easily count, took a single step forward through the snow. He moved slow and careful. The way a man moves when he wants to show that he is not a threat to anyone. And he spoke in broken English that came slow and careful, too.
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.