She was a widow. The band would give Wesley both of his asking horses, plus two more fine animals in return for taking her to his ranch and giving her a home there. Wesley did not say anything for a moment. He understood what he was looking at. Not a transaction, a casting out.
Whatever had happened to make this woman unwanted in her own camp, the terms of the offer were not really about the horses. They were about solving a problem the band had and didn't know how else to resolve. He looked at Sonsee. She was already looking at him. Her expression said nothing and everything.
She knew exactly what this moment was. She had already spent some portion of her life being discussed by men in front of her as though she were not there. Wesley said in his slow poor Spanish that he would take the woman. He said it carefully so Nantaje would understand. Not as property, as a person who would have her own place at his ranch, her own roof, her own say.
Nantaje translated. Sonsee gave no reaction. She simply turned and went back toward the dwellings. She came back 10 minutes later with a small bundle of her belongings tied in deerskin and a cradleboard strapped to her back, empty from some other time or someone else's child, he couldn't tell. She mounted the spare horse without help and waited.
They rode out of the canyon in silence, the mountains behind them, the long valley ahead. Wesley didn't try to make conversation. He wasn't sure he had the language for it. And he wasn't sure conversation was what either of them needed right then. They rode side by side on the slow road south and the only sounds were the horses and the wind and occasionally a hawk above the pale grass.
Once he looked sideways at her and caught her looking at him. She turned her eyes back to the trail immediately. He did the same. The ranch looked smaller when he got home than it usually did. He showed her the spare room off the kitchen.
It had a window facing east. He'd used it as a storage room since his father died, and it still smelled of old leather and axle grease. But the bed was solid and the roof above it was sound. He left the room and let her close the door. He made coffee and sat at the table and stared at nothing for a while.