She smelled the wood smoke from Eli's chimney from a quarter mile out and walked toward it the way a person walks toward the only light there is. She had not come to beg. She had come to bargain. When Eli opened the door, she gathered what English she had and stated her terms as clearly as she could.
Work. Shelter. An exchange. Then her legs made the decision for her.
Eli set her on the blanket nearest the hearth and went to the kitchen for the kettle.
Sarah had come down the stairs and was crouching near the woman's feet, looking at her with the frank, fearless curiosity that only children and very honest people manage."She's not dying, Papa." Sarah said.
This was meant to be reassuring. I know, Eli said. Though he wasn't certain of it yet. He heated water and mixed it with a little whiskey from the bottle on the shelf.
Not enough to warm her too fast, just enough to start the blood moving. He knelt beside her and lifted her hands one at a time, checking the fingers for the hard white patches that meant real frostbite. They were red and cracked, but not frozen through. Her feet were a worse story.
He pulled off her moccasins and Sarah made a soft sound at the sight of them. Raw, blistered, the skin split at the heels. Go get the spare wool socks, Eli told her. The thick ones.
Sarah went without argument. Sona had not lost consciousness, not exactly. She was somewhere between sleep and waking, her breathing slow and shallow, her face tipped toward the fire. Eli watched her and tried to work out what he was going to do in the morning.
He was not a man who hated. He had grown up in Missouri before the war, where Indian hating was common as mud, but his father had been a quiet man who said once that most of what men hated they hadn't taken the time to understand. That had stayed with Eli, the way things do when they come from someone you respect. Still, he was a rancher alone in the mountains with a daughter, and he knew how his neighbors would read this situation.
He could not say that knowledge didn't sit heavy. Sarah came back with the socks and handed them over without being asked twice. She sat beside the woman and watched Eli ease the socks onto her ruined feet. What's her name?
Sarah asked. Don't know yet. She said words when you opened the door. Did she speak English?
Some. Sarah thought about this for a moment. I think she's brave, she said.
Eli looked at his daughter."Why?" "Because she knocked," Sarah said."If I was that scared and that cold, I don't know if I would have." Eli had no answer for that.