Tiny and curled against the canyon wall like she'd melted into it. Brown skin. Dark hair matted with dust and sweat and stuck to her face. Lips cracked pale. Eyes glassy with the particular distant look of someone whose body was shutting down one room at a time.
She said something. Not English. Apache. Cole did not speak Apache. Cole spoke English and some Spanish and the working language of cattle, which consisted mostly of whistling and cursing and hoping.
But water, every language had a word for water that sounded like a man drowning, and he heard it in what she said, and he had his canteen. He knelt in the dirt, good knee, the one that still bent without complaint, and held the canteen to her cracked lips. Slow, small sips. He'd seen men drown themselves drinking too fast in this heat, so he waited between each one. No rush, no hurry.
The cattle could wait, she couldn't. When she'd had enough, she sagged against him, and he sat in the bottom of a dry canyon with a stranger's child asleep on his chest and thought, "Well, this is going to be a thing." He carried her on his back because she couldn't walk, and he could, and there wasn't another option, unless you counted leaving her there, which he didn't. 4 miles in the September heat with a child on his back, the sun dropping, the air going from hostile to merely unpleasant. Biscuit walked beside him because he'd untied her, and she'd chosen to stay close, which was her way of saying she approved without making a sound in about it.
The girl slept against his shoulder most of the way. He didn't know where the Apache camp was exactly. He'd heard the Dragoon foothills, maybe 10 miles north, but she'd come from somewhere, and the tracks he found, small, panicked circles before they stopped, said east from the low ridge, so he went west and kept going. And when the first stars appeared, and he was seriously reconsidering his life choices, he smelled wood smoke, campfire, not brush fire, then horses, then the thunder of hooves coming fast. He stopped walking.
There are moments when running is the reasonable choice. When a man looks at his options and picks the one that keeps him breathing, Cole stood still because he was carrying someone's child. And a man who runs while carrying someone's child is not a man worth being. He stood in the last Arizona light and counted the riders coming toward him. One.
Three. Seven. 15. 15 Apache warriors on horseback, full gallop, pulling up short in a storm of dust and hooves. And every single one of them had something sharp or loaded aimed at Cole Hargrove's face.
He did not move. He thought about moving, then thought better of it. The girl on his back, the hole in his boot, the plan to get to Dustfall, none of that survived a wrong move. So, he stood. 15 men.