"Too few, with our best warriors still tending the wounded from the buffalo hunt," Mato admitted. For the first time, Naomi saw real fear in the young warrior's eyes, not for himself, but for the children and elders sheltering in the lodges around them. It was Ohetika, waking at the sound of urgent voices, weak but lucid for the first time in three days, who found the only path through the danger that did not end in blood. "Wake me fully," he rasped. "Help me stand."
"If they see their chief alive and walking, they will know their rumor of a dying, defenseless camp was a lie built to justify a slaughter. They will have to answer for riding against a people who did them no harm." "You can barely sit up," Naomi said, alarmed, even as she moved to support him. "Then you will hold me up," Ohetika said.
There was something in the way he said it, not command but plea and trust both at once, that settled the matter more surely than any argument could have. They walked out to meet the militia together at the edge of camp. Naomi's arm braced beneath Ohetika's, Waikapi and Mato flanking them, with the camp's few able warriors arrayed calm and unhurried behind. No weapons were raised, only presence, only the plain and undeniable fact of a living chief standing upright in the morning light.
The militia's leader, a hard-faced rancher Naomi recognized from Miller's Bend, reined up hard at the sight. He had clearly expected scattered mourners and an easy fight, not a chief on his feet flanked by a settler woman the man plainly recognized. "Mrs. Colby?" he said, disbelieving. "What in God's name are you doing standing with them?"
"Saving a man's life," Naomi said, her voice carrying clear and unshaking across the open ground, "the same as I'd save yours if you came to my door bleeding, Mr. Garrity, and you know it. Because I've done exactly that for your own brother twice. This chief was gored defending a lost child, not planning any raid on you or anyone else. Whoever told you otherwise lied, and you nearly rode a war down on innocent people because of it."
Behind Garrity, a dozen mounted men shifted uneasily in their saddles, rifles still half-raised. The tension in the open ground was thick enough that a single startled horse or a single careless word might have tipped the whole standoff into tragedy. Naomi felt Ohetika's weight lean harder against her arm, his strength failing even as his voice stayed level. She understood that every second they remained standing was costing him dearly.
He was spending that cost without hesitation because the alternative was bloodshed on both sides of a line that never should have been drawn in the first place. "I have delivered half the babies in this county, Garrity," she pressed on, refusing to let the silence tip toward violence. "Yours included, if I recall, 20-some years back. You know my word is good."