The sun climbed and brought its usual brutal heat along with it, and they rode a good hour in silence before she spoke again. "Wyatt, why do you live out here alone? No family at all? " The question caught him off guard. "Had one? My mother was sold off when I was 7 years old.
My father was gone the year after. Folks called it a weak heart, though I've always figured it for something meaner than that. I grew up hiring myself out on other men's ranches till I'd scrape together enough to buy my own and never answer to anybody again. I'm sorry. It sounded like she meant it clean through.
Now I understand why you bought me. You saw her standing in me. Wyatt didn't answer, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and there wasn't much left to add. My people believe the ones we've lost never truly leave us. She kept her eyes on the trail ahead.
They live on inside us, and they guide us when we let them. Your mother would be proud of the man you grew into. Something loosened behind Wyatt's ribs that had stayed clinched tight for 20-some years. Nobody had ever put a thought like that in front of him before, and all he managed in return was a rough, quiet thanks that seemed to satisfy her fine. "Tell me about your father," Naellili said after a while.
The silence between them grown comfortable rather than heavy. "What kind of man was he before the grief took him? " Quiet, steady, good with horses, better with cattle, never raised his voice much, even when he had cause to. Wyatt turned a memory over slow, like he hadn't looked at it straight in years. After my mother went, something in him just went dim, like a lamp turned low. He kept working the same, kept talking the same, but the light behind it never came back.
That is its own kind of loss, Naellili said quietly. Losing someone while they still stand right in front of you. Never thought of it that way. But you're not wrong. They rode on through country, turning slowly greener, rocky desert, giving way to scattered trees and thin ribbons of creek water, better grazing the further they traveled.
Cresting a low rise, Wyatt reined up hard enough Duke snorted in protest. below them spread across his own home ground sat close to 18 riders. Some had already torn down sections of his fence line. Several carried unlit torches, ready and waiting, and none of it looked anything like a friendly visit. More of them. Naellili's voice had gone flat and grim.
Different men than yesterday. Friends of the ones we turned back most likely. Wyatt bid down a curse. come for you or for me for keeping you where the Grey Owl's daughter rode off with a white man travels faster than we did it seems down below a man on a pale horse rode the length of the broken fence at an unhurried walk like he had all the time in the world and knew it he turned the problem over fast 18 men were too many to fight head-on but doing nothing meant losing the one safe place either of them had left standing got an idea Yeah. He dismounted. Need you to trust it completely.
I trust you. Good, because this part turns dangerous. Quick, he laid the plan out plain and fast. Reckless, maybe outright foolish, but the only card left to play. Naellili listened without a single interruption, and when he finished, her mouth curved into something closer to hungry excitement than fear.