But then her chest moved, a shallow, almost imperceptible rise and fall. He stepped closer, his boots scuffing the dirt, and crouched down. She was a patchy. Her dress, once stitched with bone and hide, was torn open across her front. Her skin blistered and baked by the sun.
He could see the bindings at her thighs, thick, discolored, soaked through in places. The wounds were bad, but not yet rotting. He took a step back, his mind racing. This was trouble. To take her in was to invite a world of danger to his doorstep.
A sick Apache woman on his land would be a death sentence if the wrong people found out. The soldiers, the bounty hunters, the local vigilantes, they would not ask questions. They would see only an enemy and they would see him as a traitor. He could leave her. He could turn his back right away and pretend he had seen nothing.
She might last another hour, maybe two. It was the smart thing to do, the safe thing to do. It was the only logical choice. But she was breathing. She was a human being left to die in the dirt.
And Josiah Thorne, the man who had lost everything, the man who had nothing left to live for, found that he could not would not be a man who would leave another soul to suffer alone. He exhaled a long, slow breath that seemed to carry the weight of his decision. He took off his wide-brimmed hat, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and looked around one last time, as if searching for a sign for a reason to turn away. But there was none. There was only the silent indifferent sky and the dying woman at his feet.
He stepped forward, bent down, and slipped his arms under her back and beneath her knees, or where her knees should have been. Her body was light, terrifyingly light, but it was not a dead weight. She flinched when he touched her. A small, involuntary trimmer of a body that had known too much pain. Her eyes, which had been half closed, opened a little wider.
She saw him. Her gaze didn't beg. Didn't threaten, didn't plead. It simply held his a look of profound, weary resignation, the look of someone waiting for a final judgment. He didn't say anything.
He couldn't. Words were a currency he no longer traded in. He simply stood, adjusted her weight against his chest, and turned back toward his horse. She groaned once, the sound of horse, broken thing, but he didn't pause. He had made his choice.
Now he would see it through. The ride back to the ranch was a slow, arduous journey. The wind had picked up, swirling dust across the parched land. He held her in one arm, her head lolling against his chest, her breath a faint, shallow whisper against his skin. His one room cabin patched with iron sheeting, and his leaning barn looked like what they were, the last outpost of a broken man.