The light was going fast that October evening. The sun was already behind the Dos Cabezas mountains to the west, and the sky was turning that deep bruised purple that comes in the last minutes before dark settles in. Mattis was turning over a gap he'd found in the north fence that morning, trying to work out whether it needed a full post replacement or whether a wire splice would hold the winter through when Copper's ears went suddenly sharp. The gelding stopped without being cued. Mattis held the reins loose and let him stand.
A horse that has spent years on open range reads the country better than most men, and Copper had earned his trust on this point many times over. Then the voice came from across the water. It was low and steady, with something underneath it that was not quite fear but had the shape of a person who was decided to be afraid of nothing more that evening. "Someone is there. I can see you. " Mattis kept his hands open and walked Copper forward a few careful steps, enough to see across the narrow channel.
She was standing on the far bank, half in the shadow of a large cottonwood and she was not what he'd expected though he hadn't expected anything in particular. An Apache woman, young, early 20s at the most, with her hair loose and dark around her shoulders and her arms crossed over herself in the posture of a person who has been cold for some time and has accepted that fact. Her feet were bare on the mud. She wore a light summer robe of undyed buckskin, entirely inadequate for the temperature that was dropping around them even as he looked at her. There was nothing else, no horse, no saddle bags, no blanket roll, just the woman and the cold water between them and the night coming down.
Mattis took the whole of it in about 3 seconds and pulled his canvas coat off without stopping to think about it. I'm going to throw this across. Step back a little or you'll go in the water getting it. She didn't step back. She was watching him the way you watch something you haven't decided about yet, your whole body prepared to move in any direction.
But she caught the coat when it landed and turned her back to put it on, which was the most trust she was prepared to offer a stranger at that particular moment and he understood it and didn't push further. My name is Mattis Reyes. I run the spread on the other side of that ridge. There's a crossing downstream about 200 yards. I know where the crossing is.
He waited. She looked at him a moment longer, that careful unreadable measuring. Then she walked downstream without another word and Mattis rode Copper along his bank to meet her at the crossing. Her name was Sadie. She offered that much during the walk back to the ranch in the same tone she might use to provide a practical coordinate, not an invitation, just the minimum courtesy she'd grant a man who'd given her his coat in the dark.
She was Lipan Apache, a medicine woman traveling east to reach a band camp two days ride out. She had been carrying willow bark tincture, osha root, dried yarrow and prickly pear poultice, medicines her people would need heading into winter, packed in a leather medicine bundle on her paint horse with a wool blanket and a week's worth of dried food. The Quillen gang had taken all of it at that creek crossing two hours before Mattis found her. Four men, hard, practiced, moving with the efficiency of people who have done this kind of thing before and found it profitable. They'd hit three small ranches in the San Simon Valley over the past month, always taking horses and tack and whatever cash they could find, always moving on before the law organized.