He stood up and turned his back to her, a deliberate show of non-aggression. He walked to his horse, rummaged in his bedroll, and came back with a strip of jerky in an old wool blanket. He set them down near her, well out of his own reach. He waited. He sat on a rock 20 feet away and watched the sun creep toward the western mesas.
It was a long time before she moved. First, she ate the jerky, tearing at it like a starved wolf. Then, slowly, painfully, she pulled herself to her feet, using the broken wagon wheel for support. She was small, thin as a willow switch, but she stood straight. She looked at him, then at the vast, empty desert around them.
There was nowhere to go. Daniel stood. "You come with me, you'll be safe. You stay here, you'll be dead by morning. Coyotes or the cold."
He mounted Sully. He waited, the buckskin shifting under him. He knew he should ride on. Taking her in was a fool's errand. It was borrowing a fight with every settler, every soldier, and the territory government itself.
He was a man who wanted only to be left alone, to nurse the wound that had never healed. He looked at her again at the high cheekbones and the dark almond shaped eyes. And he was not in the arroyo anymore. He was 5 years gone in a small cabin near TA watching his wife. Elara, her hand gripping his, her face pale with sweat.
She had been mixed blood. Comanche and Irish, a woman who understood both the prairie and the parlor. He had loved her with a force that terrified him. He had lost her in that cabin, lost her and the child she was birthing, their daughter, who had taken one breath and then fallen silent. The Apache girl in the dirt had eyes.
Not the color, but the same look of a soul caught between two worlds belonging to neither. He was not a hero. He was not a good man. Not anymore. He was just a man haunted.
He could not save, but he could not ride away from her ghost. "Come on," he said, his voice softer. He held out his hand. She watched him for another full minute, then with halting painful steps, her bare feet bleeding on the stones. She walked to him.
She did not take his hand. She just stood beside the horse, waiting. Daniel leaned down, hooked an arm around her waist, and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing. He settled her in front of him on the saddle.
Her back pressed against his chest. She was rigid, a block of ice, trembling so hard he could feel it in his own bones. He wrapped the old blanket around her, tucked it tight, and turned Sully's head toward the mountains. "You're safe," he whispered to the wind, or perhaps to himself. "It's all right."
She did not make a sound the entire ride home. His homestead was high up, nestled in a small valley where the piñon pines gave way to aspen and spruce. It was isolated, a full day's ride from Santa Fe, and that was how he liked it. The cabin was sturdy, built of timber he had cut and hewn himself, with a stone chimney and a deep porch. A small barn and a fenced-in corral stood nearby.
It was a lonely place, a place to forget the world. He slid off the horse and reached up for her. She let him take her, her body pliant and cold. He carried her inside and set her down on the single chair by the cold hearth. The cabin was one room, a cot, a table, two chairs, a dry sink, and shelves of tins and books.