August stood tethered nearby, dozing on his feet. The cattle settled and were quiet, and Boon sat in the dark and thought about the fact that he was doing a very large amount of unpaid work for people he had never met, on the entirely reasonable chance that they would be glad to have their cattle back, and the entirely uncertain chance that glad would be all they were. He had heard things about the Apache territory he was riding toward. Most of what he had heard he had learned to discount as the kind of thing men say about other men when they are afraid of them. Boon had lived long enough in enough different places to know that fear when it doesn't have anywhere useful to go tends to turn into stories.
And stories tend to get bigger with every telling until the original fact at the center of them is buried under so many layers of embellishment that it might as well not be there. He had met Apache men before, not many, and always at the kind of cautious distance that the times demanded. And what he had found was what he generally found when he met any man at any distance. Someone who was watching him the same way he was watching them, with the same weariness and the same willingness to take a step back if things went wrong. He was not afraid of what he was riding toward.
He was, as was his nature, simply alert. He reached the outer edge of what he recognized as deliberately tended land. On the second afternoon, the land changed the way tended land always changes. Slightly greener, slightly more orderly. The grass grazed in patterns that spoke of managed movement rather than random wandering.
He pushed the herd through the late sun and over a long ridge and down into a shallow valley that opened up below him in the golden light of late afternoon, and what he saw there made him pull August up short and sit for a moment, taking it in. The camp was larger than he'd expected, not a temporary settlement, something that had been in this valley for some time, organized in a way that spoke of long occupation and careful thought about how to use the land. There were horses in a rope corral near the eastern slope, good horses, and people moving through the space below, with the unhurried purposefulness of people engaged in the ordinary work of living. And on the near edge of the camp, several men had already seen him. They had stopped what they were doing and were watching him come down the ridge with 200 cattle behind him.
And the watching had a quality to it that Boon recognized and respected, completely attentive, completely still, giving nothing away. He raised one hand as he came down the slope. He kept the other hand visible on the reins. He let August pick his own way down the rocky ground and came to a stop about 40 ft from the first men he reached. A group of four who had positioned themselves between him and the camp in a way that was not aggressive, but was not casual either.
It was the positioning of men who had learned through experience to be thoughtful about who came toward their people and from which direction. Boon looked at them. One of the men in the center was older, with gray threading through his hair, and a stillness about him that Boon had seen in men who commanded things. Not the loud kind of command, but the kind that comes from being the person in a group, who has thought the most carefully, and spoken the least, and been right often enough, that everyone around him has simply stopped questioning it. Boon looked at this man and the man looked back at him with eyes that were dark and extremely direct.