Force of habit. A man alone learns to trust rituals more than memory because memory has a way of softening at the edges when there's no one else around to sharpen it against. He was checking the west fence line when he heard the horse coming. Not urgent, not fast, just a horse walking with a man who wasn't in any particular hurry, which in this country usually meant one of two things. Either trouble hadn't found him, or the man riding didn't think it counted as trouble.
Walter Pruitt came around the ridge with his hat pulled low and his mustache. Doing that thing it did when he was about to say something he considered important. Whitfield. Walter. Fence holding.
Fence is fine. Walter nodded like that settled something though it hadn't been in question. He sat his horse a moment. Looked out at the same mountains Caleb had been looking at all morning. Then got to it the way Walter always eventually got to it.
You hear about Miller's place? No. Lost six head. Middle of the night. Gone.
Wolves. Wolves don't cut fence. Caleb. that landed the way it was meant to land. Caleb kept working, kept his hands on the wire because sometimes the only way to hear something all the way through was to keep your hands busy while you did it. Apache, Walter said, like the word itself was evidence like saying it proved something.
You see them didn't have to. Then how do you know? Because who else is it going to be? Walter's voice had an edge now. Not at Caleb. at the world, maybe at the fear he'd been carrying around like a second horse he couldn't put down.
Everybody in town saying the same thing. Bands moving through since the fighting started up again near the river. Desperate people do desperate things, Caleb. You know that better than most. I know hungry people do hungry things, Caleb said.
Doesn't make them thieves. Doesn't make them not thieves either. Silence sat between them for a moment. comfortable in the way old arguments are comfortable because you both know the shape of them by now and don't need to raise your voice to fill it. Walter dismounted after a while, leaned against the fence post, watching Caleb work the way he'd watched him work a 100 times before, ever since they'd both staked their claims out here within a year of each other. Two strangers becoming something like friends out of nothing but proximity and stubbornness.
You remember the Hendersons, Walter said. Of course, I remember the Hendersons. Whole family gone in one night four years back. You remember how that started too? Somebody being neighborly.
Somebody deciding a stranger passing through deserved the benefit of the doubt. That was a different situation, Walter. Was it? Yes. How do you figure?
Caleb straightened up from the wire, wiped his brow with the back of his wrist. Because the men who did that to the Hendersons were white outlaws wearing borrowed blankets trying to make it look like something it wasn't. You know that as well as I do. Sheriff proved it eventually. Walter's jaw tightened.
Proved it after the fact. Doesn't change what it felt like beforehand. Doesn't change what folks believed for two full months while it was happening. No, Caleb admitted it doesn't. That's my point.
Your point is that fear doesn't needed to be right to feel true. My point, Walter said, is that you can't always just wait around to find out which kind of stranger you're dealing with before you decide how careful to be. Some men don't get a second chance to learn that lesson. Caleb considered that there was truth in it, buried somewhere under the fear. Walter carried around like a second horse.
He just wasn't sure it was the whole truth. Rarely was with fear. It borrowed just enough fact to make itself sound reasonable and left out everything that might complicate the borrowing. You're too soft for this country, Walter said finally, not unkindly. Always have been.
War should have fixed that. War fixes plenty of things, Caleb said. Softness isn't usually one of the casualties. Walter almost smiled at that almost. If they come around your place, he said, gathering his reins, you run them off quick before it turns into something.
That's the only way this territory stays livable. You wait too long to decide what a stranger is. And sometimes the deciding gets done for you. Understand? I hear you, Walter.
That's not the same as agreeing with me. No, Caleb said it isn't. Walter rode off shaking his head the way he always did after these conversations, like Caleb was a puzzle he'd given up solving years ago, but still couldn't stop looking at. Caleb watched him go and went back to the fence because the wire didn't care about any of it. The wire just needed fixing, and fixing was simple, and simple was something he could still manage on a morning like this one.
He'd heard it all before, not just from Walter. From half the men in Dry Wells, from the saloon talk that drifted out the door when it swung open, from women at the mercantile lowering their voices like the walls themselves might report back to somebody dangerous. Stories about raids, stolen horses. A rancher two counties over found dead, though nobody agreed on how, and everybody agreed on who to blame before the facts had even finished arriving. Caleb had learned a long time ago that fear traveled faster than truth always had, probably always would, because he'd seen it during the war, too.
He didn't talk about the war. Not with Walter, not with anyone in town. It sat in him the way a scar sits under a shirt, always there, never mentioned, only felt on the cold mornings when the old wounds ached for no particular reason. He'd scouted for the Union, 3 years of it. Learned to read tracks, the way some men read scripture carefully, and with the understanding that a wrong interpretation could get somebody killed.