Learned that the men who screamed the loudest about the enemy were usually the ones who'd spent the least time actually looking one in the eye. He'd looked plenty of men in the eye during those years. Some of them had been exactly what the stories said. Cruel, dangerous, worth every bit of the fear that followed them. And some of them had just been scared boys a long way from home, doing what scared boys do when somebody hands them a rifle and tells them.
The world is simple. He'd never forgotten the difference, which was maybe why he couldn't make himself hate a people he'd never actually met. Not because he was naive. Walter was wrong about that part. because he'd learned the hard way in places he still didn't talk about that the stories men told each other around fires were rarely the same as the truth standing in front of them. There was one memory in particular.
He didn't take it out often. Didn't like the taste it left, but it surface sometimes. Uninvited a supply column ambushed outside a town whose name he'd long since let go of. And afterward the argument among his own men about what to do with the prisoners they'd taken. Some wanted blood.
Simple as that. an eye for an eye and no patience left for anything more complicated. One man hadn't agreed. A young lieutenant, calm in a way that made the shouting around him look foolish by comparison, who'd stood between the prisoners and the men who wanted them dead and said, "Quiet, steady. That killing men who'd already surrendered wasn't soldiering. It was just murder wearing a uniform.
Caleb had believed him, still did all these years later. But he also remembered the other men in that column, the ones who'd sneered at the lieutenant's mercy, who'd gone on afterward to build reputations for themselves that had nothing to do with mercy. At all men who collected certain kinds of weapons the way other men collected watches or good boots, prizing the ones that did the most damage, that announced themselves the loudest in a wound. He'd known two or three men like that during the war. Had steered clear of all of them. the way you steer clear of anything you recognize as rot before it spreads.
He hadn't thought about any of that in years. Didn't know yet why it had risen up in him again this particular morning unbidden while he stood mending a fence under an ordinary Arizona sky. So he kept his opinions to himself mostly and let the fence mending speak for him instead. He'd been in Dry Wells 3 days back for supplies, and the memory of it sat with him still, an aftertaste he couldn't quite rinse away. The mercantile had been full of the same talk.
Walter carried out to the ranch on horseback talk that traveled faster than truth, the way it always did in a town this small, this frightened, this far from anything resembling real law. A rancher's wife had lowered her voice at the counter, though not low enough, and said something about a war party scene near the river crossing. Nobody had actually seen it. Everybody repeated it anyway, each retelling a little more certain than the last, until a rumor with no witness at all had hardened into something the whole town treated as fact. Caleb had said nothing, paid for his flour, left outside, he'd run into the sheriff, a decent enough man named Boon, tired around the eyes in the particular way of someone who'd taken on more territory than any one badge could reasonably cover.
Quiet trip, I hope, Boon had said. Mostly keep it that way. Things are stirred up right now more than usual. Things are always stirred up around here, Boon. Boon had almost smiled at that.
Fair point, then softer, glancing back toward the mercantile where the voices still carried through the open door. Folks are scared, Caleb. Scared people don't always reason straight. You understand that better than most, I'd think, given where you've been. I understand it, Caleb had said.
Doesn't mean I like watching it happen twice. He'd written home with that conversation sitting heavy in him. the whole long way back. Past ranches whose owners waved and called out friendly enough, and past others whose owners watched him pass with the particular weariness of men who decided somewhere along the line that weariness itself was a kind of virtue. He hadn't agreed with them then, didn't agree with them now, standing at his fence line, with Walter's warning still ringing faint in his ears. The afternoon came in hot, hotter than usual for spring, the kind of heat that made the horizon shimmer and turn liquid.
So the distant things looked like they were standing in water that wasn't there. Caleb had finished the west fence and moved on to the corral gate, which had been hanging crooked since a storm two weeks back. He liked this kind of work. Simple physical, the kind of problem that had an actual solution, unlike most of the problems a man his age carried around. He had the hinge half off when his horse tied nearby, cropping at what grass there was lifted its head sharp, ears forward.
A snort that meant something. Though Caleb couldn't have said what yet, he straightened up, wiped his hands on his trousers, looked west. At first, there was nothing but heat and distance. The kind of nothing the desert specialized in so total it made a man doubt his own eyes. Then shapes small, dark against the shimmer, moving slow, travelers, he thought.
First, just travelers. Except something in the way they moved wasn't right. Too slow, too uneven. the gate of people who had been walking a long time and had stopped believing the walking would end. He watched them a while longer and felt his chest tighten in that old familiar way. The scouts instinct still alive in him after all these years of pretending it had gone quiet.