They could be scouts for something larger. They could be exactly what they looked like. They could be desperate enough to turn dangerous. The second his guard dropped, they could die of thirst 40 ft from his well if he didn't. Because that last one kept surfacing no matter how many times he tried to push it back down.
40 feet. That was all that stood between these people and water enough to keep walking. 40 ft and a rifle and every story Walter Pruitt had ever told him standing between them like a wall he'd half built himself out of other men's fear. You're a long way from anywhere. Caleb said, testing, watching for the flinch, the tell.
Whatever might reveal a lie underneath the words. There was none. Our village, the old man said, and something in his voice cracked slightly, just slight. That kind of crack that comes from carrying something too heavy for too long. Gone days now we walk since.
Gone how? The old man's eyes held his steady even through the exhaustion. Fighting, he said. Simple, final, like the word contained more than he had strength left to explain. Caleb studied him a long moment.
Studied all of them. The old woman whose hand had never left her husband's shoulder. The young woman with her fierce protective grip on the wounded man beside her. The wounded man himself upright through sheer will, eyes fixed somewhere past Caleb toward the well. He could probably smell before he could see it.
None of them looked like the stories. They looked like people who had been walking through hell and hadn't eaten in longer than any of them would likely admit it. Caleb lowered the rifle. Not all the way. Not yet.
Some habits took longer to unlearn than a single afternoon allowed, but lowered enough that the message was clear. You've got a name, he asked. Toya? The old man said, he placed a hand briefly against his chest. This is Cella.
The old woman inclined her head slightly. Two, the younger woman watching Caleb with an expression that gave away nothing and noticed everything. And Chody, the wounded man who nodded once, jaw tight against whatever pain he was carrying in that arm. My sister's son, Caleb Whitfield, he said, and felt strange saying it. Felt the whole moment tilt sideways into something he hadn't prepared for because you didn't exchange names with an enemy, which meant somewhere in the last minute, without quite deciding to, he'd stop treating them like one.
He set the rifle against the porch rail, walked toward the well without another word because words felt insufficient to whatever was happening, and his hands wanted something useful to do. The rope creaked. The bucket dropped. He hauled it up. Cool water slloshing over the rim and filled the tin cups he kept hanging by the well handle for exactly this kind of ordinary use cattle work.
Hot afternoons. Nothing that had ever mattered the way this moment mattered. He carried the cups out to them himself. They drank carefully. That was the thing that struck him hardest, watching it happen.
Not desperately the way he might have expected from people who'd clearly gone without for days. carefully. Slowly, Cella drank only a little before passing her cup back toward Toya, murmuring something low. Itua did the same with Chody, tilting the cup gently toward his mouth when his own hand shook too much to manage it steady. Caleb reefed the cups without being asked and refilled them again. Somewhere around the third trip to the well, he stopped thinking of it as a decision he was making and started thinking of it as simply the thing that needed doing next.
He watched Chody's hand tremble around the cup, watched the arm he held so carefully against his ribs. There was blood there, dried dark against torn fabric, old enough that it had stopped being an emergency and become instead a slow, grinding kind of danger, the kind that killed men days later quietly from infection instead of the wound itself. That needs looking at, Caleb said. Chody's eyes flicked to him, wary. I've set worse, Caleb during the war.
I'm not much of a doctor, but I know enough not to make it worse. Toya said something to Chody in their own language. Low in whatever it was seemed to settle something because the young man's shoulders eased half an inch and he nodded. "All right," Caleb said. "Come sit.
He brought out clean cloth. Whiskey, though not much enough to clean a wound, not enough to be mistaken for hospitality he couldn't yet afford to offer freely. He worked carefully the way he'd worked on a dozen wounded men in a war that felt both a 100 years ago and close enough to touch. Chody didn't flinch when the whiskey hit the wound. Didn't make a sound at all, actually, which told Caleb something about the kind of man, the kind of boy really, because up close, he couldn't have been more than 20 he was dealing with.
The bullet had gone clean through the meat of the shoulder. Missed the bone from what Caleb could tell without proper instruments. lucky in the narrow way any bullet wound could be called lucky. Caleb was reaching for the cloth to bind it when something made him stop, made him look closer. The wound itself, the way the flesh had torn on entry, the particular pattern of it, he'd seen that pattern before. Not often.