Smoke still hung low over the wreckage when Rhett Calder rode into it, and neither one expected the wreckage to change the whole shape of his life. He caught the smell of the ruin before he ever laid eyes on it. Scorched hide, burnt cook, ash, a bitterness on the wind that had no business hanging over an ordinary morning in the New Mexico territory. When he crested the last rise above the wash, the sight below stopped his horse cold. Lodge poles lay collapsed and blackened.
Baskets sat scattered and split across bare trampled ground. Whatever had come through here had come through fast, and it had left behind a silence, with no business being that complete. He sat his gelding a long moment at the rise, taking in the wreckage the careful way a man takes in anything that might still be dangerous before he nudged the horse down the slope toward it. Broken lodge frames, a cook fire long gone coal, supplies scattered as if someone had grabbed only what could be carried at a dead run, and left the rest to burn or rot.
He counted no bodies, which eased one particular fear, and did nothing at all for the dozen others crowding in behind it. Most of whoever had lived here was simply gone, fled, or taken, or scattered into the hills in directions no single rider could hope to guess, and Rhett was on the point of turning his horse back toward the county road to fetch the sheriff, when a flicker of movement stopped him cold near a cluster of boulders at the wash's far edge. He eased down off the gelding slow. The same unhurried way he'd eased toward a spooked colt that hadn't yet decided whether a man's hands meant help or harm. And there she was, pressed back hard against the rock as if she meant to disappear straight into the stone itself.
A young Apache woman, dust caked thick through her dark hair, her dress torn at the hem where brush rather than trail, had clearly done the tearing, one arm clamped tight over a shoulder wound that had gone past simple bleeding into something darker and more dangerous. Her eyes found him and went sharp instantly, dark, furious, frightened all at once. The look of something cornered that meant to make the cornering cost a man dearly if he pushed his luck one inch further than she allowed. She didn't cry out. She didn't beg.