Wade didn't catch a single word of it. He caught the change in Grey Talon's face instead the stone cracking just slightly into something that might on any other man in any other moment have been called relief so raw it looked almost like pain. The chief went inside. Another word. Wade followed, careful, slow, keeping his hands visible the whole way. inside.
Grey Talon, knelt beside the cot, touched his daughter's forehead with two fingers, gentle in a way that seemed almost impossible coming from hands that size, checked the bandages on her leg, with the careful, practiced touch of a man who had clearly done this kind of work before, on other wounded in other years, for other reasons Wade could only guess at. smelled the poultice one long breath through the nose. The way a healer checks a remedy before trusting it. "Autumn Sky," he said, just her name. But the way he said it, like a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying so long, he'd nearly forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight without it. Then he turned back to face Wade.
And in his eyes now was something far more complicated than the fury from before. Gratitude, distrust, confusion. All three of them fighting hard for the same small space behind his eyes. "You saved her life," he said slowly, like the words cost him something to admit. "Yes."
"Why?" One word, but it carried the whole while of every broken treaty, every burned village, every hard-earned reason an Apache chief had learned the difficult way not to trust a white man standing calm and unarmed in his own doorway. Wade thought about that question a good deal longer than the chief probably expected him to, because the honest answer wasn't a simple one, and Wade had never been much good. Even before Sarah, even before any of it, at giving the dishonest kind. "I found a person dying," he said finally.
Didn't ask what tribe she belonged to. Didn't ask what she'd done or who her father was or what it might cost me down the road to help her. I don't kill Apaches, Chief. And truth be told, I don't have much use for the men who do. I live out here alone because I got tired a long time back of people who talk a great deal about honor and don't practice one lick of it in their actual lives.
So when I found her under that rock, I did the only thing a decent man could do. That's the whole of it. Nothing more clever than that. Grey Talon studied him a long moment, unmoving, the way a man studies weather he isn't yet sure he trusts. "You lived alone," he repeated.
"Five years, they say at the trading post., a man does not hide from the whole world unless the world has hurt him first and hurt him badly. Wade's jaw tightened. Something old and raw moved behind his ribs. That another question, or you just talking now to hear yourself? "Both," said Grey Talon.