Wade sat by the cot a while longer, watching the rise and fall of her breathing, settle into something steadier, something safer. That's when Wolfrunner came to the cabin door. He was younger than most of the warriors posted outside. Maybe Wade's own age, maybe a touch less, with a careful, watchful way about him that suggested he missed very little of what happened around him, even when he said nothing at all about it. "You, Wolfrunner," said low.
Come, something to show you," he explained, walking Wade a short way from the cabin, that he'd ridden back out to the canyon that same afternoon, while Wade sat with the fever backtracking Autumn Sky Trail himself, the way any careful tracker would, wanting to see the place with his own eyes, rather than simply trust a white man's account of where and how he'd found her, he held something out now on his open palm, still faintly dusted with the pale sand of That distant canyon floor, a fragment of metal, small, blackened along one edge like it had once passed too close to fire. Found it wedged in the sand, Wolfrunner said, not 10 feet from where the rock had come down. Near the mesquite trunk you broke, prying her loose. Ground does not lie about where a thing has been, even when the men walking over it do. Wade's whole body went cold looking at it.
Colder than the desert night had any right to make him because he recognized that shape. He'd seen one just like it before. five years ago, half buried in cold ash outside what used to be his own front door. The morning he'd knelt in the wreckage of everything he loved and decided without ever really examining the decision exactly who was to blame for it. "What is it?" Wolfrunner asked, watching Wade's face far more carefully than Wade would have liked.
Wade turned the fragment over slowly in his fingers. His hands, he noticed distantly, had started to shake, just slightly, just enough that he hoped the growing darkness might hide it. "Nothing," he said. "Too fast, the word coming out clumsy." Wolfrunner''s eyes narrowed.
"You know this thing? I saw it on your face the moment I showed you. I don't know anything." Wade closed his fist around the metal harder than he meant to just tired. Long two days is all.
But that was a lie. And some part of him, the tired, honest part, the part that had walked out unarmed that very morning and told a grieving chief the plain truth without flinching, knew it was a lie the moment it left his mouth. Knew it the way you know a wound is bleeding before. You even feel the pain of it because he did know this thing. trigger housing off a rifle. A particular make, not common out here, not the sort carried by settlers or trappers or the handful of army regulars who pass through the territory twice a year on their slow, dusty circuits.