The same kind of fragment he'd found once before in the wreckage of his own burned home on the worst morning of his life. The morning he'd told himself for five straight years running had been an Apache raid, plain and simple. No further questions needed. Wolfrunner watched him a long moment, saying nothing more. But he didn't drop the fragment back into the dirt where he'd found it.
Instead, he tucked it away carefully inside his shirt. The way a man keeps something he intends to think about later, alone in private. And something about the careful, deliberate way he did it told Wade this was not going to be the last he heard of it. Not by a long stretch. He watched Wolfrunner walk back toward the fires the warriors had built a short distance off.
Watched him stop beside an older man gray-haired, moving slow and deliberate the way healers move, like every gesture has already been considered twice before it happens. Wade couldn't hear the words from where he stood. Didn't need to. He watched the older man's face change as Wolfrunner spoke. watched him take the fragment, turn it over in the firelight, the same careful way Wade had turned it over himself not 10 minutes before, watched him go very still. Then the old man looked up, straight across the dark yard, straight at Wade.
Wade didn't look away. Didn't have it in him to pretend, not after everything else this day had already asked of him. The old man said something low to Wolfrunner, something that made the younger man's jaw tighten. Then the two of them turned back to the fire without another glance in Wade's direction. And whatever conversation had just happened, whatever conclusion they'd just drawn, Wade wasn't going to be let in on it.
Not tonight. He went back inside instead. Because there was nothing left to do about it, standing out there in the cold, and because Autumn Sky fever still needed watching, whatever else the night decided to bring. Near the fires, the warriors ate in low, easy conversation, passing dried meat and cornmeal hand to hand the way men do when they've spent a long, tense day together, and are grateful finally to sit still. Somebody laughed at something Wade couldn't hear the joke of.
It was, he thought, watching from his window, a strange thing how ordinary 200 armed strangers could look. Once you stopped being afraid of the number and started noticing the people making it up, a man mending a bowstring, another stretching a sore shoulder. Nothing that looked from this distance any different from a crew of cowhands settling down after a hard drive. He wondered, not for the first time that night, how much of what he thought he knew about the Apache had ever come from anything besides men like Dobs, talking loud and certain behind a trading post counter, about people they'd never once sat down across a fire from. It was not a comfortable thing to wonder.