Grief needs somewhere to point itself or it just turns around and eats the man holding it. So he pointed it at an entire people he'd never once sat down and spoken with. And then he rode out into the desert and he didn't come back. There was a detail he never told anybody. Not the sheriff who rode out three days late.
Dust already settled. Nothing left to investigate. Not Dobs at the trading post who liked telling the story better than Wade did anyway. Adding new flourishes every time like it was a fish that kept growing in the retelling. The detail was this.
Bootprints, not moccasin prints. Bootprints, deep set, military heel, crossing the yard twice, once coming, once going before the fire had even fully caught. Wade had seen them himself that first terrible morning, kneeling in the ash, had stared at them a long moment. And then a neighbor rode up, breathless, already saying the word Apache before he'd even gotten off his horse. And grief does a strange thing to a man's eyes.
It goes looking for the story it already expects to find, and it stops looking the second it finds it, whether that story is true or not. Wade had let the bootprints go. Let the whole territory's easy answer close over the wound like a scab. Because the alternative that somebody else, somebody who looked like him, somebody who might still be walking around free as a bird, had done this to Sarah, and that Wade had simply been too broken to ask the right questions at the right time. That alternative was a great deal harder to live inside of.
Hate is simpler when it only has to travel in one direction. So, he didn't think about it. Except on nights like this one, when the wind came up wrong and rattled the tin, and his own harp sounded too loud in his ears, and there was nothing else in the whole dark world to listen to. Wade shook it off, stewed, walked to the door of his cabin, and looked out at the flat gray, nothing of pre-dawn Arizona territory. On another day, same as the last 300 before it, he didn't know yet that it would be the last ordinary morning of his life.
He'd built the cabin himself, every board of it, hauled and cut and fitted with his own two hands over one long, brutal summer. Thick walls against the heat, a tin roof that groaned when it cooled at night like something settling its bones. One narrow window facing east, so he could watch the sun come up without having to step outside first, and let the whole day see him doing it. Beside it stood the well. That well was the only thing in the world.