Because that's the thing about a man who spent five years running hard from his own grief somewhere underneath all that running. There's still a person left standing who can't stand the sound of something suffering and just ride on past it. He spurred the horse hard toward the rocks, and some small, still honest part of him whispered, "You don't even know yet what you're riding toward, Wade. You might not like it." He rode toward it anyway.
The heat by midday was already brutal, the kind that made the air itself look wet, shimmering up off the stone in waves that bent the whole horizon out of shape. His canteen was down to its last mouthful. He'd been three days chasing a stream that used to run through this stretch of canyon before the drought swallowed it whole. And he hadn't found it, and he wasn't going to. Then he saw her half buried under a slab of fallen rock, pinned at the leg, a young woman unconscious, her skin bronzed dark by the sun, and now going pale beneath it in a way that meant her body had already started shutting doors it usually kept open.
Apache. That much was clear from the beadwork on what remained of her torn sleeve, from the turquoise at her throat. Her lips were cracked white. Her face, even unconscious, was locked tight in some old private pain. Wade was off the horse before he'd finished thinking about it.
She'd been there a while, since the night before, at least, maybe longer. The desert sun doesn't wait around to be polite about killing somebody. Apache or white or anything else. One more hour, maybe less. There wasn't time to think this through properly.
There wasn't time for the part of him, and there was a part of him, an old, tired, bitter part, the part that still believed what Dobs believed, what the whole territory believed, that whispered, "She's Apache Wade. You know what happened to Sarah? You know what they are." He shoved that voice down so hard it nearly knocked the wind clean out of him because whatever he believed in the dark in the worst hours of the worst nights, this wasn't that. This was a person dying 10 feet in front of him right now.
And a man who still calls himself decent doesn't get to pick and choose who he saves based on the shape of their cheekbones. So he knelt and he got to work. The rock was too heavy to lift by hand. He knew that in about 2 seconds of trying, but there was a dead mesquite trunk a few yards off, thick, dry, sturdy enough to hold weight if he found the right angle. He ran for it, dragged it back through the sand, muscles already burning from the run alone, wedged the end under the slab, found a smaller stone for a fulcrum, and threw every last ounce of his weight down on the far end.