Whitfield's statement helps yours alongside it from a man who served directly under him that builds a case nobody in Washington can quietly bury a second time. Wade thought about that. Thought about five years spent hating the wrong people for a wound this man was now offering him an actual chance to close properly, publicly in a way that might keep some other family somewhere from losing everything the same senseless way. I'll give you whatever you need, Wade said. But the water stays with the tribe.
That's not negotiable. Not by you, not by the railroad, not by anybody wearing a uniform who thinks a report closes the matter clean. Hartwell studied him a moment, then unexpectedly extended a hand. I'll see to it personally, he said. Territories owed better than what men like Reed have been getting away with.
Might as well start somewhere. They rode back to camp at dawn. The whole strange party of them, gray talon, riding out to meet them a mile before they even reached the wickiups, relief written plain, across a face that had spent the whole night carved from something closer to stone than flesh. He didn't say much when Autumn Sky slid down from her horse into his arms. Didn't need to some things.
A father says without a single word passing between him and the daughter, he'd nearly lost twice now to two very different kinds of danger. The camp erupted the moment word spread. Not the careful, measured celebration of the naming ceremony, this time, but something raw, more relieved. The particular joy of people who'd braced themselves all night for the worst news imaginable and gotten instead exactly the opposite. Broken Blade clasped Wade's shoulder.
Once hard, wordless, and that single gesture told Wade everything. The man still couldn't quite manage to say out loud. Wolfrunner just grinned, exhausted, triumphant. "Told you," he said. "My people have a word for this, too."
"Still would not pronounce it well. Wouldn't expect me to at this point," Wade said, and found, despite everything the night had cost, that he still had a laugh left in him somewhere. Weeks passed. Hartwell's inquiry moved forward slow but steady, the way real justice tends to, nothing like the quick, clean resolution a man might wish for, but a great deal more than Wade had ever expected to see in his lifetime. Reed's operation was dismantled.
His mercenaries scattered, most of them arrested alongside him, a few turning testimony of their own. Once it became which direction the wind had shifted, the spring stayed with the tribe. Hartwell made certain of that personally, filing paperwork that put the water rights beyond any railroad company's future reach. A small, stubborn act of decency in a territory that hadn't seen much of it lately. Wade spent those weeks the way he'd spent every week since the day he pulled Autumn Sky out from under that rock, working the water channels, mending what needed mending, sitting most evenings by a fire that no longer felt like it belonged to somebody else's celebration.