Same as always, 2 hours back to the cabin. two hours under a sun that didn't care whose side you were on or whether you'd made the right choice or where the choice you made was about to blow your whole quiet careful life wide open. He kept the canteen's last drops for her lips, kept the horse at a slow, careful walk, so the broken leg wouldn't jostle worse than it already had to. And because the silence out here had a way of pressing in on a man until he had to fill it with something, Wade found himself talking to a woman who couldn't hear him in a voice that sounded strange and rusty in his own ears, unused to carrying words this far in this long. "You're going to make it," he said. "I didn't pull you out from under that rock just to lose you on my horse halfway home.
Hold on now. I've got water at the cabin. Real water. cold, straight out of the ground. Best water in the whole territory, if you want my honest opinion on it. "You hear me?"
She didn't answer, of course. He kept talking anyway. Told her about the well. About the two summers it took to dig it, about the horse, who he'd named Tuesday, for the day the water finally came. Because five years alone does strange things to a man's sense of what counts as a good joke.
He did not tell her about Sarah. doors, even halfopen ones, a man learns to leave shut around strangers. Because somewhere in the last 20 minutes, without meaning to, without wanting to, Wade Callaway had stopped thinking of the woman on his saddle as a Apache or as trouble, or as a complication he flatly did not need in a life he'd worked five hard years to keep simple. He'd started thinking of her as a person he refused, flat out refused to let die, and that thought scared him more than the 200 warriors he didn't yet know were coming. The cabin came into view as the sun dropped low and orange behind the western ridge, painting the whole desert the color of a dying campfire. Wade carried her in.
Later on the cot the only real furniture he owned. The same cot he'd slept alone in every night for five years and got the stove going, water on to boil, herbs down off the shelf. Desert sage for the swelling. Willow bark against the pain. Aloe for the sunburn already blistering across what skin the torn sleeve didn't cover.
He mixed it the way he'd learned. out of necessity, over years of patching up his own wounds with nobody around to call for, applied the paste to the leg, wrapped it snug, laid a wet cloth across her forehead, because the fever was climbing now, climbing fast, the kind of fever that doesn't ask permission before it takes a person somewhere dark. Then he sat and waited, and that's when the real thinking started, the kind he'd spent five years avoiding on purpose, because there was nothing left to do now but sit in a small, dark room with