an injured stranger and his own thoughts, and his own thoughts had never once, not in five long years, been good company. He thought about Sarah's shawl on the fence post. He thought about the fragment of a story he'd built his whole life around since a story about who took her from him. A story he had never once questioned.
Not really, not honestly, because questioning it would have meant sitting with a grief that had no direction left to point. And now there was an Apache woman fighting a fever on his own cot, and some traitor part of his chest had already decided without asking his permission that he cared whether she lived. Somewhere past midnight, her eyes opened. Just barely, glassy, fever bright, unfocused, the pupils too wide. "Where?" she managed.
One word. Her voice like dry sands out shifting. "You're safe," Wade said, keeping his own voice low. And even the way you talked down a spooked animal. Rock had you pinned out past the canyon mouth.
I got you out. You're at my place now. Her eyes found his face in the low lamplight. studied him, even half conscious, with something sharp cutting through all that fever glaze. "White man," she said. Not a question, a verdict.
"Name's Wade." "Didn't ask your name." Wade almost laughed. Would have if the whole moment weren't so strange, so far outside anything, resembling his ordinary life. "No, guess you didn't."
Her eyes slid shut again before he could say anything more. But something in his chest had shifted just slightly at that one flash of sharpness cutting through all that pain. Whoever this woman was, she wasn't the kind who went down easy. Not for a rock, not for a fever. Probably not for much of anything.
He found himself sitting there in the dark, oddly glad of that. By morning, the fever had eased some, though she was still deep under, breathing steady, but slow. Wade hadn't slept, not really, just dozed upright in the one chair he owned, jerking awake at every small sound she made, every shift of her body against the blanket. It was the light that woke him fully. Wrong light, reddish, low, rising off the eastern horizon in a shape no honest sunrise ever made.
Dust, a lot of it. He was at the window before he'd finished the thought, and what he saw there stopped his heart cold, dead in his chest. riders. Not two or three, not a dozen. Hundreds. His mouth went dry faster than the desert outside ever could have managed on its own.
They're looking for her. Of course they are, Wade. Of course they are. What in God's name did you think was going to happen? You pull a chief's daughter because that's what those markings mean.