She carried that unresolved weight quietly, the same way Levi carried his, and neither one ever expected the other to carry it alone. The suspicion cut in both directions, and Levi felt the weight of that, too. Klo softened considerably across two full seasons, nonetheless pulled Chief Taji aside more than once with hard questions about what exactly this settler intended by such repeated visits, honest friendship, or something closer to the old pattern of men who took first and sought forgiveness. Never. Chief Taji met each hard question the same patient way every time by pointing to what Levi had actually done across those two seasons rather than what he might someday decide to do instead.
Fair trade honestly kept a hand extended in genuine curiosity rather than false charity. Respect shown plainly to an old tracker's teaching to an elder's patient hands working yucca fiber. to a chief's own authority over his people and his niece. Watch a man across many moons, not his first kind gesture," the chief counseled Klo, and you will know soon enough what he truly is. By the second autumn, even Klo had taken to greeting Levi by name rather than by a weary nod. And that quiet shift, more than anything spoken aloud around either fire, carried its own proof that two careful worlds were slowly learning to trust one another.
Klo tested him plainly, once sitting the two of them down alone by the horse pins and pressing him outright through halting English and Diani translating the rest on what Levi meant to do the day this friendship stopped being convenient. The day drought or hard winter or trouble with the army made an alliance with the Chiricahua Apache a costly thing for a settler rancher to keep. Levi took the question seriously enough to think a long while before he gave it an answer. I mean to keep riding north same as I have been convenient or not because I gave my word and my word doesn't come with conditions attached to it. Klose studied him a long moment more weighing the answer the same unhurried way his people weighed most things worth weighing.
And then he nodded once short and final and never raised the question again. Word of the friendship reached beyond Cottonwood bend in time, and not everyone who heard it reacted the way Otis Puit did. A young doctor, newly arrived in the territory, curious rather than scornful, rode out to the canyon twice that second year to trade what medical knowledge he had for what See and the camp's own healers could teach him about the plants growing wild across country. His medical schooling back east had never once prepared him to understand. A rancher's wife, three, spreads over, hearing the ugly talk.