Raising it had been its own small proof of everything the two of them had been building toward Brie. Levi's neighbors came out with lumber in their own two hands. Ruth Hendricks, chief among them, and Chief Taji sent a dozen of his own strongest men down from the canyon to set the heavy roof beams and lay the adobe walls thick enough to hold cool through the worst of a desert summer. Aiga's father taught two of Levi's ranch hands how to properly cure the leather they'd be selling off the shelves before the first season was out. Ci walked the finished porch on opening day and ran one weathered hand along a roof beam. some Apache strangers labor had helped set in place.
Her look toward Diani needed no translation at all. The look of a woman who had lived long enough now to see something she had once thought impossible standing solid in front of her. Travelers making their way through southeastern Arizona in the years that followed learned to stop at Harmony Crossing, not only for supplies, but for the plain side of it. Apache families and settler families trading goods and gossip and easy laughter side by side across the same wide porch. Children of both worlds chasing each other through the same dusty yard as though the old line between them had simply never existed at all.
Sihi still brought her yucca cordage to sell there most every season, her hands slower now, but no less sure of themselves. Aiga's own son had grown into as fine a tracker as his father had ever been, and taught what he knew to any curious settler boy who thought to ask him properly and respectfully. Klo, gray through the hair now, and long past his old weariness, could often be found on that same porch of an evening trading old stories with ranchers who'd once crossed the street rather than walk near Levi at all. and not one soul left in the county thought that particular friendship worth remarking on anymore. On a typical market morning at Harmony Crossing, the porch filled with a rhythm, neither settler custom nor Apache custom could have produced entirely on its own. Ranch wives haggled cheerfully over the price of a fine woven basket while their children traded marbles and dares with Apache boys who'd ridden down from the canyon with their father's trade goods.
A cavalry supply wagon might sit parked beside a string of pack horses loaded with hide and cordage. The soldiers and the Apache traders keeping a wary but perfectly workable truce across the yard between them. Diani kept the books for the Apache side of the trade herself, a skill she'd taught herself out of stubborn necessity in the post's first hard year, and more than one settler customer learned quickly enough that she drove a harder, fairer bargain than Levi ever managed on his own. Levi, for his part, had picked up enough of Diani's language by then to greet Apache customers properly in their own tongue. clumsy but sincere, and the effort earned him more goodwill across that porch than any amount of settler charm could have managed by itself. A pair of travelers resting their horses in the shade of the porch one warm afternoon, wondered aloud to Levi.