"No," said Yellow Cloud. "I walked half my band. The other half stayed home and thought I was a fool. And I did not come because of what you did on the ridge, not really. That is only the beginning of it." He leaned his head back against the logs. "I came because of what you did after. You let your brother take the blame. That told me something about you. It told me you were a man who could carry a thing for a very long time without putting it down. A man like that, if he ever does put it down, will put it down where it belongs. I thought, either he is a coward, and he will shut the door on us, and we will know. Or he is a man who has been waiting six years for somebody to knock."
Sorley did not answer. He could not.
"You opened the door," Yellow Cloud said. "Before you knew who we were. You opened it for thirty-two people when you had food for one. I watched your face when I said how many. I saw you count. And then the child cried and you stopped counting." He closed his eyes. "That was what I came to see. I did not know it would be the blizzard that showed me. But I am glad it was."
The flute stopped. Somewhere in the room the infant woke and fussed and was hushed. The fire settled.
"I'm not asking you tonight," Yellow Cloud said. "I'm telling you so that you can think. In the morning, if the snow stops, we go on to the lake. My cousin has a camp on the Totagatic. In the moon of the crust on the snow, we go to the sugar bush. Whatever happens in Bayfield, that will happen first. The trees do not wait for agents. If you want to come to the sugar camp, come. If you want to come to Bayfield after, come. If you want to stay in your house where nobody knocks, I will not think worse of you than I already do." He opened one eye. "That is a joke. Makoons says I should say so when I make a joke in English, because nobody can tell."
"I could tell," Sorley said.
"Good," said Yellow Cloud, and slept, sitting up, as easily as a man setting down a pack.
Sorley did not sleep. He sat with his back to his own wall and listened to thirty-two people breathing and thought about Ledyard. Not the dying, which he had never seen and could only imagine, but the laughing. Baapi. The Laugher. He had not