In the summer of 1878 there was more fighting, this time to the south, where the Bannocks and some of the Paiutes rose over the destruction of the camas at the Camas Prairie in the south of the territory, a different Camas Prairie, a long way off, where cattle and hogs had been turned loose on the root grounds until there was nothing left to dig. Nils read about it in the Teller and put the paper down and walked out to the draw and looked at the blue that nobody was digging and thought that a country where people would go to war over a meadow was a country he did not understand yet, and that he had better learn it.
In the spring of 1879 Ketti turned eleven. He gave her a pair of real boots from Lewiston, with brass eyelets, and she gave him a pen wiper she had sewn from flannel in the shape of a mule, and they ate an entire dried apple pie between them at supper and were both sick and both said it was worth it.
And in the third week of September, on an afternoon so clear and still that he could hear the threshing crew working the Missourians' wheat four miles off, a rider came out of the north across the stubble with a led horse behind him, and Ketti, who was hanging wash on the line, dropped a sheet in the dirt and put both hands over her mouth.
"Papa," she said, not loudly. "Papa. It's Solvei."
It was Solvei. He knew her from three hundred yards off, by the way she carried her head a little low and to the right, and by the white hind foot flashing in the stubble. She was thinner than he remembered and her winter coat was already coming in rough over her shoulders, and at her side, running in the short-legged way of a foal not yet half a year old, was a colt the color of a dun cow with a blanket of white across his hips spattered all over with dark spots, as though someone had flicked a brush at him.
The rider was on a gray with a dark mane, a tall horse with a long neck, and he rode it the way the old man had ridden, as though the question of where his body ended and the horse began had never come up. He came at a walk. He was not hurrying and he was not hiding. When he was perhaps fifty yards from the yard he stopped, and got down, and walked the rest of the way leading both horses, which was a courtesy Nils did not understand until much later.
He was a man of about thirty, not tall, broad through the shoulders, in a calico shirt and a buckskin vest and wool trousers, with his hair cut short at the neck in the way of the men who had been to the mission school, and a black hat with a flat brim. He wore no paint and carried no rifle that Nils could see. There was a scar along the left side of his jaw, old and white, and another, newer and pinker, running up the back of his right hand into his sleeve.
He stopped at the edge of the yard and looked at Nils, and at Ketti behind him with the dropped sheet still at her feet, and at the cabin, and at the chimney. He looked at the chimney a moment longer than at anything else.