In March, Ketti and her father went down to the draw on a raw gray afternoon with a bucket and a trowel, and she showed him how the frost had heaved two of the ledge stones out of place, and he showed her how to set them back, and they argued about it, and in the end they did it her way, which he suspected was nearer to right.
The camas came up in late April. By the second week of May the draw was so thick with it that, from the rise where the cabin stood, it looked as though the spring had overflowed in the night and filled the whole hollow with water the color of the sky.
Ketti went down every evening that week. She took Ivanhoe with her, and then stopped taking it, and just sat on the ledge above the spring with her knees pulled up, watching the north end of the claim where the land rose toward the Craig Mountain country and the trail to Lapwai.
On the evening of the fourteenth, Nils was in the field with the mule, finishing the last strip of the oat ground before dark, when he saw her stand up on the ledge. She stood very still. Then she put her hand up over her eyes against the low sun.
He stopped the mule and looked where she was looking.
There were riders on the north rise, small and dark against the sky. Three of them, or perhaps four. They were coming at a walk, the way people come who have nothing to hide and a long way still to go. One of them was small enough to be a child. One of them, a little behind the others, sat a tall horse with a long neck, but the light was behind them and they were a long way off, and at that distance there was no way to tell the color of a horse, or whether it was gray.
Ketti did not wait to find out. She was already running up the slope toward the cabin, calling for the colt, and the colt was already running to meet her with his spotted blanket flashing in the last of the sun, and down in the lean-to the mare had lifted her head and was looking north, and her ears were forward.
Nils unhitched the mule and left the plow standing in the furrow. Then he walked down toward the draw, through the blue, to meet whoever was coming.