"I don't know," he said. "Ipnaxa said her brother would bring her. But there is a war, Ketti, and in a war things don't come back very often."
His daughter thought about this for a long time. Then she said, "Mama would have given them the horse," and got up and began to get dressed, and that was all the comfort he got and all he needed.
They walked to Mount Idaho that afternoon. It was eleven miles. Nils carried the shotgun and a pack with their blankets and the good china cup that had been Gudny's mother's, and Ketti carried a sack with her rag doll and a jar of Gudny's lingonberry preserves that she refused to leave behind. They reached the town at dusk, with the stone walls of the new fort going up on the hill above Main Street and wagons crowded into every lot, and men with rifles standing on every corner looking out at the prairie as though it might get up and come at them.
The first man who asked him where his horse was, was Wardell Brisbin, who kept the store and who had sold Nils every sack of seed oats he had ever planted.
"Gave her away," Nils said.
Brisbin laughed, because he thought it was a joke, and then he looked at Nils's face and stopped laughing.
"To who?"
Nils told him. He could have lied. He could have said the mare was stolen, or had broken her leg, or had run off when the shooting started. A great many horses were being lost that week in a great many ways, and nobody would have looked twice. But Ketti was standing next to him with her jar of preserves, and he had promised himself the truth.