By the next morning everyone in the fort knew. There were men there who had lost brothers on the Salmon River, and a woman whose husband had been shot in front of her, and there was no argument Nils could have made to them about the difference between one band and another, between the young men who had done the killing and an old man who could not walk to the Clearwater, that they would have been able to hear. He did not try. He kept his mouth shut and carried water and stood his watches on the wall and slept on the ground with Ketti curled against him, and he let them say what they wanted.
What they wanted to say, mostly, was that he had armed the enemy. That a horse was as good as a rifle in this kind of war. That the old man and the woman were probably spies, and the child a decoy, and that Nils's mare was at that moment carrying some warrior to the next ambush.
He did not know they were wrong. That was the worst of it. He believed they were wrong, he believed it in his body, the way he believed in the weight of the old man in his arms and the look on Ipnaxa's face when he came out with the saddle. But he did not know. And some nights, standing on the wall listening to coyotes, he thought about the dead on White Bird Creek and the soldiers lying in the canyon and wondered whether a man had any right to be kind with something that might be carried into another man's death.
In the second week of July word came that General Howard had fought the bands on the Clearwater, at the very village of Looking Glass that Ipnaxa had been walking toward, and that the bands had gone east over the Lolo trail into Montana with the whole of their herds and their families. After that the fear went out of the prairie the way water goes out of a sponge, slowly and then all at once, and the families began to go home.
Nils and Ketti went home on foot. The cabin was standing. Somebody had been through it, probably volunteers, and had taken the rest of the bacon and the coffee and broken the window, but they had not burned it, and the oats he had planted in May were standing green and waist-high in the field. He stood at the edge of the field for a long time with his hands in his pockets. Then he went to Brisbin's store and signed a note for forty dollars against the harvest and bought a worn-out mule named Pastor from a man who was leaving the country, and he went back to work.
That autumn the news came in pieces, the way news always came out there, carried by freighters and soldiers and newspapers six weeks old. The bands had fought at the Big Hole, where soldiers had come into the sleeping camp at dawn and killed women and children in their lodges. They had fought at Camas Meadows and at Canyon Creek. They had crossed the new national park at Yellowstone and turned north toward the country of the Grandmother, the British country, where Sitting Bull had gone. And at the very end of September, in the Bears Paw Mountains, forty miles short of the line, they had been surrounded in the snow and had surrendered, most of them, while some few hundred slipped away north in the night and walked to Canada.
The ones who surrendered were not sent home, as they had been promised. They were sent east, and then south, to Fort Leavenworth and then to the Indian Territory, a hot flat country none of them had ever seen, where they began to die of malaria and grief.
Nils read all of this in the Lewiston Teller by lamplight, with Ketti reading over his shoulder. Neither of them said anything about the mare. They did not have to. Every name on every list was a door that had closed.