"Your—"
"I said it to him four days ago, when we knew Dorran meant to come for Eli. I said: we need a white man with no stain on him who will tell the truth and cannot be sent away. My father said: where will we find such a man in the middle of the Moon When the Leaves Fall? And I said: I do not know, but Eli says his brother is the most honest fool in the Territory, and his brother rides for Pike, and Pike sends men up the creek to gather strays. Perhaps the creek will bring him." She shrugged, a small economical movement. "Then it snowed, and the creek did."
"You were looking for me."
"My cousins have been watching the creek for three days."
He sat back on his heels. "And if I'd been some other man?"
"Then I would have fed him and sent him home, and thought of something else." She held his gaze. "I am a widow. My husband was killed by the Lakota four summers ago on the Rosebud, and I have lived in my own lodge since then and kept my own horses, and I have a hundred and twelve of them, which makes me richer than you, and richer than most of the men in this camp. Among my people, the lodge belongs to the woman. If a marriage does not suit her, she puts the man's saddle and his things outside the door, and he goes back to his relatives, and that is the end of it. There is no judge and no paper." She lifted her chin very slightly. "So you see, I am not afraid of this. I am offering it. You need not be afraid either. When Eli is safe and the agent is answered, if you want to go, I will set your saddle outside, and you can pick it up and ride away. No one will think less of you. Least of all me."
The fire had burned down to a red bed. Eli's breathing caught, eased, caught again. Wes thought of the Yellowstone, and the brown water closing, and the one line in his mother's hand that he carried against his heart. The one to bring him home or the one to lose him.
"All right," he said. "Yes. I'll do it."
Strikes Twice did not need that translated. He nodded once, gravely, as if a horse trade had been concluded to his satisfaction, and rose, and went out into the snow.
* * *
They were married two days later, in the way of her people, which turned out to involve a great deal more giving of things and a great deal less talking than any wedding Wes had ever attended.