They talked, those nights. At first it was only about Eli, how the wound looked, whether the fever had broken, what her mother had put in the poultice. Then it was about other things. She asked him about Missouri, and he told her about the farm in Callaway County and the walnut trees and his mother's kitchen, and found that he could say the words my mother without his voice going strange. He asked her about her husband, carefully, and she was quiet a while.
"I do not say his name now," she said at last. "It is not our way, not soon after. He was a good man. He was a Lumpwood, one of the young men who are always trying to be braver than the Foxes. He wanted to strike the enemy first, and he did, and that was the end of it." She looked at the fire. "Afterward I cut my hair and gashed my arms, which is what we do. And then I took his horses and my horses and made them into one herd, and I traded and I bred and I raced them, and now I have a hundred and twelve, and no one says poor Rides Far anymore. They say go ask Rides Far, she will know which mare to buy."
"You've done well."
"I have done what I had to." She glanced across the fire at him. "You have done that too, I think. Eli says after the river you did not go home. He says you worked for Pike as if you were trying to work yourself into the ground."
"Maybe I was."
"Why?"
He did not answer for a long time. The wind pushed at the smoke flap.
"Because I was the one who said we could cross," he said finally. "Garrity wanted to wait. I said no. Eli went in the water because I said so. You don't get to go home after that."
She considered this with the same grave attention she gave to the legs of a horse.
"Eli went in the water because he wanted to," she said. "He has told me about you a hundred times. He says you were the careful one. He says if you said we can cross, then you were certain, and you were not wrong, except about a tree that no one could have seen coming." She drew her robe up around her shoulders. "Among my people, when a man loses a relative, he mourns. He cuts his hair. He gives away his property. And then, after a time, his relatives come and wash his face and comb his hair and give him new clothes, and tell him it is time to come back. They do not let him mourn forever. That would be a kind of selfishness." She lay down and turned her face toward the lodge wall. "It is time for you to come back, Wes Harlan. Your brother is behind that blanket."
He lay awake a long time after that.