Her lodge stood at the upstream end of the camp, close to the horse corrals, and it was nearly as large as her father's. She held the door flap for him and he ducked inside.
It was warm and orderly. A fire burned in a ring of stones. Painted parfleches stood stacked along the walls, and a tall inner liner of painted hide, decorated with horses and men, ran around the lower half of the lodge. At the back of the lodge, where the place of honor would be, someone had strung a rawhide line between two poles and hung a heavy trade blanket from it, red and black in broad stripes, so that the rear quarter of the lodge was closed off like a room.
Wes heard breathing behind the blanket. Slow, rough, with a catch at the end of each breath that he knew from cow camps and cholera years. The breathing of someone who was hurt.
Rides Far did not go to the blanket at once. She knelt by the fire, added a stick of cottonwood, and looked up at him.
"Before I lift it," she said, "I want you to sit down."
"I'm all right standing."
"No," she said. "You are not. Sit."
He sat. She studied him a moment longer, as if measuring how much he could carry, and then she rose and went to the back of the lodge and drew the blanket aside along its line, the brass rings clicking on the rawhide.
There was a man lying on a bed of robes. He was thin, terribly thin, and his face was turned toward the lodge wall, and his hair, which was long and tied back with a strip of otter fur, was the color of new straw. His chest was bound in clean white cloth, and there was a dark stain beneath the cloth on his left side, high, below the collarbone. One arm lay on top of the robe, and on the inside of the wrist was a small white scar shaped like a fishhook.
Wes knew that scar. He had given it to him. A rusted gate latch, in Callaway County, Missouri, when they were eight and twelve years old, and Wes had dared him to climb the gate and then shut it on his arm by accident, and their mother had sewn it with black thread at the kitchen table while Eli bit down on a wooden spoon and did not cry.
He did not remember standing up. He did not remember crossing the lodge. He was on his knees beside the bed of robes and his hands were on the man's face, turning it toward the firelight, and the face was older and leaner and burned dark by sun and wind, and there was a new scar through one eyebrow, but it was the face he had been looking for along eleven miles of riverbank for nine days, and seeing every night since in the dark behind his eyelids.