"And then Klemm said aloud what you'd thought."
"Yes." Asa's voice went low. "That's the truth of it. I'd like to tell you I hit him for putting his finger in your face. I didn't. I hit him because he said out loud what I'd been thinking for three breaths, and I couldn't stand to hear it in another man's mouth. That's not a thing a man gets to punch out of somebody else. It's his to answer for, and mine is mine."
She rode beside him a while. The mare's hooves made small, sure sounds on the stony ground.
"When we were children," she said, "you broke Mr. Abernathy's window with a ball, and you went to his door and told him before he'd even seen it. You were nine. Callum and I hid in the hedge and thought you'd lost your mind."
"He made me sweep his shop for a month."
"You'll be sweeping a good deal longer for this."
"I expect so." Something moved under the beard that might have been a smile. "I'd rather sweep than lie, Iona. I always would."
Further back, Corporal Klemm had ridden up beside Nalté. Iona watched them, two shapes in the moonlight, the big man slumped heavy in his saddle and the scout upright and light in his. For a long while neither spoke. Then Klemm's voice carried back, low and blocked through the broken nose.
"I had a brother. Emil. Rode the mail between Camp Verde and the Tonto Basin. Seventy-three, they found him by the road with his head broke in and the mail sack gone. They said Apaches."
Nalté said nothing for several strides. Then: "I am sorry for your brother."
"Was it your people?"
"Tonto people are not my people. Not the way you mean it. Some of them are my wife's cousins. Some of them would not let me sleep at their fire." The scout turned his head. "I don't know who killed your brother, Corporal. You don't either."
Klemm was quiet so long that Iona thought he would not answer.
"That's the thing, ain't it," he said finally. "Six years I've been sure. And I don't."