Iona looked over her shoulder at the soldiers standing in the gray light, at Klemm with his ruined nose, at Asa.
"Some of them," she said. "Enough."
She opened the bandage on his thigh. She had braced herself for rot and stink, and there was some, but less than she feared, and the dressing on the wound was not the one Nalté had described. It was a strip of dark blue flannel, army issue, tied with a soldier's knot. Beside Callum's head lay a canteen that was not his. The letters D.H. were scratched into the tin.
"Holloway," Asa said.
"Came last night." Callum's voice was thin. "Late. I thought he'd come to finish it. I had my pistol on him the whole time, for whatever I could have done with it. He never said a word. Knelt down there and changed the dressing and gave me his water and his biscuit. Then he sat out at the mouth of the rocks till nearly morning with his back to me." Callum shut his eyes. "I think he was crying. Or it was the wind. The wind does that here."
Nalté was crouched at the edge of the hollow, studying the sand by the reeds. He touched a track with two fingers.
"He went down," the scout said. "Into the canyon. Not away. Down. Two hours ago, maybe three."
"To warn Tull," Klemm said.
"Maybe." Nalté stood. "Or to tell him something else."
While Iona cleaned the wound and packed it with lint and bound it with fresh linen from her saddlebag, Callum talked. He could not stop himself; he never had been able to.
"The crates," he said. "I got close enough to see the stencil before they shot me. S and Company, Tucson. Wendell Saybrook. He holds the beef contract for the agency and half the forage contract for Fort Apache. Every company of cavalry they send up Cibecue Creek is another twenty thousand dollars through his books. War is the best customer he's ever had." He gripped Iona's wrist. "I need the ledger. I need Tull alive. I need Holloway alive, God help him. A dead man tells no court anything."
"I can't arrest them, Callum," Asa said. "You know the law as well as I do. My men can protect lives. We can defend ourselves and these people if we're fired on. But the moment I put a civilian in irons on my own authority, I've done what Congress forbade last year, and a good lawyer in Tucson will walk Saybrook's man straight out of the jail on it."
"I know." Callum's eyes went to his sister. "That's why Asa gave you the star, isn't it? He didn't know it yet, but that's why."
"Callum—"