"Mister," he said. "I don't know how to thank you."
Nalté looked down at him. "Don't thank me," he said. "Remember it. The next time one of us comes in off a horse shouting, remember you were wrong about where the danger was. That is better than thanks."
Stroud held his gaze, and nodded, and put his hat back on.
That night, in the long room of the old station, Captain Asa Whitcombe unbuckled his saber and laid it on the table in front of Lieutenant Ames, and told him that from that hour he considered himself in arrest in quarters pending the action of the department, and that Mr. Ames commanded the station. Ames, who had spent the day guarding eleven wagons from nothing and had not slept, looked at the saber as though it might bite him.
"Sir, nobody at Fort Apache is going to—"
"They will if I tell them, and I have." Asa set his revolver beside the saber. "You'll do well, Percival. Listen to Birch. Listen to Stroud. Listen to the scout before you listen to anyone."
Later, when Iona came out of the hospital tent where Callum and Holloway lay on cots six feet apart, not speaking, she saw Klemm standing at Asa's door in the dark. She stopped in the shadow of a wagon. She did not mean to listen. She did not leave either.
"Sir," Klemm said. "They'll call me to tell it. At the trial."
"They will."
"What do you want me to say?"
"What happened, Corporal."
Klemm was silent a long moment. "What happened is I was wrong. Out there at the gate. Before you ever hit me. I said that man cut his own arm for a show." He stopped. "Don't make it right that you hit me."
"No. It doesn't."