X.
The wagon company reached the Salt River at the end of October and took up land along an old canal the Hohokam people had cut there long before anyone thought to call it a territory. By March there were eleven houses, most of them half adobe and half hope, and a ramada of mesquite poles and brush where Iona MacRae taught school in the mornings to fourteen children, including two whose parents had come from Sonora and one whose father ran the new ferry.
The star had gone back to Callum in Tucson in February. She had given it to him on the steps of the courthouse, with the dent at the top point and the brown stain still faintly in the grain at the center, because she had found she could not bring herself to polish it out. He wore it again now, walking with a cane, and wrote her that his leg ached in the cold mornings and that he deserved it for going to look at crates.
On an evening near the end of March, with the light coming down the valley the way it had at Ojo Prieto, all at once and gold, Tobias Stroud came running to the ramada with his slate under his arm.
"There's a rider," he said. "On the ridge. Just sitting there."
Iona put down her chalk. She walked out past the ramada and shaded her eyes. West of the settlement the ground rose in a long, broken ridge, and the sun was sitting on top of it, enormous, and against the sun, small and black and still, there was a man on a horse.
For a moment her heart did what it had done in October. She felt it go cold and fast. Behind her, she heard Asa come out of the Stroud house, where he had been staying the last week of his suspension, a man in a plain brown coat with no brass on it at all, and stop beside her.
"Who is it?" Tobias said. "Is it bad?"
"I don't know," said Iona. "Let's find out before we decide."
The rider started down. He came slowly, the way a man comes when he wants to be seen coming. As he came out of the glare the shape resolved: a brown horse, a man in a buckskin shirt, his black braids down his back, and in front of him on the saddle, held there by his left arm, a small girl in a red calico dress who was waving with both hands at nothing in particular, out of joy.
The left arm was bare to the elbow. Even from that distance Iona could see the scar, a pale knot below the joint, and the way the hand held the child: carefully, completely, with all five fingers closed.
"It's Nalté," she said.
He rode into the settlement at a walk and stopped by the ramada. The girl stared down at the children, and the children stared up at her.