Klemm had found his kepi. He got to his feet slowly, a big man coming up in stages, and stood with the cap in one hand and the other cupped under his nose. His eyes were watering. Whether from the blow or from something else, Iona could not tell.
"Corporal," Asa said, "go to the steward."
"After the Apache, I suppose," Klemm said thickly.
"After the man who rode in bleeding. Yes."
Klemm looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "Sir," and the single word had a great deal folded inside it, and he walked away toward the hospital tent with his back very straight.
Ephraim Stroud, who was master of the wagon company and Tobias's father, had come up during this, his hat in his hands and his beard full of trail dust. "Captain. What's he mean, not the canyon? We roll at first light. You told us yourself Quemado's the only road with water between here and the river."
"Nobody rolls at first light," Asa said. "Keep your people inside the wall tonight, Mr. Stroud. Double your watch on the stock. I'll explain within the hour."
"Explain now."
"I can't explain what I don't know yet." Asa turned to Iona. She was still holding the star in her fist, so hard the points had bitten into her palm.
"Why give it to me?" she said. "It's evidence. It's—you should keep it."
"It's his," Asa said. "And you're his. And just now I'm not sure of my own hands." He looked down at his right fist, at the split skin across two knuckles, as though it belonged to a stranger. "Hold on to it for me, Iona. I'll ask for it when I've earned it back."
III.
In the hospital tent the light was already going blue. The canvas smelled of heat and carbolic and the yellow soap the steward used on his basins. Nathan Birch, hospital steward of H Troop, was a small man with crooked spectacles and hands that never shook. He cut away the soaked sleeve of the buckskin shirt, looked at what was underneath, and let out a long breath through his teeth.
"Rifle ball," he said. "In here, below the elbow, out the other side. Broke the outer bone clean, I think. Missed the big vessels, or you'd not have made it here." He turned the hand over gently. The palm was torn raw in a line across it. "And this?"