"The reins," the scout said. "I held them with that hand for nine miles. I had only the one hand that was sure to close."
"The surgeon at Fort Apache may want this arm off, if it goes bad."
"Nobody takes it off."
"Son, if it mortifies, it won't be your choice."
"It is my arm." The scout's voice did not rise. "If it goes bad, I will choose then. Not you, not the surgeon, not today."
Iona, standing at the foot of the cot, said, "He's right, Mr. Birch. It's his to say."
Birch looked over his spectacles at her, then at the scout, and shrugged in the way of a man who had lost that argument before and would lose it again. He poured carbolic into the wound. The scout's whole body went rigid, and a sound came out of him through closed teeth, and then he breathed and went still and let Birch work.
Asa stood by the tent flap with his hat in his hand.
"I don't know your name," Iona said, when the worst was over. "I should. I'm ashamed I don't."
"On the muster roll at Fort Apache I am Scout B-14. The soldiers say Jim, or Sergeant's Jim, or what you heard at the gate." He looked at her, and there was something dry at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile. "My name is Nalté. I am Ndé—what you call White Mountain Apache—from the country along Cibecue Creek. I have been a scout for six years. I have a wife who is better than me at almost everything and a daughter who is four and thinks horses were made for her."
"Nalté," Iona said. She said it twice, quietly, to be sure of it.
"Tell it," Asa said from the door. "All of it. From the beginning."
Nalté looked at the canvas overhead and gathered it, the way a man gathers reins.
"Six days ago your brother came to Fort Apache with a paper. Army mules gone from the herd at the Seven Mile, beef cattle gone from the agency contractor, and at every place, Apache sign. Moccasin tracks. Arrows left in a dead steer. The newspapers in Tucson are already writing that the White Mountain people have broken out. Callum did not believe it. He asked for a guide who knew the country, and Sergeant Holloway said, take my man, he's the best I have. So Holloway's detail rode with us. Six soldiers, the sergeant, the marshal, me."