They rode along the river. Ezra read the country without scolding Thomas for not seeing what he saw. Here ponies had worked hard; there a travois pole had cut a clean line in the mud; farther along, a cook fire had been smothered with wet clay that cracked now like gray bread. Thomas watched, learned, and said little. Learning was also a kind of ownership; he collected what would be useful.
By late afternoon they found ash still faintly warm under a scatter of willow leaves. Ezra stirred it with a stick and lifted a bead, blue and cheap, from the edge of the bank. “Traders’ stuff,” he said. “Women like it for stitching and such.”
Thomas felt nothing at that but a tightening in his jaw. Trinkets meant a woman had stood here. If it was Violet, she had been foolish enough to set foot on the riverbank and leave a trace. If it was not Violet, then the world had other women in it and he remained empty-handed.
They made camp in a wind-scooped hollow and ate bacon thin as paper and coffee that tasted horrible. Ezra asked where Thomas’s people were. Thomas said, “Buried or scattered,” and let the matter lie. He did not talk about his father’s death or his mother’s notions of decency. He did not talk about the lean years or the gamble he’d already won. He certainly did not talk about Violet beyond what mattered.
“She was meant to come,” he said, rolling his blanket. “She didn’t arrive. That is the sum.”
“You saymeantlike a brand,” Ezra murmured.
“It is a brand,” Thomas said. “I paid the iron.”
Ezra studied him across the coals, not friendly, not hostile, like a man sizing up weather. “We’ll start early,” he said. “Dawn will be worth more than talk.”
Thomas slept in pieces, dreamless, which he preferred. Dreams were feeling, and feeling was a tax he did not owe.
?
At first light the river drew them like a line on a map. Birds quarreled in the sky; a heron lifted and skimmed away with a slow, offended flap. Around midmorning the air changed. Ezra slowed, lifted two fingers.
“Smell it?” he asked.
Thomas did: the thin sour of burned powder and, beneath it, the far rot of meat. The ground scuffed, then pitted; the wheel-rut of a light wagon bit deep and tore out; the earth kicked up in sprays where horses had turned hard and stopped harder. The stage coach lay on its side. Buzzards watched sullenly from the ridge.
Thomas walked to the place, not in respect but in inspection. The numbers were simple: a fight had come, men had died, othershad fled, and whoever had owned the field afterward had done the accounting with their hands—anything of value taken.
He studied the churned earth, the blackened ruts where men had died. But he saw no trace of what he sought. No sign of a woman, no mark that spoke of her presence. Ezra crouched, touched the dirt, and shook his head.
“They ambushed the coach here, but they didn’t start here,” the scout said. “If any captives were with them, the trail will tell us farther on.”
So they pressed on, shadowing the river, following the faint paths left by ponies. For hours and days, they rode through low sky and scattered groves, the sun burning off the last of the morning haze, until the land bent again and showed fresher signs.
They came at last to a stretch of higher ground where ashes marked old firesides and the grass lay pressed flat in wide circles. Poles from a tepee still leaned together, weathered and empty, their coverings carried off. Ezra crouched, touching the blackened stones and the trampled earth. “Kiowa camp,” he said. “They pulled out quick, maybe a day or two before soldiers pressed them. Women, children, ponies—all moved on. When the army caught them, it would’ve been on the run from here.” The signs told the story clear: meat cut clean from bones and left behind in haste, a child’s moccasin too small to matter to those who fled, the tracks pointing toward the river bend where pursuit must have finally closed in.
?
Finally, at the water’s edge, they came upon the knee-deep churn where animals had crossed. Here the ground was littered with sign. Thomas stooped over a splintered arrow shaft, the feathersat its end dyed a dull red that had bled into the wet mud. Ezra picked up a fragment of parfleche, the painted rawhide stiff and curling where it had been cut free in haste. “They left in a hurry,” the scout murmured. “Didn’t have time to carry everything.”
The river had swallowed the rest, but these scraps were enough to tell of warriors driving ponies across, pushing women and children ahead. Then half set in mud, the small thing that clenched Thomas’ chest with hard recognition. He pried it up with a thumbnail: a pearl button, not round but oval, the kind you saw on a dress sold to a hopeful girl who told herself she would wear it in a better room.
He turned it in his fingers. It meant nothing and everything. It meant a woman whose clothes had included foolishness had stood where he stood; maybe she had torn loose crossing, maybe some hand had ripped a bodice in haste. He had not asked what color dresses Violet owned. He did not care for colors. He cared for proof.
Ezra came to crouch beside him and looked without touching. “From a traveler,” he said. “Could be hers, could be any. But it’s the right sort of wrong thing to find.”
Thomas put the button in his vest pocket with the letter—paper and shell, two soft things carrying hard meaning—and stood. On the far bank the prints of women and children showed where the ground slumped under many feet going up, then steadied along the top. He marked the direction with his eyes. He did not sayplease God.He said, “Let’s move.”
They hadn’t gone far before the riverbank told a darker tale. Grass was flattened wide as a parade ground, the earth gouged by hooves that had circled and wheeled in frenzy. Here and there the black crust of powder burns marked where rifles had fired close; farther on, a patch of soil lay soaked dark where blood had spilled and dried. Thomas dismounted and found the outline ofa soldier’s cap crushed into the mud, its brim torn away, and beyond it a lance broken clean in two. Ezra crouched near a scatter of spent cartridges and the pale bones of a pony already picked over by birds. “They caught them here,” the scout said, voice low. “Band tried to shield the women while the rest fought. Soldiers pressed hard, but they paid for every yard.” A single feather, muddied and bent, clung to a thornbush at the edge of the trampled ground, stirring when the wind shifted, as if the fight still shivered in the air.
They pressed on from the scarred ground in silence, the river sliding dark beside them. The trail grew clearer now—prints more hurried, deeper, as if both Kiowa and soldiers had driven themselves near to breaking. Twice Ezra halted to study sign: a horse that had gone down and been left, a boot heel dragging briefly before vanishing again.
The land felt tense, holding the echo of men who had only just passed. Thomas kept his eyes to the horizon, the certainty growing in him that the hunters and the hunted were not far ahead.
They were about to cross their horses over the river when suddenly soldiers appeared on the skyline, pale in the glare. They rode down with the look of men tired of chasing what did not want to be caught. The lieutenant in front had dust cut into the corners of his mouth and a way of tightening his jaw that said he heard disobedience even when a man kept quiet.
“This ground is dangerous,” the officer said. “Turn around and go home.”
“We’re following a band that crossed here,” Thomas answered. “I have cause to believe a white woman is with them.”
