The old man stopped approximately fifty feet from Corvin.
They stared at one another.
Then the warrior pointed toward the well.
Corvin glanced at it.
“What about it?”
The old man said nothing.
Instead he raised one arm.
Along the eastern ridge, mounted men moved apart.
A passage opened.
Someone began walking through them.
Corvin recognized her immediately.
The woman.
She looked entirely different from the exhausted traveler who had staggered against his fence.
Her wound had been bandaged. Her back was straight. Her dark hair had been braided away from her face.
Hundreds of men watched her pass.
None spoke.
None blocked her.
She reached the older warrior.
Then both of them looked at Corvin.
The old man finally spoke.
His English was deliberate.
“You gave my daughter water.”
Corvin’s stomach tightened.
So that was it.
“I did.”
“You knew who she was?”
“No.”
“You knew her people?”
“Apache.”
“Nothing more?”
“No.”
“You asked payment?”
“No.”
“Food?”
Corvin frowned.
“I offered.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed.
“You asked where she was going.”
Corvin glanced at the woman.
“One question. Then I minded my own business.”
Something almost resembling amusement touched the old man’s face.
Then it disappeared.
He looked toward the well again.
“Your father built that.”
Corvin froze.
“What?”
The woman finally spoke.
“Your father built the well.”
Corvin looked from her to the old man.
“You knew my father?”
The old man’s expression became unreadable.
“I knew Elias Torne.”
Corvin felt the morning heat suddenly vanish from his skin.
His father had been dead for thirty-two years.
Corvin remembered only fragments of him.
Large hands.
A leather vest.
A rough laugh.
A voice telling him never to point a gun at anything he wasn’t prepared to destroy.
And one sentence repeated enough times to survive every other fading childhood memory:
A living man still has choices. A dead man has none.
Corvin stepped forward.
“How did you know him?”
The old man’s eyes settled on Corvin’s face.
“Better than you did.”
The words struck harder than an insult.
“My father was killed when I was six.”
“I know.”
“Apache killed him.”
The silence that followed seemed to spread across the valley.
The woman lowered her eyes.
The old man did not.
“No.”
Corvin stared.
“What did you say?”
“Apache did not kill Elias Torne.”
“My aunt saw the wagon.”
“She saw what men wanted her to see.”
Corvin’s hand curled into a fist.
“I was there.”
The old man’s expression changed.
Not anger.
Pain.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “You were.”
Something cold moved through Corvin.
The riders on the ridges remained motionless.
Suddenly he understood something horrifying.
They were not surrounding the ranch.
They were surrounding a conversation.
“What do you want?” Corvin asked.
The woman answered.
“Truth.”
Corvin laughed once, without humor.
“Three hundred men for truth?”
“No.”
She looked toward the southern horizon.
“They are here because the men who lied to you are coming.”
Her name, she told him, was Kessa.
Whether that was the name she had been born with or merely the name she chose to give Corvin, he did not ask.
