The settler started moving his foot toward his rifle on the floor. Poker Joe kicked it away. We stood there staring at each other, then the man grinned in a sickly way. “Aw hell, we’ll take her in,” he whined, careful not to take his eyes off Hawk. “She’ll be all right.”

I glanced at Joseph, who was observing that settler in the aloof manner particularly his. The strain showed in his eyes. I loathed to see him humiliated and forced to deal with such scum on my behalf. I writhed inside to think of all the trouble I had caused him since Yellowstone.

I had to end this. I walked toward the couple again, until I stood between the two groups. I looked over my shoulder at Hawk, even though I knew he was the Indian with the least power among the three of them.

I couldn’t read any clues in his expression. Poker Joe was pulling his best poker face. Joseph looked back the way we had come, as if he wanted to be anywhere but where he was. (That was probably true of the whole, long flight from Lapwai, but why quibble now?)

I couldn’t do it, not to save my soul I couldn’t. I turned around. “I can’t. Don’t make me,” I said quietly.

“Then do not,” Hawk said.

Joseph spoke to me. “The way ahead is hard.”

Gratified that he had actually said something to me gave my battered heart a lift. “I don’t mind,” I told him. “I can’t stay where I am not wanted.”

Hawk put away his knife. I thought he looked relieved, but I wasn’t certain. We mounted and rejoined the line of outriders. The woman shouted after me with something that I prefer not to immortalize on paper. A couple of the riders squeezed off some shots into the soddy and I heard glass tinkle. The couple darted inside like rabbits. They slammed the door and drove the bolt home.

We rode in silence, then Hawk looked back, where the soddy was hidden again. As much of a mollycoddle as the settler seemed to be, he must have been brave enough at one time to strike out on his own for Montana Territory.

“How can people live in the ground like that?” Hawk asked no one in particular.

We rode through buffalo grass turning that memorable yellow which signals winter. It doesn’t grow too tall, so if I were you, I’d discount those elegiac passages in settlers’ memoirs where they mention riding through grass that grazed their horse’s belly. Maybe they had short horses, but not that short.