There would be no riding with the wind out there, no wild dashes for safety and freedom. There would be hard, driving work, with something building and growing around him, and there would be a girl who had held herself still in his arms, looking up at him, waiting for something within him to respond, something he had forgotten was there.
He moved his wounded leg, easing the pad he had made over the wound, and walked his horse away.
Behind him the wind stirred the grass, and the hills that had waited so long in silence had already forgotten their brief moments of blood and battle. The echoes had disappeared into the canyons and lost themselves there, the smell of gunpowder was gone … the grass remained.
The gray horse walked steadily, and the face of the man called Considine lost its strain. Down there on the flat, only a few miles west, an old man and a girl were waiting, as they had said they would wait. Behind him the wind moved down from High Lonesome, but only the wind blew along the trails, south to the border, south to Mexico.