The settlement hadn’t changed much in two years.

It had the same flat-roofed adobe houses, the same half-fallen church roof nobody had gotten around to fixing. And the damned salt flats leading to them sure as hell hadn’t changed much, either.

Isaac had ridden them a lot more than he’d wanted to in the last two years. They’d gotten easier to traverse. He might never know them as well as Tabbenanika, but he knew them well enough to get through them in only six hours instead of three days.

Isaac took a deep breath as he rode into the settlement. The last time he was here, a boy herding goat led him here. He thought of that woman whose son had been taken every day since he’d last saw her face.

And he recognized her by the central fire as soon as he rode up. She stood with a shawl pulled tightly around her shoulders despite the warm afternoon, and it was the boy beside Isaac’s horse who broke first, sliding down before Isaac had even brought Chip to a full stop.

“Mamá!” the adolescent boy yelled, slinging his full body into a run.

The woman turned around, her brows lifting all the way to her hairline as sobs broke from her eyes. Her arms flailed and she bolted, crossing the distance between them, half-leaping into the boy’s arms.

Isaac continued riding in, recognizing a few of the faces as they crowded around. Women surrounded the boy and his mother, their hands touching him as if they were questioning if it was really happening.

Through tears, the woman looked up at Isaac over her son’s shoulder and smiled.

It was the kind of smile that gripped his throat and stung his eyes. The kind of smile that held years of grief in it. The crowd parted as an old man with a cane slowly stepped past the woman and her boy and toward Isaac and Chip.

The man held a coin up. The same amount he’d given that very man the first time he’d come through.

“I don’t want it,” Isaac said. He looked past the man, at the boy and his mother. “I just wanted to bring him home.”

“Come eat,” the man said. “Please.”

And so he did, and when it was time to leave, the boy walked up to him, tears still fresh in his eyes, and held his hand out. “I never thought I’d see this day,” he said. “And I sure never thought it’d be a Cherokee that brought me to it.”

Isaac smiled. “Me either,” he muttered. “Especially not this Cherokee.”

And then without wasting a moment, the woman wrapped her arm around her boy and walked him to the other side of camp.

“I do actually walk like him,” Isaac said, to no one as he watched them walk together in unison, a chuckle feeling free enough to escape him.

With one last nod to the old man who stood at the cookfire, Isaac swung back up onto Chip, and rode on.

He had one more child to get.

Then the list was complete.

***

Isaac rode back in on a Tuesday in late spring. It’d taken two years to collect all of the children and now he had his final one. The homestead that met him at the top of the rise looked almost nothing like the place he’d first ridden into behind Ortiz’s dust two springs before.

He counted it out sometimes, on the long stretches of a ride. Same way he counted fence posts or trees when he was bored. Eleven children had come back over those two years, names pulled one at a time out of the colonel’s old ledgers and now they were finished.

It felt surreal. But it felt right.

Margaret and Tomás had married.

It was a small ceremony at the homestead with Antonia standing up for Margaret and half the county pretending not to notice or care what the neighbors would say about it, a beautiful woman marrying a half-breed and all—which in that part of Kansas, was its own victory.

Her name was Cuellar in the county books now, which was probably a good thing considering the Hollis name didn’t mean a damn anymore.

Tomás hadn’t been south of the Canadian river since they’d ridden north. He didn’t speak of the canyon much anymore, though Isaac caught him some evenings looking south past the fence line with an expression that wasn’t quite longing but something else…

He saw it mostly when Antonia wasn’t there.

When she was, the two of them talked of the canyon and the people that resided there—sometimes she even brought Luis with her. She was a thread weaved into Tomás’s life here in Kansas and back home, and it seemed into Isaac’s life as well.

Oren Hatch hadn’t seen Margaret marry.

He’d died the winter before. Quietly, in a bed Margaret had made up for him in the room that used to be her father’s. The same room, as Isaac understood without ever being told outright, that the colonel himself had slept for years before that last gray morning ended his use of it. The same morning his daughter took his life right from him.

Oren Hatch’s hand had never fully healed, and the cold those last two winters had settled into it worse each year, until it stopped being only the hand and started being something further in, something none of them had a name for and the man had never once complained about it.

He’d gone easy, Margaret said, in his sleep, and she’d been the one to find him in the morning. Isaac had come in from the north cabin for breakfast and hadn’t found any.

Instead, he’d found her at Hatch’s bedside, holding his good hand.

He hadn’t seen her cry. She didn’t in front of anyone. But he’d caught her sitting alone at the piano some nights after, not playing, just sitting, with her hands resting on the closed lid, staring in a daze out at the bunkhouse.

They’d buried him behind the barn, not far from the grave he himself had tended without ever being asked to. Isaac had dug that one too.

Chip neighed happily as soon as Isaac rode him through the front gate, and the mare he’d taken with him ran forward, cutting him off. There was a seventeen-year-old, half-Native boy atop her back. Isaac couldn’t place what tribe. Not that it mattered.

The boy had been taken at eight years old when the colonel’s patrol had burned his village and scattered whatever remained of the people in it who hadn’t been killed that night. Which was mostly just the women and children, a disgusting act from weak men.

They’d pillaged everything they could. Women, children, hides, goods, and food. The women were never recorded. But the children were.

They’d found them all from that village—except this boy. This boy’s name in the old ledger had been recorded wrong. A careless mistake that wasn’t as much a mistake at all but the unwillingness to learn how to spell or say his name properly.

It had taken Isaac months to track him down.

He’d found him finally on a farm in eastern Kansas, doing a grown man’s labor for a family that called him by a white man’s name that wasn’t anywhere close to his own. Had never even bothered to ask him what his real name might be. They didn’t care.

The boy hadn’t said much on the ride back, same as most of them. He’d just watched the country change around them with an attention that told Isaac he was looking for something particular in it, some landmark from a childhood nine years gone, and hadn’t found whatever he was looking for by the time they reached the homestead.

Margaret met them at the gate, same as she always did, and ushered the boy to the kitchen table because it was supper time.

“Great timing,” she’d said, tugging Isaac in by the forearm as the boy slowly came in behind him. She quickly pulled out chairs and set up the places. Antonia wasn’t in, so it was just four places now.

“You can sit here,” she said, pulling out the chair at the far end of the table.

He nodded and sat and Isaac sat next to him as the creak of the floor sounded behind them and a fresh washed Tomás joined them.

“So what village did you come from?” Tomás asked the boy as Margaret served them stew.

“Tahlonteeskee,” the boy said, grabbing a chunk of bread from the center and shoving it into his mouth.

Isaac felt the color drain from his face.

“What did you say?”

The boy looked at him, unsure. He stopped chewing and looked at Isaac warily.

Isaac knew the name of the village. Sequoyah, a man he’d met on his journey southward with his wife and two boys, had talked about that same village and it seemed familiar to Isaac then. And now he knew exactly what it was.

It’d come to him in memories he thought he’d long forgotten until reuniting some of these children with their families. He’d started looking into his mother’s disappearance. He’d started letting himself feel just enough to gather as many answers as he could.

“Did you say Tahlonteeskee?” Isaac asked. It was the name of the same village his mother had come from as a girl.

The boy started chewing again and nodded.

“My mother’s name was Wa-tian-kah,” the boy said, working the words out slow, like a language he hadn’t used enough in nine years to keep entirely fluent.

Isaac sat his spoon down, feeling light headed all of a sudden.

“Isaac?” Margaret asked.

“Say that again,” Isaac said. His own voice came out rougher than he meant it to.

The boy repeated it, uncertain now, glancing between Isaac and Margaret like he’d said something wrong.

Isaac knew that name even more than he knew the village’s.

“My mother was from Tahlonteeskee,” Isaac said, and the words felt strange coming out of his own mouth, like he was translating them from somewhere he hadn’t visited in years. “Her sister… her sister’s name was Watiankah.”

Tomás dropped his spoon, too.

Margaret squealed. “You’re cousins!” she yelled.

By blood, that was true.

And Isaac looked at the boy like he hadn’t looked at anyone in over twenty years. With a warmness and a familiarity that seemed foreign. The closest living relative Isaac had known about, or had reason to believe still existed, since he was twelve years old.

He’d believed he was alone in this world until Tomás and Margaret and Antonia.

But now, through them, he had blood, too.

He sat with that a long time that night, on the porch after the boy had gone to sleep in one of the spare bedrooms. It was bittersweet that the boy was his cousin. Isaac hadn’t thought he had any family left.

But that was because he’d been tracking down answers while journeying to find children.

There wasn’t any family left.

Watiankah and her husband had both been killed a few years back. Isaac knew they had a boy but had been told he’d been killed years before their deaths. He never imagined….

His throat clenched hard as tears fell from the brim of his eyes.

He built a second room onto the cabin that summer.

It wasn’t a large addition and it wasn’t showy. It was nothing more than a single room off the north wall, with a bed and a window and a stove vent shared with the main room. But it took him most of June and July to get it right, working most mornings before the rest of his chores called.

He asked the boy to move in after it was built one summer evening over a cup of coffee out on the front porch of the main house.

The boy had smiled, which Isaac hadn’t expected especially knowing he wasn’t going home after all—knowing he’d never see his mother or father again.

The piano started up inside right after he asked the boy on the porch at the end of that summer day, Margaret working slowly through a hymn she hadn’t touched in months. Isaac stood at the porch rail with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand and didn’t move to go inside.

Antonia’s mare came up the track just as the last color was going out of the sky. She was unannounced, the way she usually arrived, with a string of two pack horses trailing behind her. She reined up at the gate, looked at the two of them standing at the rail and lifted one hand in a wave.

Isaac raised his own hand back.

The piano kept going behind him. He didn’t go down to meet her, or even to help her unload.

She wouldn’t have let him anyway. Last time he’d tried, she’d put her blade to his throat and told him to “back off.”

So now he just sat, waiting for her to come to them. She wasn’t in much of a hurry by the look of it even though the day was losing its light fast. She knew what he knew, and what he’d known for the last two years.

Coffee would be waiting for her inside. And so would their family.

THE END