"Well... yes, him too," the woman said with a frown. "All of these men work for the man who runs the general store, actually. They make his deliveries from the other towns and such."
"He wants your land."
"Everyone wants my land," she said with a bitter laugh. "Life'd be easier if I'd just sell it."
The woman looked around at the land. She looked at the little farm house where she'd been born, and the farm where she'd worked all her life. She looked at the barn where she and her little brother would play before the Lord took him too. She ought to just sell the place. But she couldn't bear the thought of this patch of earth in the hands of that Turner man.
Sentimentality will be my death, she thought.
"You fight for this land," Red Harvest said. "My path is to fight for land." He began to walk away.
The woman blinked. Then she took a few steps after him. "Your path is to fight for land? But this land isn't even yours!"
"Evil men want what other people have. It is my path to stop them. This time, I do it alone," said the native man. "I stop store man."
"You can't just kill him," the woman protested.
"He kill you."
"I... I suppose he would. How could such a man exist?" She didn't like that thought. Rather than ponder it, she nudged the body of the man in front of her with the toe of her boot. His head gave way easily to the pressure, lolling to the side unnaturally.
"Such men always exist," Red Harvest said. "Bogue. Travers. Store man."
"Live for, live by, kill for, kill on. That's what my mom used to say about land."
Red Harvest appeared to be done with her philosophical musings. He stepped over the body and out the door.
Oh lord. The woman's eye flew wide. He's actually going to kill Mr. Cann.
She moved after him, shouldering her quiver of arrows and pausing to remove one from a body as the native man entered her barn.
"How will you do it? Kill Mr. Cann? The whole town could very well turn on you."
"You asked him to stop?"
"Yessir," she said. "He's a bit determined."
"Then I shoot him."
The woman paused, looking at the hot-headed young man.
"And if I hadn't asked him? Would you have stabbed him instead?"
"I ask him."
The woman was smiling to herself as they continued walking towards the town.
"How did you know I needed your help anyways? Surely you haven't been following me all these months." She remembered stories her father used to tell about the "injuns" watching white folk by spying through the eyes of the animals. He loved telling stories about the supernatural and superstitious.
"My family is in the town," Red Harvest said. "I wanted to hunt. The woods took me here."
"How coincidental. And lucky, for me."
"My path."
She studied him. He had a bold profile, full of angular edges and flat tones. But his eyes were sharp and showed how strongly he seemed to feel about things, even if his mouth rarely moved.
He had noticed the important things. He noticed that she needed help with archery, not that she ought to not be doing it in the first place. He noticed that she needed help in that moment, not that she was helpless. He didn't notice her split skirts or lack of husband, but he did notice that she was a land-owner and being hounded by an evil man.
She wondered what people noticed about him. Did they notice the temper behind the serene face? Did they notice the reason behind his killings? Did they notice the man behind the native, as he had noticed the human behind a girl?
