Don’t Hurt Him! I’ll Buy Him, She Said — ‘Call Him ‘Savage’ All You Want… I See A Man Worth Saving

Part 2

Word travels faster than horses in a small town. By the time Eleanor returned from Bradley’s store, conversations stopped when she walked in, and women she’d known for years crossed the street rather than pass her.

Only young Ethan Marsh, the doctor’s son, would meet her eyes. “They’re saying ugly things, Mrs. Hayes,” he warned. “Some of the men are talking about riding out.”

“Let them talk,” she said. But that night she took her husband’s shotgun down from the mantle.

The first test came within the week. Silas Grant, owner of the largest spread in the valley, rode up with two hired hands, Sheriff Coyle trailing behind, plainly uneasy.

“Come to check your welfare,” Grant said, dismounting with a hand near his gun belt. “A woman alone with a savage—”

“His name is Kai. And I’m not alone.” Kai appeared at her shoulder, saying nothing, needing to say nothing.

“This isn’t over,” Grant told her, remounting. “When that savage shows his true nature — and he will — don’t come crying for help.”

Reverend Pruitt began preaching against her from the pulpit that same Sunday, though he was careful never to say her name outright. Mrs. Ashford stopped speaking to her altogether.

In the evenings, over supper, Kai spoke — carefully, a little at a time. “My father was called Strong Elk,” he said once, turning a whittled peg over in his hands. “He believed peace could still be made, even when no one else believed it.”

He showed her, that same night, a small stone arrowhead, pale as bone, worn smooth at the edges, drawn from where he’d kept it stitched inside the lining of his boot since the day Coyle’s deputies first searched him. “My mother shaped this. Only thing I kept.”

“It’s beautiful,” Eleanor said.

“Protection,” he said. “For someone who matters.” He didn’t give it to her yet. He only let her hold it, once, in the lamplight, before tucking it away again.

She found herself waiting for those evenings the way she used to wait for letters from home. He found himself, for the first time in years, sleeping without dreaming of fire.

“You stand for me,” he told her, after Grant had ridden off a second time, cattle scattered from her east pasture out of pure spite. “I stand for you.”

“That’s not a debt,” she said. “That’s just what neighbors do.”

He looked at her a long moment. “Then I am glad to be your neighbor.”