Ethan looked at Tahzay with cold, weary patience. He reached down to his hip, unbuckled his gun belt—his only defense in this wild, unforgiving country—and held it out with both hands, offering the weapon and holster directly to the young Apache.
"Take it," Ethan said flatly. "Keep my gun, keep my pack horse, and keep my cattle back in the box draw. If I betray your people, shoot me in the face and throw my carcass to the coyotes. But if you want to save this canyon from being turned into an open-pit gravel quarry, you let me ride with you to the stage road."
Tahzay stared at the heavy Colt in its worn holster. For several seconds, the only sound was the sigh of the mountain wind through the dwarf pines. Slowly, with a look of grudging respect mingling with his burning pride, Tahzay pushed the weapon back toward Ethan’s chest.
"A man who gives up his teeth before the fight is a fool," Tahzay grunted in Apache. Then, switching to English: "Keep your iron, white man. But if your shadow turns against us... my arrow will find your throat before you can blink."
"Fair enough," Ethan muttered, fastening the leather belt back around his waist. "Let's ride."
The stage station at Rattlesnake Wells was a miserable, sun-scoured waystation planted in the middle of a barren alkali flat, forty miles north of Tucson.
It consisted of a squat, two-room adobe station house with bullet-pocked walls, a sagging pole corral holding six half-starved mules, and an ancient, hand-dug well that produced water tasting heavily of sulfur and iron. It was a bleak outpost run by an old Confederate deserter named Silas Croggins, who sold lukewarm whiskey and greasy mutton to stage passengers willing to risk the overland run through Apache country.
The late afternoon sun was turning the western sky into a bruised mixture of crimson and sulfur-yellow when Ethan and Ayana reached the rim of the dry wash overlooking the station.
Chato and Tahzay had remained two miles back in the broken hills, concealed among the red rocks with the spare mounts. To bring two full-blooded Chiricahua warriors within rifle shot of an overland stage stop was to invite an immediate volley from the station roof. Instead, Ethan had ridden forward alone, with Ayana wrapped in a heavy, grease-stained Mexican serape, her long, braided hair tucked beneath a faded wool sombrero to obscure her features from a distance.
"Stay down in the bed of the wash," Ethan instructed in a hushed voice, checking the load of his Colt under the shadow of his horse’s shoulder. "If shooting starts, don't wait for me. Turn that pony around and ride straight back into the rocks. You understand?"
Ayana looked at him, her dark eyes flashing with quiet defiance. "I do not run while another fights my battle, Ethan Walker. My mother rode with Nana’s warriors when the Mexican soldiers attacked our camp on the Gila. I know the sound of lead against stone."
"I don't doubt your courage, Ayana," Ethan said, his voice softening slightly as he looked into her striking face. "I doubt Silas Croggins and the scum who drink his whiskey. A gunfight in an adobe room is dirty, bloody business. There's no room to maneuver, and lead ricochets off the walls. Just give me twenty minutes. If I ain't out by the time the shadows touch the corral fence, you take the word back to your father."
Without waiting for her reply, Ethan swung into Dutch’s saddle, adjusted his Stetson, and spurred the gray gelding out of the dry wash, riding casually toward the adobe outpost as if he were nothing more than a thirsty trail hand looking for a drink.
The station yard was empty save for an old buckboard wagon with a broken axle and two hound dogs sleeping in the narrow strip of shade beneath the porch. As Ethan clattered into the yard, the door of the station house creaked open, and a lean, hard-bitten man in a greasy apron stepped onto the threshold, holding a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun in the crook of his arm.
"That's far enough, stranger," the man barked, his voice raspy from decades of alkali dust. "We don't take kindly to riders drifting in from the north hills. Stage ain't due till midnight."
"Just looking for a bucket of water for my horse and a dram of rye to cut the dust, mister," Ethan said, keeping his hands high on the saddle horn, projecting the easy, slouching posture of an exhausted cowman. "Been chasing strays out near the Devil's Ribs for three days. My throat feels like a dried piece of harness leather."