Silas Croggins lowered the shotgun slightly, squinting through bloodshot eyes at Ethan’s dust-caked face, worn boots, and sweat-stained shirt. The man looked harmless enough—just another penniless drover whose bones would probably end up bleaching in a dry gully before the year was out.
"Trough is behind the corral," Croggins grunted, turning back toward the dim interior of the adobe. "Whiskey is two bits a glass. Put your horse up and bring your coin inside."
Ethan dismounted, led Dutch to the trough, and pumped several gallons of cool, brackish water for the thirsty gelding. While the horse drank, Ethan scanned the corral.
In the second stall stood a magnificent blood-bay gelding—lean, deep-chested, and wearing a military-style McClellan saddle with polished brass fittings. Tied to the saddle horn was a waterproof dispatch case of stiff black harness leather, stamped with the unmistakable insignia of the territorial marshal’s service.
Vance’s courier is inside, Ethan thought, his pulse quickening.
Leaving Dutch tied loosely to the hitching rail so the horse could bolt if necessary, Ethan stepped onto the creaking wood of the low porch and pushed through the screen door into the dim, fly-blown common room.
The air inside was thick with the reek of stale tobacco, spilled whiskey, and unwashed wool. Two tallow candles burned on an upturned whiskey barrel in the corner. Behind a makeshift counter of rough pine planks stood Croggins, pouring a murky amber liquid into a chipped glass.
Sitting at a rickety wooden table near the back wall was the courier.
He was a young man, barely twenty-five, but his eyes carried the cold, arrogant swagger common among hired guns who wore territorial badges to legitimize their trade. He wore a crisp, tailored gray wool coat despite the desert heat, polished cavalry boots with nickel-plated spurs, and twin ivory-handled Smith & Wesson revolvers holstered low on his hips. A plate of greasy mutton bones sat before him, along with an open bottle of rye.
Ethan walked slowly to the counter, tossed a silver half-dollar onto the pine wood, and picked up the glass of whiskey. He turned his back to the bar, leaning against the counter with his elbows, sipping the fiery liquor that burned his throat like kerosene.
"Hot day on the trail," Ethan said casually, nodding toward the courier.
The young gunman barely looked up from his bottle. "Hot enough. If you’re riding south, drover, you’d better make tracks before nightfall. The Chiricahuas are restless in the ridges."
"Is that so?" Ethan said, taking another sip. "I heard tell the mining boys over at Claim Forty-Four were doing enough blasting to wake the dead. Hard to keep cattle calm when the rocks are jumping."
The courier’s head snapped up. His eyes narrowed, suddenly sharp and guarded. "What do you know about Claim Forty-Four?"
"Not much," Ethan replied, shrugging his shoulders with an air of complete indifference. "Just saw the dust cloud from the ridges. Heard in Tucson that Jason Vance was looking to hire more hands to swing pickaxes."
"Vance doesn't need pickaxes," the courier spat with a smirk of superiority, leaning back in his chair until the wooden legs creaked. "He needs surveyors and deed registrars. By the time this dispatch reaches the territorial capital at Prescott, every foot of that canyon will be registered under the Mineral Act of '72. Any redskin or squatter caught within five miles of those bluffs will be treated as an enemy of the United States."
"A legal eviction," Ethan remarked, keeping his tone carefully neutral. "Takes a judge’s signature to make that stick, don't it?"
The courier laughed—a harsh, barking sound that had no humor in it. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a heavy brass key, tossing it onto the table between them.
"Judge Miller in Prescott signed the decree three days ago," the courier bragged, emboldened by the whiskey. "Ten thousand dollars in gold syndicate stock bought his signature. The writ is in my saddlebags right now, along with the requisition order for Captain Baylor’s troopers. In seventy-two hours, the army sweeps the canyon. Vance gets the silver, the syndicate gets the toll road, and anyone standing in the way gets a military burial in a trench."
Ethan set his glass down on the counter with a quiet, solid thud.
"That’s a hard piece of business for people who’ve lived in those rocks for three hundred years," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a register that made Silas Croggins freeze with his whiskey rag halfway across the counter.
The courier stopped smiling. His hand dropped instinctively toward the ivory handle of his right revolver. "You sound like you’ve got sympathy for the savages, drover. Out here, a white man with Indian sympathies is usually a dead man."