A lead ball screamed inches over Ethan’s hat, snapping a mesquite branch beside his ear.
"Keep low against your horse’s neck!" Ethan hollered over the roar of galloping hooves. "Don't let 'em box us into the main creek bed! There's a dead end two miles ahead at the lime kilns!"
Ayana leaned flat over the pony’s mane, her dark hair streaming in the wind, her eyes locked on the twisting terrain ahead. She knew every cutbank, every sheep trail, and every dry arroyo in this territory with an intimacy born of generations of blood memory. While white men needed roads, surveyors, and telegraph poles to keep their bearings, the desert spoke to her in subtle changes of soil color, the scent of blooming creosote, and the silhouette of black ridges against the stars.
"Follow me!" she called back, her voice clear and untroubled by the gunfire. "Ghost Wash is narrow! Their heavy horses cannot turn in the stones!"
She swerved her mount sharply to the left, darting through a natural gap in a caliche bluff where two riders could barely pass abreast. Ethan hauled on Dutch’s reins, leaning hard into the turn. The gray gelding scraped his left flank against the coarse limestone wall, but the dependable animal never missed a step, digging his cleats into the deep sand and following the smaller, more agile Apache pony into the winding defile.
Behind them, the pursuing gunmen shouted in confusion as their quarry vanished into the broken rocks. One of the riders tried to cut the corner too fast; his horse lost its footing on a slick shelf of shale and went down in a shrieking heap of flailing hooves and flying gravel.
"Hold up! Hold up, damn you!" a coarse voice bellowed through the dark. "Don't ride blind into that cut! It’s full of holes!"
The temporary confusion bought Ethan and Ayana three precious minutes. But Vance’s men were seasoned border trackers—mercenaries who had hunted outlaws, Mexican irregulars, and Native parties across every square mile of the Cochise Stronghold. They dismounted, lit torches of pitch-soaked pine, and began working the mouth of the gap on foot, levering fresh cartridges into their rifles.
Ghost Wash was a subterranean nightmare carved by centuries of torrential summer flash floods. The walls rose thirty feet straight up on either side, made of white, powdery caliche and unstable boulders that threatened to tumble down with the slightest vibration. The floor was strewn with driftwood, rounded river stones, and deep sand pits that threatened to founder an exhausted mount.
Dutch was blowing hard now, his chest heaving, white foam flecking his bit and spattering Ethan’s boots. The gelding had carried Ethan through sixty miles of desert tracking over the past thirty-six hours, and the limits of horseflesh were fast approaching.
"Ethan," Ayana said, pulling her pony to a halt where the wash split into two fork-like draws beneath an overhanging shelf of sandstone. "Your horse cannot run to the mountains. His heart will break."
Ethan dismounted in a flash, his boots sinking ankle-deep into the sand. He laid a hand on Dutch’s trembling neck, feeling the frantic, hammering pulse beneath the gray coat. The horse dropped his head, his nostrils flaring wide as he sucked in the cool night air.
"She’s right, boy," Ethan murmured, his heart aching for the gallant beast. "You gave me everything you had."
From down the twisting defile came the harsh scrape of iron shoes on stone and the flickering yellow glare of pine torches dancing against the pale canyon walls.
"They're coming up the wash," Ethan said, sliding his Winchester carbine from the saddle scabbard. "Two hundred yards back, maybe less. If they catch us in the open sand, they’ll chew us up with those repeating rifles."
Ayana did not answer with words. She raised her head, placed two fingers to her lips, and emitted a low, quavering sound—the soft, mournful call of a burrowing owl, repeated three times at measured intervals.
For a heartbeat, there was only the sigh of the night wind and the crackle of distant torches.
Then, from the dark rim thirty feet directly above their heads, the call was answered: two short clicks of stone on stone, followed by the dry whisper of an arrow leaving a quiver.
Chato and Tahzay had not remained idle in the hills.
Guided by the sound of gunfire from the stage station, the two Apache warriors had paralleled the wash along the high ridge, moving across the slickrock with the silent, ghost-like speed that had baffled American cavalry columns for decades.