"First, I need your best scouts to keep Vance’s gunmen occupied at the southern pass so they can't send a warning to Fort Grant," Ethan said. "And second... I need a guide who knows the secret trails through the Tortolita Mountains, so I can beat the cavalry’s departure by six hours."
Ayana stepped forward, placing her hand on Ethan’s shoulder in the presence of her father, the elders, and the rejected suitors.
"I will ride with you, Ethan Walker," she said, her voice clear as mountain water. "The path through the Tortolitas was shown to me in my mother’s songs. We ride together, or neither of us rides at all."
Chief Whitehawk looked at his daughter, then at the white drover who had walked into his camp seeking a runaway horse. For the first time, a look of profound, sacred pride illuminated the old chief's weathered face.
"So be it," Whitehawk decreed. "The daughter of the chief and the stranger who speaks straight will ride for our lives. May the Great Spirit guide your hooves through the shadows of the red rocks."
The moon had dwindled to a curved silver horn when Ethan Walker and Ayana led their mounts through the northern cleft of the red basin.
They did not ride the primary trail that descended toward the desert lowlands. Instead, Ayana turned her spotted pony into a narrow, near-vertical fault line that cut straight into the granite spine of the Tortolita Mountains. Behind them, the cooking fires of the Chiricahua sanctuary had been extinguished, leaving the village wrapped in pitch-black shadow. Further south, along the lower rim of Cañada del Oro, distant musket shots echoed intermittently through the night air—intermittent, sharp cracks signaling that Tahzay, Chato, and forty warriors were systematically harassing the perimeter of Claim No. 44, drawing Jason Vance’s gunmen into defensive skirmishes and sealing off the southern telegraph routes.
"We have thirty-six hours before the bugles sound at Fort Grant," Ethan said, his breath rising in white wisps against the high-altitude freeze. He walked on foot, leading Dutch by the bridle to spare the gray horse’s hocks on the treacherous ascent. "If Captain Baylor mounts his companies on schedule, eighty troopers will be rolling out the gates before we can cut their trail."
"Baylor will not move before dawn on the appointed day," Ayana replied quietly from the path ahead. She climbed like a mountain panther, her moccasins finding purchase on hairline ledges of slick granite where an iron-shod boot would have skidded into oblivion. "White soldiers do not march in the dark through broken rock. Their wagons need daylight to see the gullies. We will reach the fort’s outer pickets while the morning star still hangs over the parade ground."
Ethan glanced behind him. Below their precarious perch, the desert stretched out into an ocean of deep indigo darkness, broken only by the pale, ribbon-like cuts of dry washes miles away. The air here was thin, sharp with the clean bite of high-mountain juniper and cold stone, completely purged of the sulfurous coal smoke that choked the mining syndicate’s camp.
Strapped securely beneath his canvas coat, pressed flat against his chest ribs, was the leather dispatch case containing the forged eviction orders and Jason Vance’s private ledger. The brass lock dug into his skin with every step, an unyielding reminder of the explosive cargo he carried. If Vance’s riders ambushed them on these heights, no one would ever know what had transpired on this granite spine; their bodies would be tumbled into a thousand-foot ravine, and the history books would record that Company C had merely pacified another nest of Apache hostiles.
Around two in the morning, the trail vanished entirely, replaced by a razor-thin ridge known among the Apache scouts as the Needle’s Spine.
It was a sheer dike of volcanic basalt, barely four feet wide at its broadest point, dropping away into bottomless chasms on both sides. To the east lay the jagged drop into the San Pedro Valley; to the west, an abyss of shattered red scree fell straight toward the desert floor. The wind up here was fierce, howling out of the north with relentless fury, buffeting horse and rider with sudden, freezing gusts that threatened to sweep them off the ledge.
Dutch stopped dead in his tracks. The gray gelding flattened his ears against his skull, planting his forelegs wide, his nostrils flaring wide as he caught the dizzying draft rising from the black gulfs on either side.
"Easy, boy," Ethan murmured, his heart leaping into his throat as he laid a calming hand against the horse’s trembling jaw. "Don't look down. Just look at the heel of my boot. Easy now."