"You are a great oak of our people, Nocona," she replied in their native tongue, her tone carrying both sorrow and absolute clarity. "Any woman of our band would be proud to build a fire in your lodge. But my spirit does not walk beside yours. May the Great Spirit grant your path peace, but my answer is no."
Nocona bowed his head deeply. He did not scowl, nor did he curse under his breath. He simply turned and walked back into the crowd, his shoulders square and stoic.
Now, an ominous stillness blanketed the canyon. One hundred and four suitors had stepped forward. One hundred and four suitors had been rejected.
The sun had sunk below the crest of the western red wall, casting the entire basin into a deep, bruised purple twilight. The ceremonial fires crackled loudly in the dead silence. Whispers spread like dry leaves in an autumn gale. Some of the young braves had already begun gathering their horses, their movements stiff with anger.
Chief Whitehawk prepared to stand, to bring an honorable close to an unprecedented day and offer the customary parting gifts of tobacco and dried meat to appease the wounded dignity of his guests.
Then, from the jagged northern ridge overlooking the sacred basin, the sharp snap of a dried juniper branch echoed across the canyon floor.
Twenty miles to the north of the hidden red sandstone basin, across an arid plateau where neither cottonwood nor spring wildflower dared to bloom, Ethan Walker was learning once again that the Arizona Territory had no pity for an honest working man.
Ethan was twenty-eight years old, though a stranger looking into the deep sun-creases radiating from the corners of his pale gray eyes might easily have judged him thirty-five. He was lean, built of sinew and corded muscle shaped by twelve years of unceasing, unglamorous physical labor. His skin had long since ceased to burn red under the merciless southwestern sun; it had cured instead into the dark, dull tint of old harness leather. His hands were broad, calloused heavily across the palms from handling hemp ropes, hot branding irons, and the rough handles of fencing spades.
Ethan had not come to the frontier seeking gold, nor was he fleeing a marshal’s warrant or an angry husband. His father had been a tenant farmer from Missouri who died broke and coughing blood in a damp cabin near the river bottoms; his mother had survived just long enough to see her only son grow tall enough to swing an axe before she followed her husband into the cold clay. At sixteen, Ethan had packed an old wool blanket, a rusted clasp knife, and a worn pair of boots, and he had drifted west. He had worked as a bullwhacker on the freight lines, a mucker in the dry mines of New Mexico, and finally a drover on the open ranges spreading north from Tucson.
For the past three years, Ethan had scraped together a living on a hardscrabble lease along the Santa Cruz River. It was marginal land, choked with prickly pear and caliche hardpan that broke iron plowshares, but through stubborn, grinding economy he had managed to assemble a small herd of twenty sturdy Mexican steers and three trail horses. A merchant at a northern trading post near the Verde River had offered forty silver dollars a head for the cattle if Ethan delivered them before the spring heat hardened into summer drought.
It was the largest sum of money Ethan had ever held in his imagination. With eight hundred dollars, he could buy his own title to water rights, fence fifty acres of sweet river grass, and stop living out of a canvas bedroll.
He had set out five days ago, driving his twenty head alone, using three horses in rotation to spare their legs, and leading a dependable, stocky red bay gelding that served as his primary pack animal. The bay was eight years old, broad-chested and sure-footed as a mule, carrying two heavy rawhide panniers packed with sixty pounds of dried beef, flour, salt pork, coffee, spare iron shoes, ammunition, and every legal paper Ethan possessed in the world.
Then, just after sunrise on the fifth day, calamity had struck with the suddenness peculiar to the desert.
Ethan had been guiding his herd through a narrow, brush-choked draw where the caliche earth was cut into deep gullies by flash floods. The morning air was still crisp, smelling faintly of creosote and damp gravel. He was riding his favorite mount—a dependable, iron-jawed gray gelding named Dutch—and trailing the red bay behind him on a twenty-foot lead line of braided rawhide.