Ethan’s smile vanished instantly. His jaw set into hard, rigid lines. "A signal fire?"
"A signal from Thorpe’s lookouts," Ayana confirmed, leaping onto her pony’s back with fluid grace. "The rockslide we dropped in Ghost Wash bought us hours, not days. They know the courier was taken. They know the paper is gone. If Thorpe realizes Vance is trapped, he will strike our village before the soldiers can arrive to stop him."
"Then we don't have time to sleep," Ethan said, gathering Dutch’s reins. "We take the high trail over the Devil's Ribs. We push the horses."
The return journey through the Tortolita Mountains was a desperate, grinding race against the clock.
Where their ascent had been marked by cautious stealth, their return was fueled by raw urgency. They bypassed the treacherous basalt spine of the Needle’s Spine, taking a lower, rocky shelf that cut through jagged canyons choked with catclaw and cholla. The afternoon sun beat down with blistering ferocity, baking the red earth until the heat shivered in transparent waves over the slickrock.
Dutch dug his hooves into the loose gravel, snorting white dust, his powerful hindquarters driving him up steep shale slopes. Ayana’s pony, bred for endurance in these arid peaks, scrambled ahead like a bighorn sheep, finding the narrowest deer trails through the brush.
As the sun sank behind the western peaks, casting the vast desert basin into blood-red shadow, the smell of burning wood reached their nostrils once more—not the fragrant, peaceful cedar of Whitehawk’s council fires, but the choking, acrid stench of pitch-pine and burning brush.
They reached the high promontory overlooking Cañada del Oro just as twilight gave way to darkness.
Ethan threw himself from Dutch’s saddle, crawling to the edge of the rim with his brass spyglass. Ayana slid beside him, her small hand resting against the warm stone.
What they saw through the gloom turned Ethan’s blood to ice.
The mining camp below was empty. The seven canvas wall tents had been abandoned, flapping loosely in the night wind. The iron steam boiler stood silent and cold, its fires dead.
And from the fortified timber shed where the Dupont blasting powder had been stored, deep wheel tracks cut into the red sand, leading straight into the narrow mouth of the canyon that entered the Chiricahua sanctuary.
"They moved," Ethan whispered, his throat tightening. "Thorpe didn't wait. He loaded the powder kegs onto the freight wagons and dragged the Gatling gun into the gorge!"
Ayana pointed with a trembling hand toward the northern gorge.
High up on the red sandstone bluffs, barely two miles from the hidden amphitheater of her people, brilliant flashes of musket fire flickered in the darkness. The distant boom-boom-boom of heavy buffalo rifles and the sharper cracks of Apache muskets rolled down through the canyon like sudden summer thunder.
"They are at the Gate of the Sun," Ayana said, her voice cracking with terror for her kin. "The narrow pass that leads directly into our village. If Thorpe breaks through that wall of stone, our people are trapped against the sheer cliffs!"
"Come on!" Ethan roared, scrambling back to his horse and checking the lever of his Winchester. "We ride!"
They plunged down the northern switchbacks in the dark, risking life and limb on the slickrock trails. Stones clattered down the thousand-foot drop-offs beneath their hooves, but neither rider pulled on the reins. Within twenty minutes, they hit the sandy floor of the inner canyon, galloping through cottonwood thickets that whipped against their faces like wet cords.
As they rounded the final bend before the high red gateway that protected the sanctuary, a volley of rifle fire exploded from the rocks above.
A lead ball screamed past Ethan’s ear, smashing into a dead oak tree behind him.
"HOLD YOUR FIRE!" Ethan bellowed at the top of his lungs, standing high in his stirrups, waving the white parchment envelope in his left hand while keeping his rifle raised in his right. "WHITEHAWK! TAHZAY! IT’S ETHAN! HOLD YOUR FIRE!"
From the black crags thirty feet above the gorge, a tall, familiar figure rose into view against the starlight, an ash bow held in his left hand.
"Ethan!" Tahzay’s voice echoed down from the heights. "Ride through! Quickly! The white wolves have brought their iron guns to the lower bench!"
Ethan and Ayana spurred their horses through the narrow gap in the stone wall, skidding to a halt inside the perimeter where thirty Apache warriors crouched behind boulder breastworks, their faces painted in black and white stripes of war.
Chief Whitehawk stepped forward from the shadow of a massive sandstone outcrop. The old chief carried a long-barreled Springfield rifle taken from a border skirmish twenty winters ago. His face was streaked with soot, his eyes blazing with the fierce, terrible fire of a commander defending his last home.