The old chief lifted his stone pipe, holding it toward the smoke-hole.
"I will not move, Ethan Walker. I will not lead my people into the alkaline flats where the water is bitter and the children die of the shaking fever. If Silas Burdette brings his forty wolves to the red rocks... the rocks will drink their blood, and our bones will join the stones."
Ethan stepped up beside the chief, placing his hand upon the old man's shoulder.
"They won't drink your blood, Chief," Ethan said, his voice hard as tempered steel. "Burdette thinks he’s playing against ignorant savages who can't read his contracts, and he thinks I’m just an illiterate cowhand who ran away from a plow. He’s about to find out that when you corner a working man and an Apache clan in the same canyon, the paper doesn't mean a damn thing."
Ethan turned to Ayana, his eyes burning with a cold, resolute fire.
"Get Tahzay and the horse herds," Ethan commanded softly. "Burdette wants to starve us out from Rattlesnake Wells? Then we ride to Rattlesnake Wells tonight, and we take his food, his horses, and his ammunition before he ever gets his boots into our sand."
Ayana looked at him, her lips curving into a fierce, proud smile that rivaled the sharpness of an obsidian blade.
"The horses are ready, Ethan Walker," she replied. "And the ash bows are strung."
The moon had buried itself behind a wall of bruised storm clouds when forty riders ghosted out of the Tortolita foothills and surrounded the alkali perimeter of Rattlesnake Wells.
Silas Burdette had turned the ramshackle stage station into a fortress of arrogance. Three massive freight wagons loaded with sacks of flour, cured salt pork, drill steel, and twenty wooden crates of repeating Winchester ammunition were parked in a defensive triangle between the adobe station house and the horse corrals. Behind a low breastwork of packed dirt and mesquite ties, Burdette’s mercenary brush-poppers sat passing jugs of trade whiskey, their carbines propped carelessly against water barrels, confident that no native war party would dare strike forty miles from their mountain sanctuaries.
They had never faced a force commanded by an Arizona drover who understood their own tactics, guided by the deadliest scouts of the Chiricahua nation.
"No fire on the wagons," Ethan Walker whispered into the dark, lying flat beside Tahzay in the cold sand of the northern wash. Ethan’s newly carved ash bow was strung across his back, and in his hands rested his familiar Colt .45. "We need those provisions to feed the village through the summer, and we need those Winchester crates to keep the syndicate off our ridges. Tahzay, you take fifteen men and cut the picket lines in the horse corral. When the remounts bolt, the yard will turn to blind chaos. Ayana and I take the depot shed."
Tahzay flashed a fierce, white grin through the charcoal war paint streaking his cheeks. He reached out, clasping Ethan’s forearm with an iron grip. "The wolves of Whitehawk hunt together, brother."
With the terrifying, supernatural silence that had made the Apache legends of the borderlands, Tahzay and his braves melted into the sagebrush.
Five minutes later, the night exploded.
A chorus of piercing Chiricahua war cries ripped through the darkness from the horse corrals, accompanied by the sharp slashes of hunting knives cutting hemp tethers. Sixty terrified draft mules and cavalry horses, startled by the scent of mountain lions rubbed into Apache blankets, broke through the cedar rails in a shrieking, thundering stampede. The animals swept directly across the open station yard, trampling tents, knocking over whiskey barrels, and plunging Burdette’s camp into wild, dust-choked pandemonium.
"Indians! The corral is broken!" a guard screamed, leveling a shotgun and firing blindly into the blinding dust.
Crack-crack-crack!
From the darkness beyond the lantern light, Apache arrows hissed through the air with surgical precision, finding the shoulders and gun arms of the sentries before they could reach the freight wagons. Ethan and Ayana charged through the swirling dust, leading twenty warriors straight toward the adobe station house.
A mercenary stepped out from behind a wagon, levering his Winchester. Ethan did not break his stride. Dropping low under the barrel’s arc, Ethan drove his right shoulder into the man’s ribs, knocking him into the dirt, and brought the heavy brass butt of his Colt down across the guard’s temple, silencing him instantly.