The square at Black Mesa was laid out in hard-packed dirt that gave off an alkaline smell whenever the wind rose off the alkali flats to the south. In the center stood an elevated wooden platform built from rough-milled pine planks, greyed and splintered by two seasons of dry heat and winter frost. It had served for shearing demonstrations, wool weigh-ins, and the occasional civic announcement from the territorial marshal, but this morning it served a different transaction.
Tala stood near the post on the southern corner of the boards. Her hands were bound before her with three turns of hemp rope, not pulled tight enough to stop the pulse in her wrists, but snug enough that she could not lower her arms without tilting her shoulders forward. The rope was tied with a butcher’s knot, coarse and frayed at the tail. Behind her, leaning against the rail with an open ledger propped on his forearm, stood Elias Hutchins. Hutchins wore a black wool coat that had seen better days in St. Louis, its lapels shiny with grease, and his neck was ringed by a collar that cut into his sun-reddened skin like a dull blade.
Around the platform, thirty or forty men stood in the dust. They were ranch hands from the basin, teamsters whose wagons rested by the freight yard, two shop clerks in aprons, and the town deputy, a thick-shouldered man named Vance who held his thumbs tucked inside his leather belt. None of them looked directly at Tala for longer than a few seconds. They looked at the tops of their boots, at the horses tied to the hitching rail across from the feed store, or at the ink-stained ledger in Hutchins’s hand. They behaved as though they were present merely to witness the weather or the price of oats, maintaining that polite, indifferent posture by which ordinary men make themselves comfortable with cruelty.
Tala did not watch the crowd’s eyes; she watched their hands. She watched the way Vance shifted his balance to keep his holster free of his coat hem. She watched the stable boy on the stoop of the livery, who held a horse brush in both hands and turned it over and over like a talisman. Danger, she had learned across seventeen years between the foothills and the reservation lines, rarely began with a shout. It began with a hand settling onto a strap, a boot turning quietly in the dirt to block an exit, or an official adjusting a set of papers to make robbery look like accounting.
“We have here the indenture transfer,” Hutchins called out, his voice thin and carrying easily through the dry morning air. He tapped the open page with a dry thumbnail. “Territorial statute provides for the restitution of debts incurred through tribal depredations and runaway labor. Signed by the district commissioner at Fort Apache, attested by seal, transfer of remaining term of domestic service. Let us have an opening of fifty dollars to clear the administrative fees.”
A mule skinner near the wagon tongue spit into the dirt. “Ain’t got no papers from the clerk in Prescott, Elias. You can’t assign labor without the probate stamp.”
“The commissioner’s seal serves for probate in unorganized districts,” Hutchins snapped, not raising his head from the ledger. “The paper is complete. Fifty dollars. A sound worker. Knows wool, knows cooking, quiet about the house.”
Tala felt the heat of the sun against the back of her neck. A bluebottle fly circled the wet rim of an open inkpot resting on the corner of the platform and settled there, its iridescent wings vibrating. She breathed through her nose, measuring the air. Her knees were stiff from three hours in the back of Hutchins’s buckboard, but she kept her weight evenly distributed on the balls of her feet. If the rope slipped or if an opening appeared toward the alley between the harness shop and the boarding house, she would need her ankles clear.
From the northern side of the square, where the cottonwoods grew sparse along the dry wash, the sound of an approaching horse broke the murmur of the men. It was not a fast pace—just the heavy, rhythmic plodding of a big-boned bay gelding whose hooves sank into the soft silt of the road.
The rider was a tall man in a sun-faded duck canvas coat, broad across the shoulders with a plain leather saddle that showed years of saddle-soap and prairie rain. He drew rein near the trough, dismounted with the unhurried economy of a man who spent ten hours a day in the saddle, and tied the gelding to an iron ring in the post. He did not look at Hutchins, and he did not immediately look at Tala. He reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a folded sheet of heavy foolscap paper with a broken wax seal, and walked toward the platform.