“They took me because my mother had no silver,” she said. Her eyes were fixed on the square glass inkpot, watching the black liquid reflect the pale window-light. “They took me to the agency corral at San Carlos. They kept me in the adobe shed behind the blacksmith shop for seven weeks. Then Elias Hutchins came with two horses and a paper from the sub-agent. He told the sergeant that he would take the girl to work in his kitchen in Black Mesa until the twelve dollars and the cost of the army wagon were paid.”
She paused. Her breath came a little faster, but her face remained entirely calm.
“In Black Mesa, I worked in his house for fourteen months. I carried four cords of wood from the creek. I washed his wool in the iron vat with lye until the skin peeled from my fingers. I cooked for his five teamsters. I did not run, because he told me that if I left the settlement, Deputy Vance would shoot me as a horse thief and leave my body for the buzzards in the malpais.”
Jonah turned the page, his pen moving down the second blue margin without a pause.
“On Tuesday last,” she said, “he brought me to the square. He put a rope of hemp around my hands. He told the people that my mother had died in the mountains and that her debt was now two hundred dollars for the clothes I had worn and the food I had eaten in his shed. He told the men they could bid for the paper.”
She stopped. She looked across at Jonah.
“Then this man, Jonah Reed, came with his horse. He did not ask to buy my body. He paid the two hundred dollars to take the paper from Hutchins’s ledger so it could not be sold to another man. When he cut the rope, he told me that I was free to walk or to ride. I came to this house because I chose to come. I stay in this house because the door has an iron bar on the inside that belongs to no one but myself.”
Jonah finished the final sentence. He drew a long, straight line beneath the last word, lifted the pen, and shook a dusting of fine grey river sand from a wooden shaker over the wet ink to dry it.
He blew the sand away with a soft breath, leaving the purple-black letters standing bold and distinct against the cream paper. He turned the sheet around and pushed it across the pine boards toward her.
He handed her the pen.
Tala took the wooden holder. Her fingers felt large and clumsy around the thin cedar barrel, but she held it the way the teacher at the mission day-school had taught her nine years before—between the thumb and the first two fingers, the barrel resting against the knuckle.
She dipped the steel point into the inkpot, waited for the black drop to fall back into the neck, and then placed the nib at the bottom of the page beneath Jonah’s ruled line.
She did not write quickly. She drew each letter with slow, deliberate strength, pressing the steel into the grain of the paper until it gave a faint, singing scratch:
T-A-L-A.
Beside it, below her name, she drew with two short, firm strokes the three-pronged sign of the mountain quail track—the same mark her mother had stitched into the white buckskin that lay in the cedar chest in the other room.
Jonah took the sheet, inspected the signature, and blew upon it once more. He folded it carefully into thirds, slipped it inside a heavy manila envelope addressed to The Honorable District Judge, Territorial Court, Tucson, and sealed the flap with a drop of red sealing wax melted over the chimney of the stove.
He pressed his heavy iron signet ring into the warm wax, leaving the impression of a wheat sheaf and an anchor.
“There,” Jonah said, placing the sealed packet into the japanned box beside the affidavit. “That will go south with the mail buckboard from the stage crossing tomorrow morning. When that reaches Tucson, Hutchins can bring forty men to this bench, and all they will have to show for their dust is a warrant for their own arrest.”
Tala looked at the black box. It seemed small to hold the weight of so many years of running, of burning wickiups, of ropes and ledgers and cold sheds. Yet there was a strange, hard comfort in knowing that the ink was dry, that the words were hers, and that somewhere in the big territory to the south, a judge would have to look upon her name written in her own hand and reckon with the fact that she was alive.
On Friday morning, Jonah hitched the bay gelding and the pack mule to the light spring wagon.