The frost had given way to that false, golden warmth that often visits southern Arizona in late autumn—a still, amber weather where the air is dry as cornmeal and the distant mountains seem to float two inches above the horizon on blue pools of heat mirage.
Tala stood by the corral gate, watching him check the harness. She wore her mackinaw coat and had wrapped her hair in a square of blue wool cloth she had found in the storeroom, tied beneath her chin after the fashion of the Mexican women along the river.
“You do not need to go into the town,” Jonah said, tightening the belly-band on the mule with an upward jerk of his forearm. “I can fetch the sack of salt, the kerosene, and the green coffee beans alone. It will take three hours to go and three to return.”
“I am going,” Tala said simply.
Jonah paused, his hands resting on the mule’s leather traces. He looked at her face. There was no defiance in her expression, only that steady, quiet resolution that he had come to recognize as her natural state of mind.
“They will stare,” he said. “The women will look through their parlor curtains, and the men will spit in the dust when we pass the livery. They don't like to be reminded of what they watched on Tuesday.”
“Let them stare,” she answered. “A town that can watch a girl tied with hemp rope should have the courage to look at her when she walks on her own boots.”
Jonah made no further objection. He assisted her up to the spring seat, climbed up beside her, and released the iron brake lever with his boot. The wagon lurched forward, its wheels grinding into the dry caliche ruts of the trail as they headed east toward Black Mesa.
The settlement of Black Mesa sat upon a barren terrace of red sandstone above the dry wash, consisting of thirty-odd buildings constructed of sun-dried adobe, rough pine lumber, and corrugated iron. It had grown up around the freight road that connected the copper mines at Clifton with the railroad terminus at Benson—a hard, unlovely place that existed only for silver, mules, and the thirst of men who spent three months at a time in the desert.
As the wagon rattled into the main street, Tala felt the sudden, palpable change in the atmosphere.
The dust was thick, churned by heavy six-mule freight teams that stood unhitched before the blacksmith’s shop. In front of the general store, three men sitting on overturned lard tubs stopped their talk as the spring wagon drew near. One of them—a grey-bearded harness maker named Peters—took his pipe from his mouth and held it mid-air, his eyes sliding from Jonah to Tala with an expression that was half-shame, half-curiosity.
Across the street, on the wooden sidewalk before the dry goods establishment, two women in dark calico dresses and sunbonnets paused with their baskets. One of them leaned toward the other, whispering behind her gloved fingers, her lips thin and tight with that righteous, sour disapproval by which small-town churchgoers condemn the victims of the cruelties they were too cowardly to prevent.
Tala did not lower her eyes. She sat straight upon the spring seat, her hands resting quietly in her lap, her chin lifted so that her gaze passed three feet above the heads of the people on the sidewalk. She looked at the signs: H. COHEN, DRY GOODS & NOTIONS; TERRITORIAL LAND OFFICE; E. HUTCHINS, FORWARDING & COMMISSION.
Hutchins’s office was closed. The heavy wooden shutters were drawn across the front windows and secured with an iron bar and padlock. A small, printed card was tacked to the door frame: CLOSED FOR BUSINESS IN TUCSON.
Jonah pulled the team up before the mercantile store owned by an elderly German named Baum. He set the brake, wrapped the lines around the iron handle, and stepped down into the street. He did not offer his hand to Tala to help her down; he stepped back two paces and waited, giving her the space to descend the iron stirrup by herself.
They walked together into the cool, dark interior of the store.
The mercantile smelled of smoked bacon, brown sugar, kerosene, and bolts of unbleached muslin. Behind the long counter of walnut-stained pine stood Baum, an enormous man with a white mustache stained yellow around the nostrils by snuff, wearing a clean canvas apron over his broad belly.
Baum’s eyes flickered as they entered, but his manner remained professional. He wiped the counter with a clean dry rag and nodded to Jonah.
“Guten Tag, Jonah,” the old merchant said, his voice deep and guttural. “You come for the winter salt, yes?”
“A hundredweight of coarse salt, Baum,” Jonah said, leaning one hand against the polished counter. “Two five-gallon cans of Pratt’s astral oil, a sack of green Rio coffee, and three bundles of iron stove wire.”