He nodded once, slowly. “You have your mother’s eye for weather. Sika could smell frost twenty leagues out on the sand.”
Tala pulled her thread through the indigo wool, her fingers working with that swift, ancient precision that never wasted an inch of cord. “When you live without an adobe wall between your ribs and the sky, you learn that the sky does not give second warnings. If you sleep through the shift of the wind, you do not wake up to build a fire.”
Jonah released the clamp on the stitching horse and turned the heavy trace. “A town man forgets that. A town man thinks because he has a shingle roof and a bank ledger, the world has agreed to treat him gently.”
“Hutchins thinks that,” she said.
“Hutchins will find that a winter in Prescott costs silver he does not have,” Jonah replied. His voice was calm, devoid of rancor. “His freight lines are tied up by the freeze in the mountains, and the territorial legislature will not meet until late February. When he comes back with the spring wagons, he will find the country has moved on without his permission.”
He reached to his pocket, took out a small whetstone, and spat upon it, rubbing the blade of his round-pointed leather knife in small, concentric circles. The oily grey slurry formed under his thumb, smelling of steel and grease.
“You sew well, Tala,” he remarked, his eyes on the grey stone. “The seam is straight as an iron rod.”
“My mother taught me,” she said. “She said a crooked seam was a lazy spirit made visible. She said if you make a coat with bad thread, the man who wears it will remember your lie every time the wind bites him through the wool.”
She smoothed the front panel of the coat with her palm. The wool was thick, dense, and firm. Along the inner hem of the left breast, hidden from all outside view, she had taken a length of yellow silk thread saved from the buckskin piece and worked a tiny, secret stitch: four stepped cloud triangles and the single, clean line of the quail’s foot. It was not vanity; it was an anchor. Whatever roads she walked in this coat, whether to Tucson or beyond the western reservations, the mark would stay against her heart to tell her whose daughter had fashioned the wool.
Toward nine o'clock, the wind struck the house.
It came with a sudden, whistling roar that rattled the dry cedar poles in the ceiling and drove a volley of hard, frozen sleet against the eastern adobe. The draft swept down the stovepipe, puffing a cloud of blue mesquite smoke into the kitchen before the draft righted itself.
Jonah rose, set his harness tools in the chest by the hearth, and took his mackinaw from the peg. “I’ll bring that black cow into the corral before the ground turns to grease.”
“Take the long halter,” Tala said, standing up and folding the blue coat across the back of the bench. “She knows the smell of the calf in the shed. If you lead her by the nose-band, she will follow without fighting the rope.”
He took the braided rawhide halter from the wall, pulled his hat down tight against his ears, and stepped out into the howling dark. The wind seized the door, nearly ripping the latch from his grip, but Tala stepped forward with a swift, firm stride, braced her shoulder against the pine battens, and drove the timber shut against the storm.
She dropped the iron latch into its keeper, picked up the lantern, and trimmed the wick so the flame burned clear and bright in the window, throwing a yellow beam of steady light out across the freezing gravel to guide him back from the willow draw.
The blizzard lasted thirty hours, burying the Peloncillo basin beneath eight inches of dry, powdery snow that drifted four feet deep along the northern walls of the adobe. When the sky finally cleared, it left a world of blinding, blue-white brilliance under an ice-cold sun. The cattle moved along the south-facing ridges in long, single-file lines, their breath rising like campfires against the scrub brush, pawing through the crust to find the cured buffalo grass underneath.
On the fifth day after the storm, when the thaw had begun to turn the draws into rushing torrents of red mud and crushed ice, a lone horseman came down the creek trail from the Chiricahua divide.
Tala saw him from the windmill bench where she was scraping tallow into an iron pot for soap-making. He was an Apache—an old man riding a scruffy, dun-colored pony whose shanks were plastered with frozen red clay. He wore a patched cavalry overcoat stripped of its brass buttons, his legs wrapped in rawhide leggings tied with cedar bark, and his long, iron-grey hair bound behind his neck with a strip of red flannel. Across his lap rested an ancient, half-cocked Henry repeating rifle with its brass receiver tarnished to the color of mustard.