Noche’s eyes flicked past her shoulder, his hand tightening slightly on the brass receiver of the Henry.
Jonah walked out into the open, carrying no rifle. In his right hand he carried an iron kettle of hot coffee, its spout steaming in the crisp mountain air, and under his left arm was wrapped a four-pound slab of cured bacon and a small bag of salt.
He stopped beside Tala, four paces from the pony’s nose. He looked at the old man’s patched coat, his thin, wind-scoured frame, and the tired hocks of the dun horse.
“There is hot coffee in this pot, Noche,” Jonah said in the broken, functional Spanish of the border trails. “And meat from the barrel. Eat here before you take the trail back to the divide.”
The old man looked at Jonah with that long, inscrutable gaze by which men of the desert measure those who have crossed their path before.
“You have aged, Jonah Reed,” Noche said in the same tongue. “Your hair is the color of the alkali flats.”
“The years do not consult us before they pass,” Jonah replied. He set the kettle and the meat upon a flat boulder beside the creek. “Is the snow deep in the Chiricahua passes?”
“Four feet in the timber,” the Indian answered, dismounting with a stiff, painful roll of his hips that showed his years. He took the tin cup Jonah offered and dipped it into the steaming kettle. “A horse cannot cross until the new grass comes in April. Only a wolf or an Apache woman who knows where the dry caves are can live up there this season.”
He drank the scalding coffee in long, silent gulps, his throat working with the deep, desperate thirst of a traveler who had chewed frozen snow for three days.
Tala stood between the two men, holding the red-quilled feather against her ribs. The mountains that ringed the basin had seemed like an impassable wall of rock and ice, locking her into the quiet routines of the ranch house and the court papers in the tin box. But now the peaks seemed alive again. Somewhere beyond that blinding wall of white limestone, through the secret draws where the scrub oak held its leaves and the springs never froze, Sika was moving.
She was not a ghost in Hutchins’s ledger; she was not a memory preserved only in a piece of embroidered buckskin. She was alive, walking the high ridges with her pack mules, watching the valley floors for the dust of the cavalry patrols, waiting for the grass to rise.
Jonah looked at Tala, his grey eyes reading the fierce, silent illumination that had transformed her face.
“We have until the spring runoff,” he said quietly to her, speaking in English so the old man would not feel excluded from the thought. “The court hearing in Tucson is set for the second week of March. We will settle the law with Hutchins before the district judge, get the certified seal from the territory, and then we will turn our horses toward the Eagle’s Nest.”
Tala looked down at the feather in her palm, then closed her fingers over it until the quill was warm against her skin.
“Yes,” she said. “We will settle the paper first. A woman cannot go into the mountains to meet her mother while a sheriff holds a warrant with her name on his desk. When I ride up the canyon, I will ride as a person who owes no white man a single hour of her life.”
By the first week of March, the great winter thaw had stripped the snow from the Peloncillo benchlands, leaving the valley floor carpeted in a sudden, riotous green of wild mustard, filaree, and small yellow poppies that bloomed in the shelter of the basalt rocks. The creeks were running bank-full, their cold, silt-laden waters roaring through the cottonwood groves with the sound of distant freight trains.
In the ranch yard, the light spring wagon stood loaded for the eighty-mile journey westward to the territorial court at Tucson.
Jonah had spent three days preparing the rig. The iron tires had been soaked in the creek to swell the felloes; the axle spindles were packed with fresh tallow and pine tar; and four spare hickory spokes were lashed to the reach beneath the wagon bed. Under the seat sat the japanned tin box containing the affidavits, the treaty transcripts, Tala’s signed deposition, and forty silver dollars in a canvas shot-bag to pay the clerk’s filing fees.
Tala came out from the small western room carrying her bundle. She wore the indigo wool coat she had finished during the winter storms, its bone buttons gleaming against the dark cloth, the high collar turned up against the morning wind. She carried her mackinaw rolled into a bedroll with two blankets, her elk-hide moccasins, and a pair of sturdy cowhide boots that Jonah had bought for her from a traveling cobbler in February.