She stopped at the threshold of the room, turned back, and looked at the oak bar resting quiet in its iron cradle beside the jamb.
For four months, that bar had dropped into place every evening at sundown, a boundary of solid wood that divided her sovereignty from the rest of the world. Now the door stood open to the morning sunlight, the cedar smell of the interior mingling with the sharp, sweet scent of the wet clover by the windmill.
She did not close the door; she left it swinging slightly on its oiled hinges. She walked across the veranda and set her bedroll in the rear of the wagon beside the sack of oats and the water cask.
Jonah came from the barn leading the team. He had hitched the bay gelding on the off-side and a sturdy, six-year-old chestnut mare on the near. Both animals were in prime condition, their winter coats shedding in long, greasy patches under the currycomb, their eyes bright and clear after three months of good grama hay and crushed corn.
He tied the lines to the brake handle and looked at Tala.
“The stage road through Dragoon Pass is muddy,” he said, wiping his hands on his trousers. “The freight wagons have cut ruts eighteen inches deep between the summit and the river crossing. We’ll have to camp out two nights before we sight the mission towers at Tucson.”
“The road is open,” Tala said. “That is all that matters.”
“There will be men at the way-stations who know Hutchins,” Jonah remarked, watching her face with that steady, questioning gravity that had never left him. “Some of them are on his freight accounts. They will say things that are hard to hear.”
Tala climbed up onto the spring seat without waiting for his assistance. She arranged her indigo skirt over her knees, adjusted the collar of her coat, and took the braided leather whip from its socket, laying it across her lap.
“Let them say what they will,” she said. “A dog barks at the wagon wheels because he cannot understand where the wagon is going. When we reach Tucson, we will put our boots on the stone floor of the court, and the judge will write down what is real. Words that are spoken by the spit-boxes at the way-stations do not change the ink.”
Jonah smiled—a rare, brief movement of the lips that softened the hard, granite contours of his jaw—and swung his long frame up beside her.
He released the iron brake lever with a heavy clonk. The bay and the chestnut leaned into their collars, the chains rattling against the wooden singletrees, and the wagon lurched forward across the packed gravel of the yard.
They passed the stone corral where the red heifer stood nursing beside the black cow; they passed the wooden windmill whose vanes were spinning merrily in the brisk southwest wind, throwing diamonds of spray over the green clover; and then they crossed the outer ditch that marked the western boundary of the ranch claim.
Beyond that ditch lay the open territory—a vast, unfenced sea of yellow grass, pale blue sky, and distant, jagged mountains that rose out of the earth like islands of red stone.
As the wagon climbed the long, stony bench that led toward the pass, Tala looked back once.
The ranch house looked small from the ridge—a low, square block of sun-dried mud nestled into the brown folds of the creek bed, with a thin thread of blue smoke drifting from the kitchen chimney into the wide morning air. It looked fragile, as though a sudden flood or a heavy gale could sweep it away like dry leaves.
Yet she knew the strength that was buried inside those eighteen inches of adobe: the cedar chest, the brass key on the sill, the piece of embroidered buckskin that carried the quail track, and the heavy oak bar that had proven to her that respect was not a thing granted by permission, but a boundary maintained by one’s own hands.
She turned her face toward the west.
Ahead of them, sixty miles across the shimmering alkali basin of the San Pedro, the blue, jagged crest of the Santa Catalina mountains rose against the sun like the ramparts of a great city. Behind those peaks lay Tucson, the district court, the clerk with his steel pens, and the legal papers that would finally sever the invisible ropes that Elias Hutchins had tried to tie around her life.