Tala reached beneath her indigo coat and touched the eagle feather tucked securely into her inner pocket. The quill was stiff and cold, but she knew that twenty leagues to the south, among the high crags of the Eagle’s Nest, the snow was already beginning to drip from the cedar boughs into the dry canyons, opening the secret trails that led back to her mother’s camp.
She took a deep, full breath of the mountain wind, set her boots firm against the footboard of the wagon, and let the rhythmic, iron grinding of the wheels carry her out into the wide, dangerous world that belonged to her at last.
The stage road descended into the broad, alkaline trough of the San Pedro valley under an afternoon sky that had turned from turquoise to the pale, blinding grey of hot zinc. The mud from the spring runoff had dried in the wind, leaving deep, baked ruts that wrenched at the wagon’s iron-shod wheels and threw up a powdery white dust that tasted of chalk and bitter salt.
Four hours past the crossing of the river, where the cottonwoods were just putting out their first sticky green leaves, the road curved around a low outcrop of grey limestone and brought into view the adobe walls of Dragoon Station.
It was a fortified compound, built twenty years earlier for the Overland Mail and maintained now by an enterprising Irishman named Malachi Doyle. The main building was a long, low barracks of sun-baked brick, its outer walls unpierced by windows and pitted near the roofline with loophole firing ports from the Apache wars. A four-foot stone wall enclosed a dusty corral, a blacksmith shed smelling of coal slack, and a wide veranda shaded by cedar poles and dried willow brush.
Jonah pulled the team up beside the horse trough. The bay gelding dropped its muzzle into the water, blowing two deep, shivering breaths that rippled the green scum on the surface. The chestnut mare leaned into her collar, trembling slightly from the six-mile pull through the heavy sand.
“We bait the horses here,” Jonah said, setting the iron handbrake with a dry clack. “Doyle keeps sweet grama hay in the barn, and the water is drawn from a deep seep under the limestone. It is fifty miles across the flat to the Tucson gate; we don’t cross it on tired legs.”
Tala sat straight upon the spring seat. She looked at the long veranda. Five men were sitting on empty dynamite boxes in the shade, their boots hooked into the lower rails of the benches. Two were teamsters wearing greasy duck trousers and broad felt hats crusted with salt rings; one was a cattle buyer in a black broadcloth coat with sleeves cut short to show dirty linen cuffs; and the other two were basin riders with holstered revolvers tied to their thighs with whang-leather.
As the wagon stopped, the murmur of their voices ceased. A silence fell over the porch—not a casual pause, but that sudden, watchful stillness that comes when men recognize a face they have heard argued over in saloon corners and livery stables.
Tala stepped down from the wagon box. She did not reach for Jonah’s hand, nor did she hesitate on the iron step. She stood on the gravel in her indigo wool coat, smoothed the pleats of her skirt with both palms, and looked directly at the men on the bench.
The cattle buyer leaned forward, his small, watery eyes narrowing behind a haze of cigar smoke. He took the cigar from his mouth and spat through his teeth into the dirt.
“Well, now,” the man said, his voice loud enough to carry across the twenty paces of open yard. “If that ain’t old Reed from the Peloncillo bench. And he’s brought Hutchins’s two-hundred-dollar squaw along for the ride.”
One of the teamsters let out a short, nasal bark of laughter. “Heard tell Elias went up to Prescott with a sheriff’s writ. Heard tell she held a government Springfield to his ribs and made him eat his own paper.”
Jonah did not look at the men. He unbuckled the check-reins, stepped between the horses to drop the trace chains, and led the team toward the barn door. His movements were slow, rhythmic, entirely indifferent to the talk, like an ox moving through dry brush.
Tala did not follow him into the barn. She turned and walked toward the wooden bench outside the kitchen door where an earthen water olla hung in a cradle of braided rawhide beneath the willow shade.
The cattle buyer stood up, brushing tobacco ash from his waistcoat. He was a broad, soft-bodied man whose skin had the yellow, unhealthy pallor of bad whiskey and heavy pork. He took two steps out into the dirt, blocking the narrow path that led to the olla.
“Where you headed with the old man, girl?” he asked, grinning with teeth that were black at the gum-line. “Elias says you’re registered to his ledger in Black Mesa. He’s offering twenty dollars gold to any man who holds you at the station till the stage comes down from the north.”