Tala stopped three paces away. The air smelled of horse manure, cheap tobacco, and the cold, damp clay of the water jar. She did not lower her chin; she did not drop her gaze to his boots. She stood with her feet planted firmly on the hard-packed caliche, her arms resting quiet at her sides, her hands open and visible.
“My name is Tala,” she said.
Her voice was not loud, but it had that sharp, carrying clarity of a flat stone struck against iron. It cut through the afternoon heat with an absolute, steady coldness that brought the two teamsters on the bench to their feet.
“I am not registered to any man’s ledger,” she continued, looking straight into the cattle buyer’s watery eyes. “The paper Elias Hutchins holds is a lie, and the money Jonah Reed paid was to buy that lie and take it to the court in Tucson. If you have twenty dollars of Elias Hutchins’s gold in your pocket, you had better keep it to buy a pine box, because you will not earn a penny of it from me.”
The cattle buyer’s grin vanished. His face flushed a dark, angry purple beneath his salt-stained whiskers. A white man in the territory was not accustomed to an Apache woman speaking to him in grammatical English, much less standing before him with her head unbowed, meeting his gaze as an equal on the King’s highway.
“You’ve got a big tongue for a runaway ward,” he sneered, taking half a step forward and reaching his thick, dirt-caked hand toward the lapel of her indigo coat. “We’ll see what the station keeper says about harboring stolen—”
He did not finish the sentence.
Tala did not strike him; she did not draw the horn-handled knife from her skirt pocket. She took one step to the side with that swift, fluid shift of balance she had learned on the rocky trails of the Gila, planted her left heel, and struck the inside of his reaching wrist with the hard edge of her open hand.
The blow made a sharp, dry smack, like a cedar branch snapping.
The cattle buyer gasped, jerking his arm back against his chest as the nerves went numb to the elbow. Before he could recover his balance or reach for the pocket where he carried his hideout pistol, the door of the station kitchen swung open with a heavy bang against the adobe wall.
A tall, grey-haired woman stepped out onto the veranda. She wore a stained canvas apron over a black calico gown, and across her forearms rested a twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun with the hammers cocked back to the full notch.
“That’s enough out of you, Silas Crane,” the woman barked. Her voice had the sharp, iron brogue of County Clare, honed by twenty years of feeding mule drivers and desert outlaws. “Get your greasy carcass back on that bench before I put four ounces of buckshot through your fancy broadcloth.”
Crane backed away three paces, holding his throbbing wrist against his belly, his mouth opening and closing like a landed catfish. “Mrs. Doyle, this here is the Indian girl from Black Mesa—she’s got a warrant on her—”
“I don't give a damn if she’s got a warrant from the King of Spain,” Mrs. Doyle said, resting the shotgun in the crook of her left arm without lowering the hammers. “No man lays a hand on a woman on my veranda, black, red, or Christian. And as for Jonah Reed, his silver is good at this station, which is more than I can say for your IOUs, Silas Crane.”
She turned her sharp, weathered blue eyes toward Tala. She looked at the straight, clean line of the girl’s shoulders, at the heavy indigo wool of the handmade coat, and at the steady, unblinking grey-black eyes that had not wavered for an instant.
“There is cold water in the olla, child,” Mrs. Doyle said, her tone softening by half a degree. “And there is mutton stew on the hearth inside. If you want to sit out of the dust, the kitchen bench is empty.”
Tala looked at the woman, then at the twin black muzzles of the shotgun, and finally at the cattle buyer who was retreating toward the shady side of the corral.
“Thank you,” Tala said quietly. “I will take the water. But I will stay by the wagon until the horses have finished their grain.”
She walked past Crane as though he were a pile of dry cow dung in the trail. She dipped a tin cup into the sweating earthenware jar, drank two long, clean swallows of the cold mountain water, and walked back across the sun-drenched yard to the spring wagon.