Between her and the house lay two miles of open space. Behind her, stretching away toward the Mexican border and the blue, jagged ramparts of the Sierra Madre, lay eighty leagues of mountain, canyon, and desert—an immense, untamed wilderness where no town had ever been built and no ledger had ever recorded a debt.
She was completely alone.
If she turned the chestnut’s head to the south and rode across the divide, no man could stop her. Jonah had no weapon in his hand; he held no paper with her name; he had no claim upon her hours, her labor, or her breath. She had thirty silver dollars in her cherry-wood box, her mother’s feather against her heart, and the skill to find water in the dry sand where white men died of thirst.
She felt the great, frightening weight of that silence.
For centuries, her people had known that true freedom was not an absence of danger; freedom was the terrible, beautiful necessity of choosing what to do with one’s own life in an indifferent world. Hutchins had tried to take that weight from her by turning her into property; others had tried to take it by offering her the protection of a cage with a comfortable floor.
Jonah Reed had done neither. He had simply cut the hemp rope, opened the gate, and stood back, allowing her the room to discover that the only ground worth standing upon is the ground you choose to occupy with your own boots.
Tala looked long at the southern mountains, where Sika was living in the high, secret caves of the Eagle’s Nest, waiting for the autumn trade. She would go to those mountains when the acorns turned brown, as she had promised Noche by the creek. She would sit beside her mother’s fire, listen to the old songs of the quail clan, and eat the wild plum cakes beneath the scrub oak.
But she would not go as an exile fleeing a sheriff’s writ. She would go as a woman who had a home of her own, a room with a cedar chest, and a hearth where her name was spoken with respect.
A home, she understood now, was not the place that held a person captive by force or by duty. A home was the place from which a person had the absolute freedom to leave, and to which she had the absolute freedom to return.
She touched the mare’s neck with the leather rein.
The horse turned smoothly beneath her, pivoting on its hocks until its head was pointed back down the stony bench toward the north.
Tala let the mare break into a gentle lope. The warm wind of the late afternoon caught her indigo skirt, billowing the dark wool against the stirrup leathers, and the scent of the wet sage filled her lungs with every stride. She rode down the long, red hill toward the low adobe house, not because she belonged to Jonah Reed, and not because the world was safe, but because the road was open, the gate was unlatched, and she had chosen for herself to ride home before the setting of the sun.
Seven years passed across the Peloncillo basin like the shadow of a summer hawk crossing a limestone bench—swift, silent, leaving the great, ancient face of the land unchanged beneath the sun.
The territory of Arizona had continued to transform itself with the frantic, noisy energy of the late nineteenth century. The railroad had laid its twin ribbons of steel across the southern desert from El Paso to the Pacific, bringing trainloads of immigrants, Eastern machinery, and territorial politicians with starched linen collars who built brick courthouses and surveyed the old Spanish grants into neat square sections.
Black Mesa had grown from a dusty freight crossroad into a thriving town with three churches, a two-story hotel with mirrored barrooms, and a weekly newspaper that printed editorials about progress, civilization, and the pacification of the frontier.
Elias Hutchins had not been elected to the territorial council. The transcript of the Tucson hearing, copied and circulated by his political rivals, had clung to his reputation like pine tar, and when the federal inspectors finally audited the ration accounts at San Carlos, his commission business had quietly collapsed under the weight of unpaid drafts and disputed vouchers. He had sold his freight warehouse to an outfit from St. Louis and moved north toward the mining camps of the Verde, leaving behind only an empty desk and a name that older men invoked whenever they spoke of the sharp practices of the early days.
At the ranch beneath the Peloncillos, the adobe walls had weathered thirty seasons of rain, their mud plaster repaired each autumn with fresh straw and river silt until the corners were as thick and solid as the benchland itself.