The garden behind the kitchen was green with pinto beans, squash, and sweet corn, watered by the steady, rhythmic pumping of the four-bladed windmill. Along the southern wall of the veranda, Mary Reed’s wild yellow cliff-roses had taken root in the gravel, climbing three feet up the whitewashed bricks and blooming every May with small, fragrant blossoms that smelled of wild honey and sun-baked stone.
It was an evening in late October, just before the first frost of seventy-seven.
A young man in a dark city coat and high-crowned bowler hat sat upon the veranda bench, an open leather notebook balanced on his knee, a gold-nibbed pen in his fingers. He was a reporter from the Tucson Daily Citizen, a young fellow named Harrington who had come out on the morning buckboard to write a series of biographical sketches on the early settlers of the territorial borderlands.
Opposite him, on a low cedar stool, sat Tala.
She was twenty-five years old now, her frame filled out to the strong, grounded maturity of an Apache woman who had worked cattle, handled teams, and built stone fences with her own hands. She wore a skirt of fine black broadcloth, a clean white linen waist with bone buttons, and around her throat hung the thin leather thong carrying the small brass key to the cherry-wood caddy and Mary Reed’s silver thimble. Her dark hair was combed into two smooth, heavy plaits bound with red wool, and her dark eyes, clear and unclouded, held that calm, impenetrable depth that city men often mistook for indifference.
Jonah sat ten paces away on the chopping block beside the forge, his spectacles resting on his nose as he cleaned the action of his old Winchester with an oiled flannel rag. His hair was completely white now, like the rime on winter grass, and his shoulders had settled into a permanent, stooped curve, but his hands were as steady on the steel as they had been on the platform in Black Mesa seven years before.
The young reporter tapped his pen against the paper, his face alight with that dramatic, sentimental enthusiasm that journalists bring to the stories of the frontier.
“It is an extraordinary chronicle, Miss Tala,” Harrington said, his voice quick and eager in the quiet evening air. “Truly extraordinary. An authentic romance of the border. Old Mr. Reed, riding into the dusty square like a knight of old, throwing down his gold before the cruel merchant, purchasing your freedom from the auctioneer’s block, and bringing you here to his lonely rancho to be his faithful helpmeet through the wilderness years.”
He looked up, smiling with self-satisfaction as he prepared to write the concluding sentence of his column.
“I plan to head the article: The Captive of Black Mesa: How Jonah Reed Bought Liberty for an Apache Maiden. Our readers in San Francisco and Chicago will be profoundly moved by the chivalry of the frontier.”
Tala did not smile. She did not blink.
She sat with her hands folded quietly over her knees, her back straight against the adobe wall, her gaze resting on the young man’s polished boots with a cool, measured gravity that caused his smile to falter and then disappear.
“Put your pen down, Mr. Harrington,” Tala said.
Her English was quiet, clear, and perfectly articulated, carrying that slow, carrying resonance that made the young reporter’s fingers freeze over the notebook.
“You have written a story that sounds like the books they sell at the railway depot,” she said. “It is full of big words about knights and captives, because white men like to believe that whenever an Indian is standing upright, some Christian with gold must have lifted her up by the hands.”
She pointed a long, brown finger toward the open notebook.
“Cross out those words,” she commanded.
Harrington swallowed hard, his face reddening. “Miss Tala, I only intended to honor Mr. Reed’s extraordinary generosity—”
“Jonah Reed does not need your paper to honor him,” she interrupted, her voice firm as basalt. “And I do not need your pity to make my life real. Jonah did not buy my freedom, Mr. Harrington. A person cannot buy freedom for another, any more than he can breathe the air for another’s lungs. Freedom is not an article of trade that passes from one hand to another with four fifty-dollar gold pieces.”
She leaned forward slightly, her dark eyes pinning him to the wooden bench.
“Jonah Reed paid two hundred dollars to buy an official lie,” she said, speaking each word with cold, deliberate precision. “He bought three sheets of paper from a thief’s ledger so the law would have to answer for its own forgery. And when he cut the hemp rope from my wrists, he did not tell me to follow him. He did not ask for my gratitude, he did not ask for my labor, and he did not ask me to speak for him in the town.”