Through the glass, she saw Jonah saddle the bay gelding. He moved without haste, checking the cinch twice with his fingers, testing the stirrup leathers, and slipping a canvas feed-bag into the bed of the light wagon that stood beside the shed. He led the horse through the gate, latched the heavy timber bar behind him, mounted, and rode north along the line of the scrub willow wash.
He did not look back at the house once. He did not turn to see whether she was in the kitchen, whether she had run toward the hills, or whether she was packing the cedar chest into a bundle. He rode as if the house behind him were entirely safe, or as if he had no right to question whatever she decided to do with its rooms while he was gone.
Tala turned back to the hearth. She took three dry mesquite knots from the woodbox, placed them on the grate of the iron stove, and reached for the box of sulfur matches resting beside the salt cellar. As the wood caught, crackling with a blue and yellow flame that warmed her chilled fingers, she realized that for the first time since the cavalry had ridden through her village on the upper Gila, no one was standing behind her to see how much meal she took from the bowl or how long she paused before she stirred the pot.
The heat came up suddenly after ten o'clock, burning away the frost from the wild clover and baking the adobe bricks of the ranch house until they smelled of warm straw and river mud. A silence settled over the basin, broken only by the continuous, dry tick-tick-tick of grasshoppers in the alkali scrub and the slow groaning of the windmill.
Tala sat on the rough stool beside the kitchen table. She had eaten two cold biscuits left from the day before, dipped in a little warm water with salt, refusing the pork from the brine barrel. Her stomach had shrunk during her confinement in Hutchins’s wagon, and she knew that heavy grease would make her feverish under the high sun.
The house was cool inside, the thick mud walls keeping out the glare of the noon day. In the corner of the small western room where she had spent the night stood the cedar chest Jonah had mentioned when he gave her the brass key.
She had not opened it the previous evening. A box belonging to a dead woman was not something to be disturbed lightly; among her mother’s people, the possessions of the dead were often burned or given to strangers beyond the clan so their shadows would not linger around the camp fires to trouble the living. But the cedar wood gave off an odor that pulled at her memory—a dry, fragrant resin that cut through the stale lime smell of the whitewash.
She stood up, walked into the small room, and knelt before the chest.
It was made of red cedar planks, pegged together with oak dowels and bound with straps of wrought iron that had been hammered thin and nailed with square brass tacks. The iron lock was unfastened, the latch hanging loose on its hinge.
Tala rested her hand on the lid. The wood was cold, silky-smooth from oil and polishing cloth. She took a breath, lifted the heavy lid, and tilted it back against the adobe wall.
Inside lay three folded wool blankets, dyed dark blue with indigo and smelling faintly of camphor. Beneath them, wrapped in a square of brown linen, were several small household articles: a silver thimble with a dented rim, a bundle of steel sewing needles tied with horsehair, two bone-handled hairpins, and a leather-bound hymn book with gold lettering that had faded to the color of dry sand.
Beneath the linen, tucked into the far corner of the chest, lay something else.
Tala’s hand paused in mid-air. Her breath caught, sticking like a thorn in her windpipe.
It was a piece of buckskin, eight inches wide and perhaps a foot long, tanned white with deer brains and bone grease until it was soft as the ear of a newborn fawn. The edges were cut clean, bordered with two rows of tiny glass beads—blue and white, strung on sinew. Down the center of the leather, stitched with split roots and dyed porcupine quills in shades of dull red and pale yellow, was a design of stepped clouds, four zigzag lightning paths, and the small, distinct track of the mountain quail.
It was Apache embroidery. But more than that, it was the specific hand of Sika.
Tala lifted the buckskin with both hands, her fingers trembling so hard that the glass beads gave a faint, whispering rustle against the cedar wood.