The sixth day began before the sun had any kindness in it, with the desert air still holding the cold of the night in its hollows and Elias Whitlock already in the saddle. He had slept on the ground with his coat for a blanket and his hat pulled low over his eyes, and when he woke the stars were thinning above the red rim of the world and his left ribs were aching in that deep, muffled way they always did when he had slept on stone. He sat up slowly, pressed his palm once against the old wound at his side, and waited for the thump inside him to settle into something he could ride with.
Sage stood where he had picketed her, a thick-boned buckskin mare with a patience in her eyes that Elias had come to trust more than most men's promises. He rubbed her neck, checked her feet, gave her the last of the water from his canteen in the cup of his hand, and swung up with the unhurried, economical grace of a man who had spent his youth in the saddle and his early manhood in the infantry. He did not hurry the mare into a pace she could not hold.
Six days of dust had settled deep into the weave of his canvas shirt. It was in his hair, under his fingernails, in the creases of his neck, and in the seams of the saddlebags where he kept what little he owned. He had one dream left to his name, and it had carried him across more empty country than he cared to count. Land. Not gold, not silver, and not the reckless, bloody glory men talked about around campfire lights when they were young enough to believe that dying for a piece of silk banner meant something. Just a few acres of dark, rich soil beside a clean river, where no one could ever ride up, unroll an official sheet of parchment, and tell him to move along again. He had been moved along too many times. As a boy after his mother died. As a soldier when the war was done with him. As a man with back-pay in his pocket and no address in the world to spend it on. Land meant a door that stayed shut against the wind, a creek that ran in the same place every morning, a fence he had built with his own hands. It meant staying.
At twenty-seven, Elias was lean as an iron bar. The sun of three territories had weathered his face brown, and the wind had cut fine lines at the corners of his grey eyes. His jaw was straight, his mouth rarely opened unless there was a direct point to be made, and his eyes looked through things rather than at them, the way a man looks through a stand of timber to find the line of a creek beyond it. He did not talk to fill silence. He had learned, in the war and after it, that silence was often the truest thing a man could offer, and he offered it generously.
In the pocket of his coat rode the heavy, key-wind gold pocket watch his father had left behind. The crystal was cracked down the middle like a lightning bolt, and the escapement had stopped ticking at twenty minutes past four on some forgotten afternoon twenty years ago. Elias had wound it a hundred times as a boy, hoping the hands would move, and they never had. Now he carried it because it was the only thing of his father's he had ever held that had not been taken, sold, or lost. The watch did not tell him the time. It told him who he was, and that was enough.
His mother had died of the summer throat-ailment when he was four. He remembered her only in fragments: the smell of lye soap on her hands, a song hummed low while she shelled beans on a porch, the cool weight of her palm on his forehead when fever made the room swim. After her, there had been his father, Thomas Whitlock, a surveyor who could draw a line through five miles of dense timber with nothing more than a brass compass and a pocket notebook. When Elias was seven, Thomas had saddled his red bay horse in Missouri, kissed the top of Elias's head on the porch, and ridden west toward the Arizona Territory.
I'm going to find our place, son, Thomas had told him, his voice steady and certain in the way that makes a small boy believe anything. "A piece of bottomland with timber on the ridges and cold water in the creek. Once the cabin is up, I'll send for you."
He had never sent for him. No letter came. No rider brought word. Thomas had simply vanished into the massive, empty stretches of the Western territories as if the dry wind had swallowed him whole. Elias had waited a year, then two, then stopped waiting in any way a boy can name, and started instead to carry the waiting inside him like a stone in his boot: always there, rarely spoken of, shaping the way he walked. He did not know whether his father was dead or merely lost or had chosen some other life and let the old one go. Not knowing was its own kind of grief, quieter than a grave and harder to lay down. The brass compass, his father's too, rode in his saddlebag, and Elias had learned to use it the way his father had taught him in the yard before he left: sight, note, walk, sight again. It was the closest thing to a conversation they had ever had.