Then the War Between the States had swept through Missouri like a prairie fire. A lead ball at Wilson's Creek had taken a chunk of bone out of his ribs and left his left arm stiff in cold weather, so that on winter mornings he had to work his fingers open like a man coaxing a rusted hinge. Typhoid had nearly burned his brain to ash in a field hospital near Cairo. He had watched three boys he grew up with get turned into red clay by grapeshot on a Tuesday morning before breakfast, boys whose names he still said aloud sometimes when he was alone. When the war finally released its hold on him in the spring of 1865, Elias had stepped out of a discharge tent into a world that felt hollowed out and completely silent.
He had turned his back on Missouri, bought Sage with his back-pay, and ridden straight toward the setting sun. He had worked a fence line here, a cattle drive there, a winter mending harness in a barn in New Mexico, and all the while the dream of land had narrowed and sharpened until it was the only thing he wanted with his whole heart. Not a ranch. Not an empire. A place to stop. A creek. A garden. A roof that would not be taken from him by a paper signed in a town he had never seen.
By the sixth afternoon, the flat, baked plains of creosote and snake-weed gave way to the jagged red ramparts of the Apache range. The mountains rose up like rust-colored teeth against a sky so fiercely blue it hurt the eyes to look at it. Sage's ears came forward. Elias felt his own breath change, the way it changes when a man comes within sight of something he has been walking toward for years without knowing its shape. The light here was different: harder, cleaner, laying every stone and shadow out plain. The wind smelled of dust and resin and distant rain that might never fall. Far ahead, in a fold of the land, a thin thread of smoke rose and bent sideways, and Elias knew that was a town, and that towns meant questions, and questions meant men who wanted something from a stranger.
He rode on, slowly, watching the ground the way his father had taught him, noting where the grass thickened and where a dry wash cut its crooked line toward the peaks. The red peaks seemed to grow larger with every mile. His ribs thumped their muffled hammer beat. Ahead, below a low ridge, Lark Spur Flat waited in the heat haze. Elias reined in Sage on the ridge above Lark Spur Flat and sat a long moment in the saddle, looking down, saying nothing, letting the mare blow and letting himself arrive.
Lark Spur Flat was not much to look at from the ridge, and it was less up close. Elias rode down the slope with Sage picking her way through loose stone, and the town showed itself in pieces as the heat haze thinned: twelve unpainted wooden shacks strung along a single rutted track, their boards bleached silver-grey by sun and wind, their roofs patched with tin and tar paper and whatever else a man could find when the rain finally remembered the place. A horse-trough stood by the track, full of green scum, with a thin skin of algae that broke and reformed around the muzzle of a mule drinking with long-suffering patience. Chickens scratched in the dust between the shacks. A dog lay flat in the shade of a wagon wheel, one eye open, too hot to bother with a stranger. The wind moved a sheet of old newspaper along the track and then abandoned it against a fence post, where it rattled softly like something trying to get loose.
The mercantile was the largest building in town, which was not saying much. It stood with its porch boards warped and its door propped open, and from inside came a smell Elias recognised at once: bacon grease, black powder, and stale whiskey, laid over the deeper smells of leather, coffee, dried beans, and dust. A sign above the door, hand-painted and long since faded, said MERCANTILE in letters that had once been red. A second sign, nailed lower and newer, said NO CREDIT in letters that looked as if they had been burned in with a hot nail. Elias tied Sage at the hitching rack, loosened her girth a notch, and gave her a drink from his hat at the far end of the trough, where the water was least green. Then he stepped up onto the creaking porch and into the store.
Inside it was cooler, darker, and crowded with the goods a desert town lives on. Shelves ran along the walls with tinned peaches and beans, sacks of flour and cornmeal, coils of rope, boxes of cartridges, bolts of calico, hammers, horseshoes, lamp oil, and jars of hard candy gone cloudy with age. A counter of scarred wood divided the room, and behind it sat an old man on an overturned lard tub, using a bone-handled knife to shave plug tobacco into his palm with the slow, practiced care of a man who had done it ten thousand times and intended to do it ten thousand more. He was sixty-eight if he was a day, with white whiskers, a leather apron, and eyes that missed nothing even when they looked half-closed. He glanced up as Elias entered, took in the dust on the shirt, the grey eyes, the quiet way Elias stood, and nodded once, as if filing the stranger away under a heading he would decide later.