The warrior followed Caleb's finger down to the trap, then looked back up at Caleb's eyes. He didn't understand the English words, but he understood the predicament. He was trapped like a dying wolf, and the man standing before him was his only alternative to a slow, freezing death.
Slowly, deliberately, the Apache warrior lowered the knife. He did not drop it into the snow; he pressed the flat of the steel blade against his left thigh, his dark eyes fixed continuously on Caleb. It was a compromise born of necessity—a statement that he was allowing the white man to approach, but that death remained within arm's reach if Caleb made a single false move.
"Good enough," Caleb murmured.
He turned and walked back through the trees toward Rust. He retrieved a long iron lever he used for adjusting wagon axles, a bundle of clean cotton rags from his saddlebags, and a small bottle of medicinal carbolic acid he carried for horse wounds.
When Caleb returned to the clearing, the warrior watched his every move with sharp, hawkish intensity.
Caleb knelt in the bloody snow beside the trap, keeping his body positioned just far enough away to avoid a sudden lunging knife stroke. The iron jaws were buried two inches deep into the warrior’s flesh. The steel teeth had crushed the leather of his legging, splintering the muscle and biting near the bone.
"This is going to hurt," Caleb warned, looking the man squarely in the eyes. "It's going to hurt like hell."
Caleb wedged the iron lever beneath the primary spring on the left side of the trap. He leaned his entire body weight onto the iron bar, his shoulder muscles straining beneath his heavy sheepskin coat.
The rusted spring groaned, compressed slightly, but resisted.
Caleb grit his teeth, pouring all his strength into the lever. Sweat broke out on his forehead despite the sub-zero air. With a loud, violent CRACK, the spring yielded an inch.
The warrior let out a sharp, strangled hiss through his teeth, his fingers digging so deeply into the bark of the pine tree behind him that his fingernails cracked. But he did not scream, nor did he raise the knife.
"Hold on," Caleb growled, shifting his footing on the slippery ice.
He wedged a thick piece of pine hardwood into the gap to keep the left spring from snapping back shut, then moved the iron lever over to the right spring. He grunted, forcing the steel down with a final, violent push.
The saw-toothed iron jaws sprang apart.
Caleb instantly reached in with both hands, grasping the warrior's bloody leg above and below the wound, and pulled the crushed flesh clear of the trap.
The warrior’s head snapped back against the pine trunk, his dark eyes rolling back into his head as he finally passed out from the excruciating wave of pain.
The sudden silence in the clearing was heavy and absolute, broken only by the whistling of the mountain wind through the high pine canopy.
Caleb sat back on his heels in the bloody snow, his chest heaving, his gloved hands covered in dark, sticky blood that was already beginning to freeze into a hard crust in the bitter air.
He looked down at the unconscious warrior lying against the tree.
Without the fierce, dangerous glare in his eyes, the man looked human, vulnerable, and dangerously close to death. He was a broad-shouldered man in his late thirties, his long dark hair streaked with grease and pine ash, his face carved into deep lines by years of surviving in the harsh Arizona and New Mexico territories. Across his left shoulder was a long, white puckered scar—the unmistakable mark of a old saber slash.