Caleb stood in the yard for a long moment, the Colt still cocked in his hand, his chest heaving with adrenaline. Slowly, deliberately, he let the hammer down with his thumb and slid the heavy revolver back into its oiled sheath.
He turned toward Clara. She was looking at him, not with fear, but with a quiet, measuring respect that seemed to weigh his soul in the balance.
“You know the law,” he said, his voice rough.
“My father made certain I knew every statute that could be used against us,” she answered softly. “A gun can kill a man, Caleb. But a crooked pen can starve an entire people.”
Caleb wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “They’ll be back. Vale doesn't make empty threats. In two days, he’ll bring twenty men with rifles, and Tucker will stand by watching with a writ in his pocket.”
“Then we have forty-eight hours to find what my father buried,” Clara said, turning toward the northern ridge. “Get your rifle, Caleb. We are going to cross your father’s fence.”
They rode north as the midday heat began to bake the valley floor, turning the limestone cliffs into mirrors that reflected blinding, white light. Caleb rode Barnaby, while Clara rode his mother’s old buckskin mare, a sure-footed animal accustomed to the treacherous scree slopes of the higher draws. Across the pommel of his saddle, Caleb carried a Winchester Model 1873 .44-40, its bluing worn silvery at the receiver from years of hard use. Clara carried her father’s leather satchel, a canteen of river water, and an unlit tin hurricane lantern tied to her saddle strings.
The country grew wilder and more hostile as they climbed away from the homestead. Mesquite gave way to dense thickets of blackbrush, twisted mountain cedar, and towering century plants whose dried stalks pointed toward the sky like wooden lances. The air up here smelled of sun-baked shale and resinous pine.
After an hour of hard climbing through a dry, boulder-choked arroyo, they reached the northern fence line.
It was an imposing barrier of hand-split cedar posts, weathered to the color of bone, strung with three tight lines of heavy Glidden-pattern barbed wire. It cut across the canyon like a scar, dividing the scrubby pastures of the Morgan place from the high, green timbered slopes claimed by the Vale syndicate.
Caleb reined in Barnaby, looking at the wire. “This is the line. My father told me there was nothing beyond it but snakes and drought.”
Clara rode up alongside him. Without a word, she reached down into her boot and pulled out a pair of heavy iron fencing pliers. With three sharp, metallic snaps, she severed the wire strands. The tension released with a menacing twang, the coils snapping back into the brush like striking vipers.
Caleb stared at her, half-shocked, half-admiring. “That’s destruction of fence. Under territorial law, that’s a hanging offense.”
“Only if the man who built it owned the ground,” she replied, tucking the pliers back into her boot. “Let us see what your father was hiding.”
They led their horses through the gap, stepping onto ground that had not felt a Morgan boot in twenty years.
Almost immediately, the terrain changed. The dry, cracked earth gave way to damp limestone benches where wild maidenhair ferns clung to the shadows. In the bottom of the draw, hidden beneath a canopy of dense willows, a thin thread of crystal-clear water seeped through the gravel, trickling quietly over smooth, white pebbles before disappearing into a limestone fissure.
“The creek didn't dry up,” Caleb whispered, dismounting and kneeling beside the water. He cupped a handful to his mouth. It was ice-cold, sweet, and completely free of the mineral bitterness that fouled his well below. “It was diverted.”
“Not diverted,” Clara said, pointing upward toward a massive face of fractured limestone that rose fifty feet above the canyon floor. “Sealed. Look there.”
Caleb followed her gaze. At the base of the cliff, half-choked by a massive pile of talus boulders and ancient landslide debris, lay the mouth of a dark cavern. But the rockfall was not natural. The boulders were fractured with sharp, clean breaks, and the unmistakable yellow residue of blasting powder clung to the crevices of the limestone.
“Someone brought dynamite up here,” Caleb murmured, his mind reeling. “Years ago.”
“Eighteen years ago,” Clara said, walking toward the opening. “The week my father disappeared.”
They picketed the horses in the shade of the willows, and Caleb lit the wick of the tin lantern. The yellow flame guttered against the cool, damp draft that breathed out from the cavern’s mouth—a draft that smelled of deep water, cold stone, and undisturbed centuries.
Caleb stepped through the narrow cleft first, holding the lantern high, his Winchester held ready in his left hand. Clara followed close behind, her footsteps silent as a shadow on the wet rock.
The passage was narrow at first, forcing them to squeeze through slick limestone walls that dripped with moisture. But after twenty yards, the ceiling vaulted upward into an immense natural chamber. The lantern light caught the glitter of calcite crystals lining the walls, reflecting hundreds of tiny, diamond-like points of light into the gloom.
And then they heard it.
It was not the feeble trickle of a surface seep. It was a deep, guttural roar that vibrated through the rock beneath their boots—the sound of an underground river crashing through a subterranean canyon with terrifying force.
Caleb moved the lantern forward. Ten paces ahead, the cavern floor terminated at a sheer drop. Below them, carving its way through a channel of polished black basalt, ran a torrent of clear, roaring water, twelve feet wide and rushing with enough power to turn a dozen mill wheels.
“The Great Underflow,” Clara whispered, her voice trembling with reverent awe. “The old Apache stories spoke of it. The River That Breathes Beneath the Stone. My grandmother said the valley was alive because this river carried the water from the high snow peaks straight through the belly of the earth.”