Maverick Cole had spent five years convincing himself that a drifting man owed nothing to the world and needed nothing from it.
Out where the heat devils danced across the gravel flats of southern Arizona, philosophy had a way of drying up like creek water in June. By the midday heat of his third day riding east from Tucson, Maverick could taste iron and alkaline dust on his tongue, and every bone in his lower back felt ground against anvil iron. The sky was an unforgiving blue plate that pressed down on the basin, bleaching the scrub and turning the distant volcanic ridges into pale purple jagged teeth.
Behind him trailed Bramble, a claybank gelding whose coat was crusted white where sweat had dried and caked into salt. Bramble had stopped blowing through his nostrils or protesting the climb two hours back; whenever Maverick drew rein to scan the canyon cuts, the gelding simply dropped his head until his nose hovered inches above the white stone.
Maverick took his tin canteen from the pommel, shook it, and felt only a small, lukewarm slosh against the metal wall. He unstoppered it, took a single mouthful, held it against his cracked palate until the tissues stopped stinging, and swallowed. Then he poured two drops into the palm of his worn leather work glove and rubbed it along the gelding’s dry muzzle.
"Not much farther, old son," Maverick muttered. His voice was sandpaper against raw wood. "Or else we bought ourselves the prettiest unmarked grave in the territory."
Underneath his flannel shirt and greasy leather vest, tucked flat against his ribs in an oiled-cloth packet, rested the paper that had pulled him into this wasteland.
It was an official territorial land claim, stamped with the seal of Pima County and endorsed by an agency clerk whose ledger room in Tucson smelled of stale pipe tobacco and sour whiskey. The paper bore clear, elegant bureaucratic script: Three hundred and twenty acres situated in the San Carlos foothills, bounded south by the red breaks and east by the perennial bend of the Willow Water. And below that line, written in dark, dried gall-nut ink, was the name: Maverick Cole.
Maverick had never purchased that title. He had never filed an intent to homestead, nor had he ever bribed a land registrar. He had come to Arizona after three seasons driving longhorns up through New Mexico for an outfit that went broke before payday, leaving him with seventy dollars in gold coin, a reliable Henry lever-action rifle, an old Colt Army revolver, and the saddle beneath him.
Yet three nights ago, in a Tucson saloon where card games ended with knives on the pine tables, an elderly clerk had sought him out by name, handed him the deed, and whispered that if he wanted to see dirt that didn't die every summer, he had better saddle up before the land speculators got wind of it.
A valley where the grass hides a yearling, the clerk had said. Where the river doesn't run dry even when the heavens lock up.
Most men in the bar had laughed. Men died in the desert chasing ghost rivers and Spanish gold mines. But Maverick was thirty-two years old, and he was tired to the marrow of his spine. He had mended barbed wire until his palms were laced with white scar tissue; he had broken colts for men who looked down on him from wide front porches; he had laid his head on corn-husk mattresses in bunkhouses where nothing belonged to him except the boots on his feet.
He wanted an acre of ground where no boss could stand in the doorway at dawn and tell him to roll his bedroll and move on.
Maverick spurred Bramble gently, coaxing the horse up an incline of loose volcanic shale. The path was barely a deer run, hugging the rim of an ancient basalt escarpment. The desert below stretched like a shattered ribcage—red clay washes, saguaro sentinels standing straight and barren, and sun-baked limestone bluffs.
Near four o'clock, the wind shifted.
It didn't come hot and dry like breath from a furnace. It brought a cool, damp scent—the unmistakable green tang of crushed willow bark, damp leaf litter, and deep, cold water. Bramble’s ears shot forward. The gelding lifted his chin, sniffing the air, and let out a soft, guttural whicker.
"You smell it too, don't you?" Maverick whispered.
He cleared the final rocky notch between two towering pillars of sandstone.
Maverick pulled Bramble to an abrupt halt and forgot to breathe.
Spreading out below the bluffs was a hidden world. While the desert above remained sun-blasted and dead, the basin floor opened into an immense bowl of emerald and jade. A river—broad, winding, and clear as cut crystal—cut through the heart of the valley, lined with massive cottonwoods whose crowns fluttered in a gentle breeze. Lush grama grass rose tall enough to ripple like an inland sea. Patches of dark, alluvial loam ran along the terraces, bordered by carefully irrigated patches of squash and sweet corn.