He worked until his palms were cracked and bloody, then rubbed bacon grease and pine gum into the splits until they callused over like horn.
Every afternoon at the fourth hour, Hesper came.
She never brought the veil off in the sunlight, but she no longer stood thirty paces away like a frightened doe. She would bring him fresh water, wild onions, cured venison, and loaves of dense mesquite-meal bread. Sometimes she brought an adze or an auger she had borrowed from the tribal tool-shelter, setting them down where he could reach them without comment.
She began to stay longer.
While Maverick worked on the high corner joints, fitting the logs with heavy swings of his mallet, Hesper would sit on an overturned log with a skinning knife and a bundle of dried willow withes, stripping the green bark and weaving thick, water-tight storage baskets.
They did not speak much. Maverick was not a man who wasted words when the sun was high and work remained to be done, and Hesper had lived in silence for so long that speech seemed to cost her an effort of will. But the silence between them ceased to be a battlefield; it became a shelter.
On the fifteenth evening, as dusk was turning the sky to the color of crushed plums, Maverick walked up to the natural spring behind the cabin site to wash the day's sweat and pitch from his arms and chest.
The spring pooled in a limestone basin five feet across, shaded by an overhanging shelf of weeping ferns. The water was icy, bubbling up directly from the deep subterranean chambers of the mountain.
As he reached the edge of the limestone ledge, he heard the faint sound of splashing water.
Maverick froze. His hand went instantly to the butt of his Colt. He crept forward through the ferns, parting the green frills with the tips of his fingers, and looked down into the pool.
Hesper was there.
She had removed her buckskin veil and her deerskin dress, laying them neatly across a dry flat rock beside her moccasins. She was kneeling at the edge of the clear water, her back to him, washing her hair with the suds of crushed yucca root.
The evening light, filtered through the willow branches, fell across her bare shoulders and back.
Maverick felt a sudden, sharp intake of air in his chest. Her back was long, lean, and graceful, the muscles along her spine shifting with fluid, perfect symmetry as she leaned forward to rinse her dark hair in the cold spring. But as she turned her head sideways to wring out the water, the dying sunlight caught the full profile of her face and throat.
The scar was there—vivid, pale, and puckered against the warm bronze of her skin. Yet in the quiet solitude of the mountain spring, stripped of her defensive rage and the suffocating shroud of the veil, there was no ugliness in her.
Her profile was proud, her nose straight and aristocratic, her lips full and soft, set in an expression of deep, solitary sorrow. She looked like a wild creature that had survived an arrow through the lung—scarred, fierce, and infinitely resilient.
She plunged her head into the basin, shook out the water in a spray of silver droplets that caught the amber light, and then paused.
Her back stiffened.
She did not turn around, but her hands froze on the edges of the stone pool. Her voice cut through the stillness like a drawn blade.
"I hear your boots on the shale, Maverick."
Maverick did not run, nor did he look away. He stepped out from the fern thicket, keeping his hands open at his sides.
"I came to wash," Maverick said quietly. "I didn't know you were here."
She reached down with lightning speed, seized the dark buckskin veil from the rock, and pulled it over her wet hair, tying the horsehair cord with trembling, frantic fingers before turning to face him. She snatched up her dress, holding it against her chest like an iron shield.
Through the eye-slits of the leather, her obsidian eyes blazed with a mixture of terror and white-hot fury.
"You spy on me," she hissed, her voice trembling. "Like a dog hunting scraps around a butcher's wagon."
"I don't spy on anybody," Maverick said, holding his ground. "I walked up the trail to rinse off pine pitch. If I wanted to hide in the brush, you’d never have heard my boots on that shale."
"You saw me."
"I did."
"Are you satisfied now?" she spat, her knuckles turning white where she gripped the deerskin dress. "Did you look long enough at the monster you bought with your river bottom?"
Maverick stepped forward until he was standing on the lower ledge, only four feet from where she stood shivering in the mountain wind.