Before the warrior’s fingers could close around the walnut stock of his Winchester, Maverick moved with the blinding speed of a striking sidewinder.
He lunged forward, grabbed Goyathlay by the wrist with his left hand, twisted the joint with brutal leverage that wrenched a scream of pain from the warrior’s throat, and pulled him violently out of the saddle.
Goyathlay hit the rocky ground with a bone-jarring crash.
Before he could roll over or reach for the knife at his belt, Maverick had his heavy boot planted firmly on the center of the warrior’s throat, pressing down just enough to cut off his breath. Maverick drew his Colt Army revolver with a single, fluid motion and jammed the cold iron muzzle against the bridge of Goyathlay’s nose.
The warriors behind them drew their breath in sharply, several reaching for their lances, but Lobo Negro raised a single, commanding hand, freezing every man in his saddle.
"Look at him," Maverick said, his voice carrying to every warrior in the line, though his eyes never left Goyathlay’s terrified, bulging pupils. "This is the man who wanted to lead you into war. A man who burns women in the dark and barks like a cur when the real wolves show up. If any man among you thinks he deserves to draw breath in this valley, step forward and take him."
No man moved. Not a single warrior raised a voice in Goyathlay’s defense.
The truth had been spoken beneath the morning sun, witnessed by the dead raiders and the ancient red stones of the canyon.
Maverick looked down at the choking warrior for five long seconds. Then, slowly, he eased the pressure off the man’s throat and took three steps back, lowering the revolver to his side.
"Get up," Maverick commanded. "Take your pony and ride out through that gap. If I ever see your face in this valley again—if you ever cross the Willow Water or look upon my wife—I won't call a council. I will hunt you down like a rabid coyote and leave your carcass for the ants. Now get out."
Goyathlay scrambled to his feet, gasping for air, clutching his bruised throat. He looked at Lobo Negro, but the chief turned his back on him with cold, absolute disgust. He looked at his fellow warriors, but every man looked away, refusing to meet the eyes of a disgraced outcast.
With a ragged, strangled cry of pure hatred, Goyathlay mounted his pony, wheeled the animal around, and galloped through the eastern gap, vanishing into the dry, sun-scorched wasteland beyond the spires.
Maverick watched him go until the dust settled. Then he turned, walked back through the clear river water, and stood before Hesper.
The morning sun had cleared the rim of the canyon now, flooding the entire valley with brilliant, golden light. It touched the green willows, the dark fertile loam of the eastern bench, and the quiet, radiant face of the woman who stood waiting for him.
Hesper reached out her hand. Maverick took it in his, their callused, scarred fingers locking together with a strength that no paper deed or cattle syndicate could ever break.
"Come," Hesper said softly, a true smile touching her lips for the first time in five years. "The sun is up, Maverick. We have a home to build."
The dust raised by Goyathlay’s pony drifted down into the river shallows and dissolved in the cold current, carried west toward the salt flats and the dry washes of the border country. When the hoofbeats finally faded into the vast, stony silence of the eastern desert, the canyon did not erupt into shouting or wild victory songs. It settled instead into a deep, working quiet—the quiet of men and women who understood that a single skirmish at a bottleneck was not the end of a war, but merely the turning of a page before the real bloodletting began.
Lobo Negro lingered at the water’s edge until the midday sun had driven the mountain shadows back into the cliffs. He did not issue commands with the harsh, barking cadence of military officers; he merely looked at his scouts, touched the silver medallion against his chest, and gestured toward the high rimrock trails. Ten young men turned their ponies without a word, riding out in pairs along the secret scree paths that led to the eagle roosts above the spires. They carried mirrors of polished tin, dry smoke cedar bundles, and repeating carbines. From those heights, no mounted company could move within twenty miles of the San Simon breaks without a signal flashing down to the river bottoms within the hour.
The remaining warriors dismounted to deal with the dead. The bodies of Vance McCall’s three dead regulators were stripped of their boots, their cartridge belts, their coats, and their weapons—every scrap of lead, brass, and cured leather being an irreplaceable commodity in a country where the federal government had placed an embargo on tribal trade. Their corpses were loaded across two pack mules, led three miles out into the alkaline gravel beyond the twin spires, and left on a barren limestone bench where the desert buzzards and kit foxes would do the work of gravediggers under the scorching sun. It was the hard, unsentimental law of the border: those who rode into another man’s home to burn and murder did not earn an acre of Christian dirt or a wooden cross.