By midafternoon, the valley had reorganized itself around Maverick Cole’s homestead.
What had begun as a solitary man’s desperate battle against raw yellow pine logs turned, overnight, into the collective labor of an entire clan. Thirty women and older men came up the river trail carrying woven burden baskets, stone mauls, skinning knives, and bundles of straight, seasoned cedar poles. They did not come out of subservience or fear; they came because Lobo Negro had walked through the village with his head held high, announcing that the eastern water was no longer an exposed gate, but the hearth of his daughter and the white man who had bled beside her.
Maverick stood on the foundation stones, his flannel shirt soaked with sweat, watching the procession arrive. He was unaccustomed to hands offering help without an account ledger being opened. In the cattle outfits of New Mexico and Texas, every favor was marked down against next month’s wages; every hot meal was subtracted from thirty dollars a month and found. But here, an elderly woman whose face was as creased as an old saddle blanket simply set down a basket of river clay mixed with dry grama grass, handed Maverick a smooth wooden paddle, and began showing him how to chink the gaps between the second and third logs to keep out the winter gales.
Hesper worked beside him throughout the daylight hours. She had washed the black powder and dried blood from her face in the cold pool of the spring, but she had not picked up the buckskin veil. It lay folded inside Maverick’s saddlebag in the willow brush, discarded like the skin of a winter-shed rattlesnake.
Her unmasked presence was at first a quiet shock to the village women. For five long years, they had turned their eyes aside when she passed, observing the ancient mourning taboos that protected a chief’s family from shame. Now, they saw her in the bright, unforgiving Arizona sunlight. They saw the pale, puckered line of the burn running from her left temple down to the base of her throat; they saw how the contracted tissue pulled the corner of her left eye into a sharp, hawk-like slant. But they also saw her laughing—a clear, ringing laugh that echoed off the sandstone cliffs as she hauled heavy cedar lintels into place with Maverick’s help, her strong, callused hands gripping the timber with the strength of a seasoned woodsman.
"Look at her," murmured an old hunter named Chato, who sat on a deadfall shaving ash-wood pegs with a curved drawknife. He spoke in the guttural, rhythmic Mimbreño dialect, but he made sure Maverick could hear the pride in his tone. "The fire ate the skin, but it tempered the spirit like iron dipped in snow water. A woman with an untouched face weeps when the bread burns in the coals. A woman who survived Goyathlay’s pitch can stare down a mountain lion without dropping her basket."
Toward the fourth hour of the afternoon, Maverick called a halt to the wall-building. The four outer walls of the cabin had risen to nine logs high—nearly seven feet from the limestone footing—locked together with tight dovetail corners that fit so snugly an envelope could not be slid between the joints. The top plates were notched for the heavy ceiling joists that would support a roof of split-shake cedar, river mud, and turf.
"We need the hearthstone," Maverick said, leaning on his felling axe and wiping his brow with a greasy bandanna. "A house without a stone chimney is just a wooden pen that catches fire the first time you throw green oak on the coals. If we don't seat the hearth before the roof goes on, we’ll be dragging boulders through the doorway on grease-planks like fools."
Hesper looked up from where she was kneading river clay with water in a wooden trough. She wiped her muddy hands on her deerskin apron and nodded toward the riverbed.
"Two bends up, where the water cuts into the red bluff," she said in her melodic, clear voice. "There is a shelf of black slate that fell from the high mesa before the great sickness. It does not crack when the fire burns hot. My mother used it to bake seed cakes when I was a child."
Maverick hitched Bramble to a heavy ash-wood stone boat—a flat sled made of split logs braced with iron bolts that he had salvaged from an abandoned Mexican freight wagon. Followed by half a dozen young men who had traded their carbines for pry bars and cedar rollers, they moved up the stony riverbank until they reached the red bluff Hesper had described.