There, half-buried in the alluvial silt and wild blackberry vines, lay an immense slab of dark basalt slate. It was four inches thick, five feet long, and three feet across, flat as a billiard table and polished smooth by ten centuries of river floods.
It took two hours of back-breaking, levering toil to roll the stone onto the wooden sled. The men grunted, their moccasins slipping on the wet clay, shouting instructions in a mixture of Spanish, Apache, and frontier English. Maverick worked at the center bar, his heavy boots dug into the gravel, his veins standing out on his neck like hemp ropes as he strained against the ash-wood lever. When the great stone finally tipped forward with a heavy, sucking thud onto the sled’s pine runners, the young warriors cheered, slapping Maverick’s broad back with open palms.
"You have the shoulders of a mule, white man," laughed young Koy, the eight-year-old grandson Maverick had saved in the wash days before, who had hitched his calico pony to Bramble’s traces to add his own tiny share of pull. "My uncle Goyathlay said you were weak because you ate soft bread in the towns. He lied."
"Your uncle Goyathlay spent too much time looking in the mirror," Maverick said, catching his breath and tousling the boy’s thick, dark hair. "Bread doesn't make a man strong, Koy. Hard ground makes a man strong."
They dragged the great hearthstone back to the cabin site as the sun dipped behind the western peaks, throwing long, cool purple shadows across the valley floor.
With block, tackle, and four stout cedar rollers, they guided the dark basalt into the wide gap left in the eastern wall. It settled into its bed of wet river sand and mortar with a final, resonant clack that sounded through the hollow frame of the house like a church bell ringing in an empty cathedral.
Maverick knelt beside the stone, running his scarred fingertips across its cold, velvety surface.
"Here," he whispered.
Hesper knelt beside him. She reached into the pouch of her tunic, brought out a small handful of sacred yellow cattail pollen—the hadntin used by her people to bless every life passage from birth to the warrior’s trail—and scattered it across the center of the dark slate.
"May this stone never go cold," Hesper said, her voice dropping into a solemn prayer that seemed to draw the quiet of the dusk around them. "May the fire that burns upon it warm our children, feed the weary stranger who enters through our door, and remind the earth that we are here."
Maverick looked at her in the dying light. The shadows softened the harsh lines of the burn on her cheek, leaving only the fierce, luminous beauty of her eyes and the proud carriage of her neck. He laid his large, callused hand over hers, pressing her fingers against the pollen-dusted slate.
"It won't go cold, Hesper," Maverick promised. "Not while I’ve got breath to swing an axe, and not while there’s timber standing on this river."
That night, they slept for the first time within the square perimeter of the four walls. The roof was not yet shingled; above them, through the straight pine rafters, the Arizona night sky arched in an unbroken vault of velvet black and cold, blazing stars. The smell of fresh-cut pine resin, wet clay mortar, and burning cedar smoke wrapped around them like an impenetrable cloak.
For the first time in fifteen years of drift-living, Maverick Cole did not keep his revolver beneath his cheek. He laid it on the window ledge beside his boots, pulled the heavy Navajo blankets over Hesper’s shoulders as she curled her back against his chest, and slept the deep, untroubled sleep of a man who had finally laid his anchor into the center of the world.
Three days after the hearthstone was laid, the signal mirrors flashed from the northern crags.
It was not the rapid, frantic strobe that warned of charging cavalry or raiders at the gallop. It was the long, deliberate pulse of a long-distance scout relaying news from the southern telegraph trail along the Southern Pacific line.
By noon, two riders came down through the willow breaks, their horses trotting with the steady, mile-eating lope of the mountain-bred stock. They rode straight to Lobo Negro’s council lodge, dismounted without unsaddling, and disappeared beneath the low leather flap.
Ten minutes later, young Koy ran down the river path to the eastern homestead, his breath coming in shallow gasps, his dark eyes wide with urgent importance.
"Uncle Maverick!" the boy called out, using the honorific he had adopted since the stone-raising. "My grandfather calls you to the council. He says you must put on your town coat, bring your papers from Tucson, and sit beside him at the center fire."
Maverick was perched atop a cedar ladder, driving a six-inch wrought-iron nail through the final roof shake of the cabin’s front porch. He paused, the heavy claw hammer held mid-swing, and looked down at Hesper, who was winnowing dry corn kernels from the chaff in a shallow willow tray.