She set the tray down on the porch bench. Her face was calm, but the tiny muscle at the corner of her scarred eye tightened.
"The spider in Tucson has spun his thread," she said quietly. "Vance McCall did not go back to Texas to lick his wounds. He went to the courthouse."
Maverick descended the ladder, wiped his hands on his canvas trousers, and walked into the cool interior of the cabin. From the wooden peg near the hearth, he took down his dark wool frock coat—the one decent garment he owned, purchased three years ago in El Paso for a court hearing over a disputed brand—and slipped his arms through the sleeves. He retrieved the oiled-cloth packet containing the territorial deed and survey notes from the shelf above the fireplace, tucked it into his breast pocket, and checked the loading of his Colt.
"Do you want me to come with you?" Hesper asked from the doorway, her silhouette framed by the green valley and the rushing water behind her.
Maverick stopped and looked at her. She wore a simple dress of bleached deerskin, her long black hair tied back with a crimson silk ribbon he had bought from an itinerant Mexican peddler two days before.
"This council isn't just about Indian business, Hesper," Maverick said gently. "It’s about the title. It’s about law that was written by men in black broadcloth who never saw a mountain like this. They’ll look at you and try to find an excuse to declare this marriage invalid under territorial statute."
"Let them look," she said, her chin coming up with the haughty arrogance of her father’s lineage. "I am the daughter of Lobo Negro. I am your wife under the law of this river, which was old when the territory was only a blank space on a Spanish map. If a white judge thinks he can wipe my name from this earth with a pen, let him say it to my face."
Maverick smiled—a slow, genuine grin that erased the hard lines around his eyes. "Get your horse, Mrs. Cole. Let’s go hear what the lawyers have to say."
The council lodge was packed with thirty elders, chiefs of the sub-bands, and veteran warriors who had fought alongside Cochise and Victorio in the hard years before the reservations were built. They sat in three concentric circles around a bed of white-hot mesquite coals that gave off intense heat without a trace of blinding smoke.
At the northern head of the circle sat Lobo Negro, dressed in his full authority: a magnificent war shirt of mountain sheepskin adorned with blue glass trade beads, human hair locks, and porcupine quills, his silver Spanish medallion gleaming against his chest.
Sitting opposite the chief, looking profoundly uncomfortable on a low wooden bench covered with a greasy horse blanket, were two white men.
The first was a man Maverick recognized with a jolt of dry amusement: Horace Finch, the county clerk from Tucson who had slipped the original claim paper into Maverick’s hands in the back of the saloon three weeks ago. Finch looked thinner and considerably more terrified than he had in the city; his spectacles were fogged with steam from the council pot, his collar was wilted with trail sweat, and his city-cut boots were caked with dried alkaline mud.
The second man was an entirely different breed of animal. He was forty-five years old, thick-set as a prize bull, with close-cropped iron-gray hair, cold blue eyes that moved across the assembled warriors without the slightest flicker of fear, and a mouth that looked as if it had been carved from a block of salt beef. He wore a well-fitted gray broadcloth suit, tall riding boots of Spanish leather, and a broad-brimmed white Stetson resting on his knee.
Across his waistcoat hung a heavy gold watch chain, and pinned to the left lapel of his coat was the small, unadorned silver star of a Deputy United States Marshal.
"Cole," Finch croaked as Maverick entered the lodge with Hesper at his side. The clerk scrambled half an inch to his feet before catching Lobo Negro’s cold glare and sinking back onto the bench. "Thank God you’re alive. There were rumors in Benson that you’d been dry-gulched at the border and that Silas Vance was running two thousand head through the canyon."
"Silas Vance is spitting teeth and nursing three cracked ribs in a bordertown dive," Maverick said, stepping into the center of the lodge and standing with his feet apart, his thumbs hooked casually behind his cartridge belt. "And this valley is right where it was when you handed me that paper, Mr. Finch."
The man in the broadcloth suit stood up slowly. He was half a head shorter than Maverick, but he carried himself with the heavy, unhurried authority of an officer who had commanded cavalry charges at Gettysburg.