"Then the white man has brought his war to our hearth," the chief said, his voice echoing off the curved willow ribs of the lodge like thunder before a summer storm. "For twenty winters, the agency men told us: 'Learn the white man’s law. Walk the white man’s road. Put your mark upon his paper, and your children will have bread.' We did this. We brought a man of honor into our clan. We put his name upon the stone. And now the thieves come with their big guns to tear the paper with fire."
Lobo Negro looked at Marshal Colter, his dark eyes burning with an ancient, unquenchable fire.
"Tell your cattle boss that the water does not belong to his cows," Lobo Negro declared. "Tell him the stone has been laid. And if he brings his iron cannons into the Cradle of the Heron, he had better bring forty pine coffins behind his wagons, for no man who rides with him will ever see the sunrise over the San Simon again."
Marshal Colter stood, closed his dispatch case with a heavy click of its brass lock, and picked up his white Stetson. He looked at Maverick Cole for a long, silent moment, then reached out his right hand.
Maverick took it. The marshal’s grip was hard, dry, and honest.
"I have forty-eight hours to deliver my report to the federal circuit court in Tucson, Mr. Cole," Colter said in a low voice that only Maverick and Hesper could hear. "The trail over the pass is rough, and my horse might go lame. I won't reach the telegraph wire until Monday morning. What happens in this canyon before then is between you, Vance McCall, and whatever God you pray to."
"That’s all the law I ever asked for, Marshal," Maverick answered. "Just forty-eight hours of empty road."
The two days that followed were not spent in prayer; they were spent in the furious, desperate preparation of men who knew that their graves were being measured.
Maverick took command of the valley’s defenses with the cold, methodical precision of a veteran sergeant of cavalry. He knew how mountain howitzers worked. A twelve-pounder mountain gun had an effective range of eight hundred yards with solid shot, but in a narrow, winding canyon, its real danger was canister—tin cans packed with sixty lead musket balls that turned the cannon into a giant, wall-sweeping shotgun that could shred an entire company of infantry at two hundred paces.
To bring those guns to bear, Vance McCall would have to drag the heavy wooden carriages through the boulder field at the eastern spires.
"He won't try to force the notch by daylight," Maverick explained to Lobo Negro and the circle of war captains as they gathered on the flat rock overlooking the gap. Maverick had smoothed out a patch of red sand with his palm, using twigs and river pebbles to represent the canyon terrain. "Silas Vance already learned that lesson. Two rifles held twelve men at the choke-point. If McCall charges forty men into that bottleneck, we’ll kill half of them before they clear the first bend."
"Then how will he strike?" asked Chato, his scarred hand resting on the breech of his Springfield carbine.
"He’ll use the cannons to crack the bottleneck from a distance," Maverick pointed to a high, flat bench of red sandstone that rose on the northern approach outside the spires, known as Coyote Bench. "From that bench, eight hundred yards out, his gunners can drop explosive shells right over the spires into our rear. Once he’s pulverized our breastworks and set the brush on fire, his cavalry will rush the mouth under the smoke."
"Then we must take Coyote Bench before the big guns arrive," said a young warrior, his fingers twitching on his knife hilt.
"No," Hesper spoke up. She was sitting beside Maverick, her hair braided tight for war, wearing a buckskin shirt and a canvas bandolier of .44-40 cartridges across her chest. "Coyote Bench is surrounded by open gravel flats for three hundred yards. A coyote cannot cross it without being seen. If we send our men out there, McCall’s long-range buffalo rifles will pick them off like rabbits in a corral."
Maverick looked at her, his eyes shining with grim appreciation. "She’s right. We don't try to hold ground outside the valley. We let him think the spires are abandoned. We pull our defense back five hundred yards, into the Cradle of the Heron—right around our homestead."
The warriors looked at each other with doubtful murmurs. To give up the natural gate of the canyon seemed like madness.
"Listen to me," Maverick said, his voice cutting through their hesitation like an axe through sapwood. "Between the spires and my cabin, the river makes a sharp horseshoe bend through a box canyon thirty feet deep. The walls are sheer limestone. The only path for his wagons is the dry bed of the old flood channel. If we let his wagons enter that channel, we have him in a three-sided box."
Maverick laid three flat stones across his sand map.