Maverick checked the percussion cap on his Henry rifle, checked the brass match safe in his vest pocket, and sat down beside her on the cold rock.
He reached out, found her scarred, slender hand in the darkness, and laced his fingers through hers. They sat together beneath the gathering stars, watching the dust of the enemy column crawl toward the eastern spires like an encroaching shadow across the world.
Dawn broke over the canyon not with light, but with fire.
At precisely five minutes past six, the morning stillness was shattered by a sound that made the entire sandstone basin tremble to its foundations.
BOOM-CLANG.
From the high crest of Coyote Bench, half a mile outside the spires, a gout of white smoke three yards across billowed into the morning air. A twelve-pounder explosive shell came shrieking through the sky with the sound of tearing calico cloth, cleared the top of the northern spire by thirty feet, and plunged into the empty cottonwood grove near the river with an earth-shattering detonation that threw mud, shattered branches, and smoke fifty feet into the air.
A second later, the second howitzer roared.
The shell struck the limestone scree above the old trail, showering the gorge with an avalanche of razor-sharp shale and boulders that crashed down into the river with the roar of a collapsing mountain.
On the high limestone shelf above the horseshoe bend, Maverick Cole lay prone behind his basalt parapet, his pocket watch open beside his rifle.
"Ranging shots," Maverick said, his voice completely calm. "They’re checking their elevation. They don't know the spires are empty."
For twenty minutes, McCall’s gunners pounded the mouth of the gap, throwing eighteen shells into the rocks until the red towers were shrouded in a thick, choking fog of white sulfur smoke and pulverized limestone dust.
Then, the cannon fire ceased.
Through the brass telescope, Maverick watched the smoke slowly drift away on the morning breeze. Emerging from the throat of the notch came the forward vanguard: ten mounted men, their Winchesters held ready across their saddlebows, led by Goyathlay on his dun pony.
Behind them came the two artillery wagons, their teams of eight mules lathered and straining against the heavy traces, followed by thirty mounted regulators riding four abreast, their faces hard, expectant, and cruel.
At their center rode Vance McCall.
The cattle baron was grinning, his cigar clamped between his teeth, his beaver hat tilted back. He looked at the shattered cottonwoods and the empty breastworks at the spires and clearly believed his howitzers had broken the Apache defense with the first volley. He saw no warriors; he heard no war cries. He believed the Indians had fled westward into the desert, leaving the valley wide open for his herds.
"They’re entering the channel," Hesper whispered. She was kneeling beside Maverick, a glowing slow-match of saltpeter-soaked hemp smoldering in an iron pot between her knees.
"Wait," Maverick murmured, his eyes fixed on the lead wagon. "Let the rear guard pass the red boulder. Let them bring the second gun all the way into the bend."
The column moved slowly, the heavy iron-rimmed wagon wheels grinding through the dry river gravel with a harsh, rhythmic crunching sound that echoed between the thirty-foot vertical limestone walls. Goyathlay rode twenty yards ahead, his eyes darting frantically from cliff to cliff.
Suddenly, the renegade warrior drew rein.
His dun pony stopped, snorting and tossing its head. Goyathlay’s gaze had dropped to the river gravel three paces in front of his horse’s hooves. In the dry dust, he saw a tiny, unnatural ridge—the line where the earth had been smoothed over the buried fuse.
Goyathlay opened his mouth to scream a warning.
"Now, Hesper!" Maverick roared. "Blow the channel!"
Hesper plunged the glowing tip of her slow-match into the tray of priming powder at the top of the fuse line.
A hiss like an enraged sidewinder ran down the cliff face. A line of blue smoke raced down the sheer rock wall, struck the gravel bed, and vanished beneath the surface.
One second. Two seconds.
THUUUUU-DOOOOOM.
The earth did not merely shake; it heaved upward like the deck of a torpedoed ship.
The five kegs of black powder detonated in a single, simultaneous inferno of flame, iron scraps, and shattering gravel. A geyser of fire and black smoke fifty yards long erupted directly beneath the center of McCall’s column.
The lead artillery wagon was lifted three feet into the air and torn into a thousand flying splinters of ash-wood and iron tires. The mules were annihilated in the blast; men and horses were thrown through the air like dry leaves before a tornado.
Before the deafening roar of the explosion had even begun to echo off the high rimrocks, a high, piercing war cry rose from the cliffs on both sides of the gorge.
"Release the deadfalls!" Lobo Negro’s voice bellowed from the southern rim.
Along two hundred yards of cliff top, thirty Apache warriors drove their iron pry bars beneath the balanced piles of boulders.