McCall gasped for air, his flabby face purple with terror, looking into Maverick’s ice-blue eyes. "Don't kill me, Cole... for God’s sake, I’m a white man... we’re the same blood..."
"We aren't the same blood," Maverick growled, his knuckles twisting into the cloth of McCall’s coat until the seams tore. "You’re a scavenger who burns other men’s homes because you’re too cowardly to build your own. You bought cannons to slaughter women and children so you could sell green grass to a railroad."
Maverick drew his Colt Army revolver with his right hand and pressed the cold, flat steel of the cylinder against McCall’s temple.
"I ought to let Lobo Negro take your scalp with a dull bone knife," Maverick whispered. "I ought to leave you tied to that wagon wheel until the sun boils your fat."
"Please..." the cattle baron whimpered, tears of sheer panic cutting lines through the soot on his cheeks. "Please..."
Maverick stared at the pathetic, broken creature for five long seconds. Then, slowly, with cold contempt, he lowered the hammer of the Colt and shoved McCall away, sending him sprawling into the mud at his boots.
"Pick up your hat," Maverick commanded.
McCall scrambled in the dirt, clutching his crushed beaver hat to his ribs like a shield.
"You’re going to walk out through that notch," Maverick said, pointing toward the eastern gap where the red spires stood against the clean morning sky. "You’re going to walk through the desert all the way to Benson. If you stop, if you look back, or if I ever catch your shadow within twenty miles of this valley again, I won't use a rifle. I’ll hunt you down on foot and gut you like a hog. Now get out of my sight."
McCall did not wait for a second invitation. He scrambled over the fallen boulders, slipping on the slick stones, clawing his way through the rubble with his bare hands, and ran out through the eastern notch like a whipped cur, vanishing into the scorching glare of the San Simon desert.
Above them, on the high rim of the canyon, thirty Apache warriors raised their rifles into the air, and a great, unified roar of triumph rolled down through the valley, echoing from the eastern spires all the way to the western mountains.
Three months later, the first winter snow had come and gone from the high peaks of the Mogollon Rim, leaving the upper crags capped in brilliant, blinding white, while the floor of the hidden valley remained sheltered, temperate, and green.
The cabin at the eastern bend was finished.
Its pine walls had dried to a warm, golden honey color, chinked tight with gray river lime that turned away the sharpest mountain winds. A broad, covered porch of split cedar ran along the entire southern face, looking out across the rich alluvial bench where forty head of red Durham cattle—bought with the silver salvage from McCall’s abandoned wagons—grazed contentedly in the knee-high grama grass beside thirty painted Apache ponies.
From the massive chimney of black river basalt, a steady column of sweet, blue piñon smoke rose into the crisp autumn morning, carrying with it the aroma of roasting venison, dried wild sage, and fresh-baked sourdough bread.
On the front porch, seated on a sturdy rocking chair he had carved from white oak during the long winter evenings, sat Maverick Cole.
He was dressed in clean denim trousers, a heavy wool mackinaw coat, and newly oiled leather boots. Across his knees rested a heavy, leather-bound ledger—the brand registry for the Willow Water Ranch, registered in the territorial records at Prescott under the joint names of Maverick Cole and Hesper Cole.
Beside him, leaning against the peeled cedar railing with a tin cup of hot coffee between her hands, stood Hesper.
She wore a warm wool skirt dyed indigo blue by the Navajo weavers, a fringed buckskin jacket, and her crimson silk ribbon in her hair. Her face was lifted to the morning sun that was just climbing above the twin eastern spires, bathing the valley in a flood of pure, liquid gold.
She had never picked up the buckskin veil again.
The pale, jagged scar on her left cheek had faded slightly with time, its silvery edges softening against her warm, sun-bronzed skin. To the traders who occasionally brought supply wagons through the newly opened eastern gate, she was known simply as The Lady of the Willow; to the people of Lobo Negro’s clan, she had become the link that bound the ancient world of the mountains to the new world of papers and courtrooms that was closing around them.
The gate was open now, but it was open on their own terms.
A month after the battle at the horseshoe bend, Marshal Frank Colter had returned to the valley. He had not brought deputies or warrants. He had brought an official parchment from the federal district court in San Francisco, bearing the gold seal of the United States and the signature of a circuit judge.