"Because she is ugly."
Silence descended over the riverbank. Maverick looked around. A young warrior standing thirty paces away lowered his gaze to his boots. An old woman husking corn nearby stopped her hands, her shoulders stiffening. Two women carrying water jars turned their faces aside.
The chief continued, his voice raised just enough to carry over the rushing water: "She is the ugliest woman in the mountains. Her face was broken by fire when she was young. Her temper is like mountain flint. The warriors of our band will not look at her. The half-breed scouts will not take her. She wears a thick buckskin veil whenever she walks beneath the sun. If you take this bargain, you take a woman no other man will ever desire."
Maverick felt an unexpected surge of revulsion—not at the prospect of an injured woman, but at the cold, clinical way her own father paraded her defects before a total stranger.
"With respect, Lobo Negro," Maverick said, his voice hardening, "talking about your own flesh and blood like she's a broken-winded mule with bad teeth doesn't do you much credit."
For a fraction of a second, the chief’s silver-threaded eyebrows twitched, and an ember of something like fierce approval flashed in his dark pupils before vanishing behind an iron mask.
"I speak the truth so there are no complaints later," Lobo Negro said. "She has been inspected by men before. Cowards who looked upon her veil, begged for a glimpse, and then ran like beaten dogs when they saw what lay beneath. I will not have my daughter pitied or mocked again. You accept the bargain without seeing her, or you saddle your horse and leave."
Maverick looked out across the valley.
On the eastern bend, where the river curved around a shelf of limestone, he could see high grass swaying like green waves. A grove of oak and cedar grew along the foothills, providing firewood and shelter against the winter winds. It was the exact land he had dreamed of during seven years of sleeping on frozen saddles and eating hardtack in bunkhouses.
He could turn around and spend the rest of his life working for men who owned half the territory, dying an old, landless cowhand with nothing to leave behind.
Or he could stay here, bind his fate to a people on the edge of extinction, and live with a woman who had been discarded by her own world.
"Why me?" Maverick asked softly. "You have warriors. You could trade with other bands. Why drag a drift-cowboy out of Tucson to give him your finest soil?"
Lobo Negro stepped closer. His voice dropped to a low, gravelly rasp.
"Five days ago, near Red Stone Wash, a boy was thrown from his pony. The pony broke its bridle and bolted into the rocks. The boy fell into a ravine and twisted his ankle."
Maverick’s eyes widened slightly. "The boy with the calico pony."
"My grandson," Lobo Negro said. "Koy. The son of my youngest brother who fell at Apache Pass."
Maverick remembered. He had been tracking water along the canyon bottom when he found an eight-year-old Apache boy sobbing quietly among the boulders, his ankle swollen the size of a green melon. Maverick had spent an hour finding the boy's runaway horse, mended the broken leather reins with a strip from his own saddlebags, splinted the small leg with cottonwood twigs, and gave the boy the last of his dried beef before watching him ride safely toward the high mesa.
"You were watching me?" Maverick asked.
"Two of my scouts watched you from the cliff tops," the chief said. "You had a loaded rifle. You could have killed the boy and taken the pony. You could have taken his silver wrist-band. Instead, you gave him clean water, fixed his tack, and sent him home without asking for a single coin."
Lobo Negro held Maverick’s gaze. "A man who treats a helpless child with honor when he thinks nobody is watching is a man who can be trusted with a wounded woman and an ancient valley. That is why your name was put on the paper, Maverick Cole. Now give me your answer."
Maverick took a long, deep breath of the pine-scented air.
"Bring your preacher," Maverick said. "I accept."
They did not wait for a Catholic priest. Lobo Negro informed Maverick that the desert was too dangerous for traveling men of the cloth and that tribal tradition, witnessed by the council fire, would bind them tighter than ink on church parchment.
As the sun sank behind the western rim of the mountains, throwing long, bloody streaks of crimson and orange across the sky, drums began to beat in the center of the camp.
It was not a celebratory rhythm; it was steady, solemn, and heavy, like the pounding of a giant heart inside the earth. The entire village gathered in a wide circle around a roaring fire of juniper and piñon logs. The fragrance of burning resin filled the night air.