The chief thrust the iron spade into Maverick’s hands and turned toward the east, walking with a long, unhurried stride that devoured the rough ground effortlessly. Maverick slung his rifle over his shoulder and followed.
They walked for more than an hour, moving away from the main camp along the southern contour of the river. Here, the valley broadened into an alluvial bench sheltered on the north by a crescent-shaped cliff of rose-colored sandstone that blocked the bitter northers that swept down from the Mogollon Rim during winter.
At the foot of the cliff, a natural spring bubbled up from a crack in the rock, feeding a miniature creek that tumbled twenty yards through wild fern before emptying into the main river. The timber here was magnificent: straight-grained white oak, stands of fragrant juniper, and enormous western yellow pines whose bark smelled of vanilla and sun-baked pitch.
Lobo Negro stopped near a mound of charred stones that looked as if they had once formed an ancient signal fire.
"This is the boundary," Lobo Negro said, tapping the charred stones with the tip of his moccasin. "From this pile of ash eastward to the twin red spires where the canyon pinches shut, three miles up and two miles wide. In the books at Tucson, it is marked as the Willow Water claim. In our tongue, it is the Cradle of the Heron."
Maverick walked past the stone mound, kneeling to plunge his fingers into the black earth. He brought a fistful to his nose. It smelled rich, loamy, and dark—earth that had collected dead grass, river silt, and fallen leaves for a thousand years without a plow ever turning it.
"Why didn't your young men build here?" Maverick asked, letting the black dirt sift through his fingers. "It’s the best winter pasture in the whole canyon."
"Because it sits closest to the open trail," Lobo Negro said, his tone flat and cold. "The white cattlemen who push herds out of the border country look for gaps in the mountains. If they come, they will come through the east pass between the twin spires. A man living here is not just a homesteader, Cole. He is an anvil."
Maverick stood up and dusted his trousers. "You didn't give me land, chief. You put me in the sentry post."
"I gave you what you asked for: dirt that no man can take from you," Lobo Negro retorted. "If you hold it against the speculators, you keep it. If you run when the first rancher rides through the gap with twenty hired guns, the valley vomits you out, and you die in the desert as you lived—with nothing."
The chief turned back toward the village, leaving Maverick standing alone in the tall grass with the spade in his hands.
Maverick didn't curse. He didn't drop the shovel. Instead, he drove the blade deep into the turf, carved out a thick square of sod, and laid it neatly to the side.
"An anvil," Maverick whispered to the empty sky. "Well, I’ve been hit by plenty of hammers."
By midday, Maverick had stripped to his undershirt, his skin glistening with sweat beneath the climbing sun. He had paced the perimeter of the flat bench near the spring, measuring thirty feet east to west and twenty feet north to south.
He was not building a crude dugout or a temporary wickiup. If he was going to hold this ground, he needed a cabin that could turn away a stray bullet, shed winter blizzards, and outlast the men who wanted him gone. He selected a grove of straight yellow pines growing two hundred paces up the talus slope, marked ten trees with deep blazes carved by his hunting knife, and set to work with the heavy double-bitted felling axe he had retrieved from Lobo Negro’s storehouse.
The rhythm of the axe became the only sound in the eastern valley. Thock. Thock. Crack.
Each swing drove three inches of tempered steel into the fragrant sapwood. Chips of pale yellow pine flew like shrapnel across the dry needles. His shoulders, tight and knotty from years of throwing lariats and hauling corral poles, found their old cadence. When the first pine began to groan, he stepped clear, watching the great crown sweep down through the sunlight with a roaring rush of wind and needles before crashing onto the slope with an earth-shaking thud.
He had just limbed the third tree and was notching the butt for skidding when he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle.
He didn't turn around quickly. He set the axe head on the trunk, rested his palm on the butt of his revolver, and looked back down the slope over his left shoulder.
Standing thirty yards away, near the edge of the wild plum thicket, was Hesper.
She had put the buckskin veil back on. The thick, dark hide fell over her face, obscuring every feature save for the two dark eye-slits that caught the hard glare of the sun. But she had discarded the beaded ceremonial tunic from the night before, wearing instead a practical, grease-stained dress of smoked deer hide with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, tied at the waist with a band of braided horsehair.