A wall of white dust and pulverized stone billowed into the air, completely blocking the path forward.
"Ambush!" Carpenter screamed, his voice cracking with terror. "Turn 'em! Turn 'em back!"
The outlaws violently yanked their horses’ heads around, but it was already too late. From the cliffs behind them, three more boulders came crashing down, sealing the southern exit with an avalanche of shattered rock and splintered cedar logs.
They were trapped inside a stone box, three hundred feet below the sky.
From every ledge, crack, and fissure above, the terrifying, high-pitched war cry of the Bedonkohe Apache tore through the canyon—a sound so wild, fierce, and chilling that two of the outlaws’ horses reared in panic, throwing their riders into the sharp basalt scree below.
"Fire! Shoot 'em down!" Brennan bellowed, firing his Colt blindly up into the cliffs, the heavy lead slugs flattening harmlessly against the stone shelves.
Then, the Winchesters spoke.
A coordinated volley of rifle fire rained down into the gorge with devastating, surgical precision. The first blast knocked Dutch Carpenter out of his saddle, a bullet through his shoulder and another through his chest; he hit the ground like a sack of wet sand, his cigar rolling into the dirt.
The outlaws panicked, firing their carbines wildly, their bullets ricocheting off the limestone with shrill, useless whines. One by one, caught in the open with nowhere to take cover, the men who had terrorized the ranches of the San Pedro valley were systematically cut down. Within two minutes, five of the seven lay motionless in the dust, while the Mexican trackers threw their weapons into the rocks, fell to their knees, and pressed their foreheads against the earth, begging for their lives in frantic Spanish.
Only Brennan remained standing.
His horse had been killed beneath him, but the deputy had scrambled behind a flat slab of fallen slate. His hat was gone, his face streaked with soot and blood from a flying stone splinter, his eyes wide and crazed with animal desperation.
"Mitchell!" Brennan screamed up into the smoke-filled gorge, his voice cracking into a jagged shriek. "I know you're up there! You bring your redskin dogs to murder a deputy of the United States? You’re hanging for this, Sarah! Every one of you will swing from the gallows in Prescott!"
From the shelf of rock directly above him, a figure rose slowly to his feet.
Chato stood in full view of the canyon floor, his Winchester lowered at his side, looking down at Brennan with the cold, absolute contempt of an executioner.
Beside him, Sarah stepped forward to the edge of the rim.
She stood tall in the mountain wind, her deerskin tunic billowing around her, her hand resting firmly upon her swollen stomach. In her right hand, catching the midday sun like a beacon of polished silver, was Thomas's pocket watch.
Brennan looked up. When his eyes found Sarah standing among the Apache warriors—unharmed, unbroken, and looking down at him with eyes as cold as river ice—the last shreds of his sanity seemed to snap.
"You..." Brennan stammered, raising his revolver with a trembling hand, aiming the barrel directly at Sarah's chest. "You dirty little—"
Chato did not raise his rifle.
Instead, Nalyce, who had moved silently around the rim to a vantage point forty yards south, squeezed the trigger of his Springfield carbine.
The heavy, fifty-caliber lead slug struck Brennan’s outstretched right hand, obliterating the pistol and shattering the bones of his wrist in a spray of blood and iron fragments.
Brennan shrieked, collapsing to his knees, clutching his ruined wrist against his chest. He looked down at the blood pooling in the red dust, then looked back up at the cliffs, his arrogance completely shattered, replaced by the pathetic, sniveling terror of a cornered predator who knows his time has run out.
Chato looked down at Sarah. "Does he die by the lead, or does he walk the long road without boots?"
Sarah looked at the broken, groveling man who had threatened her home, driven her into the wilderness, and sought to murder her unborn child for imaginary silver. For three months she had lived in terror of this man’s shadow. Now, seeing him kneeling in the dust, covered in his own blood and weeping like a whipped dog, she felt no anger—only a vast, cleansing indifference.
"Death is too quick for Charles Brennan," Sarah said, her voice steady and clear as it carried down into the gorge. "Strip him of his badge, strip him of his boots, and leave him with an empty canteen at the mouth of the valley. Let him crawl back to the town he disgraced. Let everyone in Silver Creek see what kind of creature he truly is."