"Die, you red bastard," Carpenter hissed through his teeth, spit spraying onto Chato’s face. "I’m taking your scalp back to Silver Creek to hang over the saloon bar!"
Chato did not waste breath on words. His dark eyes remained fixed upon the outlaw’s throat. With a sudden, explosive twist of his hips, the young Apache hooked his right heel behind Carpenter’s knee, throwing both of them violently to the ground.
As they rolled through the dirt, Chato brought his left knee up with crushing force into Carpenter’s groin.
The outlaw gasped, his grip on the knife loosening for a fraction of a second.
It was all the opening Chato needed.
Rolling on top of the stunned man, Chato caught Carpenter’s right wrist, slammed it against a buried granite rock until the heavy bowie knife clattered into the needles, and drove his own iron hunting blade downward with the swift, merciless certainty of an executioner.
Eli Carpenter’s body gave one long, violent shudder. His pale, watery eyes stared upward into the canopy of pines, reflecting the crimson light of the moon, and then went glassily dim.
Silence descended upon the immediate clearing, heavy and suffocating.
Chato knelt over the dead outlaw, his chest heaving, blood dripping from a shallow slash across his ribs where Carpenter’s blade had grazed him. He remained motionless for five long heartbeats, listening to the night.
Down by the creek, the gunfire had stopped.
The sharp, high war cries of the Bedonkohe echoed through the pines, signaling victory. Goyahkla’s flank had succeeded; the remaining four outlaws had been cut down attempting to flee back through the narrow gorge, their bodies left for the coyotes in the dry scree.
Chato stood up slowly. He wiped his blade clean on the duster of the fallen outlaw, sheathed it at his belt, and turned back toward the entrance of the lodge.
He stood in the opening, framed against the fading crimson light of the morning dawn that was beginning to streak the eastern sky with gray and gold. His bronze skin was streaked with soot, sweat, and blood, his dark hair tangled around his broad shoulders.
Sarah looked up from the bed of hides, clutching her newborn son against her chest.
Chato looked down at the tiny child, then at Sarah. The fierce, terrifying mask of the warrior dissolved, replaced by a gentle, solemn exhaustion.
"The wolves are dead, Sarah," Chato said quietly, his voice carrying the deep weariness of a man who had fought for his brother’s honor and won. "The door is whole. The child lives."
Sarah let her head fall back against the elk hides, drawing a long, shuddering breath of cool morning air. She pressed her lips against her son’s soft, dark hair, feeling his tiny heart beating in steady, perfect rhythm against her own.
The long night was over. The blood had been paid. And beneath the soaring pines of the Sierra Bonita, the new day had finally arrived.
The sun rose over the Sierra Bonita not with the violent crimson of the previous night, but with a pure, cold brilliance that washed the gray granite spires in pale amber and rose.
The smell of black powder gradually gave way to the sharp, sweet fragrance of crushed pine needles, damp earth, and the wild spearmint that grew along the edges of the swollen mountain creek. The camp was quiet, but it was not the silence of fear; it was the solemn, reverent stillness that always followed a victory bought with the blood of good men.
Two young Bedonkohe warriors had died at the lower barricade, their bodies carried by their weeping mothers to the high burial clefts on the northern face of the ridge, where they were laid to rest beneath mounds of red limestone, facing the rising sun. The outlaws had been dragged down into the lower gorge and left in the deep wash for the desert buzzards and the elements, stripped of their iron weapons, their boots, and their horses.
Inside the wickiup of Tazhi, the fire burned steady and low, fueled by dried cedar knots that filled the air with a clean, holy smoke.
Sarah sat propped against a backrest woven of peeled willow rods and soft mountain sheep fleece. Her face was pale, with dark violet circles under her eyes, but her gaze was steady and clear. The fever that had threatened her during the flight across the canyons had completely broken. She wore a clean deerskin dress decorated along the yoke with small, white river shells—a gift brought that morning by the young mother whose life Chato had saved during the winter raid.
In her arms lay her son.