"The soldiers have sent a messenger under a white rag," Goyahkla rumbled. "An Apache scout from the agency. He waits at the mouth of Devil's Gate. He says Major Howard will burn the high forest and starve our children with the winter snows unless the white woman is delivered to the fort."
Sarah’s breath caught in her throat. She looked around the camp—at the children playing near the stream, at the old women grinding their winter corn, at the young men who had bled to defend her from Carpenter’s wolves.
If the cavalry brought their Gatling guns and their winter supply trains into the Sierra Bonita, this beautiful, sacred sanctuary would become a slaughterhouse. Innocent people would die in the snow, all because a maimed, corrupt deputy had told a monstrous lie to save his own miserable reputation.
"No," Sarah said, her voice shaking with fierce conviction. "I will not let them burn this mountain for me."
Chato stepped in front of her, his dark eyes blazing with fierce protectiveness. "You are of our hearth now, Sarah! We do not trade our sisters to the blue coats! We will take the high trails to Mexico! We will fight them in the rocks until our cartridges are spent!"
"And what of the children?" Sarah asked, pointing toward the little girls playing with their reed dolls beside the creek. "What of the old ones who cannot run when the winter frost comes? Will they eat cartridges when the snow is four feet deep, Chato?"
Chato fell silent, his hands tightening around his rifle until his knuckles turned gray.
Sarah turned to Goyahkla. She stood straight, the red eagle feather on her son’s cradleboard fluttering in the morning breeze.
"Take me to the messenger at Devil's Gate," Sarah commanded, her voice ringing with the unshakeable dignity of a woman who had found her own power. "I will not go as a broken captive, and I will not go as a beggar. I will ride down on an Apache horse, wearing Apache deerskin, carrying an Apache son. I will stand before this Major Howard and I will speak the truth so loud that even the governor in Prescott will hear it."
Goyahkla looked at her for a long, silent minute. A slow, profound nod of respect dipped the chieftain's chin.
"You have the heart of a war leader, daughter," Goyahkla said. "We ride."
The morning mist did not disperse under the rising sun; instead, it drifted in long, ragged tatters along the sheer limestone battlements of Devil’s Gate, hanging over the canyon floor like the unwashed wool of sheep. A thin, bitter draft swept down from the upper rim, smelling of damp cedar needles, crushed flint, and the sharp, mineral tang of cold mountain spring water.
Sarah rode at the center of the column. She did not sit sideways on an English saddle as she had done in her girlhood in Missouri, nor did she huddle like an exhausted captive bound to a pack mule. She sat astride a broad-chested roan pony on a flat saddle pad of smoke-tanned elk hide, her stirrups fashioned from ash loops bound with rawhide. Around her shoulders hung a soft doe-skin mantle lined with rabbit fur, pinned at her breast by a bronze brooch Thomas had given her on their wedding day.
Across her back, secured by broad buckskin straps that crossed over her breastbone, rode the cradleboard. Little Thomas James—Bih-chin-te—slept through the steady, swaying motion of the pony, his dark, downy head sheltered by the arched pine hood of the frame. The single red eagle feather given by Goyahkla fluttered lazily in the cold updraft, catching the early light like a drop of fresh blood against the gray stone.
To her right rode Chato. The young warrior wore his full battle regalia: high moccasins reaching past his knees, a breechcloth of scarlet wool, and a light linen hunting shirt taken in trade from the Mexican border. Across his chest hung his brass cartridge belt, and his Winchester carbine lay balanced across the pommel of his saddle, held loosely in one calloused palm. His face was unpainted, but his features were carved in hard, unyielding lines that told of a man prepared to kill or die before the sun crossed the canyon wall.
Behind them rode ten selected warriors, including the scarred veteran Nalyce and the scout Hosteen. Goyahkla himself had remained on the high rim with thirty rifles, invisible among the dwarf pinyons and jagged boulders, commanding the high ground with the patient, deadly stillness of a hawk on a dead snag.
At the narrow mouth where the gorge spilled out into the alluvial fan of the San Pedro valley, three riders were waiting beneath a scrubby mesquite.