Major Howard sat motionless for a full minute, looking from Sarah to the infant in the cradleboard, and then up at the high limestone peaks where the morning sun was finally burning through the gray fleece of mist.
"Mrs. Mitchell," Howard said slowly, resting his hat back upon his head and squaring the brim with his gloved fingers. "You drive a harder bargain than the Apache chiefs I spent five years parleying with in New Mexico."
He turned to his sergeant. "Sergeant Miller."
"Sir!"
"Have the adjutant bring the field desk, the inkwell, and the registry to the shade of that cedar. And instruct the bugler that there will be no calls sounded today. We have official business with a citizen of the United States."
The field desk was a simple chest of walnut wood, reinforced with brass corners and hinged folding legs that set firmly into the crushed gravel beneath a solitary mountain cedar.
A fresh sheet of heavy linen parchment was pinned flat to the writing board by two lead paperweights. Beside it, a square bottle of iron-gall ink and three steel-nibbed pens lay ready. Lieutenant James Vance, a young officer with ink-stained fingers and an anxious, pale face, sat on a folding canvas stool, dipping his pen into the black well with a hand that trembled slightly whenever Chato’s dark eyes shifted in his direction.
Chato had dismounted. He stood five paces behind Sarah, his arms crossed over his broad chest, his carbine leaning against the rough bark of the cedar. He did not sit. An Apache warrior in a parley remained on his feet, balanced on the balls of his moccasins, his weight evenly distributed so that he could draw steel or leap for cover in the space of a heartbeat.
Sarah sat on an empty wooden hardtack crate, her deerskin mantle draped loosely over her knees. In her lap, Thomas slept peacefully, his miniature fingers curled around the eagle feather on his cradleboard.
Major Howard stood beside the desk, his hands clasped behind his back, his campaign coat unbuttoned at the throat in deference to the rising midday heat.
"Proceed, Mrs. Mitchell," Howard said quietly. "From the beginning. From the day the drift collapsed."
Sarah spoke for two hours.
She did not raise her voice, nor did she embellish her words with the dramatic flourishes common to the yellow sheets of the Tucson press. She spoke with the flat, unsparing precision of a frontier woman who had weighed every grain of flour and counted every nail in her cabin walls.
She described the three hundred dollars in imaginary gold that Brennan believed Thomas had cached; she recounted the deputy’s veiled proposals in the mercantile while Martha Henderson hid behind her spice jars; she detailed the splintering crash of her door beneath Carpenter’s boots; she named the outlaws who had hunted her through the night; and she described how three Bedonkohe scouts had found a dying woman in the rocks and offered her the sacred bread of their own hearth.
As the steel nib scratched furiously across the linen paper, Lieutenant Vance’s eyes grew wider, darting occasionally between the calm, sun-browned widow and the grim young warrior standing guard behind her.
"And of Deputy Brennan's mutilation?" Major Howard asked, his voice even. "The report stated his hand was severed with an axe by the hostiles after horrific torture."
"Deputy Brennan’s hand was crushed by a fifty-caliber lead slug fired by Nalyce when the deputy leveled his revolver at my chest," Sarah stated, her voice hard as flint. "He was not tortured. He was stripped of the boots he did not earn and the badge he had disgraced. I told them to leave him with his life so that he might crawl back to Silver Creek and show the merchants what kind of animal they had appointed to enforce their laws."
Lieutenant Vance finished the final sentence with a sharp flourish of his pen, blotting the ink with dry river sand before looking up at his commander.
Major Howard walked around the desk, picked up the sheet, and read the three pages with methodical slowness. When he finished, he dipped the pen himself and signed his name in a bold, sweeping hand: Alexander Howard, Major, 6th U.S. Cavalry, Commanding.
"Lieutenant," Howard ordered without looking up. "Make two duplicate copies. One for the Department of the Pacific in San Francisco. One for the United States Marshal in Prescott. The original remains in my personal dispatch case."
"Yes, sir," the young officer replied, setting immediately to work.
Howard set the pen down and turned toward Chato.