As the deputies dragged Brennan through the dark doorway, his curses fading into the adobe hall, Sarah turned to face the street.
Martha Henderson stepped forward from the crowd, her hands wringing her apron, tears streaming down her creased cheeks. "Sarah... oh, Sarah, child... we didn't know... if we had only known what Brennan was doing..."
Sarah looked at Martha, then at the shopkeepers, the miners, and the comfortable citizens of Silver Creek who had turned their backs on her in her darkest hour.
"You knew, Martha," Sarah said gently, without malice, but with a cold, unyielding honesty that silenced the street. "You knew I had no bread. You knew Brennan was coming to my door. You simply chose to look at the shelves instead."
She turned back to Major Howard. "Major, is there a team and wagon available from the quartermaster's train?"
"At your service, Mrs. Mitchell," Howard replied with a formal bow. "Where do you wish to go?"
Sarah looked toward the northern horizon, where the mighty, jagged peaks of the Sierra Bonita rose like blue islands above the yellow dust of the desert floor—wild, fierce, and free under the vast Arizona sky.
"To the northern ridge, Major," Sarah said, holding her son close as the tiny turquoise hawk and the red eagle feather danced in the desert wind. "We have a home to rebuild."
The wagon wheels groaned against the packed caliche, crushing dry stems of rabbitbrush and brittle alkali saltgrass as the heavy army-issue buckboard crawled out of Silver Creek. Behind them, the false-fronted wooden stores, the tin-roofed saloons, and the dusty misery of the mining camp shrank until they were nothing more than gray splinters against the brass glare of the southern horizon.
Sarah did not look back.
She sat on the sprung bench beside Corporal Timothy O’Dowd, a freckled young cavalryman from Ohio whose uniform was dark with sweat between the shoulder blades. In the wagon bed behind them rested two sacks of seed grain, a barrel of salted beef, three crates of fresh pine lumber donated from the quartermaster’s reserve at Fort Lowell, and an iron woodstove with its stovepipe neatly dismantled and tied with hemp twine.
At her feet, wedged securely between two sacks of dried pinto beans, rested the cradleboard.
Thomas—Bih-chin-te—was wide awake. His round, obsidian eyes tracked the slow drift of cottonwood leaves and the dizzying expanse of pale blue sky. Above his small forehead, the red eagle feather and the carved turquoise hawk swayed in rhythm with the wagon’s iron axles. He did not fret. Born amid the roar of twelve-gauge buckshot and the sulfur smoke of burning wickiups, the boy regarded the world with an unnerving, tranquil stillness that made Corporal O’Dowd cast sideways glances every few minutes, crossing himself quietly whenever the horse’s ears flicked back toward the cradleboard.
"He don't fuss much, ma'am," O’Dowd ventured after an hour of silence, clearing his throat against the powdery road dust. "My sister back in Zanesville had three boys, and every blessed one of 'em hollered like a scalded shoat if the wind so much as blew sideways."
"He knows the silence of the high places," Sarah answered softly, keeping both hands resting flat upon her knees. Her deerskin sleeves fluttered in the dry draft that blew off the Mogollon Rim. "Crying does not turn away a wolf, Corporal."
O’Dowd fell silent, red creeping into his ears. He flicked the reins over the backs of the twin mules and kept his eyes on the trail.
When they crested the shallow rise that overlooked the Mitchell homestead, the breath caught in Sarah’s throat.
The little valley where Thomas had staked their future was scarred and desolate. Where their two-room cottonwood log cabin had stood, there remained only a blackened stone chimney standing like a charred finger against the gray ridge. The fire Carpenter’s men had set on the night of her flight had consumed the shakes, the cedar framing, and the unfinished addition Thomas had planned for the nursery. All that remained were mounds of wet, gray ash, twisted iron barrel hoops, and the shattered fragments of the stoneware crock Sarah’s mother had sent west in an immigrant wagon from Missouri.
The low rail fences had been smashed down; the garden plot was overrun with thorny jimsonweed and cockleburs; and the dry irrigation ditch was choked with windblown tumbleweeds.
Corporal O’Dowd pulled the mules to a halt beside the dead cottonwood gate. He took off his campaign hat and looked around with sorrowful hesitation.
"God above, ma'am," the young soldier whispered. "There ain't nothing here but cinders and ghosts. Major Howard gave orders that if the place was uninhabitable, I was to turn the team around and convey you directly to the post settlement at Fort Lowell. You can't winter an infant in an ash pit."