Chato knelt before Sarah and the child. He pulled from his belt a small, exquisitely carved horn spoon, polished to the translucence of amber, and placed it into Thomas’s small fist.
"A gift for Bih-chin-te," Chato said. "So that he always eats from the bounty of the wild earth, and never from the hand of a master."
He looked up at Sarah, his eyes meeting hers with the profound, unspoken intimacy of two souls who had stood together at the gates of death and walked through unbroken.
"You have a strong house now, Sarah," Chato said quietly. "The wolves will not return. Brennan is in the iron cage at Yuma; Carpenter’s bones are scattered in Devil's Gate; and the miners know that Sarah Mitchell carries the medicine of the mountain."
"I have a house," Sarah replied, her voice trembling slightly with the weight of her gratitude. "Because a brother of the Bedonkohe remembered a drink of water given in the chaparral."
She reached into her pocket and pulled out Thomas’s silver pocket watch. For a moment, she thought of offering it to him as a token of remembrance.
Chato saw the movement. He gently closed his hand over hers, pushing the watch back toward her breast.
"Keep the iron that speaks," Chato said with a faint, beautiful smile. "It belongs to the son of Thomas Mitchell. Let it count the hours until he is a man. Let it remind him that there was a time when the white man and the red man shared the same heartbeat in the stone."
He rose to his feet in one fluid motion, took a step back, and touched his right hand to his brow in a gesture of absolute, eternal respect.
"Walk in beauty, sister," Chato said.
"Walk in beauty, brother," Sarah whispered.
Chato turned, vaulted onto his paint pony, and took the lead rope of Tazhi’s mount. Without looking back, the young warrior and the old matriarch rode out through the gate, past the little oak sapling, and followed the northern trail toward the jagged red cliffs that guarded the Mexican border.
Sarah stood by the gate, holding her son against her hip, watching them go.
The afternoon sun sank behind the mountains, casting long, golden rays across the greening valley of the San Pedro. The red eagle feather on Thomas’s cradleboard fluttered in the evening draft, dancing in harmony with the leaves of the little oak sapling.
Inside her pocket, the watch ticked on—steady, unbroken, and calm.
Tick-tick-tick.
The past was buried beneath the limestone; the debt of blood was paid in full; and here, upon the frontier where fear had once reigned, love, honor, and courage had planted a root that no wind could ever tear from the stone.
The spring of 1876 broke over the San Pedro valley with a sudden, riotous blooming of yellow paloverde and crimson ocotillo blossoms. The winter rains had been generous, leaving the seasonal tanks filled to their limestone rims and the bottomlands thick with rich grama grass that brushed against the stirrup irons of passing horsemen.
Sarah Mitchell stood at the edge of the east paddock, leaning against a cedar-rail fence that she had notched and fitted with her own drawknife. Her hands were brown as cured saddle skirting, lined with the faint, pale scars of barbed wire and cedar splinters, but they were steady, quick, and devoid of the nervous flutter that had haunted her youth. She wore a divided skirt of heavy brown duck cloth, calfskin work boots with double-stitched soles, and an old wide-brimmed felt hat that had belonged to Thomas, its crown shaped to shed the fierce midday glare.
Across the field, three-year-old Thomas—Bih-chin-te—was running through the high grass behind a line of five red-and-white Hereford calves.
The boy was broad-chested and straight-backed, his skin burned to a dark copper hue by the high desert sun, his thick black curls whipping across his forehead. Around his neck, resting against his homespun cotton shirt, hung the polished turquoise hawk that Chato had carved from the stone of the Sierra Bonita, its blue face darkened by body oils and sweat. He carried a willow switch in his right hand, laughing aloud with a fierce, piping joy as he turned a stubborn heifer away from the irrigation ditch with a shout that sounded uncannily like the sharp, clicking tongue of the Chiricahua scouts.
Sarah watched him, her heart full, yet her eyes constantly swept the southern rise where the wagon trail dropped down from Silver Creek.
A lone buckboard was approaching. It moved without hurry, the twin bay horses trotting with the steady, dust-raising gait of animals that had covered forty miles of alkali trail without water. Behind the seat, two heavy wooden crates were covered with a greasy canvas tarp tied down with hemp cordage.