Sarah did not reach for the Winchester that leaned inside the kitchen door, but she stepped out from the paddock and stood squarely in the center of the yard, her hands resting easily on her hips.
The buckboard drew to a halt beside the scrub oak sapling at the front gate. The little tree, now four feet tall with a sturdy trunk of rough gray bark, rustled softly in the warm draft that swept down from the north.
The driver pulled back on the iron brake lever with a loud, ratcheting clack.
It was Corporal Timothy O’Dowd, though his uniform had been stripped of its cavalry brass and yellow trim. He wore the gray flannel shirt and canvas trousers of a civilian teamster, his face older, his freckles obscured by a thick reddish-brown beard that covered his jaw like chaparral.
"Afternoon, Mrs. Mitchell," O’Dowd called out, touching the brim of his slouch hat.
"Mr. O’Dowd," Sarah answered, a genuine, warm smile breaking across her sun-browned face. "Or is it still Corporal?"
"Mister will do fine, ma'am," O’Dowd said with a grin, swinging his long legs down over the wagon wheel and landing heavily in the yard. "My five years with Uncle Sam ran out at the equinox. Major Howard signed my discharge paper with two fingers of bourbon in his tent, and I took my muster pay and bought this team off the post sutler."
Little Thomas came sprinting across the clover, skidding to a halt in the dust three paces from the teamster. The boy did not hide behind his mother’s skirts; he planted his bare feet into the red dirt, tilted his chin upward, and looked O’Dowd up and down with dark, unblinking eyes.
"Bih-chin-te," O’Dowd said solemnly, dropping to one knee before the child. He did not offer to shake hands—he knew the boy’s training. Instead, he touched his own brow with two fingers, the respectful greeting of the border scouts. "You’ve put on two inches of bone since the freeze, lad. You’re nearly tall enough to look my mules in the eye."
Thomas reached up, touched the silver medal that hung from O’Dowd’s pocket—a commemorative piece from the Shenandoah campaigns—and nodded once, a grave, measured gesture that would have looked natural on an Apache war leader twice his age.
"He does not talk much to strangers, Timothy," Sarah said softly, resting a hand on her son’s shoulder.
"He don't need to," O’Dowd replied, standing up and dusting his knees. "A man who talks too much in this territory usually ends up with lead in his gizzard or a sheriff looking for his papers."
He turned toward the back of the wagon, untying the hemp ropes that secured the canvas tarp.
"I brought the freight from the railhead at Maricopa Wells, Mrs. Mitchell," O’Dowd said, his tone shifting into businesslike seriousness. "The iron parts for the water-lifting pump you ordered from Chicago. Two cases of window glass packed in dry sawdust, three bags of seed alfalfa, and forty pounds of clean salt pork."
"And the news?" Sarah asked quietly, leaning closer. "What do the dispatch riders say about the border?"
O’Dowd’s smile vanished, his blue eyes turning grim as he looked past the cabin toward the dark blue wall of the northern mountains.
"The reservation at San Carlos is a graveyard, Mrs. Mitchell," O’Dowd said in a low, troubled voice. "The agents are stealing the beef rations and selling the agency corn to the saloons in Globe. The smallpox has taken two hundred children among the White Mountain bands. Goyahkla broke out three weeks ago."
Sarah’s breath caught in her throat. She closed her fingers gently around Thomas’s collar. "He went back to Mexico?"
"Cut a bloody swath straight through the San Pedro valley," O’Dowd nodded grimly. "Burned two freight stations south of Benson and ran off eighty head of mules from the stage company. The newspapers in Tucson are calling for blood again. They say General Crook is coming with three regiments of horse and two hundred friendly scouts to scour the Sierra Madre from one end to the other."
"And Chato?" Sarah whispered.
O’Dowd shook his head slowly. "Nobody knows. Some say he’s with Goyahkla in the high canyons across the Sonora line. Some say he stayed behind on the northern reservation to keep the women and the sick from starving when the rations failed. But there’s a company of Arizona volunteers out of Tombstone scouring the foothills right now, hanging every Indian they catch outside the agency wire without a pass."
He reached into his breast pocket and drew out an unsealed envelope of yellow butcher paper.
"This came to the express office in Silver Creek," O’Dowd said, handing it to her. "Addressed to Mrs. Thomas Mitchell. The clerk didn't want to handle it—said it smelled of sulfur and jailhouse soup."