Sarah took the paper. The handwriting was crude, jagged, and executed with a cheap pencil that had dug deep into the coarse fiber.
MRS MITCHELL
THEY CUT MY PENSION OFF AT THE COURTHOUSE. THE DOCTOR IN YUMA SAYS THE BONE IS ROTTING UP MY ELBOW. I GOT NO BOOTS AND I GOT NO NAME. BUT I AM COMING BACK FOR THE NORTH RIDGE. A WHITE MAN DOES NOT DIE IN THE DIRT WHILE A SQUAW SLEEPS ON SILVER.
C.B.
Sarah looked at the letter for a long, quiet moment. The letters were shaky, distorted by the left hand of a man who had never learned to write with his off-side, but the venom dripping from every stroke was unmistakable.
"Brennan broke out of the territorial road gang two weeks back," O’Dowd said, watching her face with deep concern. "Overpowered a guard with an iron pry bar near the Gila crossing. He’s got three horse thieves with him. The sheriff in Silver Creek won't ride out here to post a guard, Sarah. They still hold it against you that you kept the patent out of the syndicate’s hands."
Sarah did not tremble. She folded the yellow butcher paper into neat, precise quarters, walked to the outdoor cook-fire where a kettle of beans was simmering over cedar coals, and dropped the paper into the heart of the flames.
The paper curled, blackened, and vanished into a wisp of gray smoke that rose straight into the blue Arizona sky.
"Charles Brennan had two hands and five armed outlaws when he came to this door three years ago, Timothy," Sarah said, turning back to the teamster with eyes as cold and clear as mountain ice. "He left his boots, his badge, and his wrist in the stone. If he returns to the San Pedro, he will not leave a letter behind."
She reached down, took Thomas by the hand, and looked toward the high blue rim of the Sierra Bonita.
"Unload the iron pump, Mr. O’Dowd," Sarah commanded, her voice steady and untroubled. "We have fields to water before the summer turns red."
The moon of May 1876 rose thin and razor-sharp over the eastern foothills, casting faint, silver-gray shadows across the dry bed of the San Pedro. The heat of the day had not entirely dispersed; it hung low over the caliche flats like a warm blanket, smelling of baking limestone, scorched sagebrush, and the distant, dry musk of cattle clustered around the muddy margins of the stock tank.
Inside the new pine log cabin, the oil lamp was turned down low, its flame trimmed to a tiny yellow bead that barely illuminated the whitewashed cottonwood rafters.
Sarah sat at the heavy cedar table, cleaning Thomas’s Springfield rifle with an oily rag of wool flannel. She worked with methodical, practiced familiarity, running a brass rod down the rifled bore, checking the extractor claw, and laying six heavy fifty-caliber cartridges in a neat, brass row upon the polished wood. Beside the rifle lay the double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun, its hammers cocked back to half-safe, its iron breech loaded with double charges of coarse blue buckshot.
On the bed of sheepskins in the corner, three-year-old Thomas slept soundly, his breathing slow, deep, and rhythmic.
A faint sound broke through the quiet of the night.
It was not the dry clicking of a cicada or the sudden, high yip of a coyote on the ridge. It was the soft, muffled scrape of leather against the rough bark of the cedar-rail fence fifty yards to the south.
Sarah did not gasp. She did not jump.
With fluid, soundless precision, she laid the cleaning rag aside, lifted the Springfield carbine by its walnut stock, and stepped away from the table into the deep shadow beside the stone chimney. Her moccasins made no more sound on the pine floorboards than an owl’s wing brushing against cedar boughs.
She reached up with two fingers, easing back the heavy iron hammer of the Springfield until it engaged with a dull, oiled click.
Through the small glass window overlooking the front yard, the moonlit world was rendered in shades of bone and ink.
The scrub oak sapling by the gate stood motionless, its young leaves silvered by the pale light. Beyond the fence, three figures were moving through the chaparral on foot. They moved with the clumsy, hurried stealth of white men who did not understand the desert: their boots clicked against loose shale; their coarse canvas coats rasped against the thorns of the mesquite; and one of them cursed in a sharp, wheezing whisper as an agave spine pierced his trousers.
The man in the lead was unmistakable.
He was gaunt, his left shoulder hunched forward, his right arm ending in a shapeless, linen-wrapped club pinned against his ribs. He dragged his right foot with a heavy, dragging limp—the legacy of forty miles walked barefoot over the flint gravel of Devil’s Gate. Across his breast hung an old army haversack, and in his left hand he clutched a heavy, double-action Colt revolver with a cut-down barrel.