Charles Brennan had returned.
Behind him were two men—rough border drifters wearing greasy slouch hats and carrying repeating Winchesters, their eyes darting nervously toward the dark windows of the cabin.
"Keep down, damn you," Brennan’s voice hissed through the still night, raspy and venomous as an uncoiling viper. "There ain't no men here. Just the woman and the whelp. We fire the roof from the back, drop her when she runs for the door, and take the paper out of the tin trunk under the floorboards."
"What about that soldier who brought the wagon yesterday?" one of the men muttered, holding his rifle across his belly. "He might be asleep in the shed."
"O’Dowd rode back to the stage station at noon," Brennan snarled, his left eye twitching under a dirty bandanna tied across his brow. "I watched him go from the rocks. There’s nobody between us and fifty thousand dollars in silver ore, you yellow-bellied coward! Move the kerosene to the rear wall!"
The outlaw to Brennan’s left stepped forward, a five-gallon square tin of coal oil sloshing heavily against his hip.
Sarah raised the heavy Springfield to her shoulder, resting the long blue barrel on the flat wooden sill of the window. She centered the iron front post squarely between the shoulder blades of the man carrying the kerosene.
Before her finger could tighten upon the cold steel of the trigger, a shadow detached itself from the darkness beneath the cedar fence.
It did not climb the rails; it seemed to rise out of the very earth, fluid, silent, and terrifyingly swift.
A figure clad in dark, oil-stained buckskin rose behind the rear outlaw.
A flash of moonlight caught the six-inch curve of an iron blade. Without a sound, the blade swept across the outlaw’s throat with the clinical precision of a butcher’s steel. The man did not scream; he let out only a choked, wet gurgle, dropping the tin of coal oil into the soft dust as his knees buckled beneath him.
The second outlaw whirled around, his mouth opening in terror.
Before he could level his Winchester, a heavy walnut war club, studded with rows of square-headed trade iron tacks, struck him squarely in the temple with a sickening, hollow crunch that echoed off the cabin logs. The outlaw hit the ground like an empty sack of oats, his rifle clattering harmlessly into the weeds.
Charles Brennan froze.
The former deputy whirled on his good heel, raising his revolver with a frantic, trembling left hand, firing blindly into the brush.
BANG.
The muzzle flash lit the clearing in a blinding flare of orange light, the heavy slug thudding into the trunk of a dead cottonwood behind the well.
From the shadow of the little scrub oak stepped Chato.
The young warrior was thinner than he had been two years before, his ribs visible beneath a torn deerskin tunic, his copper face lined with the brutal hardships of the winter campaigns. A long, puckered saber scar ran from his right ear down into the muscles of his neck, and a bandage of rag was tied around his left thigh.
Yet his eyes—black, burning obsidian—were alive with the deadly, ancient certainty of a wolf that had cornered its prey. He held no rifle; in his right hand he gripped his iron hunting blade, dripping dark crimson from the point.
Brennan backed away toward the cabin porch, his heels catching on the rough stones of the border path. He looked at his two dead companions lying in the dirt, then looked at the silent, bronze apparition stepping toward him through the silver moonlight.
"No..." Brennan whimpered, his voice cracking into a high, childlike shriek of pure, unadulterated madness. "You’re dead... the newspapers said you were killed at the border... General Crook burned your camps..."
"The mountain does not die, Charles Brennan," a voice called out from the cabin porch.
Brennan’s head whipped around.
Sarah stood at the top of the porch steps, the Springfield carbine held firmly against her hip, the heavy hammer cocked, the dark bore aimed directly at the bridge of his nose.
"Sarah..." Brennan sobbed, dropping the Colt revolver into the dirt, falling to his knees and raising his single, trembling hand in pathetic supplication. "For God’s sake, Sarah... I’m a broken man... look at me! I haven't eaten bread in four days... I only wanted what was mine..."
"Nothing here was ever yours, Brennan," Sarah said, her voice dropping into the quiet, terrible cadence of an executioner reading a final sentence. "Not the land. Not the silver. Not my life. And not my son’s future."
She looked at Chato.