The young warrior had stopped five paces from Brennan. He looked down at the weeping, shattered creature in the dust with the cold, absolute indifference that an eagle shows to a dead rodent in the rocks.
"He broke his word to the stone," Chato said in his low, guttural English, looking up at Sarah. "He crawled back to the lodge of the widow to bring fire a second time. Does he walk away again?"
Sarah slowly lowered the hammer of the Springfield, letting the iron click softly into the half-cock notch. She looked at Brennan—at the dirt caked in his beard, at the rotten rags bound around his arm, and at the bottomless, cowardly greed that had ruined his life and driven him to the gates of hell.
"No," Sarah said, her voice ringing clear in the desert silence. "He does not walk away. But his blood will not stain this threshold."
She turned her gaze toward the southern road—the trail that led past the dry wash toward the territorial stage station where Major Howard’s supply detachments still kept an iron telegraph line linked to the military post at Fort Lowell.
"Take his weapons, Chato," Sarah commanded softly. "Tie him to the cedar post by the road. Put the telegraph wire around his good wrist. When the morning stage passes with the mail from Tucson, let the federal marshals haul him to the territorial prison in Yuma. Let him spend forty years behind iron bars, listening to the desert wind, knowing that the widow of Silver Creek is planting corn upon his grave."
Chato nodded slowly, a grim, approving smile touching his scarred lips.
He stepped forward, seized Brennan by the collar of his greasy coat with one hand, and dragged him toward the cedar post, paying no more heed to the former deputy’s pathetic, sobbing pleas than he would to the rustle of dry leaves in the wind.
Sarah stood on the porch, her hand resting on the heavy walnut stock of her husband’s rifle, breathing in the cool night air that swept down from the high peaks.
Behind her, inside the warm, pine-scented cabin, little Thomas gave a small, contented sigh in his sleep, his hand resting securely upon the turquoise hawk that guarded his chest.
The morning sun rose over the San Pedro valley with a pure, diamond brilliance that washed the bloodstains from the caliche dust and turned the leaves of the little oak sapling into shimmering plates of gold.
By nine o'clock, the southern stage from Tucson had come and gone.
The driver—a leathery veteran named Jack Slade who had driven freight across the territory since the Gadsden Purchase—had nearly overturned his team when he saw the former deputy marshal of Silver Creek lashed securely to the cedar milepost with fifty feet of braided rawhide lariat, his Colt revolver and his written confession pinned to the post above his head with an iron horse-nail.
Two armed federal deputies who had been riding inside the coach on their way to the silver strikes at Tombstone had dismounted, read the paper with grim whistles of astonishment, and tossed Brennan into the rear boot among the leather mail sacks, snapping iron shackles onto his ankles with a finality that closed his account with the territory forever.
Now, the yard was quiet again.
Beside the stone chimney, where the fragrant smoke of cedar wood drifted lazily into the morning breeze, Chato sat upon an upturned pine crate.
He had washed the blood of the night's battle from his skin in the clear water of the irrigation ditch. His raven hair was combed out, tied back with a clean strip of red flannel that Sarah had given him from her sewing basket. His torn buckskins had been mended with neat, tight stitches of deer sinew, and a thick poultice of chewed osha root and clean linen was bound across the saber wound on his neck.
Before him sat a heavy tin plate piled high with fried salt pork, hot sourdough biscuits, and a bowl of wild honey gathered from the limestone clefts above the spring.
Chato ate with the silent, rhythmic hunger of a man who had lived for months on dried mescal paste and grasshopper meal.
Little Thomas sat directly on the pine boards of the porch beside the warrior’s knee. The boy held his small wooden horse in one hand, while his other hand rested fearlessly upon the fringed cuff of Chato’s high deerskin moccasin. He looked up into the warrior's battle-scarred face with absolute, unhesitating adoration, pointing occasionally to the knife sheath at Chato’s belt and murmuring words that were half-English, half-Athabaskan.
Sarah emerged from the kitchen, carrying an iron pot of steaming black coffee. She filled Chato’s tin cup to the brim, then sat down in the rocking chair beside him, her hands resting in her lap.