They had lit lanterns. Faint, bouncing yellow dots of light moved along the ridge half a mile to the south, accompanied by the occasional shrill whistle or the muffled shout of a man cursing a stubborn horse. They were searching the trail that led back toward Silver Creek, assuming she would flee toward the safety of the town.
Because she knew Brennan controlled the town, Sarah had chosen the opposite direction.
She followed the dry wash north and west, climbing steadily into the broken limestone hills that guarded the entrance to the deep canyons—lands that no white settler entered without an armed escort. It was Apache territory. Chiricahua and Western Apache bands had roamed these gorges for generations, fighting a bitter, dying war against the cavalry patrols and the miners who poisoned their creeks with mercury.
To the white citizens of Silver Creek, the mountains were a place of slaughter and savagery. But tonight, the unknown terrors of the wilderness seemed far less terrible than the men behind her.
By the third hour, Sarah's body began to rebel.
A sharp, tearing pain radiated from the small of her back around to her lower abdomen. Her ankles felt as though they had been bound in hot wire, and the heavy calico of her skirts snagged relentlessly on catclaw acacia, ripping the hem and tearing the skin of her shins.
She paused beneath the overhang of a red sandstone boulder, panting, her hands pressed against her belly.
"Hush now," she whispered raggedly into the darkness, her teeth chattering from the cold. "Be still, little one. Just be still. We're getting away."
The child kicked violently, a frantic, rhythmic pulsing that brought tears of pure exhaustion to her eyes. She reached into her pocket, her fingers closing over the smooth, cold case of the silver pocket watch. She pulled it out and held it to her ear.
Tick-tick-tick.
The tiny, mechanical heartbeat continued, indifferent to the desert, indifferent to the night. It smelled faintly of Thomas—of pipe smoke and tallow grease.
"God of mercy," she prayed, her voice cracking in the dry wind. "If you take me, take me after the child is born. Don't let him die in the dirt."
She drank a single mouthful of water from the tin flask, swishing it around her parched tongue before swallowing, then forced herself back onto her feet.
The ground was rising steeply now. The sandy wash narrowed into a jagged ravine flanked by towering walls of red and gray limestone that rose hundreds of feet into the moonlit sky, blotting out the stars. The wind died down here, replaced by an eerie, echoing silence broken only by the scrape of her boots against loose shale.
She walked until the stars began to pale in the east.
The velvet black of the night dissolved into a slate gray, followed by the first faint bands of rose and amber along the jagged horizon. The desert was waking. Gambel’s quail called to one another in low, liquid whistles from the chaparral, and a hawk drifted lazily on the first thermal drafts above the canyon rims.
Sarah was near total collapse. Her vision swam with dark spots; her mouth was dry as bone, the water flask long since empty. Her dress was soaked through with sweat at the spine and caked in gray alkaline dust.
Then, she heard it.
A faint, crystalline murmur.
Water.
She stumbled forward, rounding a sharp shoulder of basalt rock where the canyon floor narrowed to barely twenty yards across. There, bubbling up from a fracture in the limestone wall, was a shallow, clear spring that spilled into a natural stone basin before trickling away into the gravel. Along the edges of the pool grew lush green watercress and slender willow reeds—an emerald paradise carved into the heart of the dry stone.
With a choked cry, Sarah dropped to her knees at the edge of the water. She plunged her face into the cold basin, drinking until her stomach cramped with the sudden shock. She splashed the icy water over her burning eyes, her neck, and her swollen wrists.
She dragged herself into the deep shadow beneath a shelving rock ledge a few paces from the spring, pulled her knees up to her chest, and let the satchel fall to the earth.
She was safe, if only for an hour. The outlaws could never have tracked her through the rocky bed of the wash.
The relief was so overwhelming that her defenses finally shattered. Sarah buried her face in her apron and wept—silent, racking sobs that shook her entire frame. She wept for Thomas, who had died alone in the dark beneath a mountain of rock; she wept for her little home, now ruined and burned; she wept for the terrifying, impossible future that awaited her and the child she carried.
Slowly, the exhaustion of the night overcame her. Her sobs grew shallow, her breathing evened out, and she slipped into a heavy, dreamless slumber against the cold limestone rock.