By the creek, at the edge of the cottonwoods, stood three stones stacked one
atop the other, deliberate as a signature. Tucked into the topmost was a single
hawk feather.
"My brother," Saya said, and her voice shook. "Dokan. This is his mark β it
means I am looking, I am near, do not despair." She turned to him, joy and
fear warring in her face. "He's alive. He's searching. He's close enough to
have found this creek."
35
Silas studied the stones. "If he can find you, the men can follow him."
"I know." Her hand found his sleeve. "That's why Iβ" She stopped, steadied
herself. "If he comes, they'll watch him. They'll watch the trails he watches."
"Then we'll be ready." Silas looked at the stacked stones, then at her. "Your
brother sounds like a man who knows how to be careful."
"He is worse than careful. He is stubborn." A ghost of her old humor. "It runs
in the family, apparently."
He almost smiled. Then the weight of it settled: Dokan out there somewhere,
hunting for his sister, and Hale's men hunting for both of them, and this small
cabin at the mouth of a canyon sitting square in the middle.
"We'll be ready," he said again, and made it a promise.
That evening they sat on the porch and talked it through the way people talk
through a coming storm β naming it to shrink it.
"If Dokan finds me, the men may follow him here," Saya said. "He is careful,
but no one is careful enough forever."
"Then we don't wait to be found." Silas whittled at a stick, thinking out loud.
"Hale's consolidating something around Three Springs β land, water, I don't
know which yet. Men like Hale leave paper. Deeds, filings, claims. There's a
land office in Juniper Flats, and a blacksmith named Felipe whose brother
was Esteban, the shepherd who vanished. If anybody in this county wants
Hale's paper trail found, it's Felipe."
"You would ride into town asking questions? After today?" She gestured at
his face β at the open, honest, terrible-at-lying face he apparently had.
"I'd ride in buying horseshoes and lead ingots and minding my own
business," Silas said. "Freight men know how to be invisible in plain sight.
36
Nobody looks twice at a mule-skinner buying supplies." He set down the
stick. "And if there's paper tying Hale to the springs, I want it before his men
come back with harder questions."
Saya was quiet. Then: "My leg will bear riding in another week. Maybe less.
If we must runβ"
"We won't run," Silas said. "Not from your brother, and not from them." He
looked at her β this woman who'd walked into his canyon half-dead and
proceeded to reorganize his entire life. "Dokan's looking for you. Hale's
looking for whoever cut his trap. Let them both look. We'll be the ones who
know the ground."
She studied him for a long moment, and then she smiled β slow and fierce,
the healer's daughter and the tracker's sister both in it at once.
"My brother will like you," she said. "He likes stubborn men. He says they
are the only ones worth arguing with."
The riders came at midday, four days later, riding in openly along the creek
trail like men with nothing to hide.
Silas saw the dust first, from the woodpile. Two horses, moving easy. He set
down the axe, wiped his hands, and stepped onto the porch. His rifle stood
just inside the door, out of sight but within reach. Inside the cabin, behind
him, everything went still β Saya silent among the shadows, listening
through the chinks in the log walls the way he'd taught her.
The lead rider was a big man with a scarred knuckle on his right hand, visible
even at distance when he raised it in a mock-friendly wave. Aikens. Hale's
foreman. Silas had seen him in Juniper Flats, usually at Hale's shoulder,
usually smiling the way a wolf smiles at a fence post.
37
"Howdy," Aikens called, reining up at the edge of the yard. The younger
hand hung back, eyes moving over the cabin, the corral, the woodpile β
cataloguing. "Silas Wren, ain't it? Freight man, retired?"
"That's right." Silas stayed on the porch. He didn't offer his hand. "What
brings Hale's men to CaΓ±on Seco?"
Aikens's smile didn't falter. If anything it widened. "Mr. Hale sends his
regards. He's been asking after old acquaintances." He let his gaze drift,
casual as you please, across the cabin windows. "Lost anything lately? A
stray, maybe β or a visitor?"
Behind Silas, inside the cabin, there was no sound at all. Saya might have
been a held breath.
Silas looked at Aikens for a long moment. He thought about the trap, and the
fever, and the clean cup. He thought about Esteban Reyes's two sons
searching the arroyos for six days. He thought about small shoes set side by
side by a wagon bench.
"Can't say I have," he said evenly. "Slate's here. Woodpile's here. Don't recall
losing anything else."
Aikens studied him. The younger hand shifted in his saddle.
"Well now," Aikens said softly. "That's funny. Because we've heard
different." He leaned forward on his saddle horn, and the friendliness drained
out of his voice like water out of a cracked bucket. "A steel trap got sprung
out in the canyon country. Belonged to a friend of ours. And somebody cut it
β cut it clean β and walked off with what was in it."
"That so."
"Mr. Hale takes an interest in theft, Silas. And in the people who commit it."
38
Aikens straightened. "You see anything β anyone β out of the ordinary
lately, you'd be doing yourself a favor to mention it. Before somebody has to
come back and ask harder."
The threat hung in the midday heat, plain as a posted notice.
Silas didn't move from the porch. "I'll keep that in mind."