working, rebranding stolen cattle, too far from any road to run and too
watched to refuse.
"Esteban?" Silas asked.
"Alive," Quinn said. "Aikens swears it. Thin, worked hard, but alive."
Silas closed his eyes. Somewhere across the street, in the dark of the livery,
Slate stamped and blew, dreaming whatever horses dream.
"Dawn," Quinn said. "We ride at dawn. Dokan knows the trail."
Silas nodded. He had promised Dokan's sister that they would finish it. He
had promised Dokan her safety. He was beginning to understand that
promises were like fence posts β you set them one at a time, and after a
while you had something that could hold.
Pell the surveyor was waiting in Quinn's office when they came back inside,
and he was not the same man who had once walked the Cobre County lines
with a red notebook in his coat and Hale's money in his pocket. Two weeks
in a cell had taken the starch out of him. His hands shook when Quinn set a
tin cup of water in front of him, and they shook worse when she laid the
86
charcoal copies on the desk between them β Silas's copies, the ones he had
made by lamplight, every column and date faithfully rendered in black dust.
"You made these?" Pell whispered, staring at them.
"I did," Silas said.
Pell laughed, a short broken sound. "Then you know. You know all of it." He
looked up at Quinn. "I'll tell you everything. The camp, the men, the β the
family. I'll tell you where. Just β" His voice cracked. "Just don't let him
have me killed in that cell. He has men everywhere. You don't know. You
don't know what he's β"
"We know," Quinn said evenly. "That's why you're going to help us take the
camp at first light, and why afterward you're going to stand up in a hearing
room and say every word of it where everyone can hear."
Pell nodded, weeping openly now, past shame and into the clean, cold
country beyond it. "The box canyon," he said. "Past the second spring.
There's a trail β Dokan's people know it. The men are there. Esteban, and
four others. They rebrand the stock and they don't get paid and if they run
β" He stopped. "If they run, Aikens's riders hunt them. Like β like
animals."
"And the Hallorans?" Quinn asked quietly.
Pell's face crumpled. "They fought," he whispered. "At the taking. The father
fought. I'm sorry. God help me, I'm sorry."
Silas felt Saya's hand come to rest on his forearm. He had not heard her come
in. Her medicine pouch hung at her belt, and her face was very still, the way
it got when she was holding something too heavy to set down in front of
others.
87
"Show us," she said to Pell. Not unkindly. Just certain.
They rode before first light β Quinn, six deputies, Silas, Dokan, and Pell
tied loosely to his saddle, pale as dough, pointing out landmarks with a
shaking hand. Dokan led them off the main trail an hour out, up a deer path
through the pines that switchbacked along a granite shoulder, and brought
them out above the box canyon just as the sky went the color of cold ash.
Below, the line camp: three cabins, a corral, a branding fire already lit, men
moving slow with sleep. Eight of Hale's riders, maybe nine, rifles stacked by
the cook tent because no one had ever come up the deer path before and no
one expected anyone to.
Quinn's whistle cut the morning open.
It was over in minutes, and afterward Silas would remember it the way he
remembered most mercies β as a blur of shouting and raised hands and no
one dead. Outnumbered three to one and taken from above, Hale's men did
the arithmetic and laid their rifles down. Aikens's second, a hard-faced man
with a scar through his lip, started to reach for his belt and thought better of it
when he found himself looking down the barrels of four deputy rifles and
Dokan's drawn bow, held steady as stone.
And then, from the smallest cabin, the door opened, and a thin man stepped
out into the gray light, blinking, one hand raised against the sun β and
Felipe, who had ridden with the posse's supply wagon because Quinn had not
been able to keep him home, made a sound like a man punched in the chest.
"Esteban," he said.
The thin man stared. "Felipe?" he said, and then he was running, stumbling,
and Felipe caught him, and the two brothers went down together in the dirt of
the box canyon, holding each other, and Felipe was weeping into his
88
brother's matted hair, and Esteban β who had been taken off the Juniper
Flats road eleven months ago and had not been heard from since β was
laughing and crying at once, saying Felipe's name over and over like a prayer
he had been saving.
The other freed men stood blinking in the dawn, dazed, hardly believing the
rifles were really lowered. One of them, an old Mexican drover with white in
his mustache, sank to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground.
Dokan went to him and lifted him up by the shoulders and spoke to him in
Spanish, gently, and the old man clung to him and wept.
Pell slid off his horse and stood apart, watching, his face gray. "I drew the
maps," he said to no one. "Every camp. Every line. I drew them all."
But it was what lay in the draw behind the cabins that stopped them all. Pell
led them there without being asked, his shoulders shaking β three mounds
of piled stone, carefully made, someone's hands having done the work with a
tenderness that sat strange beside everything else. Saya walked to them
slowly, her moccasins silent on the pine needles, and knelt by the smallest