"Don't let them take me," she whispered. Her eyes were open now,
fever-bright, fixed on him.
"They won't."
"You don't know what they want."
"Then tell me."
She held his gaze. The fire had burned down to coals, and in the red dark her
face was all shadows and brightness at once.
"The springs," she whispered.
He leaned closer. "What about them?"
But her eyes had already drifted closed again, and her hand slipped from his
wrist, and he sat in the dark with the word hanging in the air between them
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like smoke, and did not sleep for the rest of the night.
"The springs."
Silas leaned closer, the firelight dragging shadows across the rock wall
behind her. Outside the overhang, the night had settled into its deep hours —
the creek's murmur, the ticks and rustles of the canyon, the slow breathing of
Slate where he stood picketed in the dark.
"What about them?" he said quietly.
Saya's fingers were still around his wrist. Her eyes were open, and for a
moment the fever seemed to clear from them like smoke lifting off water.
"They are not just taking land," she said.
He waited.
"They are making people disappear."
A coldness moved through Silas's chest that had nothing to do with the night
air. "Who?"
"Families. Travelers. Men who refuse to sell." She had to stop and breathe.
The words came thin, each one costing her. "Three weeks ago, a shepherd
vanished near the south spring. Esteban. A Mexican man with two sons. His
boys searched the arroyos for six days."
Silas knew the name. Esteban Reyes. He'd bought mutton from the man two
winters back, a quiet fellow with a limp and a laugh that surprised you.
"Last week," Saya went on, "a wagon was found standing empty on the old
mining road. No horses. No people. The fire still warm in the cook pot."
22
"Did you see what happened to them?"
"No." Her grip tightened. "But I found the second wagon myself. Near Three
Springs, in the cottonwoods. I went inside it."
She stopped. Her throat worked.
"Blankets," she said at last. "Folded. A cook pot. And small shoes. A child's
shoes, set side by side by the bench, as if someone meant to come back for
them."
Silas said nothing. He had freighted goods through country like this for
fifteen years, and he knew the particular silence that fell over a place where
something wrong had happened. He could feel it now, pressing at the edges
of the little shelter.
"These men think no one will come looking for people without power," Saya
said, and the anger in her voice was steady even through the fever. "A
shepherd. Travelers with nothing. Who would ask questions?"
"Did they know you found the wagon?"
"Yes." She swallowed. "I followed them after. I thought they were ordinary
thieves, stealing horses or supplies. Then I saw them at dusk, on the ridge
above the middle spring — with the surveyor."
"Which surveyor?"
"I never heard his name. But he carried a red notebook, and he wrote in it,
and he pointed, and the men nodded." Her eyes held his. "Every place he
marked, Silas — every single place — someone lost something after. A fence
cut. A well gone bad. A man gone."
Silas looked toward his saddlebag, where the expensive cigarette stub lay
wrapped in paper. He thought of a man beside a black carriage, years ago,
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offering fifty dollars for a blind eye. Ambrose Hale. The richest cattle broker
in Cobre County. A man who considered the law something he could rent by
the hour.
"How did the trap get you?" he asked.
"I was watching the trail they use. I stayed too long in one place, thinking
like a hunter instead of prey." A flicker of self-reproach crossed her face.
"The trap was set across the trail itself. Not beside it. Across it. For whatever
walked there."
"Traps for people," Silas said slowly, "or for whoever gets curious."
"Either way, it found me."
Her voice was fading, but she forced herself on, the way a person forces
themselves up a last slope.
"I watched them at dusk," she whispered. "From the rocks above the middle
spring. The surveyor wrote and wrote in his red book, and pointed at the
water, and the big one with the scarred knuckle — he laughed about
something, and the others laughed too. I was too far to hear the words. Only
the laughing." Her fingers tightened on his wrist. "They left at dark. I stayed
until the stars were out, marking in my own head where they'd stood, what
they'd pointed at. In the morning I went down to the trail to read their tracks
— and the trap took me before I'd gone ten paces."
"Set overnight," Silas said quietly. "While you watched."
"While I watched," she agreed, and there was fury in it — at them, at herself.
"I thought like a hunter. I forgot that hunters also set snares."
She closed her eyes then, and for a while he thought the fever had taken her
under again. But her breathing stayed even, and her hand stayed on his wrist,
24
and he sat very still in the firelight and did the arithmetic of what she'd told
him.
Traps set on human trails. Men vanishing near water. A surveyor marking
ground in a red book. And Hale's money somewhere underneath it all, the
way bedrock sits under soil — you couldn't see it, but everything rested on it.
He'd worked for Hale once. Briefly. Long enough to learn the shape of the
man.
Saya stirred. "Don't let them take me," she murmured again, half in sleep.
"They won't," he said, and this time it wasn't comfort. It was a decision, and
it landed in him with the weight of something he'd been avoiding for eight
years.