At dusk Naya came out with two cups of coffee and saw what Micah was already seeing. On the ridge above the road, where no traveler would pause at that hour, riders sat their horses in a line β four, perhaps five β motionless against the last of the light. They were too far for faces and too near for accident. They watched the house the way men watch a claim they mean to take, and when the first thunder rolled down the San Pedro, they did not ride away.
Chapter 26
Fire in the Rain
The storm broke an hour after full dark, and it came the way desert storms come to the San Pedro, all at once β wind first, bending the cottonwoods double, then rain so hard it drummed speech out of the air. Naya had just banked the lamp when she smelled smoke, and the smell was wrong. Rain smoke is clean. This was kerosene and dry wood, close and rising.
Micah was already at the door with his rifle. Orange light shivered along the side of the claim shack where their tools and winter stores were kept, and even in the downpour the flames were climbing, fed faster than rain could argue with them.
"They mean to smoke us out," he said. "Get the children to the root cellar. Stay low."
But Naya had already moved. She woke Tomas first, a hand on his shoulder, calm as morning. "Shoes. Take Elena's hand. Do exactly what we practiced." The boy was up and steady in seconds, lifting his sister, who clung like a small wet cat. Luz she carried herself, doll and all, out the back into the rain, where the cellar mouth gaped by the kitchen garden. She settled them on the sacks of beans with a lantern and Elena's quilt. "You are the guard now," she told Tomas. "If anyone but Micah or me opens that door, you shout for Grandfather. Can you shout that loud?" He nodded, jaw set. "Good. You are brave and bored in a cellar. Both are allowed."
Then she went back into the yard, because there were buckets, and a well, and a house that Micah had built board by board, and she had not finished with any of them.
The shack was lost β she saw that at once β but fire travels on wind, and the wind was pushing sparks toward the house roof. Naya organized the water as she would have organized a sickroom: no panic, every hand a task. Two of the older camp boys who had ridden in at the first alarm she set to pumping; she herself hauled and passed, her skirt plastered to her legs, calling distances and turns over the thunder. "Soak the blankets! Lay them on the east edge! Again β again!" Her voice cut through the storm because it had to, and people obeyed it the way they had obeyed it in fevers and childbirths all her life.
Beyond the firelight, worse was happening. Through the sheets of rain she saw men around her father at the edge of the corral β Noche, who had come down from camp when the sky turned, standing straight in the storm with his blanket over his shoulders. Garrett Sloane held a lantern in one hand and a paper in a oilcloth wrap, and two of Brandt's hired men stood too close behind the old chief, one with a pistol hung casual and ready at his side.
"Just your mark, old man," Sloane was shouting over the rain, thrusting the paper toward a small folding table that another man shielded badly from the wet. "Brandt is merciful. Sign the sale, the burning stops, everybody goes home dry. The court is going to take it anyway. This way there's money in it."
Noche looked at the paper the way a man looks at a snake in his path. "My daughter read the treaty in the white man's own court," he said. "I will wait for the white man's judge to finish reading it too."
"You'll wait in ashes," Sloane said, and his smile was thin and wet. The man with the pistol shifted it, not quite raising it, letting the chief understand the shape of the conversation.
Micah understood it too. He came out of the smoke from the far side of the corral with no lantern and no warning, moving through the rain the way he had once moved through enemy country, and the first Sloane knew of him was the rifle barrel cold against the back of his neck.
"Drop the paper," Micah said, quiet enough that only the circle heard him. "Then drop the lantern. Slow."
Everything froze except the rain. The hired man with the pistol half-turned, and Micah said, without looking at him, "If that hand finishes rising, you will be the second man I deal with, and the first one is already decided." The hand stopped. In the firelight Naya saw Sloane's face work β calculation, hatred, and beneath both, the bright edge of fear β and she saw the moment he chose to be a coward in a new direction. He let the paper fall into the mud.
"You're finished, Donovan," he spat. "Brandt owns courts you haven't heard of."