Chapter 1
The Road Past Cottonwood Creek
The light was going thin and amber when Elias Vale came down the pass road into the Cottonwood Creek valley, and Cinder picked his way as if he understood that neither of them had anywhere particular to be by dark. The dun gelding was dusty to the belly, his gait steady and unhurried, the way a horse learns to travel when his rider never asks him to hurry toward a place, only away from the last one. Elias sat loose in the saddle, reins in one hand, the other resting near his thigh where habit kept it, not threatening, only ready. He was thirty-eight that autumn of 1884, though the years sat on him in a way that made strangers guess older until they saw how straight he still stood when he dismounted.
Below him the valley opened in a gentle bowl, Cottonwood Creek threading silver through pasture gone gold with October. Cottonwoods along the water had turned, their leaves trembling yellow against the dark pines that climbed the far slope. The air smelled of cold water, fallen leaves, and woodsmoke from somewhere he could not yet see.
Then he saw the ranch.
It sat in a grove of pines on the far side of the creek, a one-room log cabin with a porch and a lean-to roof, a corral, a barn with a loft, and a garden plot gone to late stalks behind a crooked fence. A lantern burned in the cabin window, a single warm square against the gathering dusk, and the smoke from its chimney rose straight in the still air. What caught his eye longest, though, was the fence. Along the creek pasture the south line of cedar posts and rails had fallen into ruin β posts leaning like tired men, rails down in the grass, whole sections open to the water. A place with a fence like that was a place where hands had been too few, or luck too thin, for too long.
Elias reined Cinder to a stop on the road and looked for a long moment. He could see no man about the yard, no horse in the corral but a single mare who lifted her head to watch him. Somewhere inside that cabin someone tended the lantern and waited for night. He thought of riding on. The road south led to San Tomas, half a day's ride beyond the hills, and beyond that to other roads that asked no questions.
He thought of riding on, and then the weariness that lived in his bones made its quiet argument. Cinder needed water and graze. The creek bottom offered shelter, and a camp apart from any man's land β or woman's, as the case might be β would offend nobody. He would water the horse, sleep as he slept, and be gone before the lantern was lit again.
He turned off the road where the grass was trampled at a crossing and led Cinder down to the water. The gelding drank long and gratefully, then raised his dripping muzzle and sighed. Elias unsaddled him, rubbed him down with a handful of dry grass, and picketed him where the graze was still green along the bank. He made his small camp the way he had made a thousand camps, without waste: bedroll laid on level ground under a cottonwood, saddlebags for a pillow, fire small and soon let die, for he needed little cooking and less light. He ate cold pork and a biscuit gone hard, and drank creek water from his cupped hand.
Dark settled over the valley, kind and complete. The lantern in the cabin window burned on a while longer, then dimmed, then went out. An owl called from the pines behind the ranch. The creek talked softly over its stones, a sound that should have been a lullaby to any tired man.
Elias Vale lay on his back with his hat over his eyes and his Colt .45 on the blanket beside his right hand, the grip turned toward his fingers as it had been every night for ten years. He did not pray. He had given up asking heaven for sleep some years back, figuring the request had been heard and answered in the negative and that a man should take the hint. Instead he listened β to the water, to Cinder shifting and cropping grass, to the night birds, to every small sound sorted into harmless and not harmless by a part of his mind that never stood down. Sleep came as it always came, in thin snatches, an hour here and twenty minutes there, each one shallow enough that a snapped twig could pour him instantly awake with his hand closed on iron. Above him the stars wheeled in their patient order. Below them, in the valley that looked so much like rest, Elias Vale kept the only watch he knew how to keep β his own, and badly, and all night long.
Chapter 2
The Night He Failed