Marta's testimony went down on paper before dawn, in Silas's careful hand, by lantern light, while she spoke and Saya repeated each sentence back in their own tongue to be certain nothing had wandered in the crossing.
"I, Marta, daughter of Haskay, was present when the soldiers marked the boundary," it began. It told of the iron chain stretched glittering in the sun, of Captain Delaney, a red-whiskered man who had wept when he drank their water and called it the sweetest of his life. It told of the stone with the eagle cut upon it, set where the twin junipers stand beyond the north arroyo, and of hands laid upon hands upon the stone. Marta listened with her eyes shut, then made her mark, a firm small cross, and two other elders who had been children that day made their marks below hers.
"You carry my voice in that wallet," Marta told Saya, as the pages were folded into oilcloth against her heart. "Do not let it argue with gunmen on the road. A voice is not a shield. Ride around trouble as water rides around stone."
They found the boundary stone before the sun was two hours high. Floods had turned and half-buried it, canted like a drunk against the arroyo bank, but when Joseph โ who had insisted on riding though his leg was bound stiff and his face went white at every jolt โ scraped the crusted earth from its face, the eagle stood revealed, wings spread, cut sixty summers gone and enduring still. Saya made a rubbing with charcoal on a flour sack, and Silas's distances, paced with his father's cracked brass compass, went into the wallet beside the testimony, so any honest man in Tucson might put his own hand on the proof.
Joseph hefted the rubbing as if it weighed no more than a feather. "This is a small thing to set against Bragg's gold."
"A bullet is a small thing," Saya said, "and it settles more than gold does. Truth is not weighed by the pound, cousin. Mount up. Your leg."
"My leg is Apache," Joseph said through his teeth, swinging into the saddle with his arms. "It will do as it is told."
They rode with three horses and a mule carrying water they could ill spare โ one skin, a canteen apiece, and a gourd for the animals at the worst stretch. Chief Taklish stood at the camp's edge until they were specks. He did not wave. Chiefs of his generation let their standing be the farewell.
The country toward Tucson was made to teach humility: creosote flats like hammered tin, arroyos that promised shade and delivered snakes, an abandoned stage station whose well Kane's men had fouled. They rode in the early hours and the late, lying up at noon, Saya rationing water by mouthfuls counted aloud.
On the second noon, in a paloverde's thin shade, she saw the dust. Not wind-dust, which wanders. Rider-dust, which intends. It came from behind them, resolving into three horsemen who did not ride as travellers ride, pausing at water and prospect, but as a rope rides when it is being drawn tight.
"Kane," Joseph said, squinting. "That is his long coat, even at this distance. And that is his way โ never hurrying, because he has never yet been late for a killing."
"He does not want us dead in particular," Saya said. "He wants the oilcloth. A body can be explained in this country. A paper arriving in Tucson cannot be unexplained."
They did not run. Running kills horses in that heat, and Kane knew it and counted on it. Instead Saya led them down into the great dry wash that cut the flats diagonally, where banks were high and bends many and a horseman showed himself only in glimpses. Twice they heard shots, far off, not aimed so much as spoken โ a warning that the rope was still drawing. Once, rounding a bend, they found a rattlesnake coiled in the wash's only shade, and gave it, in respectful silence, the whole road.
At dusk the wash climbed onto a long ridge, and below them in the gathering blue, unexpected as mercy, lay the telegraph and stage station at Rillito Crossing โ one adobe house, a corral, and a pole with a wire that sang faintly in the evening wind, running south toward Tucson like a thread out of a labyrinth. Saya looked at that wire a long time.
"My voice can ride that," she said softly. "Faster than Kane. Faster than any horse Bragg feeds."
Joseph, swaying in the saddle with pain and weariness, managed his crooked grin. "Then let it ride, cousin. But let us get our skins under that roof first. For here they come."
Behind them, on the ridge they had just crossed, three riders stood silhouetted for one held breath against the last of the light โ patient, unhurried, and already dismounting to come on foot, where horses could not follow and the dark would do half their work for them.
Chapter 20: Fire in the Storehouse