Chapter 1: The Crossing
The river ran low and red at dusk, and Jonas Hale brought Preacher down the bank with the care of a man who had crossed bad water before and meant to cross it again. The bay gelding tested the stones with one forefoot, snorted at the smell of iron in the current, and then went on at his rider's quiet word, picking his way between boulders worn smooth as skulls. Beyond the far shore the desert rose in terraces of stone toward Cinnabar, three miles by road and a world away by every other measure.
Jonas was thirty-four, a widower, a small rancher with forty head and a house empty of a woman's voice for three years. He kept his hat low and his thoughts lower. In his shirt pocket, against his heart, rested his father's silver locket, engraved with two willow trees.
He had come because a neighbor's boy had ridden in at noon with word of smoke on the south bank, thin and wrong, the kind that did not rise from any cooking fire. Jonas had saddled Preacher without hurry, rifle across the saddle and revolver at his hip.
The smell reached him before the sight did: burned canvas and wood, harness leather gone to char, and beneath it the sweet corruption of a body left a day in the sun. Preacher shied once, hard, and Jonas steadied him with a hand on his neck. "Easy, preacher man," he said. "Preaching won't help him now, whoever he is." The gelding settled, ears pricked toward the wagon, or what the fire had left of it.
It had been a freight wagon, heavy-built, the kind that hauled ore down from the claims or goods up from the railhead. Now it stood on its iron tires in blackened earth, its bed burned through, its canvas top gone except for one scorched rib of cloth that lifted in the evening wind. Jonas dismounted and led Preacher wide of the wreck, reading the ground as other men read print.
The teamster lay beside the off wheel, face down, one arm flung out toward the river as if in his last moment he had remembered water. He was a big man gone soft around the middle, gray at the temples, and the back of his shirt was dark where the bullet had gone in between his shoulders. Jonas knelt, turned him gently, and looked at a face he did not know. The man's eyes were open to the darkening sky. Jonas closed them with his thumb, as his mother had once shown him, and stood with his hat in his hand.
"No brand I know," he murmured. "No strongbox neither." Whoever had done this had not come for cargo, for the crates held cloth and tinned goods and a case of lamp oil that had not taken flame. Men who killed for plunder did not leave such things. Men who killed to send a message left exactly this: a burned wagon on a public crossing, a dead man every traveler south of Cinnabar would find.
In the ash at the wagon's rear, half buried where a small hand might have dropped it in flight, Jonas found the doll. It was made of corn husk and scraps of blue calico, with yarn hair the color of ripe wheat, and one bead eye gone. He picked it up, and ash sifted from its skirt like gray snow. A child had ridden on this wagon, or walked beside it, yet there was no child's body among the wreckage and no small tracks in the trampled ground, only deep prints of shod horses that had come from the east and gone back east, unhurried.
That troubled him more than the dead man did. Dead men were an ending; a missing child was a beginning, and beginnings in this country drew blood for miles. Jonas tucked the doll inside his coat, against the locket, and was straightening when the rocks around the crossing moved.
They had been there the whole time. Four Apache warriors rose from the stone where stone had seemed to be, rifles leveled, faces painted with dust and shadow, their stillness more eloquent than any war cry. They had let him kneel and close a dead man's eyes. They had waited until he found the doll, and Jonas understood, with the slow clarity that comes at riflepoint, that they had wanted him to find it.
He raised his hands away from his rifle, slow as sunrise. "Evening," he said, dry as the river stones. "I suppose telling you I just got here would be wasting breath we might need later." The nearest warrior, a broad man with a scar through one eyebrow, gestured with his rifle toward the gelding, then toward the darkening east, where the slot canyons cut the hills like wounds. The meaning needed no translation. Jonas looked once at the dead teamster and once at the river running red with the last light, and then he mounted as they bade him, four rifles keeping their patient counsel upon his back.
Chapter 2
: The Valley Behind the Stone