They blindfolded him with a strip of woven cloth that smelled of sage and woodsmoke, and they tied it well. Jonas did not resist. A man with four rifles at his back and a child's doll in his coat was in no position to argue terms, and besides, what he had seen at the crossing did not fit the shape of a simple ambush. Raiders did not wait to let a stranger pray over the dead.
They took his rifle and revolver, but left him the locket. They set him on Preacher and led the gelding by a rope, and for the first hour he counted what he could: gravel turning to sand, the river smell fading, a climb, a descent, the air cooling as stone rose on either side until he felt the light narrow to a blade above him. The canyon walls came so close that his stirrups brushed rock. Water dripped somewhere, patient as a clock.
"Mind telling me if there's a low branch?" Jonas said once, to the darkness. "I'd hate to arrive with my brains rearranged. The brains I have are barely sufficient as it stands." No answer came except the soft tread of moccasins and Preacher's hooves on stone, but he fancied the silence behind him changed, the way a room changes when men in it are deciding whether to smile.
The ride lasted through full dark. Twice they stopped to water the horses at seeps he heard but did not see. Once, far off, an owl called and was answered. Jonas rode with his hands easy on the saddle horn, and thought of his ranch house standing dark, and of word reaching Cinnabar that he had gone down to the Rio Sombra at dusk and not come back. He thought, too, of the doll, and of small feet that had left no track.
Near dawn β he knew it by the birds, and by a thinness in the air β the canyon widened. Hands helped him down, not roughly, and stood him on ground that gave beneath his boots: grass. Living grass, thick underfoot, in October, in the driest year in seven. The blindfold was lifted away, and Jonas Hale opened his eyes upon the Valle de las Sombras, and forgot, for a moment, to breathe.
The valley lay beneath Cerro de la Campana, Bell Mountain, whose bell-shaped summit caught the first sun while the floor still stood in blue shadow. A stream ran through it, clear and cold, bordered by fields β corn high and green, beans, squash, melons in ordered rows, tended ground that spoke of seasons of peace. Lodges stood along the water beneath cottonwoods. Smoke rose from morning fires. Horses grazed in a natural corral of stone. At the valley's heart rose one cottonwood so great that three men could not have joined hands around it, its crown spreading like a held green sky above a cleared circle.
It was, Jonas understood, impossible β and the impossibility was what men would kill for. Where water was law and grass was wealth, this valley was a sovereign country hidden behind stone, guarded with the whole strength of the Sombra band. Every baron and land office clerk with a map and an appetite would want a name for this place, a line drawn around it, a price put upon it. The warriors had not brought him here as a guest. They had brought him the way a river brings a log: because the current of events allowed no other course.
The whole camp had come out to watch the white prisoner arrive. They lined the path in silence β old women with silver in their braids, children clinging to their mothers' skirts, young men with rifles and bows, elders wrapped against the dawn cold. No one jeered. The silence was worse; it was the silence of a people weighing a man's life in a scale he could not see. A little girl, perhaps six, stared at the blue calico showing at his coat where the doll rode, and her mother drew her back, though the child never stopped staring.
From among the lodges an old woman approached, small and straight-backed, with a healer's bundle at her belt and eyes that missed nothing: Grandmother Saba, he would learn, the band's elder and medicine woman. She studied Jonas as she might study a wound β for what was in it, and whether it would fester β then spoke to his captors words that made the scarred warrior grunt, almost in amusement. She reached out, fearless, and adjusted the doll against his coat so its yarn head would not be crushed. Then she walked toward the great cottonwood, and the crowd parted.
Jonas followed where the rifles guided him, across the green valley under Bell Mountain, every eye in that hidden country upon him. He had ridden all night to arrive at a place that existed on no map he had ever seen. Whatever waited beneath the cottonwood, his old life β fences, forty head, an empty house β had ended at the canyon mouth, as surely as if the blindfold had never come off.
Chapter 3
: A Debt Thirty Years Old