The riders came at first light, when the canyon mouth was still in shadow and the dew lay cold upon the stones. Jonas counted them from the ledge above the entrance, his father's rifle across his knees, and stopped counting at forty, because after forty the number did not change the arithmetic of what they faced. They rode in no hurry. Dust rose behind them in a pale plume, and at their head, on a black horse groomed like a parade animal, sat Ezekiel Harrow in a gray coat, his hat low, his gloved hands quiet on the reins.
Below, in the mouth of the slot canyon, Chief Nahlin waited with twelve riders in a loose line across the narrow ground. Jonas descended the cut and took his place at the chief's left hand. Willa stood at his right, veiled, her mare's reins in her fist, and behind them the canyon walls rose so close that a man might almost touch both sides at once. Above, hidden in the cliff's seams, the valley's riflemen lay still; in the caves behind them the children and the old ones waited in a silence practiced like a prayer.
Harrow reined in twenty paces from the line and sat looking at the canyon as a buyer looks at a house he has already decided to own. His gunmen spread out behind him in a ragged crescent, carbines across their saddle bows β railroad toughs, mine guards, drifters who had sold their winters for wages.
"Chief Nahlin," Harrow called. "I have come a long way to save us both some grief."
"You have come a long way into a country that is not yours," Nahlin said. "That is the grief, and it is yours to carry home."
Harrow did not smile. "I will speak plainly, since plain speech is honored among your people. The valley behind you sits on claims recorded by Harrow Consolidated. The papers your son-in-law stole from my offices are company property. And the man himself" β his gaze moved to Jonas, mild as a clerk's β "is wanted in connection with a jailbreak at Fort San Rey and the wounding of my men. Give me the valley, the papers, and Jonas Hale, and by sundown every soul in your caves can come down and live unmolested on the flats, with wages for those who want work. Refuse, and I cannot answer for what forty rifles will do in a place with one door."
"The papers were not stolen from an honest house," Nahlin said. "They were taken from a thief's desk by a man the thief had chained in a cellar. If the law wants them, the law will have them. You are not the law, though you have dressed like it for years."
Harrow's gloved hand lifted and settled again. "The law is a slow horse, Chief. It has not reached this valley in fifty years. I have."
Jonas spoke then, because the naming of him had put a weight in the air that silence would only settle wrong. "You had my father sign a deed to land he never sold, Zeke. Only his hand was three years in the grave when the ink dried. You had my brother killed for carrying the numbers of your mine in his pocket. If you want me, I am standing where you can see me. But you will have to explain to these men why they are dying for a forged signature."
Not a head turned among the gunmen, but something moved through them, the way wind moves through wheat.
Harrow studied Jonas a long moment. "Your father should have taught you that a Hale's word is only worth the ground under it, and I own the ground." He turned his horse a quarter turn, addressing the canyon now, the caves, the unseen. "Hear me, all of you! I did not come to butcher women in caves. I came for what is mine. Think on it while the light lasts. When the sun tops that ridge" β he raised one gloved finger toward the eastern rim, where the sky was already paling β "my offer closes. After that, what happens here is on the heads of the stubborn."
He wheeled the black horse and rode back through his crescent of men, who parted for him and closed behind him like water.
Nahlin let out a breath. "He gives us time because he wants the caves to argue for him," he said. "Fear climbs walls faster than men do."
"He will have the sun in his eyes when he comes back up this slope," Willa said from behind the veil, and Jonas heard the steadiness in her voice and loved her for it fiercely. "And we will have the shadow. Grandmother chose this hour for the caves before ever he chose it for his threat."
Jonas looked up at the brightening rim, at the thin line of gold gathering on the stone. An hour, perhaps a little more. He thought of the locket against his chest, of the papers sewn into oilcloth, of Renner waiting in the rocks, and he set his rifle across his knees again.
"Then we use his hour," he said. "All of it."
Chapter 22
: She Lifts the Veil
The sun had not yet topped the ridge when Willa handed her mare's reins to her father and walked out alone into the open ground between the two lines.