Josiah turned it over in his hands. The buckle was stamped deep and clean, not with initials but with a brand โ a V with a bar beneath it, encircled, the registered brand of Colonel Harlan Voss, worn on the belts of his riders like a uniform they forgot they were wearing.
Aiyana looked from the buckle to the darkness north, where the hoofbeats had already faded. "They will say it was stolen," she said. "They will say Apaches took it in a raid."
"Let them say it in daylight," Josiah said, and closed his hand around the cold metal. "To Ben, and Micah, and every man in this valley who is tired of being afraid of shadows. This time the shadows left something behind."
Chapter 15
: Box Canyon
Aiyana started at first light from the trampled ground east of Ben Rawlins' fence, where the official trail โ the broad, obvious one, all unshod prints and a dragged branch โ swung north toward the reservation line, exactly where a posse would be expected to follow it. She stood over that trail a long moment, Josiah and Frank Delgado waiting with the horses, then dismissed it the way a reader dismisses a lie told too loudly. "This was made to be followed," she said. "The cattle did not go this way. Men who move stolen stock in a drought move them toward water, and gentle, or they arrive with dead beef. Look for the trail that hides."
She found it within the hour, south of the first: a fainter story written under the louder one. Drag-sign, she called it โ the shallow scoring left by a trailing rope end and the scuffed half-moons where heavy beasts had been kept bunched and slow. Twice they lost it on bare rock and twice she recovered it by patience, reading bent grass and a displaced stone as other men read print, until by midmorning the sign turned up a dry wash Josiah had ridden past a hundred times without seeing.
The wash narrowed. Cottonwoods gave out; walls of red rock rose on either hand, close enough that the riders went single file. Frank, riding last with his rifle across his saddle, kept glancing upward, and Josiah did not blame him. It was country made for an ambush, and had plainly been chosen for a different purpose: a place a man could ride past for twenty years and never know.
The wash ended in a wall โ or seemed to. Aiyana dismounted and led her horse left, behind a fall of boulders big as wagons, and there was the mouth of it: a slot no wider than a wagon bed, choked with brush that, on close looking, had been cut and reset by human hands. Beyond the brush the canyon opened like a held breath.
It was a box canyon, half a mile long and perhaps two hundred yards across, walled sheer on every side. Along its floor a seep kept a line of green alive in the dead summer โ grass, cropped close, and a muddy waterhole trampled by many hooves. And cattle. Sixty head, maybe seventy, filling the place with their lowing, restless in the heat. Even at a distance Josiah could see they were Rawlins stock by the build of them, the red Ben had bred for since '71, the white-faced calves Clara named against all ranch custom.
But it was the brands that stopped his breath. The cattle nearest the slot had been worked recently, and still bore the raw, healing evidence of it: over Ben's clean Rafter R, a running iron had been dragged hot through the hide, extending and joining the lines into a sprawling new mark meant, once the hair grew, to pass for the Bar V. The smell of old burned hair and salve hung over the herd. A running iron was not a tool of honest men; it took time and a held animal and a fire, and every man in the territory knew what carrying one signified.
At the far end of the canyon, under a lean-to of poles and canvas, two men sat by a cold fire with their rifles across their knees. Josiah knew them both: Pell, a hulking, silent man who had ridden for Voss three seasons, and Lige Hart, not past twenty, who kept touching his hat in a nervous habit, even sitting. Between the lean-to and the herd stood a small corral of fresh-cut poles, and in it an iron brand leaned cooling against the rail โ long-handled, for running work.
"Nobody guards a canyon that does not exist," Frank said, very quietly. "And nobody rebrands another man's cattle by accident."
Aiyana had not looked at the guards since the first moment. She was studying the walls, the slot, the single way in that was also the single way out, committing the place to herself as her father had taught her: as it would look in the dark, in a hurry, in a fight. "Two men," she said. "They will be relieved, on a schedule. I can learn the schedule in two nights."