"Keep them apart tonight," he said. "Sleep in shifts, and not one of you rides anywhere alone. If Voss is what this says he is, he will already smell the weather changing โ and a man like that does not wait for the storm to reach his door."
Chapter 21
: The Drive at Dawn
They rode out before the light had found the river, when the air still held the thin coolness of night and the dust had not yet risen. Josiah watched them from his porch on Arroyo Seco, his knee bound tight with wet cloth, his weight on the rail, a soldier left behind while others went to the work. He had argued until Sloan laid a hand flat on the table and said the well could not be left unwatched, and that a man who could not run could still shoot straight from a doorway. So he stayed, and Aiyana stayed with him, and the rest went down the valley in a long, uneven column.
Marshal Everett Sloan rode at the head, not from pride but because no one else trusted the order of the rest. Behind him came Ben Rawlins, whose cattle they were going to fetch, his jaw set hard. Then Frank Delgado and three settlers who had lost stock and water both, men who a month before would not have crossed a yard to speak to an Apache except to order him off it. Then came Nahlin's people โ six riders, lean and silent, Aiyana's cousins among them, rifles across their saddles, eyes on the hills. Between the two parties the dust rose in a single cloud, and that, Josiah thought, was the miracle and the shame of it: one cloud, made by all of them together.
Sloan had laid the plan the night before on Micah Trent's counter, with a map drawn in spilled flour. Box Canyon cut into the eastern breaks where Voss's land ran unfenced to the sky. Its mouth was narrow enough for two men to hold, its walls too steep for cattle to climb, its far end choked with rock. If Killion had hidden the rebranded herd anywhere a crew could work brands unseen, it was there. They would come in at first light from the north rim, drop down the old game trail, and take the two guards โ if there were only two โ before a shot could scatter the herd.
The trail down was worse than Delgado remembered. Loose shale slid under the horses' hooves, and once Rawlins' mare stumbled and went to her knees, and the nearest rider to catch her bridle was an Apache boy of seventeen who did not let go until she had her footing again. Rawlins stared at the boy's hand on his leather, then nodded once, curt and astonished. No one spoke of it afterward. The silence between them was not peace. It was a rope held taut from both ends, and every man understood that if one of them let go โ a word, a shot, a hand raised too fast โ the whole thing would snap.
At the canyon floor the smell reached them first: cattle, close-held and restless, dung and hot hide and the green reek of the seep Killion's men had dammed with brush. Then the herd itself, perhaps two hundred head, filling the shade of the west wall, Rawlins' lazy R visible on flank after flank beneath a fresh brand burned clumsily over it. Rawlins made a sound low in his throat and started forward, and Sloan caught his rein.
"Not yet," Sloan said. "We take it lawful or we do not take it at all. I see them first. I name them first."
The guards were where Delgado had promised: two of Voss's riders by the seep, one asleep with his hat over his face, the other boiling coffee. They never heard the settlers come through the cattle, for cattle cover a multitude of noises with their own shifting and lowing. The waking man looked up into Sloan's pistol and Delgado's rifle and lifted his hands. The sleeping man woke with Sloan's boot against his ribs and did the same. It was over without a shot, and the quiet afterward felt larger than the canyon.
Then the work began, and work did what no speech could have done. A herd penned too long does not drive; it mills and bellows and tries every wall. Settler and Apache rode the edges together, turning leaders, doubling back for calves, shouting in two tongues at the same beasts, until slowly, as the sun cleared the rim, the herd found the mouth of the canyon and took it, streaming out onto the flat in a river of backs and horns. Rawlins rode the drag with dust in his teeth and wept without shame, counting brands aloud.