Chapter 1 - The Smoke of Old Betrayals
The ricochet screamed off the adobe lintel, spraying dry mortar and sun-bleached clay across Silas’s boots. Down below, the dark shape of a horse shifted against the deepening purple of the arroyo shadows. A second shot followed, cracking through the thin desert air with enough velocity to punch clean through the rotting timber partition behind Silas's shoulder.
"They're not trying to drive us out," Silas muttered, his voice gravel-rough and entirely devoid of panic. He shifted his weight, wincing as the old lead slug in his right hip pulled against the muscle. "They’re trying to keep our heads down while the other two cut off the arroyo bend."
Nalin crouched beside him against the low adobe parapet, her knuckles white where she clutched the leather ledger to her chest. The fading light caught the sharp angle of her cheekbones and the dark determination in her eyes. "You said there was another trail downriver. A way out toward the scrub oaks."
"There was," Silas replied, his eyes scanning the open basin where the greasewood cast long, skeletal shadows. "Twenty years ago, when the water ran high and the cavalry had four outposts between here and Fort Apache. Now the banks are silted in, and a horse can't cross without breaking a leg in the sinkholes. Vain knows it. That's why he’s taking his time."
Down in the wash, Blackjack Vain raised his voice again, mocking and loud, bouncing off the canyon walls. "Hear that, Miller? The old man told me you were rotting in a Kansas hole! Said you took a bullet for the redskins and stayed down in the dirt where you belonged!"
Silas didn't answer. He laid his Sharps rifle across the crumbling sill, checked the rear sight, and ignored the way his knuckles were scarred and blackened from old powder burns.
Nalin looked up at him, the red dust of the prairie clinging to the hem of her tunic. "He called you Sergeant. You were with Halloway’s scouts."
"I was," Silas said, his gaze fixed on a clump of sagebrush three hundred yards out where a boot heel had just briefly disturbed the dust. "And Halloway was a captain when I carried dispatches for him. Seems time's been good to him. He traded his lieutenant's bars for a colonel's braid and a share in whatever's running through this territory."
"Children," Nalin whispered, her voice dropping into a register that made Silas's chest tighten. "My sister's little girl was taken from the agency at San Carlos three winters ago. They told the old people she was sent to a mission school in Santa Fe. But the names in this book... they don't go to schools, Silas. They go south. Across the border into Sonora, where the mining syndicates buy labor that doesn't show up on tax rolls."
Silas didn't look at her, but he shifted slightly to give her more cover behind the thickest part of the surviving wall. "I know how those syndicates operate. I saw what happened to the wagon trains that didn't pay the toll when Halloway was quartermaster at Camp Grant. Men like him don't care about red or white. They care about receipts."
A heavy thud shook the lower floor of the station. One of Vain’s men was testing the rotting oak door at the base of the ladder.
Silas reached down, unhooked his skinning knife from his belt, and laid it beside his ammunition pouch. "Stay low against the interior partition. If that door gives, don't try to run for the back window. The drop's twelve feet onto jagged limestone."
"And you?" she asked.
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"I'm going to remind Vain why he shouldn't have brought his deputies into a dry wash before sundown," Silas said, cocking the Sharps with a sharp, metallic click that cut through the silence of the dying day.
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