Chapter 11 - The Shadow of the Mogollon Rim
The morning sun climbed steep and pale over the ragged rimrocks, turning the alkali flats behind us into a blinding sheet of white copper. My gelding carried double without complaint, his iron shoes clicking softly against the shale of the dry wash, but every quarter-mile I glanced back to watch Zora’s brother.
His name was Taza. He had taken two buckshot pellets through the meat of his left shoulder three nights before when Morrison’s riders tore through the sheep camp, and though Zora had packed the wounds with chewed cedar bark and clean cotton, the boy moved with the stiff, fragile gait of a man carrying cracked glass inside his ribs. He held a peeled willow branch like a staff, his jaw locked, eyes fixed on the gray line where the scrub pine met the high timber. He had not asked to rest once. Apache pride was a hard, quiet thing that demanded blood before surrender.
Behind me, Zora’s hands were light against my ribs. Her touch was cautious, the rough calluses of her palms catching slightly on the wool of my trail vest. She was listening. Not to me, and not to the labored breath of the horse, but to the canyon behind us.
"Morrison won't stay turned around, Adam," she said softly. Her voice barely carried over the creak of the saddle leather. "A man like that does not let an open book slip through his fingers. In the town, his word is the law. Outside it, he is only a hunter."
"He knows what was written on page forty-two," I said, reining the horse around a washed-out boulder. "He knows the federal surveyor in Prescott has a copy of the land grants with his real signature on them. If he hangs us, he hangs himself."
"Men who own the earth do not hang," she answered simply. "They buy better rope."
We climbed out of the creek bed by noon, entering the stunted piñon country where the air grew thin, smelling of turpentine and sun-baked stone. We made cold camp beneath an overhang of red sandstone that hid the horse from the sky. There could be no fire. Morrison had four Chiricahua scouts on his payroll—men from the San Carlos agency who had forgotten their clans for ten dollars a month and government rations. If smoke curled above the juniper line, they would read it from five miles out.
I eased down from the saddle and helped Zora down. When her boots touched the ground, her knees buckled slightly from the long hours of jarring motion, but she caught my forearm to steady herself. Her dark eyes met mine, searching my face with the same relentless scrutiny she had shown when I first pulled her out of the horse trough in Red Creek while Morrison’s deputies laughed on the boardwalk.
"You bled for that ledger," she whispered, looking down at the dried crust of blood along my left sleeve where a grazed rifle shot had torn the fabric. "Why? You were a drifter. You owned nothing in that valley."
"A man who owns nothing still has to sleep at night," I told her, unsaddling the gelding to let his back cool. "Morrison took my brother’s homestead eight years ago with a forged tax deed. I was too young and too full of whiskey to stop him then. I watched my brother drink himself into a grave behind the livery. When I saw what Morrison was doing to your people along the wash, I realized the man hadn't changed. Only his victims had."
Taza sank down against the rock wall, his face gray beneath the sun-darkened skin. His breath rattled slightly in his throat. Zora dropped to her knees beside him, pulling a tin canteen from my saddlebag and dampening the hem of her skirt to wipe the dried sweat from his forehead.
"He is burning," she said, looking up at me, panic flickering behind her dark irises for the first time. "The lead was dirty. If we do not boil needles and cut the flesh open before nightfall, the poison will reach his heart."
I looked north toward the jagged teeth of the blue mountains. Between us and the high pine was three leagues of open Malpais—black lava rock that would shred a horse’s hooves and offer neither water nor shade. To cross it in daylight was suicide. To stop here without fire meant watching her brother die.
Before I could answer, a single pebble bounced down the scree slope fifty yards above our shelter.
The gelding threw his ears forward, nostrils flaring. I reached slowly for the Winchester scabbard propped against the saddle, my thumb sliding over the hammer.
From the shadow of a dwarf cedar on the ridge above, a man stepped out into the open. He was not wearing a cavalry coat, and he did not carry a carbine. He wore grease-stained buckskins, and in his left hand he held an iron surveyor's transit.
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"Put the rifle down, Adam," the stranger called out, his voice hoarse and dry as alkali. "Morrison didn't send me. But he's less than three hours behind your tracks, and he brought the dogs."
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