The Quiet Man of Red Creek Who Returned for the Apache Woman Left in the Dust—And the Ten-Year-Old Ledger That Brought a Tyrant to His Knees

The man came down the slope with the sure-footed agility of a mountain goat, his moccasins making no sound on the loose gravel. He was past fifty, his beard streaked with white and nicotine, one eye clouded over by a pale cataract. Across his shoulder hung a surveyor's measuring chain, clinking like small bells with every stride.

"Silas," I said, lowering the Winchester’s muzzle an inch, though my thumb remained cocked. "You were supposed to be in Santa Fe five years ago."

"Santa Fe's full of lawyers and smallpox," Silas grunted, reaching the level floor of the overhang. He didn't look at me; he looked straight at Zora and the boy lying against the rock. "The boy's got the gangrene starting. You can smell it ten feet off. Smell like spoiled pork."

Zora rose to her full height, her hand dropping instinctively to the bone-handled skinning knife she kept hidden in the folds of her skirt. "Who is this white man?"

"Silas Vance," I said. "He drew the original territory maps for the army back in '68. If Morrison has land deeds with seals on them, Silas is the man who forged the township markers to match them."

Silas spat a dark stream of tobacco juice against the sandstone wall. "I didn't forge nothing, Adam, and you know it. Morrison moved the stone cairns after I drove the stakes. He shifted the southern boundary of the reservation two miles north so he could claim the water rights on the San Pedro. When I told the district judge, Morrison burned my cabin and paid the sheriff to run me into the badlands."

"And now you're living in the rocks like a badger?" I asked.

"Now I'm watching the road," Silas said. He crouched beside Taza, paying no mind to Zora’s knife, and peeled back the crude bandage on the boy's shoulder. He whistled low through his teeth. "Two pellets still in there. One's resting against the collarbone. If you try to dig it out with that butcher knife, girl, you'll clip the artery and he'll bleed out before the moon rises."

"Can you take them out?" Zora asked. The anger in her voice had thinned, replaced by a desperate, maternal terror.

"I can," Silas said. "I got sheep dip and carbolic acid in my camp two miles up the arroyo. And I got clean needles. But we got another problem." He turned and pointed with his transit rod back toward the south. "Morrison brought Dutch, and Dutch brought two bloodhounds from the territorial prison at Yuma. Those dogs don't care about tracks. They're smelling the blood on this boy's shirt. The wind is coming off the desert, blowing right up this canyon."

I walked to the edge of the overhang. Through my field glasses, the distant floor of the valley was a shimmering haze of heat waves. But three miles back, tiny specks crawled across the white sand like ants on a salt flat. Five riders. And ahead of them, two low, dark shapes bounding through the mesquite.

"How long?" I asked.

"An hour. Maybe ninety minutes if the heat slows the hounds down," Silas replied. "You can't outrun them with double weight on that horse, and the boy can't walk another hundred yards."

Zora walked over to where her brother lay. She reached down, took his hand, and pressed it against her cheek. When she looked up, her face was set like carved flint.

"Take him," she told me. "Take Taza behind you on the horse. Ride to this man's camp. I will take your bloody coat, Adam. I will run west toward the Malpais. The dogs will follow the blood, and Morrison will follow the dogs."

"No," I said instantly.

"You cannot save both of us, Adam!" Her voice cracked, raw with fury and grief. "You have already done more than any white man has ever done for my people. You brought us out of the stockade. You broke the chains. But my brother is the last of my blood. If he dies, our line ends. Let me take the dogs into the rocks."

"You run into the Malpais on foot, and you die in the sun within six hours," I said, stepping between her and the trail. "Morrison doesn't just want the boy dead, Zora. He wants you. He wants to bring you back through the streets of Red Creek in an iron cage to show the town that nobody leaves his valley alive."

"Then what do we do?" she demanded, tears of frustration shining in her eyes. "Wait here like rabbits for the wolves?"

I looked down at the surveyor's transit in Silas’s hands, and then at the narrow bottleneck where the canyon walls pinched together fifty yards below our ledge.

"Silas," I said quietly. "Where did you get that transit?"

"Found it in an abandoned government wagon two months back," the old man mumbled. "Why?"

"Because it’s packed in a cedar chest," I said. "And government survey crews don't carry transits into rock country without twenty pounds of blasting powder to clear the grade."

Silas grinned, his yellow teeth showing through his tangled beard. "Thirty pounds, Adam. Black Dupont grade. But you're crazy if you think you can blow a canyon wall without burying yourself."