Chapter 13 - The Powder in the Crevice
We worked in silence, driven by the knowledge that every breath we took drew the hounds closer. Silas led our horse by the bridle, supporting Taza with one arm as they crept up the narrow goat path toward his hidden cave in the canyon’s upper rim.
Zora refused to leave my side. When I tried to push her up the trail behind them, she tore a strip of hem from her linen dress, soaked it with water from my canteen, and handed me the Winchester.
"I can load as fast as you can fire," she said, her voice steady now, stripped of tears. "In the Sierra Madre, my mother loaded carbines for my father when the Mexican cavalry trapped them in the canyon of the priests. I am not a child to be hidden in a cave."
I looked at her—at the red clay dust streaking her cheekbones, the wind whipping black strands of hair across her dark, sharp eyes—and I knew there was no point in arguing. We were tied to each other now by something deeper than pity or gratitude.
We buried the iron-banded powder keg in the narrowest throat of the wash, wedging it beneath a leaning slab of red shale. From the keg’s touchhole, Silas had rigged a six-foot strip of cotton wick soaked in kerosene. It would burn fast, giving us less than twenty seconds once lit.
The first hound’s baying came rolling up the draw like a brass bell struck in an empty church.
It was a deep, mournful howl that bounced off the canyon walls, followed a second later by the frantic, high-pitched yelps of the second dog. They had hit the blood scent where Taza had rested by the rock.
"Get behind the boulder," I told Zora, pulling her down into a narrow fissure twenty paces up the eastern wall.
The heat in the draw was suffocating. The air smelled of baked limestone and dead grass. Through the shimmering haze, the first hound burst around the bend of the canyon—a massive, liver-spotted beast with long ears trailing in the gravel and foam dripping from its jaws. It had its nose glued to the sand, running low and fast, straight for the spot where Taza’s bloody rags had lain.
Ten yards behind came the second dog, and behind them rode Morrison, Dutch, and three ranch hands on lathered horses, their saddle leather squeaking, carbines held across their pommels.
Morrison looked different from the man who had turned away at the creek bed dawn. The cold, calculating authority that usually masked his cruelty had vanished, replaced by an ugly, rabid desperation. His hat was pulled low, his gray eyes bloodshot from dust and sleeplessness. He knew that every mile we gained north brought us closer to the federal garrison at Fort Whipple.
"Hold up!" Dutch yelled, reining his buckskin hard as the hounds reached the shale slab and began circling, howling frantically at the dead-end scent. "They went up the rock here, Captain!"
Morrison pulled his stallion up, his horse’s flanks heaving white foam. He drew his nickel-plated Colt and looked up the walls, his gaze sweeping the jagged crevices.
"Come down, Adam!" Morrison bellowed, his voice echoing between the cliffs. "You've got no water and no country to run to! Throw down the ledger and the girl, and I'll let you ride out of the territory! You have my word on it!"
"Your word isn't worth the lead to shoot you with, Morrison!" I shouted back from the fissure.
Morrison’s head snapped toward our hiding place. A vicious, mocking smile broke across his thin lips. "You always were an idealistic fool, boy. Shoot them down!"
The ranch hands brought their rifles up, but before the first shot could crack, Zora leaned out from behind the rock with a burning sulphur match in her hand. She dropped it straight onto the exposed kerosene fuse below our ledge.
The spark caught with a vicious hiss.
A streak of white smoke hissed along the rock floor like a striking rattler, racing toward the keg wedged under the shale slab.
"Powder!" Dutch screamed, hauling his horse’s head around so violently the beast nearly fell onto its haunches. "Back out! It's a trap!"
Morrison fired twice into the crevice—the heavy lead slugs mushrooming against the rock inches above my head, spraying sharp shards of granite into my face—before he, too, spurred his stallion in terror.
The world vanished in an ear-shattering roar of orange fire and black smoke.
The shockwave lifted me off my feet and slammed me against the back of the fissure, knocking the wind from my lungs in a single, brutal gasp. The canyon walls shrieked as hundreds of tons of shale and boulder broke loose from the rim above, pouring down into the wash like a roaring red waterfall of stone and dust.
For a long minute, there was only the choking darkness of sulfur smoke, the rattle of falling pebbles, and the terrifying scream of a crushed horse buried beneath the slide.
I coughed, dragging myself across the broken stone, my ears ringing with a high, deafening whine. Through the settling dust, I reached out blindly until my hand found Zora’s arm. She was coughing, her face coated in white limestone dust, but her eyes were wide, clear, and alive.
Below us, where the trail had been, was a twenty-foot wall of shattered red boulders.
On our side, the air was clearing. On the other side of the slide, through a narrow gap between two giant stones, I could hear Morrison cursing like a madman, his voice shrill with rage.
"Adam!" he screamed from beyond the barrier. "You can't cross the Malpais! You hear me? There is only one water hole within forty miles, and my riders are already holding it! You're going to die of thirst out there, you son of a bitch!"
Zora stood up, dusting the red dirt from her knees. She didn't look back at the wall of rock. She picked up my rifle from the ground and handed it to me.
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"He is right about one thing," she whispered, pointing toward the black, jagged volcanic wasteland stretching out behind our ridge. "The only water between here and the fort is the Apache Spring. And if Morrison's men are there, we will have to take it from them in the dark."
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