Chapter 21 - The Bitter Salt of Treason
The wind off the Bradshaw Mountains was sharp with the scent of high-altitude pine and alkali dust, but to me, it felt like ice water dumped straight down my collar.
Zora took two steps back, her boots scuffing into the gravel of the wagon rut. Her hand, which only seconds before had rested against my skin with a tender, fragile warmth, hovered over the bone handle of the Apache skinning knife at her hip. The softness in her dark eyes was gone, wiped clean as slate, replaced by the lethal, calculating stillness of a hunted wolf that had realized the trap was sprung from the inside.
"Zora, no," I choked out, my tongue thick as tallow. "Look at me. I didn't know. By God, I swore to you I didn't know."
"He calls you brother," she whispered, her voice low, vibrating with an agony worse than any bullet wound Morrison’s men had given us. "He speaks of plans made in the dark. You brought the ledger. You brought the deeds. And you brought me."
On the black horse, fifty yards up the military grade, Caleb let out a dry, rattling laugh. It was the same laugh that used to echo across the cedar breaks when we were boys in Missouri before the war burned everything we owned down to ash. He leaned his forearms across the pommel of his saddle, the brass hilt of our father’s cavalry saber catching the high morning glare.
"Don't play the saint now, Jesse," Caleb said, his voice carrying effortlessly on the northern breeze. "The girl fought hard, I’ll give her that. But Morrison’s empire was never meant to die for nothing. We bled for this territory. You kept the old man occupied in Red Creek, you dragged the paper across the malpais, and now the harvest is ready to reap. Bring the saddlebags up here."
Silas didn't move. The old surveyor sat hunched on his mule, his good eye darting between Caleb’s gray coat and the trembling rage in my shoulders. Silas knew what lay in those canvas saddlebags: the land patents, the survey marks, the forged treaties that Morrison had used to starve Zora’s clan off the spring waters of the Verde. If those papers were turned over to Caleb, the tyranny wouldn't end—it would simply change masters.
"You died," I roared, stepping in front of Zora, though she instantly shifted to keep her line of sight clear. "I dug the trench behind the livery with my own hands, Caleb! I shoveled six feet of clay over your pine box while Morrison stood by the fence with his whiskey bottle and laughed!"
"You buried a drunken mule skinner with my boots on, little brother," Caleb smiled, his scarred cheek twitching with cold amusement. "Morrison thought he poisoned me. He didn't know I had friends in the territorial militia who knew how to siphon arsenic from a gut. I needed to vanish until the ledger surfaced. And you, Jesse—honest, dutiful, bleeding-heart Jesse—were the only hound in the territory stubborn enough to dig it out of the ground."
He urged the black horse forward two paces. The heavy iron key between his fingers gleamed in the sunlight.
May you like
"Step aside from the red woman, Jesse," Caleb ordered softly. "Hand me the saddlebags. Or do I have to remind you what happens to deserters in our family?"
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