Chapter 35 - The Smoke in the Hearth
The rear door of the Skull Valley station was thick ponderosa pine, reinforced with rusted iron straps and secured from the inside by a heavy drop bar.
Jesse pressed his back against the rough stone wall, his breath coming steady and slow despite the heat that radiated off the sun-baked masonry. Beside him crouched Zora and Kaya, moving with identical, predatory silence, their knives drawn and Henry rifles held at the ready.
Silas Finch sat ten yards back, curled behind an overturned wooden water trough, shivering like a hound in winter despite the blistering afternoon sun.
"There's two men inside with Morrison," Jesse whispered, his eyes on the narrow rear window above the cistern. "One by the front loopholes, one feeding the hearth. The chimney smoke is getting thicker. If we wait two minutes, there won't be enough left of that survey chain to prove a chicken coop."
Kaya looked at Jesse, her dark gaze flicking down to the heavy army-issue Colt at his hip. "Can you take the bar off the door with lead?"
"I don't need lead," Jesse murmured.
He unhitched a three-foot length of heavy iron wagon axle that he had pulled from the corral wreckage. He weighed the cold iron in his hands, measuring the balance, then met Zora’s eyes. She gave him a single, sharp nod.
Jesse stepped out, swung the iron axle with all the leverage in his broad shoulders, and slammed it directly into the heavy pine door right where the interior bar rested.
The sound was like an artillery shell detonating in the courtyard. The dry pine around the iron brackets splintered with an ear-splitting crack, the drop bar snapping cleanly in two.
Without waiting for the dust to clear, Jesse kicked the door inward with the heel of his heavy riding boot and plunged into the smoke-filled gloom, leading with his Colt.
"Down!" Jesse roared.
A muzzle flash lit up the dark interior like lightning. A heavy bullet from an ivory-handled revolver slammed into the stone jamb inches from Jesse’s ear, showering his face with stinging rock dust.
Jesse dropped to one knee, firing twice into the yellow flare.
A heavy groan answered him. One of Morrison’s hired gun-hands dropped his weapon, clutching his belly as he collapsed across a scarred dining table, sending tin plates and whiskey bottles crashing to the dirt floor.
Through the dense, choking smoke pouring from the massive stone fireplace, Jesse saw him.
Arthur Morrison stood in front of the hearth, his fine broadcloth suit spattered with soot, his silver-trimmed Stetson knocked askew. In his right hand, he held a heavy iron poker; in his left, he held a set of heavy, soot-blackened steel chains fitted with round brass medallions. The parchment maps were already roaring in bright orange flames behind him, curling into gray ash that drifted up the stone flue.
"You're too late, Jesse!" Morrison snarled, his eyes bloodshot, wild with the frenzy of a trapped animal. "The territorial grant is gone! The Governor’s original signature is ash! You can't prove a thing!"
Morrison swung the heavy chain back, aiming to fling the steel links deep into the raging coals where the brass medallions would melt into useless slag.
Before the chain could leave his hand, a streak of red and brown blurred through the smoky doorway.
Kaya lunged forward, her knife gleaming in the firelight. She didn't strike for his throat—she struck down with brutal, practiced precision, the heavy blade sinking deep into the meat of Morrison’s right forearm.
Morrison shrieked in agony, dropping both the poker and the chain. The steel links clattered hard against the stone hearth, bouncing onto the dirt floor just inches from the roaring flames.
"Devil woman!" Morrison screamed, stumbling backward, clutching his bloody arm against his chest.
Kaya stepped over the fallen chain, her knife raised for the kill, her eyes burning with ten years of unquenched reservation rage. "For my mother," she hissed in Apache.
"Kaya, wait!" Zora shouted, sprinting into the room and grabbing her sister’s wrist with both hands. "Do not kill him! If you kill him, the military court will call this an Indian raid! They will hang every warrior who rode with you from San Carlos! He must stand before the judge in Prescott!"
"He burned them alive, Zora!" Kaya screamed, struggling against her sister's grip with terrifying strength. "He burned our mother in the cedar brush! He doesn't deserve a court of white men!"
"He will hang!" Zora insisted, her face inches from Kaya’s, her voice breaking with raw, desperate passion. "He will hang by their own law, under their own rope, in front of the whole territory! That is the only way our people ever hold this land again!"
Jesse stepped past the two struggling sisters, his Colt trained dead on Morrison’s chest. Morrison was slouched against the stone mantel, his face gray with shock and blood loss, his arrogant smirk completely shattered.
"Finch!" Jesse barked toward the doorway. "Get in here!"
Silas crept through the ruined doorway, coughing violently from the smoke. His single eye swept across the room until it landed on the blackened steel chain resting on the floor. He dropped to his knees, ignoring the heat of the hearth, and picked up the heavy links with trembling, calloused hands.
The old surveyor took his shirt sleeve and wiped the soot from the largest brass medallion welded to the center ring.
Beneath the black carbon, crisp territorial survey stampings and the deep, unmistakable seal of the United States Indian Boundary Commission gleamed in the firelight.
"It’s intact," Silas sobbed, holding the cold brass to his forehead like a man clutching a holy relic. "The original corner markers are right here. Morrison never melted them down. The Verde valley still belongs to your clan, Zora. By federal law, it never ceased to be yours."
Morrison let out a low, venomous curse from the floor. "You think that scraps of brass will save you? The cavalry is right behind you, Finch. When Miller gets here and sees the bodies, he’ll wipe these red dogs off the earth."
Right on cue, from the northern ridge above the valley, the high, rhythmic thunder of approaching cavalry hooves vibrated through the floorboards of the adobe station.
Jesse walked over to the front loophole, squinting through the dust.
Captain Miller’s company of fifty cavalrymen was descending the ridge at a hard gallop, their blue wool tunics vivid against the pale grass, carbines drawn and gleaming in the late afternoon sun.
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Jesse lowered his Colt and turned back to the room. The immediate danger was past, but the real crisis had just arrived. If those fifty blue-coats surrounded this adobe with Kaya’s warriors dug into the wash, a single nervous trigger finger would unleash a bloodbath that no brass medallion could ever stop.
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