Chapter 7 - The Choice at the Divide
The wind howled fiercely along the high ridge, carrying the chill of the upper elevations down through their jackets. They paused near a wind-scoured juniper tree whose roots clung desperately to a crack in the bare rock. Tomás was shivering, his face pale beneath the coat of soot and trail dust, his boots now little more than leather rags held together by twine.
Clay sank down onto a flat boulder, pulling his canteen free to offer it to the boy. Tomás took it with trembling hands, drinking sparingly before passing it back.
“How much farther to your brother’s camp, Kea?” Clay asked, wiping sweat from his forehead despite the freezing wind.
Kea looked out toward the jagged peaks of the higher Dragoons, where storm clouds were beginning to pile up in bruised, purple heaps against the northern sky. “Two hours if we take the ridge. Four if we have to drop back into the wash to avoid the patrol paths.”
“We don’t have four hours,” Clay said, nodding toward the north. “That’s a norther blowing in. If we get caught in a freeze up here without shelter, the boy won’t make it.”
Tomás lowered his head, jaw tight with stubborn pride. “I can make it. I’m not a child.”
“Nobody said you were, son,” Clay replied gently, his voice carrying an unexpected warmth that surprised even himself. “Dying of hypothermia isn’t about being a child; it’s about plain physics. The wind up here doesn’t care how tough you are.”
Kea watched the two of them—the broken white rancher and the grieving Mexican-Apache boy—with a quiet intensity. She reached into her pouch, pulled out a small piece of dried venison, and handed half to Tomás and half to Clay.
“There is an old line-camp cabin,” Kea said, turning to Clay. “Built by cattlemen ten years ago before the Apache wars drove them back south. It has a stone hearth and a tin roof. It is off the main trail, hidden in the pines below the second ridge.”
“Will Crowe’s men know it?”
“Only if they know the country better than my people do,” Kea answered. “And Silas Crowe knows nothing except how to track a bribe.”
Clay stood up, rolling his shoulders to test the dull, persistent ache in his side. He looked down at the valley below, where a faint speck of dust indicated another rider—or a second group—joining Crowe’s men at the foot of the canyon. The net was tightening. The Tucson Land and Water Company was not sending local ruffians anymore; they were deploying professionals who treated land titles like war loot.
“Then that’s where we head,” Clay said. “Can you find it in this wind?”
Kea didn’t answer with words. She simply turned her face into the rising gale, pulled her woolen blanket tighter across her shoulders, and stepped out onto the granite rib of the mountain.
They hiked in silence for over an hour, the temperature dropping steadily as grey mist swallowed the higher peaks. Every step sent a jolt of sharp fire through Clay’s ribs, but he gritted his teeth and kept pace, refusing to show weakness in front of the boy. He watched Tomás stumble once and caught him by the collar before the boy could slide down the shale slope.
“Keep your eyes on Kea’s heels,” Clay instructed quietly, steadying the boy. “Step where she steps.”
By the time the afternoon shadows turned the rocks the color of old iron, the stunted pines grew thicker, shielding them from the worst of the freezing gale. Kea ducked behind a massive granite outcrop choked with deadfall and pointed downward.
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Nestled in a sheltered bowl beneath an overhanging cliff sat the line-camp cabin. Its timber walls were dark with age, the shingled roof mostly intact, and a small, crooked stone chimney rose from the western corner.
It looked empty. But as Clay reached for the latch on the heavy oak door, he smelled something that made every hair on the back of his neck stand up: the faint, unmistakable trace of Virginia tobacco smoke.
