They came down the mountain on the second day, Shenoa on the paint, moving slowly, Levi leading pocket and taking the steep sections one careful foothold at a time. She directed the route through gesture, not words. A tilt of the head here, a shift of weight there. She knew this country better than any map he had ever read. They came out of the high timber onto a secondary track he hadn't known existed.
A path running parallel to the main road, but 200 ft above it, invisible from below, winding through a band of stunted oak. She stopped and held up one hand. Three riders below them on the main road, moving north. Town clothes, not trail clothes, they hadn't come far. fresh horses they had left simmer on recently. They were moving in a spread pattern, heads turning side to side, not traveling, searching, Shenoa pulled the paint back into the oaks without a sound.
Her hand had gone to the leather parcel. Levi watched until the riders disappeared. He didn't ask, she didn't explain. They waited 20 minutes, then moved again, keeping to the high path. The town of Simon in 1883 looked orderly from the road.
A newspaper, two hotels, a courthouse, a land office. A sheriff named Gerald Coulton, who had been reappointmented three times without opposition because no one who had tried to oppose him the first time had felt moved to try again. What the town also had, though it was not printed in the newspaper, was a problem dating from the land survey of 1879. A survey conducted by a federal assessor named Abernathy Price, who had come from Santa Fe with three assistants and a mandate to document existing land rights in the Jigorilla range before the territorial government parceled it for railroad easement grants. Price had done his job.
He had documented everything including the fact that the eastern quarter section of what the local land association wanted to convey to the Cimarron and Eastern mining consortium had been the subject of a formal grant in use agreement with the Jackarilla Apache. A pre-existing agreement signed in 1872 by a federal Indian agent and witnessed by two Apache leaders giving the ban legal access to hunting and gathering ground along the upper Rayado Creek for 60 years. The agreement had been translated by a man named Miguel Aldama, a half Apache half Mexican interpreter from Taos who had worked federal translation contracts for 8 years. His translation was clear, accurate, notarized. It meant the eastern quarter section could not be legally conveyed to the mining consortium without either buying out the Apache access rights, a process requiring years and federal approval or producing evidence the 1872 agreement had been voided.
The easiest path to that evidence. Certain men in Cimarron had decided was to ensure the man who made the translation and the only remaining copy of his notarized work ceased to exist. Miguel Aldama was found hanged from the bridge over the Cimarron River in October of 1882. The coroner's ruling was suicide. Shenoa was Miguel's niece.