Didn't argue. I think he was relieved somebody else was deciding. Dashka was already flat on the ground, cheek to the dirt, eyes closed. The rest of us waited. Even the horses seemed to hold their breath.
She sat up, many horses behind. 12, 15, but they are slowing. They argue. She tilted her head. Now four. Come on.
The rest turned toward the road and ahead. She lay back down longer this time. Her fingers spread flat on the ground like she was feeling for a pulse. Ahead eight ate not moving far toward the broken mountain. Tavana and Ka looked at each other.
Devil's canyon. Tavana's voice had gone flat as a skillet. They go to the canyon. Why there? Silence.
That door again. Closing. Tavana. I just got named a renegade on every wire in the territory. A good man died last night for letting us sleep under his roof.
I've got four guns behind me and a head and a wounded witness with his hands tied. I'm done walking into rooms with the lamp off. Why the canyon? She didn't look away. I'll give her that.
She never once looked away from me. Because that is where my father kept it. Kept what? What his father kept and his father before him. All my life he went into that canyon alone twice a year and came back with nothing in his hands and dust on his knees.
When I was grown, he took me with him. Only once she breathed. Gold Marshal worked gold. old silver things the grandfathers of our grandfathers made and hid when the Spanish came and the Mexicans and then your soldiers more than you have ever seen in one place. Isha muttered something in her own tongue in English. Isha now he'll want it too.
I don't want it. I want the men who killed the Pickering Boys. Everybody says that until they see it. Then I'll be the first one who means it. We rode east into the sun with Dupre's tracks plain as print in the soft ground.
He wasn't hiding his trail, which meant he was either arrogant or he wanted to be followed. Both kinds will kill you. The second kind does it smiling. Around midday, Wesley spoke up from the bay where he rode behind Isha with his tied hands on her belt. That sheriff Ror, he came to the station the day after when I was still out of my head.
He stood over my cart and he told me plain as day, the Apache women did it. told me before I could even remember what happened. He promised to wire Tucson for a doctor. He never did. Hap sent it himself 2 days later. You're just remembering this now?
I'm just letting myself remember it now. Isha twisted in the saddle and looked at him. Something almost like pity. Welcome to the truth, freight boy. It is very uncomfortable.
Sit still. The broken mountain grew up out of the haze through the afternoon. A long ridge split down the middle like somebody had swung an axe at it. Walls of red rock straight up, one narrow mouth, and the clouds stacking up over the northern peaks behind it, darker every hour, with lightning stitching around inside them without a sound. We left the horses in a stand of ironwood a mile out.
Wesley, too, tied to a tree with water and shade and my promise I'd come back. He didn't like it. He liked the alternative less. By the time we reached the canyon mouth, the sun was going down red and the smoke of Dupre's fire was rising thin and blue from somewhere deep inside. I checked my guns.
Colt six, Winchester 14, the derringer in my boot. Two against eight and whatever else was in there. Here is the plan. I go in alone. You five stay with the horses.
No. Five voices. One word. It hit me like a slap. Kane stepped up.
They killed our mother, our father, our aunts, the old men who told the stories, the women who taught us beating. 37 of our people. Marshal in one morning. While we were in the hills gathering medicine, we came back to smoke. Her voice didn't break. That was the terrible part.
It had broken already somewhere else a long time ago and healed hard. This is not your fight alone. You do not get to go in alone. Then we go in my way. I want DRI breathing.
Why? Because a dead man can't testify. And a white man's word in a territorial court against a white sheriff is the only thing that's going to keep you five from hanging. Your word won't do it. I hate that.
It's still true. That landed. I watched it land on all of them. Tavana closed her eyes for one second. Alive then.
Dupre only. The others. The others surrender. If they'll surrender. They will not.
Then they won't. We went in on foot. And here is something I learned that night that no lawman school would ever teach. Five Apache women moving through a canyon in moccasins make no more sound than the shadow of a cloud. I was the loudest thing in that canyon.
My boots, my breathing, the creak of my belt. I felt like a brass band at a funeral. Around a bend in the rock wall, the fire light. Eight men sprawled around a mesquite fire like they owned the dark. A bottle going round.
Horses picketed in a string along the wall. Rifles leaned against a boulder, out of reach, and at the center of them, broad and loud and laughing, with a scar that pulled his upper lip into a permanent sneer and a black gap where two front teeth used to be, sat Clee Dupre. They'll talk, they always talk. Give him a night in the rocks and a sunrise with no water. Then we start on fingers.
One at a time, the tall one last, she'll watch. Laughter around the fire beside me. In the dark, Tavana's whole body went rigid, not shaking. Rigid like a bow string drawn to the ear. She leaned close.