"They took my horse and left me here. "
The voice came across the creek at dusk, and what happened next would cost Mattis Reyes everything he'd built his grief around, and give him back something he thought he'd lost for good. Her name was Sadie. She was a Lipan Apache medicine woman standing alone and cold on a muddy creek bank in the autumn of 1883 with nothing but the clothes on her back. The men who'd robbed her were still in the valley, and they would be back before the week was out. She had seen their faces.
She just didn't know yet that they knew it. This is the San Simon Valley, Arizona Territory, late October of 1883. A widower running cattle alone. A healer traveling to her people with medicines for the coming winter. And a gang of horse thieves who made the mistake of leaving a witness standing at the water.
Now, back to the creek. Mattis Reyes had been running cattle in the San Simon Valley for 11 years, and running it alone for the last two. His wife Anna had died of fever in the winter of 1881, and since then the ranch had gotten quieter in ways that a man cannot fix with work. Though Lord knows Mattis had tried. He rose before light every morning.
He mended what needed mending and replaced what couldn't be mended. He cooked for himself and ate quickly, the way a man eats when there is no one to talk to across the table. When food is fuel and the meal itself is just a thing you move through to get to the next task. Arizona Territory in the autumn of 1883 was a hard place to be lonely because the land itself had that quality. Vast silences and dry wash, and a sky that went on past the point of comfort, past the point of beauty, and to something that pressed down on a solitary man from sunrise to dark.
He was 34 that October. Young enough to understand he had decades of this kind of silence ahead of him if nothing changed. Old enough to have mostly stopped believing it would. He checked the lower fence line most evenings before dark, the way he had done for years, walking Copper, his sorrel gelding, patient and sensible and so long familiar with this particular route that he navigated it more from habit than guidance. Along the bank of the San Simon where it ran slow this time of year, a ribbon of water between cut banks, the cottonwoods going gold on either side.