Luke looked at the woman walking beside him. She was young, perhaps 20. She glared at him with a hatred so pure it felt like heat, but her lips were cracked from dehydration. These were not the bloodthirsty raiders from the dime novels. These were people walking on the edge of death.
"They are starving. " Luke thought, the realization hitting him harder than the club had. "They are stealing cattle because they are dying. " He remembered the storekeeper refusing to sell the cornmeal. He remembered his own silence. The guilt he had carried for 3 years shifted, changing shape. It was no longer just about the past.
It was about the present. He was part of the machine that was grinding these people into the dust. The leader of the group, the gray-haired warrior, stopped and pointed upward. Ahead, the canyon walls seemed to split. A narrow, hidden trail switched back and forth up the sheer rock face.
"Up. " The warrior said. Luke looked at the trail, then at the faces surrounding him. There was no mercy there, only a desperate, terrifying need. He began to climb, the rope around his neck pulling tight, leading him into the heart of the enemy camp, and toward a judgment he was beginning to fear he deserved. The journey up the hidden trail had been a blur of gray stone and gasping breath, but the arrival at the camp was a collision with a wall of sound and smell.
Luke was shoved forward, stumbling over the lip of the canyon floor, and fell hard onto the packed earth. The dust puffed up around him, coating his tongue with the taste of copper and dry rot. He tried to push himself up, but a boot, moccasin-clad and hard as iron, shoved him back down. He stayed there for a moment, his chest heaving, listening to the sudden cessation of noise. The camp had been alive with the sounds of daily labor, but now it held the heavy, suffocating silence of a courtroom before a verdict.
"Get up," the old warrior commanded. Luke scrambled to his knees and then to his feet. He swayed, the blood rushing in his ears. He looked around. The camp was nestled in a wide amphitheater of red rock, protected on three sides by sheer cliffs that climbed halfway to heaven.
Wickiups made of brush and canvas were scattered like tossed tumbleweeds. The air was thick with the smell of burning mesquite, cured leather, and the distinct, sharp tang of unwashed bodies and fear, but mostly the air was thick with resentment. He was standing in the center of a loose circle. It was not a war council of painted braves, as the dime novels back east would have had it. It was a circle of women.
There were perhaps 30 of them, ranging from young girls with wide, terrified eyes to ancient grandmothers whose faces were webs of wrinkles. They stared at him not with curiosity, but with a cold, appraising hostility. Children peeked from behind their mothers' skirts, their dark eyes darting between Luke and the weapons held by the few old men who stood guard. Luke felt naked, though he was fully clothed. He had been stripped of his gun belt, his knife, his hat, and his dignity.
He stood before them, a white man in a world where his skin was a uniform of death. Ayanna stepped forward from the circle. Up close, she was even more formidable than she had been during the ambush. She was not tall, but she held herself with the tension of a drawn bowstring. Her buckskin dress was stained with grease and earth, and her hands were scarred from work, but her face was struck from flint.
She looked at Luke as one might look at a rattlesnake found in a cradle. "Why is he breathing? " Ayanna asked, her voice clear and cutting. She did not look at Luke. She looked at the old warrior who had brought him in. "We do not need another mouth to feed.
We do not need a spy to lead the bluecoats here. " "He is a rancher," the warrior grunted. "He has strong hands. He has a white heart. " "Ayanna spat. " She turned to the other women, her voice rising. "Do you not see? He tracks like a wolf.