The dust along the Rio Grande was not merely dirt; it was pulverized bone, dried silt, and the crushed remains of white mesquite burned to fine gray powder by the midsummer sun. It coated everything—the cracked leather of riding boots, the heavy folds of wool blankets, the deep crevices around the eyes of men who had spent forty years riding between the river dikes and the iron-red buttresses of the Dragoon Mountains.
In the autumn of 1862, the borderland between Texas and New Mexico Territory did not belong to the Confederacy, nor to the Union, nor to the territorial governor who sat in Santa Fe writing frantic dispatches that took three weeks to reach the desk of the Secretary of War. It belonged to the wind, the thorn-apple bushes, and the long, silent shadow of the Chiricahua Apaches.
In the small, sun-baked plaza of San Pedro—a settlement that consisted of seven adobe hovels, a roofless chapel, and a stone well that yielded water tasting heavily of sulfur—a Mexican muleteer named Don Esteban sat on an inverted lard tub, scraping grease from his bridle straps. His boots were unbuttoned, revealing ankles thick with ancient, white scar tissue.
"If you go south of the river after the noon bell," Esteban murmured without looking up from his strap, his voice dry as corn husks rubbing together in a root cellar, "do not take the iron bit out of your horse's mouth to let him graze. If he smells water before you do, he will nickering. And if he nickering, the Indioswill not shoot you from the ridge. They will simply wait until you reach the dry draw, take the horse by the headstall, and peel your skin back like the husk of an overripe pomegranate while you are still trying to unholster your dragoon pistol."
A young man sat across from him on the rim of the dry fountain. His name was Silas Vance. He was twenty-one, dressed in a faded blue Union infantry coat whose brass buttons had been removed and replaced with horn toggles, and his fingers were long, ink-stained, and calloused from four years of pulling heavy iron levers in his uncle’s printing shop in St. Louis before he had been drafted, assigned to a supply quartermaster unit, and promptly abandoned in the desert when his mule wagon lost an axle three miles north of the crossing.
"I have a pass," Silas said softly. His voice lacked the harsh, flat gravel of the border men; it still carried the slow, musical cadence of the Missouri river valleys. He pulled a folded sheet of blue foolscap paper from his waistcoat pocket. "Signed by Lieutenant Miller at Fort Craig. It gives me leave to enter the settlement to look for the ledger books from the old silver smelting company."
Esteban looked at the paper for a long time. He did not touch it. To him, paper was merely something white men used to wrap salt beef or to start fires when the cow dung was too wet to catch.
"The paper is very pretty, gringo," Esteban said, spitting a dark stream of tobacco juice onto the red dust near Silas’s boots. "You should keep it in your mouth. When the Apaches find you, it will keep your tongue from drying out while they tie you upside down over a fire of green scrub oak."
"They say there is a woman here," Silas said, ignoring the old man’s words. He had been told the story three times between the depot at El Paso and the crossing at San Pedro, each time by a different teamster, each time with different details added or stripped away like bark off a cedar fence post. "A white woman who was taken during the raids on the Mimbres Valley seven years ago. They say she speaks no English now, but she sits in the shadow of the church wall every afternoon while the Apache hunters trade pelts for powder."
Esteban stopped scraping his leather. He slowly pulled a horn-handled knife from his belt and held the flat of the blade against his thigh, using it to scrape a smudge of blue clay from his knuckle.
"Her name is not important," Esteban said low. "The Chiricahuas call her Ni-Kha-Ta—the one who stays in the rocks. Her father was a German blacksmith named Weber who built a forge near the copper mines. When Mangas Coloradas took the valley, he burned Weber over his own anvil. He took the girl. She was twelve then. Her hair was the color of fresh corn silk—not yellow like butter, but pale, almost white, like the dust on the limestone cliffs near the canyon mouth."
"Is she still alive?" Silas asked, his hand tightening around the edges of the blue paper.
"Alive?" Esteban chuckled, a sound like dry gravel sliding down a tin chute. "What is 'alive' in the desert, muchacho? She does not speak to the Mexicans. She does not speak to the Americans. She carries five-gallon water jars up the mesa three times a day until her collarbones stand out like dry ribs on an old ox. She belongs to Mangas's half-brother, a man called Iron Hand because his right fingers were crushed by a freight wagon wheel when he was a boy and healed into an iron claw."
Esteban pointed his knife toward the south, where the sharp, jagged red fingers of the Organ Mountains rose against a sky so blue it looked hard and brittle, like glazed stoneware.
"She is not a prisoner who sits in a cellar waiting for a cavalry bugle, Silas," Esteban added, using the boy's name for the first time. "She is a slave. But in the mountain, a slave who knows how to find the bitter roots that stay wet in August is worth more than ten horses. If you try to look at her eyes, Iron Hand will cut your throat from ear to ear before you can read the first line of your blue paper."