Silas looked down at the paper in his hands. The ink was already smudging from the sweat of his palms. He thought of his uncle’s shop in St. Louis—the cool, dark smell of lampblack, linseed oil, and damp newsprint; the low, steady clatter of the handpresses; the predictable, orderly lines of lead type set into metal chases. In that world, everything had a place, a margin, a heading, and an index.
Here, between the red dirt and the white sky, there were no margins. There were only those who hid behind the stone walls and those who waited in the high brush with iron-tipped arrows held lightly between their teeth.
"Where is she now?" Silas asked quietly.
Esteban nodded toward the rear of the ruined church.
Through a gap in the cracked adobe wall where the altar had once stood, a figure was moving slowly across the dry wash. She wore a skirt made of tanned deer hide, darkened by grease and smoke at the hem, and a pair of tall, soft-soled moccasins that rose past her knees, wrapped in narrow strips of rawhide. Over her shoulders hung a piece of coarse gray army blanket, secured at her neck with a bent brass pin.
Her hair was long, matted with dust and pine resin, but where the sun caught the crown of her head, it shone with a faint, ghostly luminescence—a pale, silver-gold thread that looked entirely alien against the dark, sun-blackened skin of her face and forearms.
She was carrying an iron pot filled with river sand, using her thumb to scrub the grease from its inner rim with a rhythmic, mechanical motion that had no beginning and no end.
Silas stood up from the rim of the fountain. His knees were stiff from the ride, his tongue felt heavy in his mouth, and the dry air burned his nostrils with every breath.
"Sit down, fool," Esteban growled without turning around. "The hunter with the iron hand is watching you from the mesquite bushes behind the well. If you take three steps toward that girl, he will put a three-bladed iron point through your liver before your foot hits the ground."
Silas did not sit. He took one step forward into the red dust.
The Apache man did not emerge from the mesquite; he seemed to materialize from the shadow of a dry arroyo like water seeping through a seam in gray slate.
He was short, wide-shouldered, with a chest like a grease-barrel and legs that bowed outward from a lifetime of riding small, lean ponies without stirrups. His skin was the dark, reddish-brown of wet mahogany, crisscrossed across the breast by two rows of white bone beads strung on rawhide thread. His right hand—the crippled one—was wrapped in a greasy strip of black mule-hide, the fingers permanently contracted into an iron-hard hook that hung at his hip like a butcher's tool. In his left hand, he held a short carbine—a rusted, cut-down Spencer rifle whose stock was bound with wet sinew that had dried into a yellow, horn-like skin.
He stood twenty feet from Silas, his dark, opaque eyes unblinking, fixed not on Silas’s face, but on his collarbone—the exact spot where a knife blade would find the soft hollow above the breastbone.
The girl did not stop scrubbing her iron pot.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
The sound of the dry river sand against the cast iron was the only noise in the plaza, save for the low, dry rattle of the wind through the dead stalks of wild mustard.
Silas reached into his pocket—slowly, deliberately, keeping his fingers flat and visible so the hunter would not think he was reaching for a hidden pistol. He pulled out a small object wrapped in a piece of oiled calico cloth.
He unrolled the cloth. Inside lay an old silver pocket watch with a cracked hunting case. It had belonged to Silas’s grandfather—a heavy, key-wound piece made in Liverpool that had stopped running three years ago when the mainspring snapped during a snowstorm on the Mississippi River. The silver was tarnished black in the crevices, but the engraved scrollwork on the cover still caught the sharp white glare of the noon sun.
Silas held it out on his open palm.
"I don't want the silver ledger," Silas said, speaking clearly toward the glass-like eyes of Iron Hand, though his gaze slid sideways toward the girl with the silver-gold hair. "I want to talk to her. Ten minutes. Just ten minutes."
Iron Hand did not look at the watch. He did not look at Silas’s face. He looked at the white skin of Silas’s wrists—soft, blue-veined skin that had never seen the hard sun of the high mountains.
"He does not know what a watch is, pendejo," Esteban called out from his lard tub, though his voice had lost its dry humor; it was thin now, sharp with genuine fear. "To him, that silver is just a cold rock that makes no soup and kills no deer. Put it away before he takes it and your thumb along with it."
The girl stopped her hand.
For the first time, her head turned slowly toward Silas. Her face was narrow, high-boned, and covered in a fine layer of white alkali dust that settled into the faint creases around her eyes and mouth. Her eyes were not brown like the Apache women's, nor dark black like the traders'—they were a strange, pale, gray-green, like the water in a quiet creek pool after a spring rain, but they were entirely flat, devoid of memory, curiosity, or recognition.