He stood up, his socks moving silently over the hard-packed dirt floor, and walked to the window.
The moon was low, a thin, silver scythe hanging over the black teeth of the Organ Mountains.
Standing in the small, narrow alley between the adobe wall and the cactus fence was a figure.
It was not Iron Hand.
It was the girl.
She was standing perfectly still, her head tilted slightly to one side, looking up at the square gap of the window. Her face was half-in shadow, half-lit by the cold silver light of the dying moon.
In her right hand, she held a small, dark object.
She did not speak. She did not make a sound. She simply reached up and set the object onto the wide mud sill of the window, then stepped backward into the shadows of the mesquite.
By the time Silas reached his hand through the opening, she was gone. The alley was empty, save for the wind blowing a tumbleweed across the sand.
Silas picked up the object.
It was a small, round cake made of wild mesquite meal, mixed with crushed pine nuts and dried deer fat, baked hard as stone on a flat rock over an open fire.
It was the food the Apaches carried when they traveled fifty miles a day through the high, waterless canyons where no horse could follow.
And stuck into the center of the hard brown cake was a small, bright object that caught the cold white light of the moon.
It was a single brass button—a Union army button, decorated with the raised figure of an eagle holding three arrows in its talons, polished until it shone like gold.
Silas held the button in his palm. His thumb ran over the smooth brass edge, then over the small, sharp steel loop on the back.
It had not been cut from an old coat with a knife; the cloth around it had been unraveled thread by thread, carefully, patiently, over hours of silent work in the dark corners of an Apache lodge.
The morning came not with soft light, but with a white, blinding flare as the sun cleared the jagged rim of the eastern hills. By eight o'clock, the heat was already rising from the stone plaza in visible, shimmering waves that made the distant mountains look like they were floating on a lake of grey oil.
Silas found Esteban at the well, drawing a bucket of thick, muddy water for his three pack mules.
"She came to my window last night," Silas said, standing by the old man's shoulder.
Esteban did not stop hauling the hemp rope. His old arms were thin, the muscles looking like dry beef jerky under his dirty cotton shirt.
"I know," Esteban said flatly.
"You saw her?"
"I did not see her. My lead mule saw her. She turned her ears toward the wall at two hours past midnight. A mule does not turn her ears for a dog or a coyote; she turns them only for an Indian or a panther."
Esteban dumped the muddy water into a wooden trough. The three mules shoved their noses into the scum, drinking with long, noisy gulps.
"She left this," Silas said, showing the brass button on his palm.
Esteban looked at the button for three long seconds. His old face did not change, but his small dark eyes narrowed until they were almost hidden behind his wrinkled eyelids.
"That button belonged to a sergeant named James," Esteban said quietly. "He was with the 1st New Mexico Volunteers. They caught him in the draw near Horse Creek two years ago. They did not kill him quickly. They left him in the sun for three days."
Silas felt a sudden cold sickness in his stomach. "Did she... did she take it from him?"
"Who knows?" Esteban spat into the trough. "Maybe she took it from his coat while he was still screaming. Maybe she found it in the sand after the coyotes were finished with him. But she did not give it to you because she loves your blue eyes, muchacho."
"Then why?"
Esteban leaned over the trough, resting his heavy palms on the wet wood, his face inches from Silas's.
"Because she wants salt," Esteban said softly.
"Salt?"
"In the mountains, there is no salt except what they get from the salt lakes six days north, near the white sands. The Chiricahuas are low on salt this autumn. Their hides do not cure well; the fat turns black and rots before the leather is soft. She knows you come from the fort. She knows the blue coats have sacks of white rock-salt in their supply wagons."
Esteban reached out and took the brass button from Silas's palm, turning it over in his dirty fingers before tossing it back into Silas's coat pocket.
"She gave you her food—the meal of pine nuts and fat. That is a contract, Silas. In her world, if a woman gives you food from her pouch, and you take it, you must give her three hand-spans of white salt, or you must give her a knife that will hold an edge on an elk bone."
"And if I don't?"
"Then Iron Hand will come back," Esteban said simply. "Not at noon. Not when the cavalry is riding by. He will come when you are asleep behind my adobe wall. He will take your pistol, he will take your boots, and he will leave your blue coat on a cactus bush for the crows to nest in."
Silas walked away from the well, out through the ruined arch of the church, and stood on the small dirt ridge that overlooked the dry creek bed.
To the south, the desert stretched out forever—red, gray, yellow, and brown, a vast, empty ocean of rock and thorn that seemed to have no end and no center. Somewhere out there, three miles or thirty miles away, the Chiricahua lodges were hidden in the narrow canyons where the cold springs trickled out of the limestone.