He pulled the brass button from his pocket again.
He remembered his uncle’s shop in St. Louis. He remembered his cousin Clara, who had worn white cotton dresses with blue ribbons at her waist and played three tunes on the piano every Sunday evening after church. Clara had been terrified of spiders, of dark hallways, of the smell of coal smoke from the river steamboats.
If Clara had been taken into these red mountains seven years ago, she would have died within three weeks—not from a spear or an arrow, but from the simple, terrifying weight of the silence, the hard sun, and the endless, unyielding stone.
This girl—this Ni-Kha-Ta—had not died. She had become like the wild plum trees that grew in the dry draws: small, gnarled, covered in sharp thorns, producing fruit that was bitter to the tongue, but rooted so deep into the rock that no drought could kill them.
He heard the sound of hoofbeats behind him.
A single horseman was riding south along the trail from Fort Craig. He was a Corporal in the 5th Cavalry, his blue jacket covered in a thick layer of yellow dust, a canvas mail-pouch slung across his chest.
He reined in his horse near Silas, his mount steaming with sweat, its nostrils red and flaring.
"You the clerk from the Records Office?" the corporal shouted through the dust.
"I am," Silas said.
The corporal pulled a folded letter from his pouch and threw it down at Silas’s feet.
"Order from Captain Shirley at the depot," the corporal said, leaning over his saddle horn to wipe his nose with the back of his dirty sleeve. "The supply train from Leavenworth was ambushed near the Cimarron Crossing. No more ledgers are coming south this season. You’re ordered to fall back to Fort Craig on the morning supply wagon. Get your gear ready. We pull out at daylight."
Silas picked up the letter. The red wax seal was already cracked from the heat.
"What about the captives?" Silas asked, looking up at the soldier. "The ones taken in the Mimbres raids?"
The corporal laughed—a short, ugly bark that ended in a dry cough.
"Captives? What captives, son? The only thing down here in the brush is Apaches and rattlesnakes. If there were any white women out there five years ago, they’re either dead or they’ve got five half-breed young-uns pulling at their skirts. Leave 'em be. The territory don't pay for white meat that's already gone native."
The corporal turned his horse's head, dug his rowels into its flanks, and galloped back toward the northern trail, leaving a long, slowly settling trail of yellow dust in the still air.
Silas did not sleep that night.
He stayed in the small quartermaster shed behind the trading post, where Esteban kept two heavy canvas sacks of coarse livestock salt—dirty, gray rock-salt that had been mined from the dry lake beds near the Pecos River, meant for the horses and oxen of the freight lines.
Using a small brass scoop, Silas filled a heavy linen flour sack with thirty pounds of the salt. He tied the mouth of the sack tightly with three strands of waxed leather twine, then wrapped the whole bundle in a spare wool blanket from his own kit.
He set the bundle near the window.
Beside it, he placed his dragoon pistol, his small leather notebook, and the silver watch with the broken mainspring.
At midnight, the moon rose again—fuller now, white as an old bone, turning the mud houses of San Pedro into square blocks of silver and charcoal.
Silas sat on his blanket with his hands resting on his knees. He was not waiting for the military wagon that was supposed to take him back to Fort Craig. He was waiting for the click of two stones in the dark alley.
It came at one hour past midnight.
Click. Click.
Silas stood up, picked up the thirty-pound sack of salt, and walked out through the small rear door of the shed.
The air was bitterly cold now—the desert dropping fifty degrees the moment the sun went down. The stars above the Organ Mountains were huge, clear, and hard, looking like cold steel spikes driven into the vault of the sky.
She was standing near the cactus fence, exactly where she had stood twenty-four hours before.
She wore the same grease-darkened deer-hide skirt, the same soft moccasins wrapped in rawhide. Over her shoulders, she had pulled a second blanket—an old piece of scarlet wool that had belonged to an officer of the Mexican army, faded now to the color of dried beef.
Beside her, leaning his wide shoulders against the fence post, was Iron Hand.
He held no carbine tonight. In his left hand, he carried a long, iron-tipped lance whose butt was decorated with three red hawk feathers that fluttered softly in the night wind. His crippled right hand was tucked into his leather belt like a stone wedge.
Silas walked forward until he was six feet from them. He did not look at Iron Hand; he looked at the girl.
He laid the heavy sack of salt on the red dirt between them.
He pulled back the top flap of the wool blanket, untied the leather twine, and scooped up a small handful of the gray, coarse salt crystals, holding his palm out into the silver light of the moon.
The girl did not move for three seconds.
Then she stepped forward. She did not look at Silas's face; her eyes were fixed entirely on the gray rocks in his hand.