She knelt in the dirt—her knees making a soft crunchagainst the dry gravel—and reached out her thumb and forefinger. Her skin was cold, rough as sand-paper, her nails short, thick, and black with dirt along the edges.
She picked up three large crystals of the salt and placed them on her tongue.
Her eyes closed.
For a single, fleeting second, her face softened. The hard, wooden expression that seemed carved into her skin by seven years of sun and wind melted away. Her cheeks seemed to sink slightly, her throat moved as she swallowed, and a long, low sigh came out of her dry lips—a sound that was neither Apache nor English, but simply the sound of a human creature receiving something it had starved for through a hundred long, dry days.
She opened her eyes. She looked up at Silas.
Her pale gray-green eyes were no longer flat. In the moonlight, deep within the small pupils, there was a faint, blue spark—a shadow of something that had lived long ago in a house with a forge and an anvil, where the sound of iron striking iron was accompanied by the singing of a mother who had died before the copper mines were abandoned.
She opened her mouth.
"Su... su..." she whispered.
The sound was tiny, broken, like a dried leaf being dragged across a stone floor.
"Sugar?" Silas whispered back, his heart leaping into his throat. "Is it sugar you remember?"
She shook her head slowly, her face clouding over with frustration as her mind wrestled with a language that had turned to dust in her brain seven years ago.
"Su... Salt," she said suddenly.
The word was hard, ugly, pronounced with a heavy, clipped German accent that sounded as if it had been dug out of a deep grave beneath six feet of clay.
“Saltz.”
Iron Hand took one step forward. His lance butt struck the ground with a dull THUMP.
He reached down with his left hand, gripped the top of the flour sack, and lifted the thirty-pound weight as if it were a bag of feathers. He swung it over his broad shoulder, his dark eyes fixed on Silas with an expression that was no longer hostile, but hard, cold, and final—the look of a businessman who had completed a trade at the long-house and was now closing the gate.
He touched the girl's head with his crippled right hand.
She stood up immediately. The soft, vulnerable look in her eyes vanished like water dropped on a hot stove. Her face turned back into wood, into stone, into the dark, silent skin of Ni-Kha-Ta.
She turned her back on Silas and walked toward the south, following Iron Hand through the gap in the cactus fence.
Silas did not go back to St. Louis.
When the cavalry supply wagon pulled out of San Pedro the next morning at sunrise, Silas’s name was crossed off the roll by the quartermaster sergeant with a thick stroke of red lead pencil.
Silas Vance, Clerk. Deserted at San Pedro Crossing, October 20, 1862.
He bought an old brown mule from Esteban for forty silver dollars—half of all the money he had saved from his two years of army service. He bought a heavy iron pot, two wool blankets, a ten-pound sack of green coffee beans, and three tin cans of lard.
He did not buy a rifle. He kept only his grandfather's silver watch and his notebook.
"Where are you going, loco?" Esteban asked as Silas adjusted the girth strap on his mule. The old man was standing under the shade of the chapel wall, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes filled with a mixture of pity and dry contempt.
"South," Silas said.
"South is thirty thousand square miles of stone and Apaches," Esteban said. "There are no printing presses down there. There are no books. There are no women who wear silk dresses and play the piano on Sunday afternoons."
Silas looked down at his brown mule's ears.
"I am not looking for a woman who plays the piano," Silas said.
"Then what are you looking for?"
"I am looking for the rest of the words," Silas said.
He turned his mule's head toward the southern trail—the narrow, iron-red draw that led past the Organ Mountains toward the deep canyons of the Rio Bonito.
He rode slowly. The sun rose higher, casting his long, thin shadow across the red dust before him like a dark pointer on a sundial.
Three miles south of the crossing, where the mesquite gave way to tall, yellow stalks of mountain grass and sharp, grey spears of spanish bayonet, he stopped his mule near a dry waterhole.
Sitting on a flat rock beside the trail was the girl.
She was alone.
Iron Hand was nowhere to be seen, though Silas knew, with the deep, quiet certainty of a man who had learned the lesson of the desert, that the hunter with the iron hand was sitting in the high rocks three hundred yards above the trail, his rusted carbine resting across his knees, watching every movement of the brown mule’s ears.
She did not have her iron pot today.
She sat with her hands tucked into her deer-hide skirt, her long, dust-covered hair blown across her face by the mountain wind.
Beside her on the flat rock lay three small objects:
A piece of dried cedar wood, carved into the crude shape of a mountain quail; a small, clear quartz crystal that caught the white sunlight like a diamond; and a small brass screw from the back of an old American printing press—an object Silas had lost from his waistcoat pocket two days before in the plaza of San Pedro.