The movement brought back fragments of memory: Crowe's face, the rifle butt, Anna shouting, the sound of men dragging someone away.
He forced himself to breathe slowly.
Panic was a luxury.
He needed to know whether he was alone.
He listened.
Water trickled over stone. Wind moved through the cottonwood leaves. Somewhere in the distance, a horse stamped.
No voices.
No footsteps.
He tried to move his wrists.
The rope was tight, but whoever had tied it had used a simple knot. Elias worked his fingers against the cord, searching for an edge he could loosen.
It took several minutes.
By the time his hands came free, his fingers were numb.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky.
Ten years earlier, he had lain in almost exactly the same position.
Different country.
Different sky.
The same taste of blood.
He had been twenty-eight, riding with a small group of men hired to escort a freight wagon through western Kansas. Their employer had claimed the cargo was agricultural equipment. Elias had discovered too late that it contained stolen rifles intended for an outlaw gang operating near the territorial border.
He should have left when he learned the truth.
Instead, he had convinced himself that the money mattered more than the risk.
The men who hired him had promised an easy job. Ride beside the wagon, keep watch, and collect his payment at the next settlement.
But the wagon had been ambushed at dusk.
Gunfire erupted from both sides of the road.
The lead driver fell from his seat. One of the horses bolted. Men shouted and fired into the smoke.
Elias remembered the terrible confusion of it.
He remembered seeing a boy beside the wagon, perhaps twelve years old, trying to pull his father away from the wheel.
He remembered hearing a woman scream from inside the wagon.
And he remembered the man who had hired him shouting, "Leave them! Get the cargo!"
Elias had hesitated.
Only for a moment.
But the moment had been enough.
By the time he turned back, the boy was dead.
The woman had been wounded, and the wagon was burning.
Elias had carried her into the grass, where she died before sunrise. Her husband survived long enough to tell Elias that the boy's name was Samuel.
Then he had asked Elias to find the child's sister.
Her name was Ruth.
Elias had promised.
He had even written the name on a scrap of paper and placed it inside his Bible.
But when the men who had hired him returned, they offered him money to keep quiet.
He accepted it.
He told himself he would use the money to find the girl.
He told himself he would return when the danger had passed.
He told himself many things.
He never found Ruth.
He never discovered what happened to the family.
And when the local authorities began asking questions, Elias rode west.
He had spent the following decade trying to become a man who no longer remembered.
But memory was not something a man could outrun.
It was simply something that learned how to travel quietly.
A sharp sound brought him back to the present.
Ranger.
The stallion stood near the trees, his reins tangled around a fallen branch.
Elias pushed himself upright.
"Come here, boy."
Ranger pulled against the reins.
Elias crawled toward him, freed the leather, and rested both hands against the horse's face.
The stallion pressed his muzzle against Elias's chest.
For a moment, Elias closed his eyes.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
He did not know whether he was apologizing for getting captured, for leaving the horse tied alone, or for the years of neglect that had followed him like a second shadow.
Perhaps all three.
He checked the saddle.
His rifle was gone.
His revolver was missing.
The saddlebag had been opened, and most of its contents had been scattered across the ground. The Bible lay near the spring, its pages damp. His bedroll had disappeared.
Crowe had taken everything useful and left the rest.
Except the Bible.
Elias picked it up.
The leather cover had been scratched, but the pages remained intact. His mother's handwriting was still visible inside the front cover.
Elias, remember that a man is not measured by how far he travels, but by what he is willing to stand beside.
He stared at the words.
Then he closed the book and put it inside his coat.
A low rumble of thunder rolled across the hills.
Rain was coming.
Elias searched the clearing for tracks. Crowe's men had ridden south, taking Anna and Whitaker with them. Their horses had left deep impressions in the soft ground. One of the men had been dragging something heavy, perhaps a box or a bundle of maps.
Elias followed the tracks for nearly a mile before he found a torn piece of paper caught beneath a rock.
It was a fragment of Whitaker's survey.
On it, someone had drawn a rough outline of the spring and the surrounding hills. A red mark indicated a narrow passage east of the main canyon.
Beside it, in Whitaker's handwriting, were two words.
Old mine.
Elias studied the map.
He knew the region well enough to understand the significance.
An abandoned silver mine lay in the hills east of Mercy Crossing. It had been closed twenty years earlier after a collapse killed three workers. The main entrance had been sealed, but an old drainage tunnel still connected the mine to a ravine that emerged less than two miles from the spring.
The tunnel was too narrow for horses.
But men could use it.
If Crowe intended to hide the surveyor, the mine would be an ideal place.
If he intended to kill him, it would be even better.
Elias folded the paper and placed it inside his coat.
He had no gun.
No food.
No bedroll.
His head was bleeding, and the rain was beginning to fall.
For the first time in years, he had nothing between himself and the consequences of his choices.
He could return to Mercy Crossing and ask for help.
But if Crowe had taken Anna and Whitaker to the mine, every hour mattered.
Elias mounted Ranger.
"Let's go."
The stallion moved beneath him, eager despite the long night.
They rode east through the rain.
By midday, the storm had turned the prairie into a gray, shifting landscape. Water streamed down the rocky slopes. The trail became a ribbon of mud, and Ranger slipped twice while descending a steep embankment.
Elias guided him carefully.
He could feel blood drying along the side of his face.
Every movement hurt.
But he kept riding.
As the mine came into view, he saw a thin column of smoke rising from the ravine.
He dismounted behind a cluster of boulders and tied Ranger beneath an overhang.
Then he approached the entrance on foot.
The mine stood beneath a cliff of red sandstone, its wooden supports blackened by age. A rusted rail emerged from the darkness and disappeared into the tunnel. Near the entrance, two horses were tied to a post.
A man sat beneath a makeshift shelter, smoking a cigarette.