The wind off the Mogollon Rim carried the smell of rain that never fell—a dry, bitter scent of sage, dust, and scorched pine.
Arthur Hale wiped his brow with the back of a filthy leather glove and stared across the sun-baked soil of his homestead. He was forty-two years old, though his joints groaned like a draft wagon burdened with stones, and his dark hair was rapidly silvering around the temples. For fifteen years, he had bled into this earth. He had hauled river rocks with his bare hands to lay the foundations of the cabin, dug irrigation ditches through sun-hardened clay until his palms peeled, and buried two younger brothers who had succumbed to winter lung-fever and bad whiskey.
He was a lonely man on a lonely ranch—a place built entirely on stubbornness and isolation.
The trouble had started six months prior. It began subtly: a section of heavy pine fencing mysteriously flattened near the northern ravine, leaving fifty head of cattle to wander toward the alkali flats; a water gate jammed with heavy rocks; an unexpected letter from the county land office claiming his boundaries were subject to "re-surveying."
Arthur had dismissed it as bad luck, the casual cruelty of frontier life. But luck didn't wear iron horse-shoes, and luck didn't carry Winchester rifles.
It was late afternoon when Arthur rode out to inspect the upper spring near Devil’s Canyon. The shadows were lengthening into deep indigo ribbons across the red clay. He was riding a steady, gray-dappled mare named Sinder, his lever-action rifle slung across his saddle scabbard.
As he turned the horse through a tight gap between two towering monoliths of sandstone, the air went deathly quiet. Even the cicadas ceased their shrill buzzing.
Arthur reined in. "Easy, girl," he muttered.
A rifle cracked.
The sound tore through the quiet canyon like thunder breaking over a tin roof. Pain—white-hot, sudden, and terrifying—blasted through Arthur’s left shoulder. The impact threw him backward out of the saddle. He hit the ground hard, the breath forced violently from his lungs in a ragged gasp.
Before he could pull himself up, a second shot slammed into his ribcage.
The ground rose up to meet him. Dust filled his nose and mouth. Through a haze of crimson and gray, he heard voices—coarse, laughing men’s voices—echoing off the canyon walls.
"Get his horse! Leave the old fool to rot!"
"Check his pockets?"
"For what? He’s broke as a church mouse. The boss said leave him. Let the coyotes finish the Hale place."
The sound of hoofbeats faded into the distance.
Arthur lay in his own blood on the cold dirt. The sky above turned from orange to deep purple, then to the vast, cold black of the Arizona night. The cold set in, sinking deep into his bones. His lungs felt as though they were filled with crushed glass. Every breath was a agonizing battle. He thought of his dead brothers, of his mother’s face from thirty years ago, and of the dry, unforgiving soil that was about to consume him.
So this is how a life ends,he thought, closing his eyes against the stars. Alone in the dark.
He did not expect to wake.
He certainly did not expect the soft, firm touch of a hand on his neck, or the smell of burning cedar and crushed sagebrush.
When Arthur opened his eyes, he was not in heaven, nor was he in hell. He was lying on a makeshift travois made of pine saplings and thick canvas, being dragged across the rough ground. Three figures hovered over him against the pale wash of dawn.
They were women. Three Apache sisters.
The eldest—a woman with sharp, severe eyes, a long scar tracing her left cheekbone, and a face carved from granite—stared down at him with an expression that held neither pity nor softness. Beside her stood a younger woman, her hands stained dark green with crushed herbs, pressing a cloth firmly into Arthur’s bleeding chest. The third, the youngest, stood a few yards away, a repeating rifle held casually across her chest, her keen eyes scanning the horizon for dust clouds.
Arthur tried to speak, but only a dry rattle came from his throat.
"Do not talk," the eldest sister said in heavily accented, clipped English. "Your lungs are full of blood. If you bleed inside, you die."
"Who..." Arthur choked out.
"People who do not want to see a man murdered like a dog," the middle sister said softly, her hands working methodically to apply a bitter poultice of boiled root and tallow to his wounds.