The sun over the Dragoon Mountains did not merely warm the earth; it scraped it raw. By two o’clock in the afternoon, the air above the alkali flats vibrated in long, greasy ribbons of heat, bending the distant ocotillo stalks until they looked like drowning men reaching out of a red dirt sea.
Caleb Vance rode with his hat pulled low enough that his brow stayed in deep shadow, though it did little to cool the cracked leather of his skin. He was thirty-two years old, but his eyes had the pale, washed-out blue of river ice that had seen too many high-desert summers. Across his lap rested an old Spencer repeating carbine, its walnut stock worn slick by sweat and leather scabbed smooth by fifty thousand miles of dry brush.
Behind him, twopack mules picked their way down the shale incline, their ears flopping with every uneven step. Their wooden packsaddles creaked a dry, rhythmless song that Caleb had listened to for three months—ever since he had left the silver camps near Tombstone to look for cattle country that wasn't already fenced with barbed wire or choked out by overgrazing outfits from El Paso.
He pulled his gelding, a big-boned buckskin named Copper, to a halt near a sun-bleached outcrop of limestone. Caleb uncorked his wooden canteen, brought it to his lips, and tilted it back. Three warm, metallic-tasting drops hit the back of his dry throat before the vessel coughed empty.
He shook the canteen near his ear. Nothing.
"Well, boy," Caleb said, his voice raspy as sandpaper on cedar. "We’re about out of talk."
Copper grunted, tossing his head toward the granite jaggedness rising four thousand feet above them—the stronghold of the Chiricahua Apaches.
For three years, the Arizona territory had been a furnace of quiet terror. The cavalry patrols out of Fort Bowie stayed strictly to the wagon ruts of the Butterfield Overland route, moving in tight, nervous columns of fifty carbines or more. The local newspapers in Tucson swore that every draw between the Gila River and the Mexican line was alive with hostile bands under Cochise and his lieutenants—men who could melt into the shadow of a yucca and leave a rider dead in his saddle before the report of a Springfield rifle had cleared the canyon walls.
Caleb knew the stories. He had seen the charred timbers of the station house at Dragoon Springs two years back, and he had buried three teamsters near the San Pedro whose bodies had been left to the coyotes. But he also knew something the army officers in their wool dress coats refused to understand: men didn't kill out of pure spite in a desert this hard; they killed for grass, for horses, and above all, for water.
The drought of 1874 had gripped the borderlands like an iron vice. The creeks that usually ran through September were now dry gutters of cracked grey mud. The tinajas—the natural rock basins high in the mountains that caught the winter rains—had evaporated into dust bowls filled with dried bees and dead lizards.
Caleb dismounted, his boots crunching on the loose slate. He didn't look at the sky; he looked at the ground.
Near the base of a stunted mesquite tree, a line of small black ants was moving in a tight, purposeful string toward a seam in the granite wall. A hundred yards to the west, a solitary roadrunner stood perfectly still beside a patch of prickly pear, its beak slightly parted, its feathers ruffled to catch whatever ghost of a breeze might drift down the wash.
Caleb knelt down, pressing the back of his hand against the red dirt near a crevice in the shale. It wasn't cold, but it wasn't baking hot either. Deep underneath the stone, something was keeping the ground from turning to glass.
He reached into his saddlebag, pulled out a short-handled prospector’s pick, and began to clear away the gravel. He didn't dig like a miner looking for silver; he worked with slow, rhythmic efficiency, tossing aside the sun-baked surface stones until he reached the dark, iron-rich sand four feet below.
After twenty minutes of digging, his fingernails were black with wet loam. He reached down, scooped up a handful of the dirt, and squeezed it in his palm. When he opened his fingers, the soil stayed in a tight, dark ball.
A faint, cool dampness seeped into his calloused skin.
"It’s here," Caleb murmured to the buckskin. "It’s deep, but it’s here."
Before he could reach for his shovel, the silence of the canyon broke—not with a gunshot, or a war cry, but with the dry, unmistakable click of an iron carbine hammer being pulled back to full cock.
Caleb didn't jump. He didn't reach for the Spencer lying across his saddle fifteen feet away. He knew that if he moved more than an inch, two inches of iron would pass through his ribs before his hand ever touched the leather scabbard.
Slowly, very slowly, Caleb opened his hands and raised them to the level of his shoulders, his palms facing outward toward the blinding sun.
"I’m unattached," Caleb said into the dry air, speaking in the rough, broken Spanish that served as the trade tongue along the border. "No soldiers. Just a man looking for a drink."
From behind the limestone boulders forty yards up the draw, six figures stepped out into the light. They didn't move like white men—they didn't rustle the dry grass, nor did their moccasins click against the stone. They appeared like gray ghosts rising out of the rock itself.