The men were lean, built like hickory roots that had grown around granite boulders. Their skin was dark as old walnut, grease-stained and weathered by a lifetime under an unfiltered sun. They wore canvas breechcloths, tall deer-hide moccasins buttoned up to their knees, and high-waisted cartridge belts slung low over their hips.
The leader of the group was an older warrior with a broad, flat nose and a deep scar that ran from his left eye down to the corner of his jaw, pulling his mouth into a perpetual, frozen half-smile. He held an old brass-framed Henry rifle pointed straight at Caleb’s belt buckle.
He stepped closer, his dark eyes scanning Caleb from his dusty slouch hat down to his worn spurs. He didn't look at Caleb’s face first; he looked at his hands, then at his saddlebags, then at the wet dirt Caleb had just turned over with his pick.
"You look for silver, Americano?" the warrior asked. His Spanish was thick, hard-edged, stripped of all unnecessary vowels.
"I look for water," Caleb replied quietly, keeping his voice steady, low, and smooth. "Silver don't fill a canteen, and it don't keep a horse from dropping."
The warrior with the scarred cheek walked over to the hole Caleb had dug. He squatted down, touched the dark mud with his thick index finger, and brought it to his tongue. He spat the dirt out, but his eyes narrowed as he looked up at Caleb.
"This wash has been dry since the green corn month," the Apache said. "There is no water here."
"There’s water six feet down," Caleb said, pointing with his chin toward the seam in the rock wall. "The limestone drops off under that shelf. The rain from two years ago is trapped in the shale pocket beneath the caprock. It’s sitting there like beer in a keg, but you have to break the stone to get to the tap."
The warriors exchanged brief, guttural words in their own tongue—harsh, clicking sounds that sounded like stones striking against iron. Two of them stepped behind Caleb, efficiently stripping the Spencer carbine from his saddle and slipping his hunting knife from his belt. They didn't strike him, nor did they bind his hands, but the way they positioned themselves around him made it clear that a single fast movement would be his last.
The leader waved the barrel of his Henry rifle toward the upper canyon.
"You come," he said. "The Chief will see if you speak truth, or if you are just another white liar waiting for the blue-coats to find your bones."
They moved up the draw for two hours, leaving the main wash behind and climbing into the narrow, twisted chimneys of the upper Dragoon range. The trail was invisible to Caleb’s eyes—a goat track of loose shale and sharp rock that rose at an angle that made Copper heave for breath.
As they mounted a high ridge, the canyon opened into a wide, hidden basin surrounded on three sides by sheer red granite cliffs that rose eight hundred feet into the turquoise sky.
This was the stronghold.
Scattered across the basin floor were forty or fifty wickiups—domed shelters made of bent willow saplings thatched with dried bear-grass and canvas tarps. Children ran naked between the brush structures, chasing skinny dogs, while women worked over small, smokeless fires made of dried mesquite root.
The air here felt different—it was heavy with the smell of roasted agave, woodsmoke, tanned hides, and the sharp, sour tang of horse sweat. But over everything hung the unmistakable atmosphere of a people under siege by the sun.
The horses tethered near the stream bed were rib-gaunt, their coats dull and patchy. The women at the cooking fires moved with slow, heavy steps, their lips cracked and dark. Near the center of the camp, three large leather water bags hung from a wooden tripod—they were dry, shriveled, and stiff as dried beef.
The warriors led Caleb toward the largest shelter at the foot of the cliff. Sitting on a woven Mexican blanket in the narrow strip of shade provided by an overhanging ledge was an old man.
He was not tall, but his chest was broad as a flour barrel, and his white hair was held back by a strip of red flannel cloth tied around his forehead. His face looked as though it had been carved out of ironwood and left in the weather for a century. This was Locono, chief of the local Chiricahua band—a man who had fought the Mexicans before the Americans ever came, and who had survived three cavalry campaigns by knowing every rock between the Rio Grande and the Gulf of California.
The warrior with the scarred cheek stepped forward and spoke for several minutes in rapid Apache, pointing back down the canyon and then at Caleb.
Locono listened without moving a muscle in his face. His dark, hooded eyes stayed fixed on Caleb, reading the white man's posture, the dust on his boots, the calm way he held his arms by his sides.
When the warrior finished, Locono stood up slowly. He walked over to Caleb, stopping so close that Caleb could smell the sage and grease on the old man’s buckskin shirt.
"You say you find water where my people see only dry dirt?" Locono asked. His Spanish was better than his warrior's—clearer, slower, weighed down by authority.
"I say I know where the caprock holds it," Caleb answered, meeting the chief’s gaze directly. "Your land is hard, Chief, but it tells secrets if you know how the stone lays. I’ve prospected from the Colorado down to Sonora. Water moves like blood under skin; you just have to know where the vein runs deep."