Caleb stood up slowly.
He looked at Locono. He looked down the line of twenty-two women. He felt the cold iron of his knife at his hip, the weight of the Spencer carbine resting against his saddle, and the heavy, dangerous silence of forty warriors watching his every move.
Caleb walked slowly down the line of women. His boots made no sound in the deep dirt of the fire ring.
He stopped in front of the young white woman with the blue eyes. Her lower lip was trembling, her skin so pale he could see the blue veins under her jaw. She was no more than nineteen, her hands scarred by work at the tanning racks.
He moved past her, stopping next to a young Apache woman whose brother had been killed at the battle of Apache Pass two years before. She looked him straight in the eyes, her jaw set, refusing to flinch as the white man inspected her.
He walked to the end of the line, then turned around and walked slowly back to where Locono stood waiting, his arms folded across his thick chest.
"They are good women, Chief," Caleb said softly. His Spanish was clear, devoid of anger or pride. "Any man would be fortunate to have a wife who can endure this country."
"Choose," Locono said again. "The night grows short, and tomorrow you may ride in peace."
Caleb took a deep breath. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his tobacco pouch, and rolled a single cigarette with slow, methodical fingers. He lit it with a twig from the fire, blew a thin stream of white smoke toward the stars, and looked Locono straight in the eye.
"I can't take any of them, Chief," Caleb said quietly.
A low murmur passed through the circle of warriors. The man with the scarred cheek stepped forward, his hand dropping to the hilt of his butcher knife.
Locono’s dark brows pulled together into a deep, dangerous furrow.
"You refuse my gift?" the chief asked, his voice dropping an octave into a low, rumbling threat. "You think my women are not clean enough for a white cowboy? Or do you think you are too big a man to take a gift from the Chiricahua?"
"I refuse no gift out of disrespect," Caleb replied, his voice calm and level as a carpenter’s rule. "I refuse because of how I was raised by a mother who lies in a grave near the Red River."
Caleb stepped closer to Locono, taking a slow pull from his cigarette.
"Where I come from, Chief, a man doesn't take a woman like he takes a horse out of a corral. A woman isn't a bag of corn you trade for digging a ditch. If a woman goes with a man, she goes because her heart tells her to go—not because her chief ordered her to step forward, and not because a white man had a sledgehammer in his hand."
He pointed toward the young white girl with the blue eyes.
"That girl has a family somewhere down on the San Pedro who pray for her every night when the sun goes down," Caleb said. Then he pointed to the Apache girl with the proud chin. "And that girl belongs to these mountains. If I took her to a white town, your people would hate me, and my people would treat her like a dog."
Caleb tossed his cigarette butt into the coals.
"You owe me no debt for the water, Locono. The water didn't belong to me; it belonged to the rock. I just helped it find its way out into the light. The earth gives water to every man who knows how to ask, whether he wears buckskin, cotton, or blue wool."
The silence in the camp was total now. Even the horses tethered near the fresh stream had stopped their stomping.
The twenty-two women stood frozen in the firelight. The young white girl had stopped trembling; she was staring at Caleb with wide, disbelieving eyes, her mouth slightly parted. The young Apache woman lowered her chin just half an inch, her dark eyes watching Caleb with a new, strange kind of respect.
Locono stared at Caleb for a long, agonizing minute. His face was an unreadable mask of iron and shadow.
Slowly, the old chief turned his head and looked at his people—at the women who had been brought out like cattle, at the young warriors who were watching their chief to see how a leader answered a white man who had just refused his honor.
Then, Locono did something that no man in that camp had seen him do in ten years of war.
He smiled.
It was a slow, creaking smile that split his scarred face like a wedge driven into dry pine.
"You are a strange white man, Caleb Vance," Locono said, speaking the cowboy's full name for the first time. "You dig like a mole, you speak like an old preacher, and you turn away from twenty-two women when your blankets are cold."
The old chief turned back to the line of captives.
"Go back to your wickiups," Locono commanded the women with a flick of his wrist. "The white cowboy wants no wives tonight."
As the women turned to walk back into the dark, the young white girl paused for a fraction of a second. She looked over her shoulder at Caleb, her lips moving silently to form two words: Thank you.
Caleb gave her a single, almost invisible nod before turning back to the chief's fire.
The next morning broke clear and sharp over the Dragoons. The air smelled clean, washed free of dust by the cold water that was still pouring from the limestone seam, filling the dry creek bed with a clear, laughing stream that ran three hundred yards down the canyon before sinking back into the sand.