Caleb stood beside his buckskin gelding, tightening the cinch on his stock saddle. His two pack mules were loaded, their wooden packsaddles strapped down tight with diamond hitches.
He checked his canteen—it was full, cold, and dripping wet against his canvas trousers.
Behind him, the camp was awake. Women were filling their jugs at the new stream, their voices light and musical in the crisp morning air. Children were splashing in the shallow pools near the rocks, their laughter echoing off the red cliff walls where yesterday there had been only the dry silence of death.
Locono walked up to Caleb’s stirrup. Beside the chief stood Taza, the young warrior who had swung the sledgehammer the day before. Taza was holding the reins of a sleek, deep-chested bay mare with two white hind stockings—a horse that showed the clean, high-headed blood of a California rancher’s stock.
"You take no woman," Locono said, gesturing to the bay mare. "So you take the horse. She is fast. She can run two days without water, and she knows the trails between here and Mexico better than the buzzards."
Caleb looked at the mare. She was a beauty—lean-limbed, broad-browed, her coat shining like an old copper penny in the morning sun.
"I can't take your best horse, Chief," Caleb began.
"You will take her," Locono interrupted, his voice dropping into a hard, non-negotiable register. "Or I will shoot her where she stands. A Chiricahua chief does not let a man leave his camp with his hands empty when his people are drinking his water."
Caleb looked at the old chief’s face, saw that he meant every word, and bowed his head slightly.
"I’ll take her," Caleb said, taking the leather reins from Taza’s hand. "And I’ll treat her right."
Locono reached into his belt and pulled out a small piece of flat white shale—the same stone Caleb had split the day before. Using his hunting knife, the chief had scratched a crude, clear mark onto its smooth surface: the outline of a mountain peak with three horizontal lines running through its center, and below it, the shape of a running stream.
He pressed the stone into Caleb’s hand.
"If you ride in these mountains," Locono said, "and you meet my warriors, or the people of Geronimo, or the men of Cochise... show them this stone. Tell them you are the man who broke the rock for Locono. No Apache will touch your horses or take your scalp. You have the freedom of the Dragoons."
Caleb looked down at the scratched piece of shale. In the Arizona territory of 1874, that small piece of rock was worth more than ten thousand dollars in United States gold; it was a passport through two hundred miles of death.
"Thank you, Chief," Caleb said. He tucked the stone deep into his leather vest pocket, right next to his heart.
He climbed into his saddle, gathering the reins of the buckskin and the lead ropes for his mules and the new bay mare.
Before he turned his horse toward the canyon mouth, he looked over the camp one last time. Near the third wickiup, the young white girl was standing beside an older Mexican woman. She was wearing a clean blue cotton dress now, her hair brushed back and tied with a leather thong. She wasn't smiling, but the hollow, wild look in her eyes was gone.
Caleb lifted his hat to her—a single, respectful sweep of his brim—then turned his horse down the trail.
Three days later, Caleb Vance rode into the small, dusty settlement that had grown up around the stage station at Apache Pass.
It was a miserable strip of sun-bleached frame buildings, canvas tents, and adobe huts squeezed into the narrow gap between the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas ranges. It smelled of whiskey, mule manure, and stale tobacco.
As Caleb pulled his horses up to the hitching rail in front of the Butterfield Overland office, three men stepped off the covered porch.
They wore dirty wool trousers tucked into high riding boots, greasy slouch hats, and heavy Colt revolvers slung low on their hips. Their faces were red from whiskey and sun, their eyes small and mean with the restless arrogance of men who made their living by taking what belonged to others.
The leader was a tall, raw-boned man named Luke Miller—a former border scout who had been discharged from the army for selling government rifles to Mexican smugglers, and who now ran a small, shady outfit buying stolen cattle along the San Pedro.
Miller stopped near Caleb’s stirrup, his hand resting casually on the butt of his single-action Army revolver. His eyes swept over Caleb’s rig, lingering long and hard on the sleek bay mare trailing behind his pack mules.
"Well, now," Miller said, his voice raspy with tobacco spit. "Look what the wind blowed in out of the hills. Where'd a lone cowboy like you pick up a fine piece of horseflesh like that bay, mister?"
Caleb didn't dismount. He kept his right hand lying casually across his thigh, four inches above his Spencer carbine.
"I traded for her," Caleb said evenly.
"Traded?" Miller sneered, looking back at his two companions, who chuckled on cue. "Traded with who? There ain't nothing up in them Dragoons except wild Apaches and dead men. Unless you stole her off some ranch down in Sonora."
One of Miller’s men—a short, squat fellow with a scarred lip—stepped around to the off-side of Caleb’s horse, positioning himself to grab the bay mare’s lead rope.