The sun hammered the red valley flat. Heat shimmerred off the cracked earth. Three riders crested the ridge from the north, dust rising slow behind them. They rode loose and shore. Below a lone cabin baked in the white light.
A man stood by the dry well, pouring the last of his water into the horse trough. He saved none for himself. The riders pulled up. The lead man grinned too wide. He reached down and dropped the shape from his saddle.
It was a woman. She hit the dirt hard, bound, bruised. She pushed up on her hands and looked straight at him, her eyes burned. He didn't reach for the rifle. He stood there with the empty bucket.
While the desert waited to see what would break first between them. The well was almost dry. Jack Marorrow knew it. Before he even dropped the bucket, he could hear it. That hollow knock against damp stone instead of the deep clean splash a well was supposed to give.
He cranked the rope up anyway, watched the bucket come back barely a third full. Muddy at the bottom, he poured it into the trough for the horse. Didn't take any for himself. That was the kind of man he'd become out here. The kind who fed the animal first and forgot about the rest.
The kind who woke up before dawn, not because he had somewhere to be, but because sleep had stopped being something he trusted. 3 years in the San Simon Valley did that to a man. Or maybe it wasn't the valley. Maybe it was what he'd carried into it. The sun was already brutal.
Not even 8:00 in the morning, and the light had that white hammering quality, like it was angry at the ground, like it wanted to flatten everything that dared grow. Jack wiped his face with his sleeve and stood there a moment, looking at nothing. Looking at everything. The cabin behind him was small. One room.
Log walls he'd cut himself from timber hauled out of the canyon. A roof that had been fighting gravity since last winter and losing a window with no glass. Just a square of empty sky where the breeze came through when it bothered to come at all. It wasn't much, but it was his. The only thing left that was, he'd had his name once, a reputation.
Jack Marorrow, best trail scout in the Sixth Cavalry, the man who could read Apache land like other men read a newspaper, who could find water in a place that looked like it hadn't seen rain since the earth was young. Who knew which canyon turned back on itself? Which ridge line had eyes on it? Which silence meant nothing and which silence meant you and maybe 40 seconds to decide what to do next. He'd been good at it.
That was the problem. He'd been too good. And someone had used that goodness for something he hadn't agreed to. And a boy named Danny had died because of it. Not a boy.
His brother, 24 years old, younger than the war, younger than the dust, younger than the sorrow that followed everything west of the Mississippi in those years. Dany had followed Jack into the cavalry because Jack was there. Because Dany thought where Jack went was where safe was, Jack never corrected that assumption. He should have. He turned away from the well, from the memory, from the old habit of picking at that wound like it might eventually heal if he just kept at it the right way.
It never did. It never would. You didn't heal from being wrong. You just got quieter about it. He was very quiet now.
He heard them before he saw them. Three horses coming from the north trail, which meant they'd come through Redstone, which meant they knew the area. Or someone in Redstone had told them where to find a man named Jack Morrow, living alone at the edge of the valley, like he was trying to disappear, but hadn't quite managed it yet. Jack didn't reach for his rifle. Not yet.
He set down the empty bucket and turned around and waited. They came over the low ridge in a line, kicking up a thin tail of red dust behind them. Three men riding the way men rode when they owned something loose in the saddle, unhurried, like the land beneath them was just background to their own importance. He recognized the one in front, Doyle Creed, 45 years old, and wearing every one of them on his face. Big man, thick through the chest and neck, a beard the color of dirty straw, eyes set too close together, which Jack had always thought gave him a look of permanent suspicion, like he was always about to accuse you of something he himself had done.
Creed had been cavalry once long time ago before the army figured out what he was willing to do for money and decided it didn't want him representing it anymore. Now he moved between things, between people, carried information one way and favors another, and never let you see the full shape of what he was building. Jack had worked a contract with him once 7 years ago before Dany. Before any of this, he hadn't liked him then either. Creed pulled up about 20 ft out.
The two men behind him, one lean and sunburnt, one heavy set with a hat pulled so low you could barely see his eyes, stayed back, waiting. Creed grinned. Big. Too big. The grin of a man who already knew how this was going to end.
Tomorrow. He clicked his tongue. Didn't think you'd still be out here. Still am. Yeah.
Creed looked around at the cabin. At the dry well, at the yellow. Nothing of the valley stretching out in every direction. I can see that there was a shape draped across the saddle of his horse. Jack had noticed it when they came over the ridge and had told himself it was a bed roll, a bundle.
Something tied wrong because the alternative was something he didn't want to look at yet. But it moved small, subtle, a shift of weight, a living thing adjusting itself in the way. Living things do when they've been still too long. You remember that contract we ran in ' 81? Creed said water rights survey out of Santa Cruz.
I owe you from that. Never got squared up. Jack said nothing. We're square now. Creed reached down, grabbed the shape by whatever he had hold of, and dropped it.
Not like baggage, not even like he was trying to be rough, just like it was something he was done carrying, and this was as good a place as any to set it down. A woman landed hard on the red ground. Her wrists were bound in front of her with a strip of rawhide so tight the skin around it had gone dark. Her hair was black and tangled with dust and dried blood at the temple. She was face down for a moment.
Then she pushed herself up onto her hands. The way you moved when something hurt, but you refused to let it stop you. She turned her head. Jack looked at her and she looked at Jack. Her eyes were very dark, black as obsidian.