Hale closed his eyes. He had written letters like that once. He had received fewer replies than he sent.
A knock came. Briggs entered with a tin cup of coffee and the face of a man delivering bad weather.
"Lieutenant's talking," Briggs said. "Wants a deal. Says there's a trader named Hollis waiting in Aspen Canyon with a dozen riders. Says if we don't show with the wagons, Hollis will come looking anyway—maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Kane wants immunity for the tip."
Hale drank the coffee. It tasted of chicory and resolve. "He gets a fair trial and a chance to speak. He does not get to trade other men's lives for his neck." He stood. "Rouse the ready squad. Quietly. We will not wait for Hollis to invent his own order."
Grey Feather was already at the gate when Hale arrived, as if he had heard the name Aspen Canyon on the wind. Rain Song and the youth—called Little Branch—waited with fresh ponies. Hale assembled eighteen men, leaving the rest to hold the walls under Briggs's second. He left Kane locked and guarded. He took the forged order with him, folded beside Greaves's letter, twin documents of what ambition could write and what it could erase.
They rode north under a moon thin as a blade.
Aspen Canyon was a dark throat in the hills, its walls pale where the moonlight found them. Hollis's campfire was a red eye half a mile in—careless, or confident. Hale dismounted the column in a wash and went forward on foot with Grey Feather, Ruiz, and four riflemen. The plan was simple: surround, call out, take prisoners if they dropped steel, end it if they did not.
Hollis had twelve men, as Kane had said. They sat among crates stamped with Fort Red Clay's own quartermaster mark—crates Kane must have diverted days earlier under the guise of "forward caching." Hale felt a flare of anger so clean it almost steadied him.
In the dark minutes before they closed on the fire, Hale's mind did what it always did under pressure: it slowed the world into parts.
He thought of Philadelphia winters and his father's shears. He thought of a charge at Petersburg where the smoke made every man the same color until the morning counted the differences again. He thought of the first time a white private had refused his order, and the second time, and the tenth, and the long discipline of answering refusal with competence so undeniable that refusal became expensive. He thought of Kane's neat reports and wondered at what point ambition had tipped into predation—whether there had been a single hour, or only a slope.
Ruiz crouched beside him. "Captain. If they scatter into the side cuts, we could spend a day chasing shadows."