His ranch stood in a narrow valley west of a trading settlement called Red Wash. In the wet season, a stream crossed the lower pasture, and cattle could drink beneath cottonwoods that had survived longer than anyone remembered. That year, the stream had become a chain of muddy pools. The well still worked, but its water rose slowly, one bucket at a time. Every day Corvin measured how much his horses could have and how much he could afford to give the cattle before they were sold. The numbers never came out in his favor.
At thirty-seven, Corvin had rough hands, sunburned skin, and a copper-brown beard. He had come west with a borrowed wagon, a horse he could barely afford, and his father's belief that the land rewarded the man willing to stay. The land had taken his savings in a dry winter, his stable roof in a windstorm, and his last good hay crop two years earlier.
He had stayed out of stubbornness and because he no longer knew where else to go.
Jonah Price, who had worked cattle before Corvin was born, said the ranch survived on two things: repairs made a week too late and Corvin's refusal to admit defeat. Their third hand had left for a railroad job in June. Jonah's knees were failing him. The bank in Red Wash had sent a letter giving Corvin until the next month to make a payment, and Harlan Voss, the wealthiest cattleman in the valley, had already offered to buy the property for less than the cost of its fences.
Corvin had burned that offer in the kitchen stove.
The afternoon before the riders came, he had ridden into the hills to check a spring that fed the northern wash. He carried two small canteens, a coil of rope, and the tin cup that had belonged to his father. He wanted to know why the upper watercourse had suddenly stopped. When he reached it, he found a dry channel filled with stones that should have been dark and wet. A thin trail of fresh hoofprints led toward a rocky cut farther north, but the heat made following them seem like a poor use of daylight.
He was turning home when he heard a horse crying from somewhere below the trail.
Then came the unmistakable sound of a human voice, faint and hoarse, calling once before falling silent. Corvin dismounted and followed the sound around a ledge. At the bottom of a narrow ravine lay a fallen gray horse and a man half-trapped beneath the edge of its saddle. The horse was dead. The man was alive, but just barely.
He looked to be in his early thirties. His dark hair was tangled with dust, his shirt had been torn at the shoulder, and one leg lay at a painful angle against a stone. His skin was hot and dry to the touch. Corvin saw that he was Apache, and for a second the warnings he had heard in town came back with all the force of the midday heat.