Chapter 1

The stagecoach was late, and Tina had been watching the empty trail for so long that the landscape itself seemed to have become a part of her consciousness. The road ran between two enormous walls of weathered red sandstone, winding through the narrow canyon before emerging into a wide basin where the last light of evening lay upon the desert like a sheet of dull copper. The heat of the day was beginning to withdraw from the earth, but the rocks still breathed warmth, and the air carried the dry smell of dust, sagebrush, and sun-baked stone. Somewhere far above, a hawk circled in the pale sky, its wings motionless as it watched the country below, while the only sound near Tina was the occasional restless stamping of her horse. She had been sitting motionless against the rocks for nearly an hour, her rifle across her knees, her eyes fixed upon the road, and she had reached that peculiar state of patience in which a person no longer feels that she is waiting for something because waiting itself has become the whole of existence.

George, on the other hand, had never possessed much patience. He was crouched beside her with his back against the rock, chewing a strip of dried beef and occasionally spitting a piece of gristle into the dust, his black hat pushed back from his forehead and his revolver resting comfortably against his thigh. He had complained about the heat, the dust, the lateness of the stage, the quality of the beef, and the fact that Tina had made him climb halfway up the canyon before sunrise to find a suitable position, and she had answered every complaint with silence until he finally laughed and shook his head. “You know,” he said, looking down at the empty road, “a man could almost think you don’t enjoy my company.” Tina did not look at him, but the corner of her mouth moved slightly, because despite everything she knew that George’s foolish talking was one of the things that made the dangerous life they had chosen bearable.

They had been together for almost two years, and in those two years they had learned one another’s habits more completely than either had ever learned those of anyone else. George acted before thinking and talked when nervous, while Tina watched, calculated, and kept her thoughts hidden until she was certain what she intended to do. He could make her laugh when she had forgotten how, and she could keep him alive when his courage carried him farther than his good sense. They had slept beneath the same cold stars, shared stolen food beside dying campfires, crossed rivers in winter, outrun posses and once spent three miserable days hiding in an abandoned mine while six armed men searched the hills above them. There had been arguments, curses, bruises, hunger, and fear, but there had also been a strange loyalty between them, something neither of them had ever bothered to name because people who lived as they did did not spend much time naming the things they depended upon. For Tina, George had become as familiar as the revolver at her hip or the old scar across her left hand, something she simply assumed would always be there.

Then the sound came.

At first it was almost too faint to distinguish from the wind, a distant vibration beneath the hard earth, but Tina felt it through the soles of her boots before she heard it clearly. She lifted her head, and George stopped chewing at once as the rhythm of approaching hooves gradually emerged from the silence, followed by the faint grinding of wheels against the trail. A moment later a thin cloud of dust appeared around the bend, and behind it came the stagecoach, rocking heavily from side to side as four tired horses pulled it toward the canyon. The driver sat high on the box, his shoulders bent slightly against the wind, while the dark windows of the coach gave no indication of the people hidden inside. Tina watched it approach with the cold concentration she always felt before danger, and as the coach reached the narrowest part of the road she quietly raised her rifle and said, “Now.”