Chapter 2

After a minute, Concho slithered away from the edge. Despite the heat of rocks beneath him, despite the lure of a horse and the naked owner, he was sobered by the realization that he had once again narrowly escaped death. His blade had been swifter than the crooked trading post owner’s gun hand. Before the pistol could be cocked, a stabbing point passed through the man’s wrist. Concho had snatched the old Colt Dragoon from nerveless fingers. Now, Yusen had spared him a second time. The vertical drop was more than enough to kill. At least forty feet below, a steep jumble of crumbling rock, mesquite and cacti choked the crevasse. A dense grove of slender pines, aspen, willows, scrubby desert oak and surprisingly large cottonwoods gave a dark green tint to the spring. From what he could see, surging water had carved a channel through fallen limestone, eroding the tank from bedrock. Pouring from the outflow lip, small rapids were making echoing, crashing chuckles. The sight was a promise of cool refreshment. Next to water, he coveted the magnificent horse. The girl was only of passing interest.

At a slight bend, the cleft narrowed to forty or fifty paces. The bottom was verdant for nearly a half mile. Cliffs on both sides leaned in, a precarious overhang sheltering the chasm. After several hundred feet, the substantial outflow creek diminished to a slow, shallow stream. That eventually shrank to a quarter mile of meandering brook. Finally, the water vanished, sucked into fractured bedrock, parched earth and drift sand.

Concho turned from the scene. He was desperate, determined to escape reservation police and the injustice of white law. His focus settled on the horse. Perhaps a hundred yards downstream of the waterfall, the animal was cropping lush green grass in the damp basin of a narrow but lush meadow. A groomed black tail switching flies, the tall gelding looked sleepy. He was hobbled, long reins knotted and looped over the cantle. His Mexican saddle was fancy, decorated with silver. Still not quite believing the sight, Concho made out a rifle stock protruding from the scabbard.

“Very foolish,” he said, grinning and licking dry, cracking lips. The rifle would soon be his. “This white girl is worse than careless.”

More carefully, Concho studied The eastern rim. Banded rock loomed over the spring. Eyes following a snarled ribbon of creosote bush and mesquite, desiccated bunch grass and cacti, he marked several large fractures. A few almost reached to the canyon bottom.

The eastern wall angled away for another half mile, twisting southeast, widening, eventually wrapping around another shoulder of the San Andreas foothills. Concho guessed that the girl had ridden in from that end. He squinted, Checking the area immediately south of him, taking in the outline of one ragged fissure perpendicular to the canyon. The wide split cut back eastward, into the dunes. Surrounded by more growth, that cleft opened no more than fifty yards beyond the grazing horse. He looked long and hard, guessing the split opened some fifteen or twenty feet above brush and cacti. The crevasse offered a potential route down to the canyon bottom.