Chapter 1

The slender man in the big sombrero reined-in his horse where he would be hidden among the scrubby trees. The dust-crusted, strawberry-roan mare was blowing hard. He had stopped her several dozen yards below the crest of a high ridge, where the piñon and desert cedar grew thickest. Even that was not saying much, here, in the isolated, arid reaches of southeastern Arenoso, some hundred miles west of its border with New Mexico, and about twice that north of the border with old Mexico.

The man—Malik was his name—pulled off the battered, once-white sombrero and let it hang down his back, suspended by the chin cord across his neck. He gave his short, near-black hair a vigorous scratching. Where the sombrero had covered his forehead, there was a band of tan, creamy skin, heritage from a Castilian mother. The rest of his somewhat broad face was, at the moment, the gray-brown color of the local dust, even into the deep pockets that held his dark brown eyes. His nose and his lips verged on thin, reflecting the influence of his father’s Northern European forebears. While distinctive, his features were neither handsome nor ugly; at best, they simply suited him.

With his hands on the horn and cantle, he pushed himself up and took a quick look down the slope on his back trail, the distances shimmering in the afternoon heat on this second day of June, eighteen eighty-five. Something moved between the cactus trunks, maybe a half mile back. He reached for the carbine but paused when a pronghorn antelope doe and two fawns wandered into full view. He slumped back down onto the saddle and patted the roan’s sweaty neck.

He stood in the stirrups, swung his right leg over the cantle, and lowered himself to the stony ground. The horse groaned deep in her chest and stood, head drooping, breathing fast and heavy. Malik opened the saddle bag and pulled the spy glass from where it was wrapped in a clean shirt. Then he went over to a piñon, rested his forearms on a branch, and held the narrow end of the telescoping tube to his eye. Adjusting the length to focus, he checked his trail all the way back down to the head of the canyon where he had entered the valley, some six miles to the southeast and a maybe a thousand feet lower in elevation.

After several minutes scanning the desert scene, he walked back to the horse, lifted the sombrero’s chin cord over his head, and used it to hang the wide-brimmed hat from the saddle horn. He then turned around and walked up toward the nearby ridge top, marked by one of a series of exposed lines of dark rock that were the spinal columns of the region’s topography. As he travelled east to west, he was, in fact, on the second of four roughly parallel ridges, which extended on a north-south axis, each one slightly higher than that preceding, but each showing a similar rocky ridge line at its crest. The first ridge was cut by a deep canyon; that canyon had been his point of entry into the valley behind him.

Approaching the crest, he bent his spare, not-quite-six-foot frame, and then finished on hands and knees for the last few yards. He shoved the army-style, flapped, cross-draw holster back on his left hip, then stretched out on his belly. He poked his head over the dark rocks, and took in the scene to the west, one very much like that behind him.

He surveyed a long, downward gradient of about five miles, dropping almost a thousand feet, and facing a similar grade rising to the next ridge. The extensive slopes were separated at the bottom by a dry, sandy streambed. In sum, it was a narrow, arid valley, a bit too wide to be deemed a canyon. The ground was surfaced with a hard, gritty loam, a mix of small- and large-grained sand, rocks, and gravel. Scattered about the upper slopes were outcrops of layered, dark, upthrusts and rubble, the random formations varying from a height and breadth that would dwarf a large barn down to the barely remarkable.

For all the apparent aridity, plant life was surprisingly abundant. The slopes seemed almost verdant in drought-tolerant growth: sage, rabbit brush, assorted spindly shrubs, patches of scrubby grass, several types of cactus—both tall and ground-hugging—and the occasional yucca, maguey, and paloverde tree, with stands of the low-growing piñon and bushy desert cedar trees appearing on the upper reaches. Further west, beyond the next ridge, there was another, notably higher ridge, with some Douglas fir, spruce, and Ponderosa pine near the top and with patches of aspen and strands of cottonwood lower down. Well beyond that fourth ridge, Malik could see the snow-laden peaks of a southern spur of the Rocky Mountains.

His eyes moved slowly and deliberately across the expanse as he rested against the warm ground.

After a few minutes, he edged back, away from the ridge line, reversing the sequence, keeping low before fully rising. He walked down through the trees to the roan. The horse, in the meager shade from a piñon, was breathing easier. Malik stood in front of her and, scratching her head behind her ears, blew gently toward the roan’s nostrils. She shook her head and snorted.

With a last glance back down the slope, he took the reins in hand and, keeping to the piñons, started toward the ridge, the mare following with plodding steps.

Once over the top, he led the horse deeper among the short, spindly evergreens and, for the next twenty minutes, walked her among the trees as her breathing slowed further.

Then, at a likely spot, he stopped and dropped the reins to the ground, tugging gently downward in the process, the signal for her to stand in place. He went to the packs and untied the big, flat-sided canteen. He removed the sombrero from where it hung from the saddle, turned the tightly woven, varnished “straw” hat over, and emptied half the canteen’s contents into its inverted crown. He moved in front of the horse and held the upturned hat under her nose. The roan finished the water in a few seconds. Malik patted the horse’s shoulder and hung the sombrero from a piñon branch.

Returning to the packs, he took up the telescope once more and he moved back to the ridge. Resting his arms on the rocks, he slowly played the glass over the distance he had recently traversed. For several minutes, he watched alternately with and without the scope. Finally, he scooted back down and returned to the horse.

The roan mare was cropping some of the sparse grass that grew in the sandy soil around the piñon. Malik unlimbered a smaller canteen from the packs and poured about half into the hat, then topped that off from the big canteen. He offered it to the horse and it was soon gone.

Rubbing her neck, he spoke quietly, “That’s it for tonight, girl. I’ll save you a drink for the morning, then we’ll need to find some water.” He lifted the smaller canteen to his own lips and took several short sips of the warm water, then he hung both canteens from a piñon. Turning back to the mare, he loosened the leather strings holding the saddle packs, lifted them off, and set them at the base of the same tree. He slid the forty-four-forty Winchester Seventy Three carbine from its scabbard and leaned it against the tree. From a scabbard on the opposite side, he drew a Scott messenger gun and propped it next to the rifle. The ten-gauge gun featured a slightly shortened shoulder stock and double barrels cut down to fourteen inches. Back at the roan, he loosened the cinches and pulled the saddle and blanket from the mare. He upended the saddle by the tree, exposing its damp underside, and hung the blanket over a branch. Snagging a length of soft rope from the pack, he readied a twenty foot lead that he tied to a tree, looping the other end over the roan’s neck. He removed her bridle and hung it from another tree branch. He followed that by checking her hooves, using a dull blade on a pocket knife to pry pockets of packed dirt and pebbles from under the edges of the shoes.

He went back to the packs, where he pulled out a nose bag fashioned from some old dungarees. Inside it was a sack of oats. He poured a ration of oats into the nose bag and tied it on the roan, giving her neck another couple pats.

Malik went back, retied the top of the oat sack, and dropped it into a saddle pack. Then he retrieved a stiff-bristled brush and gave the roan a slow going-over while she finished the oats. She repaid him by dropping a small pile of horse apples. “Same to you,” he whispered toward her ear as he untied the feed bag.

He took a long pull from the small canteen, then grabbed his bedroll and the spyglass and once more crept up on the ridge. He spread the oilcloth ground sheet and the three blankets, then stretched out on them on his stomach and again began looking back toward the southeast. A quarter hour later, he rolled onto his back, adjusting the holstered revolver to a more comfortable and reachable position on the front of his left hip. The revolver in the holster was a single-action Colt Army chambered for the same forty-four forty cartridge that fit his carbine. After a minute looking up at the pale blue expanse of cloudless sky, he closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.