Chapter 3 - The Silver Brand on Her Spine
The blue light died as the sun edged over the rimrocks. Dust hung in the cabin’s diagonal shafts of morning light like sifted meal. Ethan had not slept more than forty minutes. His neck was stiff from the fleece against the bare planks, and the brass shells in his gun belt had pressed deep, purple rings into his hip bone.
Across the room, the rope-strung bed was empty.
Ethan’s hand cleared the blanket and found the Colt in one motion. The cylinder clicked as he rolled onto his knees. The door hung half an inch open on its leather hinges, the leather strap frayed where the wind worked it against the frame.
He rose without stomping his heels down, stocking-footed, cold seeping through his thick wool socks. Outside, the valley was copper-plated under an empty autumn sky. The herd stood bunched against the split-rail enclosure, their breath rising in gray plumes that broke apart before reaching the cedar tops.
Nahimana was kneeling by the butchering bench behind the smokehouse.
She had drawn water from the creek in the heavy tin bucket Ethan had mended with solder back in May. Her sleeves were rolled to the shoulder, pinned with cactus needles. In the hard morning glare, the scar Ethan had seen by lamplight looked worse—not mystical, but violent. The jagged, blackened lines weren't tribal ink; they were the consequence of an iron tool heated past red until the scale fell off it, applied by someone whose hand was steady and whose intent was merciless.
She didn't turn around, though Ethan made no effort to muffle his tread on the dry gravel.
"You move like a bull in dry brush," she said. Her voice had none of the midnight whisper left in it; it sounded like iron struck against river shale.
"Ranchers don't hunt by crawling," Ethan said, stopping four paces behind her. He noticed the bucket water had a sheen on top—not grease, but a pale, milky oil. "What’s that you’re washing with?"
She plunged her arms into the water up to the elbows. "Jimson root. Bitter sage. If I don't draw out the heat, the skin rots. It has rotted every year since the wagons fell."
Ethan leaned against the peeled post of the smokehouse. "The Mexican silver wagons didn't carry branding irons, Nahimana. I know the trade routes down from Hermosillo. They carry salt, tallow, and silver ingots stamped with the eagle or the crown. That mark on your shoulder was made with an iron template. I’ve seen hide thieves use the same style to alter steer brands."
Her back went rigid. For the first time, Ethan saw the tendons in her neck strain like wet hemp.
"You think my people did this to me?" she asked, her knuckles whitening beneath the surface of the pale water.
"Your people didn't have steel stamps like that," Ethan said. "A blacksmith in Sonora made that head. Or a smith in Tucson. Look at the edges—the radius on the turns is too square. That's cold-rolled trade iron, ground down on an emery wheel."
Nahimana turned her head slowly over her shoulder. Her amber eyes took in the rancher: his dirty cotton shirt, the grease on his thumb, the cool gray appraisal in his gaze that seemed completely indifferent to the ghost stories she had tried to poison him with the night before.
"The three warriors who died," she said, watching him closely. "You don't think a spirit killed them?"
"I think your old man fed them something slow, or someone followed them out into the mesquite with a gutting hook," Ethan said, uncocking his revolver and sliding it back into the holster. "Men are cheap out here. Ghost stories are just the grease people use to slide their murders through without the elders asking questions. Your father wanted you out of that camp because somebody with a brand like that is looking for you. And whoever they are, Chaska is scared of them."
May you like
Nahimana stood up. Water ran off her brown wrists, dripping from her fingers into the red dirt. For three seconds, she looked small against the huge, indifferent wall of the Rincon Mountains behind them.
"Then you should have let them shoot you in the canyon, white man," she said. "Because the men who hold the twin to this iron aren't coming with spears. They have thirty Henry rifles, two wagons of powder, and they own every badge between here and the Gila River."
