Chapter 5 - A Town Built on Buried Sins
Ethan didn't hide the cattle. Doing so would look like an admission of guilt to any rider who knew the valley. Instead, he saddled the bay gelding, tied Nahimana’s sorrel mare to the tail rope, and forced her into a clean calico shirt and an old wool coat he had salvaged from a dead teamster back in seventy-nine.
"Keep your hat pulled over your ears," he told her, tightening the cinch until the bay grunted. "Your eyes will give you away faster than your skin. White men in town are stupid about hair—they think every Indian woman looks like an old scrub squaw with grease in her braids. But your eyes are the color of a dead cougar’s. Don't look Vogel in the face."
"Luke Vogel does not fear dead cougars," she said from beneath the brim of the felt hat. "He buys them for five dollars and nails their skins to his barn door."
They hit the outskirts of Ocotillo Flats by sundown. The town was four hundred yards of mud, horse dung, and unpainted pine board slapped against the dry wash. A sawmill groaned on the southern bank, spewing yellow cedar sawdust that smelled like vinegar when it met the ditch water.
The general store sat high on cedar pilings to keep the spring flash floods out of the sugar barrels. On the porch, three men in canvas coats sat on lard tubs, whittling splinters from a crate of ax handles.
Ethan hitched both horses to the middle rail. His spur rowels clicked a steady rhythm as he climbed the four steps. He kept his right hand loose at his side, brushing the hem of his coat back behind the revolver's hammer.
Luke Vogel stood behind a walnut counter polished smooth by thirty years of silver dollars and greasy elbows. He was forty-five, thick-necked, with small, gray eyes that looked as though they had been drilled into his pink skull with a half-inch auger. A heavy gold watch chain looped across his corduroy vest, ending in an Apache tear stone set in lead.
"Miller," Vogel said, laying a bone-handled razor flat on a piece of strop leather. "Heard you were stuck in the Chiricahua country. Thought maybe the red boys had used your ribs for firewood."
"Weather held me up," Ethan said, leaning his hip against the counter, three feet clear of the scale. "Lost three calves to the scrub rot. Need forty pounds of flour, two tins of lard, and a box of forty-four-forty."
Vogel didn't move toward the shelves. His eyes drifted over Ethan's left shoulder, through the fly-specked window glass, toward the hitching rail where Nahimana sat motionless on the sorrel mare.
"Brought company," the storekeeper said. His voice was too soft for a man with shoulders that wide.
"Hired a hand from the Papago village down by the mission," Ethan replied without turning. "Cheap labor. Knows how to dig posts through the caliche."
Vogel picked up the razor, wiped the blade against the thigh of his trousers, and folded it into its horn handle with a dry snap. "Papago don't ride sorrels with high-cantle Mexican saddles, Ethan. That saddle came off an Agency mule two years back. Had the brass ring on the skirts."
"Got it off an iron hunter in Benson for eight bits," Ethan said. His voice stayed level, cold as well water. "You selling flour today, Luke, or are you just admiring the leather?"
Vogel reached under the counter. Ethan’s thumb hooked over the hammer of his Colt before the wood creaked.
The storekeeper pulled out a brown bottle and two heavy, thick-bottomed glasses. He didn't pour. He set them between them like boundary stones.
"Old Chaska died yesterday morning, Ethan," Vogel whispered, leaning forward until the stink of his pipe smoke filled the space between their hats. "Found him pinned to his own fire pit with an oak stake through his throat. His wickiup was burned clean. And somebody cut the ears off every horse in his corral."
Ethan’s jaw locked, but he didn't give Vogel the satisfaction of a blink. "Apaches have their own fights."
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"That wasn't Apaches," Vogel said, his voice dropping until the sawmill outside seemed louder than his words. "That was the Tucson Land and Cattle Company. They had a paper from the territorial governor saying that entire valley belongs to the railroad. Chaska held the Mexican grant parchment. Now the paper is gone. And they say the old man gave the duplicate to his girl before he died."
Vogel’s pig-like eyes slid back to the window. "They’re offering five hundred dollars in gold coin for her, Ethan. Dead or alive. But they want her back skin intact. They say she's got a map burned into her shoulder that shows where the boundary markers were set before the Gadsden Purchase."
