Cover Page

Dedication

To Donnie Dale,
more than friend, brother.
And to Warren Knowles, Tom Randall, and Jim Todd,
who walked the walk.

PROLOGUE

February 10, 1918

John Power woke to the sound of bells and horses’ hooves. He rolled out of bed, not quite sure what was going on, just that it wasn't right.

“Lion,” his father said. “There's a damned lion after the horses.”

“Lion,” his brother said.

John had his feet on the floor as his brother Tom stumbled over him, rifle in hand, heading for the door.

Jeff, still in his union suit, rifle in his right hand, pulled the door open.

“Throw up your hands,” someone said.

“What the hell?”

John heard the shot then and saw his father take a step back before he lurched forward, through the door and outside.

More shots.

John went to the door where his father had stood only seconds before. There was more shooting, and he could hear bullets going past him. Tom ran behind him and went to the window at the far end of the cabin.

John saw someone move ten yards beyond the cabin door and took two shots, unsure whether he hit anyone or not.

Glass shattered and Tom yelled, “Sons of bitches, sons of bitches.” John turned and saw Tom hunched over against the wall, blood coming down his face. He made a move toward him, and Tom waved him back.

He saw the movement beyond the door, sighted and shot quickly, and saw the body drop like deadweight. Something blew up in front of him, and then his face, his left eye, went to fire. He was blind now, blood in both of his eyes.

John heard more glass breaking, and Tom fired out the window.

There was more fire coming at him from in front of the door, and John continued to shoot blindly until Tom came up behind him. “Got one at the window,” he said. Tom continued to fire out the door, though his face was also a mask of blood.

Then there was no more firing except theirs. Both Tom and John stepped back from the doorway and hunkered down on the floor, waiting for more fire to come.

When it didn't, they moved slowly out the door. The Old Man, Jeff, lay in front of it, face down.

John knelt down. He had wiped blood from his right eye, and he could see now that the Old Man was bad shot. The back of his union suit was thick with blood, and more pulsed out of the wound on his back. He turned the Old Man over. Jeff's eyes rolled in their sockets, and John could see that he was struggling to control his eyes and look at John. The hole in the upper part of his chest whistled, and blood oozed from that, too.

“How is he?” Tom said.

John only shook his head.

“Jesus,” Tom said. “You shot in the face?”

“I don't think so,” John said. “Something in my eye. Did I get shot in my eye?”

“I don't think so.” Tom cradled John's chin in his hand. “My God. You got a chunk of wood in that eye. Big as my finger.”

“Bastards,” the Old Man said, his voice only a little beyond a whisper. Tom Sisson walked up to where the brothers crouched over their father.

“Who the hell are they?” John asked.

“That right there is Kane Wootan,” Tom said. “I'd say you shot him all to death. Wish it had been me.”

The Old Man began to cough blood out of his mouth and nose.

“We got to get him to the doctor,” John said.

“No,” Tom said. “He don't need no doctor. Wouldn't live to see one. Get a blanket on him. Try to keep him warm. I'm going to check these others.”

Sisson handed John the blanket from around his shoulders.

“You all right, Sisson?” John asked. Sisson only nodded.

“Holy Christ,” Tom said. “We just killed us the Graham County Sheriff's Department.”

“Are there any more?”

“Not that I can see. Don't know, though. Don't go standing up, just in case. Where the hell were you, Sisson?”

“In there.” Sisson motioned toward the cabin with his head. He had a .30-06 in his hand.

“You shoot?”

Sisson nodded. He had the glassy look of a man who has seen what he feared most in the world.

“Hit anything?”

Sisson just stared down at the Old Man. “Dying,” he said.

“Guess that's right,” Tom said.

“What are we going to do?” John asked.

“Get out of here,” Tom said. “We got to get the hell out of here.”

“We can't leave the Old Man here.”

“Got to. We can't take him.”

The Old Man looked from Tom to John, back to Tom, and then to Sisson. He looked surprised. Sad and surprised. He nodded. “Go,” he said.

“We won't leave you,” John said.

The Old Man shook his head. “Go.” Then he raised his right hand slowly and pointed toward the mine. “Mine.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “That's the mine. Our mine.”

“He wants to go to the mine,” Sisson said. “He don't want to stay here. He wants to go to the mine.”

“That what you want, Old Man?” Tom asked.

Jeff nodded. “Bastards,” he said.

Tom wasn't sure who the Old Man referred to. “Sisson, you want to help me carry him to the mine?”

“I'll do it,” John said.

“You should go clean yourself up. You look worse than dead. We got to look at your wounds.”

“No,” John said. “I'll carry him.”

Tom started to argue, then said, “Get his feet. I'll get his arms.”

They carried him the couple hundred yards from the front of the cabin to the entrance to the mine. They laid him down just inside the entrance. “You still alive?” Tom asked.

The Old Man wheezed, and more blood came out of his mouth.

“I'm going to get some water for you. You want food?”

Jeff shook his head. “Water.”

“I'm going to get that.”

“What are we going to do about these ones?” Sisson asked.

“Nothing,” Tom said. “Leave them be.”

“We killed them.”

“That's right, and that's all we're going to have to do with them.”

“I better go find the horses,” Sisson said.

“Fast as they was going, they're miles gone now,” Tom said.

“Got to find them. Can't walk out of here.”

“Well, do it, then.”

Tom went back into the cabin and poured some water from his canteen into a tin cup for the Old Man. He looked around. There wasn't much there. Some clothes and their guns. A little food. They had been eating out of cans since Ola May died. Better take it all, he thought. He saw the leather folder for the mine papers and picked that up and put it in his pocket.

“I thought I told you to wash your face,” Tom said when John came back.

“I did.”

“You're bleeding like a pig.”

“I know. You too.”

“All three of them missed us. Still messed us up, though.”

“Bastards,” John said.

“Bastards.”

“Got horses,” Sisson said. “Two horses and a mule.”

“Not ours.”

Sisson nodded toward the dead lawmen. “Theirs.”

Tom shrugged. “Ours now.”

Tom took the water and papers to the Old Man inside the mine entrance. He held up Jeff's head so he could drink a little. Jeff coughed most of it up, mixed with blood. Tom put the papers under the blanket on the Old Man's chest. “We ain't going to need these. You neither, I guess. But it's your mine. Probably always was.”

He looked at the Old Man and thought the Old Man was going to cry. “They hurt you pretty bad, Old Man.”

Jeff just coughed some more. At just a whisper he said, “Go.”

“We are,” Tom said. “Don't want to leave you here, but we got to go. Got to get out of here.”

The Old Man raised his hand an inch or two and twitched it. Good-bye. Tom walked out of the mine and up the hill toward the cabin. The bodies of the lawmen were spread evenly around. He sighed. It had started to snow.

CHAPTER ONE

1918

Tom Power had glass splinters in his eye. His brother John had a large wood splinter in his eye, and a piece of his nose had been blown off. Both were blind on the left side. The wounds were open and bleeding, and their blood mixed on their clothing with the blood of the dead and dying they had left behind.

They kept riding, moving forward. Tom Sisson, the hired man, followed them at a distance as they descended the Galiuro Mountains of southern Arizona, heading toward Redington and the northwest base of the mountains. It was Sunday, late morning. They were the only ones left alive.

“I think we ought to get rid of Sisson,” Tom said. John said nothing. “I'd leave him, except he's the only one who can see worth a damn.” John plodded forward in silence. “He didn't do us no good back at camp, and I doubt he will do us any good today,” Tom added.

“He did his part,” John said.

“He's no man in a fight.”

“He held his own. He can see. We can't.”

“And that's the only reason I'm keeping him on. He can see.” Tom let his horse pick its way through the rock and scree of the draw they were descending. “I think he had something to do with Ola.”

“Do what with Ola?”

“Whatever he done,” Tom said. “Whatever. Somebody did something to her, and I think it was him.”

“I don't think he done nothing,” John said.

“Well, you wouldn't. Thinking ain't what you're good at. And somebody did something to that girl. I think he fucked her and killed her.”

“He didn't do neither. And he can see. We need him.”

“Then why ain't he out in front then?” Tom asked.

“No one told him to. Sisson don't do what he ain't told to do.”

“And I guess that's right. No one told him to shoot anyone, so he just stuffed his big ass under the bed and let us do all the work.”

“He was shooting. I know that.”

“The hell. Sisson. Get up here and take the lead. You got two good eyes.”

Sisson spurred his horse forward until he made his way up even with the brothers. “Where we headed?” he asked.

“Out of these mountains and away from Thems that got ropes and a need to see us hang. Someone's found those bodies by now. There might have been another that got away. We don't know.”

Sisson, a big man, old, in his forties, with big, drooping moustaches, nodded and spurred his horse forward and on down the draw. The rocks were getting bigger now, rocks that had rolled a long way down the draw in the spring thaw. Sisson was a former army scout. He knew this territory as well as any other white man did. He turned back to Tom and John. “Mexico?” he asked.

“Suppose,” Tom said. “Any way we go but south, there's going to be more of Thems, looking for us. And there ain't going to be nothing left for us up here. Mexico. Mexico's where we can start over.”

“Can't be posses yet. Probably no one's found out about it yet. It takes a long time to get to Safford, which is where they would go.”

“No,” Tom said. “Klondyke. There's a telephone in Klondyke. If Thems don't know yet, Thems is about to find out. And when Thems find out, Thems is going to be on us like hornets. It won't take Thems long to find out and to let everyone else know.”

“Telephone,” Sisson said. He shook his head. He didn't know much about telephones, except that he didn't like them. He had known the telegraph operators at Fort Grant, and he figured they were out of work now because of the telephones. Now he had to outrun the damned things. He wished they had never been invented.

The snow that had begun a couple of hours earlier was easing off now. They had been riding in it all the way down the mountains from Kielberg Canyon, a ragged upheaval of rhyolite, treacherous in summer and worse in winter, especially in snow. But whoever was going to report the fight to the police, and someone was going to report it, would go the other way—east and north to Klondyke and then to Safford. They wouldn't come this way, west, toward Tucson, and the law in Tucson wouldn't be as anxious to take them as the law in Safford. And the law in Tucson wouldn't try to hang them.

The horses moved slowly, picking their way down the canyon. The men wanted speed, but, blind, they needed the horses to go as they would. Even with Sisson, clear-sighted and in the lead.

The mountains, the Galiuros (locals pronounced the name “glurrows”), were rugged and steep. There was a road on the east side through Rattlesnake Canyon that the Powers and Sisson had cut through to bring in mining supplies and to take out the ore they had mined. They left the other way, though—the way without roads, the way that was safest for them. The Galiuros had been home to Tom, John, and their family for years. It was hard country, but they were hard men. They had expected to become rich up there in Kielberg Canyon. They had not. And now only the dead were left up there in the canyon. They were leaving the Galiuros, and they were not coming back.

“We should have stayed with the Old Man,” John complained. Often enough, he picked up on Tom's thoughts, though he was the dumb one and Tom was the smart one. “We shouldn't have left him there to die alone.”

“More dead than alive,” Tom said.

“It wasn't right.”

“You want to die, don't you?”

“Nah, I don't want to die.”

“You keep coming up with ideas that lead to the same place—you and me and Sisson here, dead. When Thems come up and find all of them dead, killed by Gentiles, Thems is going to want us dead. Going to get us dead, if they can. The only way that ain't going to happen is if we can put enough distance between us and Thems to keep ourselves alive. You want to go back and see to the Old Man and take your chances? You want to see if Thems is going to forgive in that holy way that Thems got? You think we got ourselves a chance?”

“No. The Old Man shouldn't have to die alone, though.”

“We all die alone. That's how it works,” Sisson said. Both Tom and John looked at him as though his horse had begun to speak to them.

“That's right,” Tom said. “We got one chance, and that's with me, and it's down to Mexico. That's our chance. Otherwise, we're dead, too. We keep riding. The Old Man is dead by now. That part of the story has been told.”

The fight had lasted only seconds, and now they were getting the hell out. The two brothers and Tom Sisson had headed west out of Kielberg Canyon and into Redfield Canyon down toward the San Pedro River Valley. They kept the mountains between them and any who would be following them.

“I don't think Sisson killed anyone. I think he had his big ass wedged under the bed,” Tom said, after Sisson moved ahead.

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn't,” John said.

“Those would be the choices,” Tom said. “‘Didn't’ being the correct one.”

“How many did you kill?”

“I don't know, one, I guess.”

“I got one. That's two. Who got the third?”

“I don't know.”

“Sisson. It's got to be Sisson. He's the only other one there.”

“The Old Man could have got one.”

“I don't think he ever got off a shot. They shot him as soon as he opened the door. So it's got to be Sisson who got the third one.”

“And then he crawled under the bed, did he?”

“I don't know,” John said.

“That's right, you don't. Don't burn a lot of food thinking. It ain't your strong point.”

They rode on in silence, on the lawmen's horses, following Sisson. It was still snowing, but less now. It had begun to snow just after the fight was over, and it had kept up. It was a light snow that covered the scrub brush more than the ground and that glistened in the horses’ manes. They were coming down in elevation quickly now, and soon the snow would be gone. That was good. Tracking them would get harder. Tracking them would be hard anyway. They knew the area well.

“Do you think the Old Man is dead?” John asked.

“Yeah. I think he's dead. He was bad shot.”

“That was something. That fight just starting up like that. We can tell them that we didn't start the fight. Thems just up and started shooting. Shot the Old Man still in his underwear. Thems had no call. No call.”

“You want to explain that to a jury? A jury in Safford? A jury of Mormons, most of Thems the dead's relations? You want to explain that to Thems? Even if Thems don't hang you before you even get your trap open?”

“I don't want to explain nothing.”

“Well, there you go, then,” Tom concluded.

“I wouldn't mind if you explained some things, though.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like what was that all about?”

“Maybe we can go back and ask the law,” Tom said. “No, wait. They're dead. No use in asking.”

“No. You. You explain,” John demanded. He had a rugged perseverance that saw him through things, including arguments with his younger brother.

“Do I look like law to you?”

“No. But I think you know what they was doing there this morning.”

“Must have been that draft business. They said they was coming for us.”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know what?” Tom asked.

“That draft stuff. That don't seem worth it.”

“No, it doesn't. But that's law for you. Thems got their own way of looking at things.”

“Kane Wootan was there. Why was he there?”

“Because he's a deputy sheriff?”

John snorted. They rode on a bit more. The snow had let up to just occasional flakes. “You know. You know that you know. You know a lot more about this than you're saying.”

“I know a lot about a lot of stuff that I ain't saying. And I ain't going to say it, so leave it be.”

“Where are we going?” John asked.

Tom sighed. The world would be a better place if you didn't have to spend so much of your life explaining it to the dumb ones who figured they needed to know things instead of just following along in silence. “Mexico.”

“I know, Mexico. Where in Mexico?”

“We ain't even out of the canyon yet. Can't go nowhere until we're out of this canyon. Right now it's out of the canyon or be killed. Let's do this first.”

“It's a long way to Mexico.”

“It's a long way to anywhere with you running your yap all the way. When we get down out of the canyon, we're going to need better horses. I think I can do that at Carlink ranch. Then just down the river's a big mesquite bosque where we can get some rest.”

“Posse ain't going to rest.”

“That's because there's a bunch of them. There's only the three of us. We rest. When we ain't resting, we outthink them. You needn't be a part of that.”

They came out of the canyon in the afternoon. The trail had become steadily more treacherous as they descended toward the floor of the San Pedro River Valley. Stones from boulder size to small enough to fit a man's hand littered the opening of the canyon. Worse were tons of scree that had come down the streambed carried by the spring thaw. The horses and one mule picked their way delicately through the obstacles, skittering now and then as a stone or deposit of scree gave way under their hooves.

Sisson's horse hit a pile of scree resting against a dead and rotting sycamore branch and lost its footing on the right side, going down heavily and sending Sisson hard into the rocks. The horse went down near his feet and stayed there for a moment, then, in a panic, struggled and righted itself, coming up bloody on the right side. Sisson lay still on the rocks, which were now spattered with blood.

“Sisson. Sisson. You all right, Sisson?”

Sisson groaned, then rolled from his side to his back. He came partly upright, braced on his left arm, his right arm held to his side. He sighed. “I don't know.” Then, “I'm all right. I guess. I'm all right. How's the horse?”

The bay mare was bleeding from a cut on the shoulder and having a hard time putting her weight on the right foreleg, more trouble than one would expect from a cut to the shoulder. Tom Power touched the wound with his finger, and the mare snorted and skittered. “I don't know.” He bent down and ran his hands up and down the mare's leg, stopping every now and again to put some pressure on the bone. “I don't think anything's broke. Something wrong up at the shoulder, though. May have knocked it out. Just have to see if she can walk and take weight. What about your arm?”

“It ain't broke. It's the elbow. My hand's gone numb. That shouldn't be too bad.” He came over to his horse, took the reins from Power, and started walking ahead. The horse followed, limping but walking. “She'll get better. Or worse,” he said. “We'll see.”

They headed due west, then, toward the bosque, which would give them cover until nightfall. If necessary, they could hold off a good-sized posse from the cover of mesquite. Tom took the lead, with John bringing up the rear. Sisson, leading his horse, walked in the middle. The horse seemed neither better nor worse.

“I'm going to leave you two in the bosque while I take the horses over to Carlink. By the time I get back, it should be dark enough we can head out again. You all get rested up. It's going to be a long pull. We'll take the riverbed as long as we're able. Once we're out of there and onto the flat of the valley, we're going to need to beat it across fast as we can. We should be able to get into the Dragoons before they can get up any kind of posse.” The Dragoon Mountains, rugged and rocky, would provide good cover.

“I don't think they'll want this horse,” Sisson said.

“That ain't your problem. I'll take care of it. How's the arm?”

“No better. No worse.”

“That's half bad, which is better than all bad, I guess.”

“Usually. Not always.”

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