Chapter 1 - Nobody Dies Alone
The cry was so faint Eli Crane nearly mistook it for wind dragging through the dry grass.
He stopped beside the creek bed and listened.
There.
A woman.
Not shouting.
Barely breathing loudly enough to be heard.
Eli left his bay horse beneath a mesquite tree and climbed the low ridge with his rifle in one hand. After twenty years of living beneath Arizona skies, he had learned that silence usually meant one of two things.
Nothing was there.
Or something dangerous was waiting.
He reached the crest and froze.
Two women lay in the wash below.
The younger was motionless in the dirt. Her dark hair covered half her bruised face, and one lower leg rested at an angle no healthy leg should have made.
The older woman knelt beside her.
Blood had soaked the left shoulder of her buckskin clothing.
Yet she still held a knife.
The moment she saw Eli, the blade came up.
“Stay back.”
Her voice shook from exhaustion, not fear.
Eli lowered his rifle.
The woman’s eyes followed the weapon.
Then him.
Then the ridge behind him.
Hoofbeats rolled faintly across the desert.
Someone was coming.
Eli dropped his rifle into the dirt.
The woman blinked.
He lifted both hands and spoke slowly in the little Apache he remembered from his years scouting.
“I will help you.”
Her expression hardened.
“Why?”
Eli looked at the unconscious younger woman.
Then at the blood sliding down the older sister’s arm.
“Because nobody dies alone in the dirt if I can stop it.”
For several seconds, neither moved.
The hoofbeats grew louder.
Finally the knife lowered a few inches.
“My sister,” the woman said.
Eli descended.
Up close, the injuries looked worse.
The older woman had been shot cleanly through the upper shoulder. The bullet appeared to have exited, but blood loss and dehydration had left her trembling.
The younger woman’s lower leg was broken.
Eli crouched.
“What are your names?”
The wounded woman hesitated.
“Tala.”
She touched the unconscious woman.
“Mira.”
Eli nodded toward himself.
“Eli.”
A rider appeared on the distant ridge.
Then another.
Tala turned.
Her face changed.
“They found us.”
A rifle cracked.
Dust kicked up beside Eli’s boot.
He grabbed Mira beneath the shoulders and knees.
“Move.”
Tala staggered after him.
A second bullet struck a dead cottonwood trunk.
His horse reared as Eli reached it.
He lifted Mira across the saddle.
Tala grabbed the horn with her good hand.
Another rider came down the slope.
Tala suddenly stopped.
Her knife flashed from her hand.
It buried itself in the leather hanging from the rider’s saddle.
The startled horse reared violently.
The rider fought for balance.
Eli seized the moment.
He mounted behind Mira, pulled Tala up, and drove his horse toward the western hills.
They reached his ranch after dark.
Mira woke screaming when Eli straightened the broken leg enough to place wooden splints around it.
Tala nearly stabbed him with a kitchen knife.
“If I leave it like this,” Eli said, staring directly at her, “she may never walk right.”
Tala stood beside the bed breathing hard.
Then slowly lowered the weapon.
When Mira finally stopped crying, Eli turned to Tala.
He washed the bullet wound and wrapped fresh cloth around her shoulder.
She never made a sound.
Only after midnight did Eli notice something folded beneath her belt.
A paper.
Tala saw him looking.
She removed it.
“Why were they hunting you?”
Instead of answering, she handed it over.
Eli unfolded the sheet.
Two crude drawings stared back.
Tala.
Mira.
Underneath, in heavy black type:
CAPTURE ALIVE.
$5,000 REWARD.
Eli looked up.
“Five thousand?”
Tala’s eyes stayed on the dark window.
“They need something we know.”
Glass exploded inward.
Eli threw himself across Tala as a bullet tore through the cabin.
“CRANE!”
A voice outside.
Eli went still.
The riders knew him.
“Send the sisters out!” the man shouted. “You walk away!”
Eli reached for his rifle.
“You picked the wrong house.”
He fired through the broken window.
A rider dropped from his saddle.
Tala grabbed Eli’s arm.
“Stop.”
She flipped the bounty paper over.
An old photograph had been attached to the back.
Three people stood beneath a cottonwood tree.
Tala and Mira’s father.
A white man Eli did not recognize.
And a woman wearing a pale dress.
Eli forgot the gunfire outside.
His fingers tightened around the photograph.
“That’s Sarah.”
His dead wife.
Tala met his eyes.
“That is why they knew where to find you.”
Outside, several rifles cocked at once.
Then another voice shouted from the darkness.
“Eli Crane, you have sixty seconds!”
Eli stared at Sarah’s face in the photograph.
She had been dead four years.
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And suddenly he understood something worse than being surrounded.
The strangers outside knew more about his marriage than he did.
