Epilogue: The Blue Shawl
Three weeks later.
The autumn had come to the high country of Black Timber. The aspen trees along the ridges had turned from green to a brilliant, incandescent gold that looked like a fire that did not burn. The air was crisp, smelling of pine needles, cedar smoke, and the first light frost of October.
In the yard where the cabin had stood, a new foundation of dressed river granite was already rising.
Sixteen men—neighbors from the small ranches up on Turkey Creek, men who had finally found the courage to spit on Vain’s memory once the federal indictment was published in the Prescott papers—were working with broadaxes and adzes, squaring thirty-foot logs of yellow pine.
At the edge of the cottonwood grove, two horses stood saddled.
One was Colton’s big black gelding. The other was a sleek, blood-bay Morgan mare, fitted with a high-pommeled stock saddle, two full canteens, and a pair of heavy saddlebags packed with wool blankets, dried beef, and three hundred dollars in gold coin.
Colton stood beside the mare, holding the reins in his large, scarred hand.
He wore a clean wool shirt and his old black hat. His face was weathered, but the deep, hollow lines of grief that had carved his cheeks for five years had softened into something resembling peace.
Nia walked out of the temporary wall-tent pitched beside the spring-house.
She was dressed for the trail. She wore high-topped boots of soft, oiled leather, a heavy wool coat of dark green, and around her waist was buckled the Sheffield knife in its rawhide sheath. Her dark hair was braided neatly, falling across her shoulders, and her chin was lifted toward the southern gap in the mountains.
She walked to the mare and stopped.
Colton held out the reins.
“The road through the pass is clear,” he said quietly. “The federal agent at San Carlos has the new registry. Your people’s band is down on the salt fork of the Gila. The marshal says no one will cross your paper again.”
Nia looked at the leather reins in his hand.
She did not take them.
“You paid two hundred dollars on the block, Colton,” she said, a faint, rare spark of humor dancing in the depths of her obsidian eyes.
“The debt was paid thirteen years ago, Nia,” Colton answered, his voice dropping into that deep, gentle stone-creek register. “You owe me nothing. Not an hour of labor. Not a word. I told you on the trail: you belong to yourself.”
Nia turned her head.
She looked at the new house rising from the granite. She looked at the clear, cold water bubbling through the stone trough where the mint grew thick and sweet. She looked at the high ridge where the eagles wheeled in the blue October sky.
Then she walked past the horse.
She walked up the three rough-hewn stone steps of the new porch, where the upright cedar posts had just been notched into place.
Hanging from an iron nail beside the new doorway was the old, faded blue shawl that had belonged to Martha Colton.
Nia reached out.
Her scarred fingers lifted the sun-bleached wool from the iron nail with infinite, heartbreaking tenderness. She did not throw it aside. She did not cast it into the dirt.
She folded the blue shawl with slow, reverent care, smoothing the frayed silk fringe with the palm of her hand, and carried it into the darkness of the house, laying it gently inside the cedar chest where the sacred things of a family were kept.
She walked back out onto the porch.
She stood in the center of the doorway, her hands resting easily at her sides, her eyes meeting Colton’s across the sunlit yard.
“I belong to myself,” she said, her voice clear, steady, and carrying the music of the mountain wind. “And I choose to stay here.”
Colton stood frozen for the space of two heartbeats.
Then he lowered the horse reins.
He walked across the red dirt of the yard, climbed the stone steps, and stood beside her on the porch, looking out together over the vast, golden valley where the smoke of the past had finally cleared, leaving the world beneath the great mountains quiet, clean, and free.