“You’re a dead man, Mercer!” Stroud screamed from behind the heavy logs. “You hear me? Harassment of federal agents! High treason! I’ll bring the whole damn garrison from Fort Bellamy down on your head!”

“You aren’t federal agents, Stroud!” Jonah shouted back, stepping off the porch and using the cabin’s heavy oak doorframe as cover. “You’re dog-catchers making twenty dollars a head! Get off my property!”

“I’m coming back, Mercer!” Stroud called out, his voice receding as he scrambled through the brush toward his horse. “And when I do, I’m bringing twenty men! I’m gonna burn this cabin down with you and that squaw inside it!”

Jonah heard the panicked thrashing of Stroud’s horse, followed by the heavy clattering of hooves as the scout galloped away into the darkness, following the trail Silas had taken.

Silence returned to the yard, broken only by the heavy breathing of the kid lying motionless in the dirt and the nervous stomping of Jasper at the rail.

Jonah didn’t lower his rifle. He stood on the porch for three full minutes, his eyes scanning the moonlit brush for any sign of a trap. When he was certain they were gone, he walked down into the yard, checked the twitchy kid’s pulse—he was dead—and led the kid’s abandoned horse into the barn.

He walked back into the cabin, bolted the door shut, and dragged the rug away from the cellar floor.

He pulled the trapdoor open.

The woman was huddled at the bottom of the ladder, her dark eyes reflecting the faint moonlight. She was holding a rusty iron nail she had pulled from the wall, ready to fight for her life.

Jonah reached down and held out his broad, dirt-stained hand.

“They’re gone,” he said softly. “For now.”

Chapter 7: The Unbroken Promise
She stared at his outstretched hand for a long moment before releasing the rusty nail. She reached up and placed her hand in his. Her skin was still burning with fever, but her grip was firm.

Jonah pulled her up out of the darkness and helped her back to the bed.

He pulled a wooden chair up to the bedside and sat down, leaning his Winchester across his knees. He looked at her closely. In the pale moonlight, he could see the dirt streaked across her cheeks, the deep exhaustion etched into her young face, and the ferocious, unbroken intelligence burning in her dark eyes.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Jonah asked gently.

She swallowed hard, her throat clicking. “Nalin,” she whispered. “My name is Nalin.”

“I’m Jonah Mercer.”

Nalin looked down at her hands, wrapped in white linen strips, then up at the faded blue blanket covering her body. “Why did you help me? You don’t know me. I brought death to your door.”

Jonah looked away, staring out the small window toward the two wooden crosses standing high on the ridge.

“Three years ago,” Jonah said, his voice flat and quiet, “I sat in this exact room and watched my life end. I lost my wife to a bad winter, and my girl to a fever I couldn’t stop. I told myself after that… I was done. I closed the door on the world. I built a fort out of my own misery.”

He looked back at Nalin.

“Then I found you in Ash Creek. You pressed your bloody hand on my coat and bargained for your life. And I realized… if I let those dogs take you, or if I let you die in that dirt, then the man I used to be really is dead. And I’m not ready to give him up just yet.”

Nalin’s eyes softened. Tears cut clean tracks through the dust on her cheeks. “They have my brother, Jonah. His name is Daniel. He is only sixteen. Stroud’s men… they have a camp eight miles north, near the old sulfur springs. They are holding him in iron chains until the military wagon comes on Friday.”

Jonah gritted his teeth. “Friday is two days away.”

“They will send Daniel east,” Nalin said, her voice trembling with a terrifying blend of sorrow and fury. “To a prison in Florida. He will die there. He cannot live without the mountains.”

Jonah stood up. He walked over to the wooden peg near the hearth and pulled down his leather gun belt. He buckled it around his waist, checking the cylinder of his Colt .45 with practiced, deliberate movements.

“Where are you going?” Nalin asked, trying to sit up.

“Stroud’s going to go to Fort Bellamy to get reinforcements,” Jonah said, slidingextra box of cartridges into his coat pocket. “It’ll take him till tomorrow afternoon to get back here with a posse. That gives us twelve hours.”

Nalin looked at him in shock. “Us?”

Jonah walked over to the bed and knelt beside her. He looked at her bound feet. “You can’t walk. But you can ride behind me. And you know the way to their camp.”

Nalin stared at him, her lips trembling. “You would fight Stroud’s whole camp for a stranger?”

Jonah looked her dead in the eye. “You offered to be my wife back at Ash Creek.”

A faint, bittersweet ghost of a smile touched Nalin’s lips despite her pain. “It was a fever dream, Jonah. A desperate lie to make a white cowboy save a dying woman.”

Jonah reached out and gently pulled the blue blanket up around her shoulders.

“Out here,” Jonah said softly, “a vow is a vow, Nalin. Whether it’s spoken in a church or screamed in a dry creek bed. I didn’t save you just to let them break your heart tomorrow.”

He offered her his hand once more.

“Let’s go get your brother.”

Chapter 8: The Fire at Sulfur Springs
The moon was riding high and white in the ink-black velvet of the Arizona sky when Jonah and Nalin crested the ridge above Sulfur Springs.

The air here smelled foul—a thick, yellow stench of rotting eggs and hot mineral water that bubbled up from fissures in the earth. Below them, nestled in a small bowl surrounded by towering red sandstone cliffs, lay Caleb Stroud’s secondary hunting camp.

Two canvas wall tents stood near a flickering campfire. Three horses were picketed near a dry scrub oak. And near the base of a high rock wall, bound hand and foot with heavy iron logging chains wrapped around a pine stump, sat a young man.

Daniel.

He was thin, his clothes ripped, his head resting against his knees in absolute exhaustion.

Jonah pulled Jasper to a halt behind a dense thicket of scrub oak. He eased Nalin down from behind his saddle, setting her down gently against the trunk of an old mesquite tree. He handed her a loaded Colt .38 double-action revolver he had taken from his gun cabinet before leaving the cabin.

“You stay here,” Jonah whispered, his voice low and sharp. “If anyone comes up this ridge who isn’t me or your brother, you use this.”

Nalin took the heavy iron gun, her fingers wrapping around the grip with fierce determination. “Be careful, Jonah. Silas is still alive down there. And there are two others who stayed behind to guard the camp.”