Where the Red Earth Drinks the Sun: The Ballad of Cole Ransom, the Sacred Waters of the Painted Canyon, and the Vow of the Iron Maiden.
Where the River of Promise Runs Red: The Reckoning of Cole Ransom, the Daughter of Nantan, and the Ghost of the Arizona Sun
Part I: The Crucible of Dust and Bone
Cole Ransom had survived two stampedes along the Chisholm Trail, three close-range gunfights in saloons that smelled of sour mash and kerosene, a bout of yellow fever that had killed every other man in a San Antonio boarding house, and six days of sun-blind madness across the jagged expanse of the Arizona territory.
Yet, as he stood waist-deep in crystalline, mountain-cold water with twelve bowstrings drawn taut against his breastbone, it occurred to him that the desert had merely been saving him for a more theatrical execution.
He had only wanted to wash the salt from his eyes.
That had been his cardinal sin.
Six days earlier, Cole had turned his back on Texas.
He had ridden out of Fort Worth with forty-eight silver dollars sewn into the lining of his saddle skirts, a Spencer carbine with a pitted bore, a battered Colt Army revolver, and an unspoken conviction that if he didn’t reach California before the winter rains, he would wither into nothing more than a ghost haunted by dry plains.
He was twenty-four years old.
He possessed no deed to an acre of earth, no family waiting by a hearth, and no surname that commanded credit at a territorial bank.
All he truly owned in the world was Dusty—a big-boned, dun-colored gelding with dark points and the stubborn constitution of a mountain burro—and an uncanny, almost unnatural patience for understanding the minds of unbroken horses.
The drovers in Texas said Cole could lay a palm flat against the neck of a snorting, wall-eyed mustang and have it feeding out of his coat pocket before the midday sun went orange.
They called it an eye for horseflesh.
Cole called it common sense: animals, unlike men, never lied about what they intended to do to you.
California ranches, rumors claimed, paid forty dollars a month in hard gold for men who could break wild stock without snapping their legs or breaking their spirits.
Cole had planned to live on that gold.
If the furnace of the lower Colorado plateau did not bake his marrow into ash first.
The paper map he had bought off a drunken surveyor in El Paso had proven to be a work of pure fiction.
Trails drawn in confident black ink petered out into dry washes choked with greasewood and catclaw.
Ridges that should have led north twisted back like broken vertebrae into blistering alkali sinks.
By the morning of the sixth day, the heat had reached such an intensity that the air seemed to hum like a scalded iron kettle.
Cole’s two-quart canteen had yielded its last lukewarm, metallic swallow fifty miles back.
His lips had split down the center, bleeding into the white crust that rimmed his mouth.
His tongue felt like a block of dried cedar wedged against the roof of his palate.
Every breath tasted of scorched flint.
Dusty was dropping his head, his gait stuttering into an uneven shuffle, the horse’s ears flopping sideways—the universal posture of a beast whose furnace was running out of steam.
Just one more draw, Cole had rasped, though there was no voice left, only the clicking of dry gristle in his throat. Just down into the red wash, boy. We find nothing, we lay down together.
Then Dusty had stopped.
The dun gelding’s ears snapped forward, twitching with sudden, sharp interest.
His nostrils flared, quivering as he drew in deep drafts of the blistering wind.
The horse gave a low, rumbling nicker from the bottom of his chest and took the bit between his teeth, pulling the reins out of Cole’s blistered fingers.
Cole did not fight him.
A horse dying of thirst knows where water sleeps long before a dying man does.
They rounded a towering buttress of vermilion sandstone—two colossal pillars of red rock that looked as though some ancient giant had cleaved a mountain in half with a war-ax.
Beyond that narrow, shade-dappled throat, the furnace died.
The temperature plummeted fifteen degrees in the span of thirty strides.
Cole rubbed his swollen eyes with the heel of a filthy hand, convinced he had finally crossed the threshold into the final, merciful delirium of heatstroke.
Before him stretched a hidden gorge.
Along the floor of this shadowed canyon ran a creek—not a stagnant alkali pool or a muddy seepage, but a wide, swift-running vein of water as transparent as hand-blown window glass.
Green reeds and wild mint crowded the banks, their dark perfumes slicing through the dry rot of the desert.
Cottonwood trees with leaves like trembling green coins cast trembling emerald canopies over deep, gravel-bottomed pools where silver minnows flickered in the sunlight.
Cole nearly fell out of the saddle.
He hit the soft earth on his knees, crawled the last three feet, and plunged his entire face into the current.
The shock of it was violent.
The water was so cold it made his teeth ache to the root and sent a knife-stroke of pain straight through the center of his skull.
It was sweet, pure, and clean, tasting faintly of snow and pine granite.
He drank until his belly groaned with the weight of it, then rolled onto his side on the cool clover, coughing and laughing like an escaped madman.
“Good boy,” he croaked, looking back at Dusty.
The horse was standing knee-deep among the rushes, drinking with steady, rhythmic gulps, his flank hollows filling out.
“Good boy, Dusty.”
Cole sat up and looked around.
The sheer walls of the red canyon rose three hundred feet on either side, carved smooth by centuries of flash floods.
The sky above was a stark ribbon of azure.
There was no sign of a trail.
No smoke hung on the breeze.
There were no split-rail fences, no abandoned fire rings, no prints of hobnailed boots in the soft bank.
To a man who had spent six days marinating in his own sour sweat, sand grit, and horse grease, the invitation was absolute.
He stood, swaying slightly on legs that still remembered the sway of the stirrups.
He unbuckled his gunbelt, laying the heavy holster and his Colt carefully upon a high, sun-baked boulder alongside his sweat-stained Stetson.
He unbuttoned his salt-stiffened calico shirt, stepped out of his split, worn-out trousers, and peeled his woolen socks away from raw, blistered feet.
Leaving his gear by the stone, Cole walked into the current.
The gravel was smooth as river marbles beneath his bare soles.
When the water reached his thighs, he gasped; when it hit his ribs, the sheer luxury of it drew a ragged groan from his chest.
He waded out until the stream came up to his waist, then fell backward into the pool.
He submerged entirely.
Under the water, the world fell into a profound, ringing silence.
The desert heat was extinguished.
For twenty seconds, Cole Ransom did not have a past, did not have a debt, and did not have an empty belly.