DAY ONE …

      He was hurt and riding cautiously. Thoughts not quite grasped made him uneasy, and he listened for an errant sound in the hot wind. His eyes were narrowed – searching for a broken leaf, a freshly turned rock, anything from which he could make some sense of his vague uneasiness. Nothing. The desert seemed right, but wasn’t somehow. He turned in the saddle and looked behind him. A tumbleweed was bouncing in front of wild assaults from the wind. But the trail was empty. He turned back and sat, listening.

      Over six feet and carrying two hundred pounds, Nat Swanson didn’t disturb easy, but this morning he was edgy. His hat brim was pulled low, casting his face in shadow. The intense heat and the wind were playing with the air, making it warp and shimmer over the land. He forced himself to peer through it, knowing he wouldn’t get a second chance if he missed a sheen off sweating skin or the straight line of a gun barrel among branches.

      As his mule climbed, he slowly reached his hands back and pulled black shoulder-length hair out of the way behind his head, securing it with a piece of silk ribbon. Caught in this way, the hair revealed the finely shaped features of his weathered profile. His skin was a dark copper colour and sun lines etched deep into the corners of his eyes and mouth gave his face the look of cracked rock when he smiled.

      Without much motion, he slipped the leather thong off the hammer of the pistol hanging at his side, easing the weapon halfway up the holster to clear it, then settling it back down again. The sheer cold weight of it felt comforting.

      He had been running for a week, and he was light on sleep and heavy on dust and too ready for trouble. He’d killed a man in a West Texas town he’d forgotten the name of – over a woman whose name he’d never known. He hadn’t wanted the woman or the killing. Nor had he wanted the hole in his thigh. What he did want was to get to California, and that’s where he was headed. Buttoned in his shirt pocket was a deed for a Santa Barbara ranch. Perhaps a younger man would have run longer and harder before turning to fight and maybe die; but Nat Swanson was thirty-five years that summer, old for the trail, and he had run as far as he was going to run.

      A covey of mearns quail flushed near the ridge top and glided down the bright mountain air, disappearing in a thick stand of manzanita to his left. He reined the mule in and sat watching. The animal stood with its ears tilted back, then switched them forward and listened up the trail. The mule was desert-bred stock, and Swanson knew it sensed the danger as well as he. The uneasy feeling came over him strong again, and he blew out his nostrils to clear them and then breathed in, scenting the wind. Nothing. But there was something. Mearns quail didn’t flush easy in high winds.

      It was early morning and he was perched halfway up a hardscrabble New Mexico hillside, following a deer path that stayed comfortably below the crestline where a larger pack trail ran. It was habit with him never to ride main trails or ridge lines even in the best of times, and this morning, with three riders tracking him, he wasn’t about to start breaking the habit.

      He ran facts over in his mind. It didn’t figure that the men who had chased him across miles of hot desert on bad water had magically managed to get ahead of him. Even if they could have pushed their animals that hard, which he plain doubted, they couldn’t have guessed which arroyo he would take into the high mountains. No man was that lucky. There was no sense to it, and he was a man who liked things to make sense.

      A sound from behind told Swanson the dog had worked its way up through the brush of the mountain. He looked over his shoulder at it sitting