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Blood On The Salado
The Rio Salado is dying. Six weeks after Caleb Doss pinned a sheriff's badge to his shirt in the boomtown of Caldera, the crisis he inherited has metastasized beyond the reach of any document packet dispatched to a distant territorial court. Judge Harlan Creed's mining headgate is drawing the river down to its autumn bones, and the arsenic it pushes into the lower flow has turned Mescalero springs to poison.
Cheis's band has been drinking contaminated water for three months. When his warriors raid the mining camp's water storage - taking barrels, not scalps - the Army at Fort Stanton sends a cavalry detachment under an officer who sees savages, not thirst. Doss has four days to prove this is a water war before the lieutenant starts a real one. Schoolteacher Marisol Vega is the only person in Caldera who can open a channel to Cheis - and she does it on her own terms, not the sheriff's.
The communication she brokers may be the only thing standing between eighty Mescalero men, women, and children and forced removal to the Bosque Redondo reservation, which every Apache leader in the territory has correctly identified as a death sentence wearing an administrative face. But Creed is not standing still. He has purchased the territory's timber rights in the San Andres foothills, and as the first norther of winter descends on the valley settlements with killing force, the families who cannot buy firewood at Creed's prices will pay with something that cannot be recovered.
Deputy Tomás Archuleta stands in the snow outside the sheriff's office on the morning after and does not raise his voice. What he says will change what Caleb Doss is willing to do. What it costs will follow both men into the spring.
Cheis's band has been drinking contaminated water for three months. When his warriors raid the mining camp's water storage - taking barrels, not scalps - the Army at Fort Stanton sends a cavalry detachment under an officer who sees savages, not thirst. Doss has four days to prove this is a water war before the lieutenant starts a real one. Schoolteacher Marisol Vega is the only person in Caldera who can open a channel to Cheis - and she does it on her own terms, not the sheriff's.
The communication she brokers may be the only thing standing between eighty Mescalero men, women, and children and forced removal to the Bosque Redondo reservation, which every Apache leader in the territory has correctly identified as a death sentence wearing an administrative face. But Creed is not standing still. He has purchased the territory's timber rights in the San Andres foothills, and as the first norther of winter descends on the valley settlements with killing force, the families who cannot buy firewood at Creed's prices will pay with something that cannot be recovered.
Deputy Tomás Archuleta stands in the snow outside the sheriff's office on the morning after and does not raise his voice. What he says will change what Caleb Doss is willing to do. What it costs will follow both men into the spring.
