The click of the hammer being cocked was unnaturally loud in the silence.
“That’s far enough,” she called out her voice, rough from disuse, but steady.
The man stopped his dark eyes fixed on her. He showed no fear, no surprise. He simply waited, his gaze unwavering. He stood a good 20 paces from her, close enough for her to see the intricate bead work on his moccasins, far enough that he wasn’t an immediate threat.
“I have no quarrel with you,” Kora said, her voice gaining strength. “State your business and be on your way. My water is my own.”
It was the usual reason strangers trespassed on her land. The spring was a siren’s call in a thirsty land. The big man did not answer immediately. He looked past her at the sturdy cabin, the neat stacks of firewood, the small flourishing garden. His gaze seemed to take in every detail of her solitary existence, every piece of evidence of her resilience.
Finally, his eyes returned to hers. When he spoke, his voice was a low baritone, the English words carefully formed with only a slight musical accent.
“We have not come for water,” he said, his voice calm and resonant. “We have not come for war.”
Kora kept the pistol trained on his chest. “Then what have you come for?”
The Apache leader, whose name was Gotchi Min, let the silence stretch for a moment longer, allowing the weight of his next words to gather.
The six other warriors remained mounted, as silent and imposing as statues, their eyes watching the exchange with an unnerving intensity. They were a wall of muscle and menace, a silent chorus to their leader solo. Gotchimin took one more slow, deliberate step forward, ignoring the pistol aimed at his heart.
He looked directly into Kora’s pale blue eyes, and for the first time, she saw something other than stoic resolve in his expression. It was a deep unwavering seriousness, an ancient gravity that seemed to emanate from him.
“My name is Gimin,” he said, his voice, carrying clearly in the still air. “I am the son of a great chief. These are my brothers and my most trusted warriors.”
He paused, his gaze, sweeping over her from the frayed hem of her denim trousers to the wild strands of sunbleleached hair that had escaped her braid.
“We have journeyed for three days from the Sierra Madre. We have come to ask you to be my wife.”
The words struck Kora with the force of a physical blow. The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The relentless sun, the silent mountains, the seven giants before her, all blurring into an incomprehensible tableau, her finger tightened on the trigger. The cold steel of the pistol, the only real thing in a moment of utter surality.
Trash. It was a word so foreign, so disconnected from her reality that it might as well have been from another language. For a woman who had spoken to no one for years, the proposal of marriage from a 7-foot Apache warrior she had never seen before was not just unthinkable. It was madness.
