Amos knew that in a fair fight between them, outside the bar, he wouldn’t stand a chance; he’d be dog meat. John may not have been tougher, but he was younger, taller, and heavier. By the time a fight was over, most likely the cops would be called. One or the other of them or maybe both would be hauled off to jail and charged with assault. Amos had already done time, and he didn’t want anything like that to happen to John. That in a nutshell took the fair-fight option off the table. What Amos needed was a one- or two-punch effort that put a stop to the whole affair before it had a chance to get started.
As the quarrel escalated, tension crept like a thick fog throughout the room, and the rest of the bar went dead quiet.
“I don’t want to fight you, kid,” Amos said in a conciliatory tone while calmly pushing his stool away from the bar. No one noticed how he carefully slipped his right hand into the hip pocket of his worn jeans, and no one saw the same hand ease back out into the open again with something clenched in his fist. “Come on, son,” he added. “Take a load off, sit down, and have a beer.”
“I am not your son!” John growled. “I never was, and I’m not having a beer with you, either, you son of a bitch. We’re done, Amos. It’s over. Get some other poor stooge to be your pack mule.”
Big Bad John Lassiter never saw the punch coming. Amos’s powerful right hook caught him unawares and unprepared. The blow broke John’s cheekbone and sent him reeling backward, dropping like a rock on the sawdust-covered floor. Big John landed, bloodied face up and knocked cold. In the shocked silence that followed, with all eyes focused on John, no one in the room noticed Amos Warren slip the brass knuckles back into his pocket. No, it hadn’t been a fair fight, but at least it was over without any danger of it turning into a full-scale brawl.
As John started coming to and tried to sit up, several people hurried to help him. Amos turned back to the bartender. “No need to call the cops,” Amos said. “Next round’s on me.”
As far as the bartender was concerned, that was good news. He didn’t want any trouble, either. “Right,” he said, nodding in agreement. “Coming up.”
It took several people to get John back on his feet and work-wise. Someone handed him a bar napkin to help stem the flow of blood that was still pouring from the cut on his cheek, but the wad of paper didn’t do much good. The damage was done. His shirt was already a bloody mess.
“See you tomorrow then?” Amos called after John, watching him in the mirror as he staggered unsteadily toward the door.
“Go piss up a rope, Amos Warren,” John muttered in reply. “I’ll see you in hell first.”
That was the last thing John had said to him—I’ll see you in hell. They’d quarreled before over the years, most recently several times about Ava, but this was the first time they’d ever come to blows. In past instances, a few days after the dustup, one or the other of them would get around to apologizing, and that would be the end of it. Amos hoped the same thing would happen this time around, although with Ava standing on the sidelines fanning the flames, it might not be that easy to patch things up.
Lost in thought, Amos had been walking generally westward, following the course of a dry creek bed at the bottom of the canyon, some of it sandy and some littered with boulders. During monsoon season, flash floods carrying boulders, tree trunks, and all kinds of other debris would roar downstream. As the water level subsided and the sand settled, there was no telling what would be left behind. In the course of the day, Amos had seen plenty of evidence—spoor, hoof prints, and paw prints—that indicated the presence of wildlife—deer, javelina, and even what Amos assumed to be a black bear. But there was no indication of any recent human incursions.
At a point where the canyon walls narrowed precipitously, Amos was forced off the bank and into the creek bed itself. And that was when he saw it—a small hunk of reddish-brown pottery sticking up out of the sand. Dropping his heavy pack with a thud, Amos knelt on the sand.
It took several minutes of careful digging with his bare fingers for him to unearth the treasure. Much to his amazement, the tiny pot was still in one piece. How it could have been washed down the stream bed and deposited on a sandy strand of high ground without being smashed to bits was one of the wonders of the universe. Amos suspected that the sand-infused water of a flash flood had buoyed it up before the water had drained out of the sand, leaving the pot on solid ground.
Once it was free of the sand, Amos pulled out his reading glasses, then held the piece close enough to examine it. He realized at once that it was far too small to be a cooking pot. Then he noticed that a faded design of some kind had been etched into the red clay before the pot was fired. A more detailed examination revealed the image of what appeared to be an owl perched on top of a tortoise. The presence of the decorative etching on the pot along with its relative size meant that the piece was most likely ceremonial in nature.
Still holding the tiny but perfect pot in his hands, Amos leaned back on his heels and considered the piece’s possible origins. He wasn’t someone who had a degree in anthropology, but he had spent a lifetime finding and selling Native American artifacts from all over vast stretches of Arizona’s desert landscapes.
Years of experience told him the pot was most likely Papago in origin. Sometimes known as the Tohono O’odham, the Papagos had lived for thousands of years in the vast deserts surrounding what was now Tucson. This particular spot, on the far southeastern flanks of the Rincon Mountains, overlooked the San Pedro Valley. It was on the easternmost edge of the Papagos’ traditional territory and deep into the part of the world once controlled and dominated by the Apache. Had a stray band of Tohono O’odham come here to camp or hunt and left this treasure behind? Amos wondered. More likely, the tiny artifact had been a trophy of some kind, spoils of war carried off by a marauding band of Apache.
Since the pot had clearly been washed downstream, there was a possibility that a relatively undisturbed archaeological site was sitting undiscovered farther up the canyon. There were several professors at the U of A who would pay Amos good money as a finder’s fee so they could go in and do a properly documented excavation. As to the pot itself? Regardless of where it was from, Amos knew he had found a remarkable piece, one that was inherently valuable. The curators at the Heard Museum would jump at the chance to have a whole undamaged pot for their southwestern collection. Amos knew that most of the pots on display in the museum had been pieced back together, and there was a reason for that.
The Tohono O’odham believed that the pot maker’s spirit remained trapped inside her pots. As a consequence, when the pot maker died, tradition demanded that all her pots be smashed to pieces. So why was this one still whole? That made the theory of it being stolen goods all the more likely. Apaches would have no reason to adhere to Tohono O’odham customs. Why free a dead enemy’s spirit? What good would that do for you?
Wanting to protect his treasure, Amos put the pot down and then tore a strip of material from the tail of his ragged flannel work shirt. The material was old and thin enough that it gave way without a struggle. He wrapped the pot in the soft cloth. Then, stowing the protected pot as the topmost item in his bag, he shouldered his load and headed back to the truck. It was early afternoon, but he wanted to be back on the far side of Redington Pass early enough that the setting sun wouldn’t be directly in his eyes.
Making his way back down the stream bed, Amos kept close watch on his footing, avoiding loose rocks wherever possible. With the heavily laden pack on his back, even a small fall might result in a twisted ankle or a broken bone, and one of those could be serious business when he was out here all by himself with no way of letting anyone know exactly where he was or summoning help. And rocks weren’t the only danger.