Jornada Posting

The silver came out of the San Andres Mountains in the summer of 1861, and four hundred men followed it into a boomtown called Caldera — a raw bench of alkali earth wedged between a worked-out canyon and a desert that had been killing travelers since the Spanish gave it its honest name: the Journey of the Dead Man. Former Army scout Caleb Doss arrived to buy a mule. He found the town's first sheriff three days dead in a mine shaft — no boots, broken neck, nothing under the fingernails but rock dust and silence — and inside a week he was wearing the man's badge because no one else in Caldera could read the sign and no one else was stubborn enough to follow it to its source. He does not want the job. The job does not consult him.What he inherits is a jurisdiction balanced above three separate catastrophes. Federal Judge Harlan Creed has spent two years constructing a legal architecture — patient, precise, invisible — designed to strip every valid silver claim in the San Andres into a holding company that answers to no one but himself, and Caldera's dead sheriff apparently got close enough to see the blueprints. The Mescalero Apache war leader Cheis, whose band has held the mountain springs at Ojo de la Osa for eleven generations, is raiding mining camps because Creed's operations poisoned the water his people drink, and a U.S. Army detachment is three days' ride away with orders to respond in the language the Army speaks best. And somewhere south in Texas, a Confederate general is assembling an army to take New Mexico Territory, and half the men in Caldera came from the states that put him there.Into this walks Marisol Vega — schoolteacher, daughter of a Spanish land grant older than American sovereignty, speaker of four languages, and the person in Caldera who has been reading the entire situation since before Doss arrived. She is not looking for a protector. She is looking for a man who can tell the difference between what the law says and what justice requires. Doss doesn't know yet whether he is that man. Neither does she. The Jornada does not wait for either of them to decide.