Looming mountains slumbered in the hazy June heat. No wind stirred the dust in the narrow, dung-filled street, no color brightened the flat grayness of the dozen decrepit buildings along either side of a crumbling wooden boardwalk. Even the Red Snake Saloon was quiet, the gold-vested piano player passed out over his tinny keyboard. The town was smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, huddled beneath the lip of a towering granite mountain under the Mogollon Rim. Few lived in this godforsaken region of Arizona beneath the sheer towering red cliffs and pine forests of the Mogollon except a small collection of hardy souls eking out an existence along the stagecoach line. Juliana, sitting with her fellow passengers inside the dining room of the Tin Horn Hotel, could see why. The town was a forsaken, squalid pesthole, dwarfed by the wild, awesome landscape that surrounded it. Who could survive long here, amid the filth and isolation? The only people she had seen since they’d arrived, other than the hotel proprietor—a thin, sullen fellow who had served them greasy fried prairie chicken and hardtack biscuits—were a trio of savage-looking men who had ridden in like a swarm of hornets a few moments ago and headed straight for the saloon.
