For Seven Days In The Spring Of 1882 The Man Called Shalako heard no sound but the wind.... No sound but the wind, the creak of his saddle, the hoofbeats of his horse. Seven days riding the ghost trails up out of Sonora, down from the Sierra Madre, through Apache country, keeping off the sky lines, and watching the beckoning fingers of the talking smoke. Lean as a famine wolf but wide and thick in the shoulder, the man called Shalako was a brooding man, a wary man, a man who trusted to no fate, no predicted destiny, nor to any luck. He trusted to nothing but his weapons, his horse, and the caution with which he rode. His hard-boned face was tanned to saddle leather under the beat-up, black, flat-crowned hat. He wore fringed shotgun chaps, a faded red shirt, a black handkerchief knotted about his throat, and a dozen scars of knife and bullet. It was a baked and brutal land, this Sonora, sun-blistered and arid, yet as he sifted his way through the stands of organ-pipe cactus, prickly pear and cat's claw, he knew the desert throbbed with its own strange life, and he knew those slim fingers of lifting smoke beckoned death.
