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By Root 1606 0

the dungarees cinched by a scissored-down belt and moleskin jacket she’d borrowed from Delfino. Instead, she wore only the dark-blue silk dress that had served as a makeshift blouse these past days, the dress she’d worn to the center to visit Granna, light-years ago it seemed now. Awfully creased, but it was the thought that counted. She washed her face with canteen water and looked at the morning with clear, bright eyes. Having brushed her hair and collected it into as nice a chignon as she could manage without a mirror, she rummaged lipstick from the bottom of her backpack and applied it, then emerged from the house barefoot. Marcos thought to compliment her, but for all her sudden splendor, Ariel was as sharply centered as Delfino on the impending confrontation. He realized that while she and his uncle had arranged themselves to different purposes, they shared equally the spirit of honoring the moment.

She asked Marcos for the glasses and, too, saw the ranger. “We don’t have any way of communicating with them, do we.”

“We’re telling them what they need to know just by standing here,” said Delfino.

“You think they can read your placards?”

“If they can’t they will soon enough.”

“You mind if I post one of my own?”

Delfino thought for a moment, then said, “Paint’s over there. Your reason for being here’s every bit as good as mine.”

In no time, Delfino’s No Trespassing Private Property notices were joined by Ariel’s Looking for Veteran Kip Calder. She’d added the word Veteran in the hopes it would inspire in these military men compassion toward her father.

“What an insane bunch the bastards must think we are,” said Marcos.

Ariel smiled at him.

“I’d take that as a compliment.” To punctuate his point, Delfino spat into the breeze.

Her movements were studied by the rangers who now determined to advance their positions. Reported back that they had two males and a female. After walleting his field phone, the sergeant squared himself, looking up at the three of them, and gestured his peaceful intent, waving hands slowly above his head. The interlopers didn’t return the courtesy, so he stopped to resurvey them through his binoculars.

Now close enough to read the quaint placards, he relayed their messages on the closed channel back to White Sands and was ordered not to proceed until further instructed. He communicated this to his men, then sat down on an anvil of igneous in the trench gulch after checking it out for snakes. Unwrapping a stick of chewing gum and pushing it into his mouth, he scrutinized the forescape of tawny sills, stone jointings, and a narrowing apron of sand for the best approach to the site.

Private property, he mused. What kind of witless wonder would want to set up shop in such a place as this? Even if the government weren’t putting bread on Jim’s table and meat in his Crock-Pot, he would deem this land fit only for the uses to which it was presently being put. Exploding dummy prey and testing high-velocity hardware. At least Alamogordo was on the lee side of natural wrath. Over along this western edge of the basin was different. Beautiful in the harshest ways. But you come here looking to homestead and you ought to be homesteaded straight to the cuckoo’s nest. Soup to nuts but skip the soup. Kinda like that.

The secure line came to life. They’d arrested the other man who avowed he was not Delfino Montoya but one William Calder. Delfino Montoya was high probability among the Dripping Spring group. A call from a worried relative corroborated this and indicated the male was his nephew and female this Calder’s daughter, though Calder—in custody at the infirmary—had stated he had no family.

It was all coming to complex clarity.

Montoya was on file as having communicated threats to various official individuals over the years with regard to his eviction from Dripping Spring a long time ago. To be considered potentially armed and dangerous, since his name came up on the computer as a buyer of blue-market armaments from right-wing extremist purveyors. They were trying to get specifics on that. The relative