Firelight at Mustang Ridge

by Jesse Hayworth

  “There’s a gully on the other side of the trees.” Sam pointed. “Past that is as gemmy-looking a hill as I’ve seen in a while. Come on, I’ll show you.” Seeing Axyl hesitate, he prodded, “Aw, come on, old man. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “I could wind up living out here for the rest of the summer in some cobbled-together shack with solar panels on the roof, a cistern on one side, and a composting toilet on the other.”

  Midas elbowed Murphy. “Did you get all that?”

  “Shut it,” Axyl grumbled. But his eyes stayed locked on the crystals. “Any more like that?”

  Sam patted his saddlebag. “I got lucky. Started poking around this morning and hit on a good-size pocket.”

  “Lucky is right. Let me guess. You had a feeling about this place.”

  “Something like that.” And that was all he was going to say on the matter. All he needed to say.

  The grizzled prospector glanced around, studying the trees now rather than scowling at them. “You name it yet?”

  “I was thinking of calling it Misty Hill.”

  The crow’s-feet around Axyl’s eyes eased up. “After your ma. That’s nice.”

  Actually, Sam had decided on the name that morning, when he’d woken up wrapped in his bedroll and found himself surrounded by a dense, low-lying fog despite the drought. But, yeah, maybe there had been something subconscious at work there, too. His ma’s name had been Mary, but everybody had called her Misty—except his father, who had called her “My Mary” or, more often, “your Ma, bless her soul.”

  “Misty Hill it is,” Sam said, his voice going thick. Clearing his throat, he added, “What do you think, Murph? You going to have enough sky to work with, or are we going to need to cut some trees?”

  “Hm.” Murph, who was the overlord of all things solar-powered at Babcock Gems, studied the clearing, squinted along his outstretched arm to make some thumb-level measurements, and got a look on his face that Sam recognized as meaning, Stand back, folks, I’m doing calculus in my head. After a moment, he nodded. “I can make it work.”

  “Good. Get going on plans and a supply list. You know the routine. Take Axyl’s cobbled-together-shack idea, make sure there’s room to sleep, cook, hang out, and sort rocks, and keep it as eco-friendly as you can get it.”

  “I want a separate building to house the prototypes,” Midas put in. “We’ll want as many as we can airlift or motor out here. It’s time to do some serious field-testing.”

  Murph’s mouth flattened. “Not if by field-testing you mean treating the equipment like a bunch of crash-test dummies. This is precision machinery we’re talking about here.”

  Midas held up both hands. “Hey, it’s not my fault that your inventions don’t always stand up to the real world.”

  “There’s a difference between regular use and ‘Whoops, I just dropped a fiber-optic probe four stories into a caldera.’”

  “The grip was like a wet banana.”

  Murph’s face went a dull, infuriated red. “Only for someone who forgets he has opposable thumbs.”

  “So,” Axyl said to Sam, his voice carrying over Midas’s squawk, “you want to show me that crystal pocket?”

  “Sure. Back here, through the trees.” While the other two escalated from “Damn thing should’ve been shockproof anyway” to “Oh, yeah? Says the guy who totaled his new mountain bike because he was watching a hawk,” Sam patted Yoshi’s rump. “You want a ride?”

  Axyl snorted. “Not on your life, boyo.”

  They headed off as the engineers went straight past “your momma” territory into geological insults. It was background noise to Sam, though, like the crunch of a shovel or the ring of a hammer on stone, and it faded quickly once they got into the trees, with Yoshi picking his way and Axyl grumbling about the smell of sweaty horse.

  When they reached the other side of the narrow forest band, the grumbles cut off as Axyl got his first look at the slope where Sam had found the gemstone pocket. The old rockhound came up beside Yoshi and scanned the huge, rocky expanse, which rose a couple hundred feet in almost no time, with streaks in the blocky stone chunks suggesting that most of it was metamorphic rock with some amphibole. The high temperature, high pressure, and slow cooling processes that went into forming the stones were also the forces that generated species of corundum—like rubies and sapphires—and other valuable deposits. Better yet, there were glittering inclusions of vermiculite schist, which was another marker that valuable stones could be nearby. And the rocky slope stretched on for miles.

  Axyl whistled, his beard a-quiver.

  “Admit it,” Sam said, prodding. “It’s a good piece of land, and not just for field-testing the new gadgets.”

  “It’s okay.” Then, with his expression flattening to something that was almost a smile, Axyl allowed, “It’s better than okay. Even if you hadn’t found that crystal pocket, I’d have to say it’s got a damn good look to it. Gemmy as hell.” He studied the glitters, which tempted a rockhound to imagine riches beneath. “Your old man would’ve liked this place.”

  “I thought so. It’s got a great view, a good place to stick a campsite, and a whole lot of potential for surface mining, but no guarantees.” Trooper Babcock hadn’t been the best prospector out there, certainly hadn’t been the luckiest, but he had loved the land and the thrill of the hunt.

  Digging into his saddlebag, Sam came up with his custom-molded, reverb-dampening rock hammer—one of Murph’s earliest contributions to the team—and held it up in challenge. “One hour, best specimen wins, Midas judges?”

  Axyl unslung his pack and pulled out a scuffed rock hammer that probably had a cousin in a museum somewhere. Lifting it and getting a gleam in his eye, he added, “Loser buys the beer.”

  * * *

  Danny’s early days in Blessing Valley had passed in an odd slow-motion blur, where each hour seemed to stretch endlessly, yet somehow she was already into her second week and running low on food. She wasn’t ready to return to the ranch, though—wasn’t ready for chaos and human noise—so she had taken to supplementing her stores with the edible berries, greens, and flowers she found on long walks that took her along the river and up gentle slopes. She was usually dragging by the time she returned to camp, ready to wolf down a quick meal, fire up her solar-powered electric fence, and crawl into the tent she had set up beside the dark, narrow RV. She rarely made it through a night without the dreams finding her, though, and she never slept in.

  On day nine—or was it ten?—she emerged from the tent not long past dawn, to discover a beautiful morning of pale blues and pinks in the sky, with birds singing up in the trees, the river bubbling in its banks . . . and a pair of squirrels sitting on the table, surrounded by a mound of white-paper confetti and in the process of tearing more shreds from a gutted paperback.

  “Hey!” she said, stomping a foot. “Stop that!”

  The bushy-tailed thieves levitated off the table, up onto the RV’s awning, and from there to an overhanging branch, where they clung, chittering down at her like she was the one who was trespassing. Reddish brown, with tufted ears and puffed-up cheeks, they would’ve been cute if they’d been minding their own business.

  “That’s my book!” she exclaimed, recognizing one of the self-help, find-your-path-in-life guides she had packed in the bottom of her duffel. “Where did you get—” She broke off at the sight of a narrow gap where the RV’s door should have been tightly closed. “Ohhh, no. I didn’t!”

  It was entirely possible, though. She had forced herself to go into the camper last night to snag the last of the canned soup, and although she had mostly gotten over feeling like the walls were going to snap in on her at any second, she still got shaky being inside the tight quarters, and she always rushed to get back outside.

  Yeah, she might have left the door open. And a couple of squirrels might have gotten into th
e beautiful RV, with all its gadgets, custom touches, and shiny things.

  “Please. Don’t tell me.” The chitters increased overhead when she opened the door the rest of the way and stuck her head into the dim interior, blinking to focus her eyes as she scanned the driver’s seat, with its lush leather covering and the embroidery running down the side, spelling out RAMBLING ROSE. She didn’t see any scratches or holes, though, and there didn’t seem to be anything out of place farther down the narrow tunnel, in either the sitting area or the kitchenette.

  The creatures had been in there, though. They had gotten into her duffel. Who knew what else they had done?

  Forcing herself up the RV steps, she ignored the fear-prickles. Knock it off. You’ve been in here a bunch of times. Nothing bad has ever happened, and nothing bad is going to happen this time, either. Holding tight to that logic, she edged into the darker, narrower hallway beyond the kitchen, past the bathroom-coffin and finally to the bedroom. Where, darn it, she saw that her duffel was open, the contents torn and strewn across the bedspread, with shreds of bright yellow packaging—all that was left of a forgotten bag of Peanut M&M’s—dotted over the things that had decorated her room at the hospital, then rehab: two gift-shop teddy bears, a mug that read CLIMB FASTER: GRAVITY IS ONLY A THEORY, and a dozen paperbacks—stories about climbers, castaways, and explorers, all with get-well notes on their inside covers that were signed “Love, B.” And, front and center, a framed, zoomed-in snapshot of her standing alone at the tippy-top of a high, rocky precipice, wearing climbing gear and a bright, eager smile.

  Hissing out a breath, she stumbled back a step, her vision graying around the edges. She remembered the cloudless sky and the perfect sunny day spent with her parents and sister, remembered her mother caroling “Cheese!” as she snapped the picture, even remembered having a blister on the back of her left heel, where her sock had worn through on the long hike to reach the out-of-the-way Grade IV climb. But as she backed up another step and banged into the too-close bedroom wall, things shifted, turning the sunny day dark and dismal, and pulling the invisible ropes that suddenly wrapped around her so tightly that she couldn’t breathe.

  High walls on either side of her, pressing in on her, folding her into an impossible pretzel and kinking her diaphragm, making it hard to breathe. Rocks beneath her, above her. On her. Trapping her.

  She clawed at her throat, part of her knowing that meant her hands were free, but unable to make it matter as her vision tunneled narrower and narrower until all she could see was the yellow confetti and the stranger in the picture, who looked like her, except that she was ready to take on the world, ready to—

  Darkness.

  3

  The noon sun beat down on the horse and rider as Yoshi descended into a dry wash, his movements swinging the saddle back and forth while Sam whistled “Home on the Range” to the beat, thinking there was something seriously cool about playing cowboy, riding out under the big Wyoming sky with a scraggly scruff on his face and nobody else for miles.

  Granted, the average old-timey cowboy wouldn’t have had his saddlebags loaded with uncut gems—that would’ve been more the bailiwick of a pick-wielding miner with a couple of pack mules. Or maybe a bandit, riding a fast horse and looking over his shoulder to see if there was dust on the horizon. “Bandit, definitely,” he decided. “Don’t you think, Yosh?”

  The gelding shook his head, making the bit jingle.

  “I’ve got a month’s pay in stones,” Sam drawled, getting into character as the sure-footed horse started up the other side of the gulch, “a six-shooter, and a disguise. So, stick ’em up, pardner!”

  Sure, the red bandanna that made up his disguise had started out wrapped around some muffins four days ago, courtesy of a stopover at Mustang Ridge on his ride out to Misty Hill. But he had tied it around his neck after breaking camp that morning, and now pulled it up to cover the lower half of his face, settling his Stetson on his brow and pretending it was bad-guy black felt rather than summer straw.

  Dropping his reins as they hit the flatlands once more, he drew from his hip, cocked his thumb as if his index finger were the barrel of a pistol, and fired at a nearby rocky outcropping, imagining the posse that’d been sent from the nearby—in backcountry terms, at least—town of Three Ridges to take him down and recover the stolen gems. “Pew, pew, pew!” Okay, maybe the noises were more sci-fi blaster than Wild West six-shooter, but whatever. “Pew, pew!” The last imaginary shot took out the imaginary marshal who’d been right on his tail, and Sam blew across the tip of his index finger. “There you go, Yosh. That’s the way it’s done!”

  The paint gelding snorted and broke into a jog, headed for the distinctively stacked landmark stones that were becoming clearer with each mile, letting him know that Mustang Ridge was just a few valleys away now, maybe a couple of hours at an easy pace.

  “You want to bum some dinner?” Sam asked his horse, even though his stomach was already grumbling with a hells to the yes on that one. “Wyatt did say we should swing back by on the way home.”

  Granted, Sam’s college buddy would no doubt get in some more digs about it being time for him to grow up and settle down—Wyatt was full steam ahead when it came to his new baby and upcoming wedding, and seemed to think Sam should be revving up to take the same fall. But he figured he could handle another dose of “You need to quit with the flings and find yourself a real relationship” if it came with chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and gravy thick enough to walk on.

  “Off we go, then,” he said, nudging Yosh into a lope that rolled down one hill and up the next. The horse’s hooves beat a syncopated tattoo on the sunbaked earth, kicking up dust that coated the back of Sam’s throat, tasting like—

  Smoke!

  * * *

  The flames roared up toward Danny, heating her skin and making her hair crackle around her face as she tossed in another paperback and watched the pages curl and blacken in the firepit. “Good-bye—”

  A sudden clatter of galloping hooves brought her whirling around, her heart leaping into her throat as she pictured Jupiter and the herd stampeding through camp. Then a loaded-down brown-and-white-spotted horse burst through the trees, carrying a big cowboy wearing a mask on the lower half of his face.

  At the sight of her and the fire, the man hauled back on the reins and flung himself out of the saddle, hitting the ground even before his horse had come to a skidding stop. He advanced on her. “What in the blazes—”

  Survival instincts taking over, Danny threw the last paperback at him as hard as she could, nailing him in the face.

  “Ow!” He reeled back as she fled past him to the four-wheeler.

  Flinging herself aboard, she twisted the key and hit the button to start the engine, but nothing happened. Her breath hitched in her lungs as the stranger reoriented himself and started toward her. She scrambled off the ATV, grabbed her pack from the tent, yanked out her anti-critter revolver, and cocked the hammer. “Freeze!” she shouted, even though he’d already done exactly that, making like a statue when he saw that she was armed.

  “Whoa, lady, hang on.” His voice was low and resonant, his granite-gray eyes more focused than scared as he added, “Finger off the trigger. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She kept her finger right where it was. “Then why are you wearing a mask?”

  Sudden understanding dawned. “Oh, for— Hang on. Don’t shoot. I’m just going to pull down the bandanna.” He did just that. “Sorry. Forgot I was wearing it. Is that better?”

  Not really. Because dang. Without the bandanna, his face was a whole lot of stubble, dark skin, and angles put together in exactly the right combination.

  Which didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. Hot guys could be dangerous.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, her heart drumming against her ribs. “What do you want?”

  “I’m a friend of the people wh
o own that RV,” he said with a nod toward the Rambling Rose. “And what I want is for you to point that gun someplace else.”

  She kept it on him, but took her finger off the trigger. “Who?” she pressed. “I want names.”

  “Rose and Ed Skye own the bus,” he said without hesitation. “Their daughter, Krista, is a month or two away from marrying my college roommate, Wyatt Webb. They’ve got a daughter, Abby, and—”

  “Okay.” Pulse slowing, she lowered the hammer. “I believe you.”

  “Good.” His eyes sharpened on hers, putting a quiver in the pit of her stomach. “Then do me a favor and kill that fire before you torch the whole damn valley.”

  She glanced past him, to where it was starting to burn down, now that she wasn’t lobbing pictures, books, and men’s XL T-shirts into it anymore. “It’s fine.” And she didn’t want to talk about the fire. The cathartic burn had seemed like a really good idea when she found herself sitting outside the RV with the contents of the duffel strewn around her. Now, though, it seemed silly and overdramatic, like skywriting TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE from one horizon to the other rather than just saying it out loud.

  “Maybe. You’ve got it in the pit and the river is right there. But just last week an ember from a near-dead wildfire caught on a current of air, carried a mile, and torched Gabe and Winnie Sears’s place. House, barns, and all. They got their five kids and some personal stuff out, and let the livestock run loose, but the rest is gone, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Didn’t take more than an hour. It’s that dry right now. Anyway.” He shrugged. “I was on my way to Mustang Ridge, smelled the smoke, and figured on the worst case. I’d apologize for overreacting—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I get it. I’ll douse it, and keep the cook fire small from now on.” She stuck her hands in her pockets, suddenly off-balance and feeling like she had already forgotten how to talk to another human being. Especially one that looked like him. “Sorry I clobbered you.”