Caleb’s smile offered neither comfort nor real humor. “Back East and in California, other men already own the good land. Not here. Here a man can have as much good land as he’s willing to fight for. I’m not a bad fighter, Willow, and not a bad hand with cattle, either.”
“Is that what you want—to homestead land here and be a rancher?”
Caleb nodded absently, again watching the country rather than the woman who was watching him.
“You can find some mountains and parks like these a few days south of the San Juan country,” he said. “The grazing is fine, but you’d be combing Apaches and Comanches out of your hair every sunrise, and your cattle would have more arrows than a porcupine has quills. Not much pleasure in that, or profit.”
For the space of several breaths Willow looked at the land, then back at the hard-faced man who was watching every shift of breeze through forest and grass, his clear gaze sifting each motion to find one made by man. Or rather, men.
Comancheros.
Uneasiness prickled through Willow. She hadn’t expected the West to be civilized, but she hadn’t really understood what such a total lack of civilization meant, either. In some ways it was rather like being at war. Constant vigilance was needed, for inattention could be fatal. That didn’t bother Willow greatly, for she had become used to living on edge during the war. She had become good at listening for sounds, at sleeping lightly, at sliding away into the forest with her mother at the first hint of danger.
But this wide, wild, extraordinary land wasn’t like her farm. Here she was dependent on Caleb’s strength, fighting skills, and knowledge in a way that frightened her.
He warned me it would be like this, Willow told herself. He told me in plain English.
She shivered as the echoes of a past conversation whispered through her mind once more. Where I’m taking you there’s no law at all. Out in those mountains a man takes care of himself because no one else will do it for him.
And a woman? What does she do?
A woman finds a man tough enough to protect her and the kids she’ll bear him.
It seemed far more than a handful of days since Willow had heard and disregarded Caleb’s warning, thinking that whatever lay ahead couldn’t be more dangerous than the war she had already survived. It seemed a lifetime since she had ridden out of Denver’s rude comforts into a land that grew more wild with each westward step.
Yet, even knowing that, she wouldn’t have traded one of those steps for the safety of the East she had left. Despite the danger, there was something in the wild horizons of the Rockies that lifted her heart and made her soul sing.
Willow closed her eyes and absorbed the small sounds of the land around her. One of the horses snorted and stamped. A saddle creaked as Caleb shifted his weight. A bird called off in the meadow. There was no smell of smoke, of sawn lumber, of turned earth. The breeze carried scents untainted by man, becoming a river of life rushing softly around her, caressing her.
“Damn it, Willow, I said I would be back. Don’t you believe me?”
Startled, she opened her eyes. “Of course I believe you.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, smiling almost sadly. “Not the way you mean. It’s just that…” Her voice faded. “Suddenly I realized that I love this clean, wild land, even if it isn’t very safe.” She smiled with lips that wanted to tremble. “The idea takes a little getting used to.”
Caleb studied Willow with a sudden, fierce intensity, but said only, “If you wanted to be safe, you should have stayed home.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I know. Don’t worry, Caleb. Whatever happens is on my head, not yours. I might not have known what I was coming to, but I knew what I was leaving behind.”
Caleb waited.
Willow said nothing more. She simply looked out over the land and measured the bittersweet pleasure of having realized part of her dream of finding a new home, only to discover that the land might not be possible for a woman living alone. It wasn’t like the more gently made country of her childhood. Yet the gentle land had been ravaged beyond her ability to bring it back.
“What are you thinking?” Caleb asked quietly.
“I was tired of the wounded, worn land,” Willow said slowly. “I wanted to see the Mississippi rolling broad-shouldered down to an unknown ocean. I wanted to see a treeless plain stretching from horizon to horizon with buffalo a great brown river winding through shoulder-high grass. I wanted to see the Rockies thrown like a magnificent stone gauntlet across the plains.”
Willow’s voice faded as she thought of other things she had wanted, to see a face that was kin to her or at least not enemy, to see her favorite brother, to laugh with him, to remember a time when she wasn’t alone. She wanted…She shook her head slowly, for she wanted things that had no words, simply a longing as deep as her soul and as endless as night.
Slowly, Willow let out her breath and accepted that, whatever happened, she was more alive here than she would have been in West Virginia. Nothing had ever called to her in quite the way the mountain landscape did, except the man who rode beside her. Like the mountain, Caleb was hard, unexpected, often baffling. And like the mountains, being with him offered moments of warmth and wild beauty. She turned and smiled gently at him.
“Go do what you must,” Willow said softly. “I’m all right now.”
Caleb hesitated before he pulled a big pocket watch from his pants and handed it to Willow. “Give me fifteen minutes head start. Then come on at a smart trot.”
Willow’s fingers tightened around the watch. The metal was smooth, burnished, and radiated the heat of Caleb’s body into her cold hand. Memories exploded in her, memories of being kissed, of his beard brushing against her sensitive skin, of his powerful body molded to hers, of his hand between her legs, shocking and caressing her in the same searing instant. Sensations rippled through her, making her tremble.
To have come so close with both the land and the man, and then to know how easily both could be lost…Willow bit her lip and bowed her head.
“Don’t worry,” Caleb said, moved despite himself by Willow’s fear and her fight against giving in to it. “I won’t be far off. If you hear gunfire, go to ground and wait for me to find you.”
“What if—what if you don’t?”
“I will. I didn’t live this long to be killed by some no-account, drunken Comanchero.”
Caleb tugged his hat down and lifted the reins. His big horse moved off at a canter, leaving Willow alone. Motionless, she watched while Caleb cast for sign along the left side of the clearing, working back and forth until he vanished in a depression in the wide, gently rolling park. He reappeared a few minutes later, only to drop from sight once more.
When the fifteen minutes were up, Willow drew the shotgun from its scabbard, laid the weapon across her lap, and started down the lefthand side of the basin at a hard trot. The horses strung out behind her, prodded by Ishmael to keep the pace.
It was two hours before Caleb rejoined Willow and rode by her side through the grass at the edge of the forest. The land was still open, still spacious, a wide, wide river of grass flowing between lofty dams of stone.
“See anything?” she asked.
“Tracks,” he said succinctly. “Four horses. One shod. They’re either hunting deer, hunting us, or hunting someone else.”
“How can you tell?”
“They were doing the same thing I was doing—casting around for sign.”
“Where are they now?”
“They split two and two. One set of tracks cut to the left behind us. The other cut off to the right along a branch of the river. There’s a good pass at the head of that branch. If it weren’t for those two gunnies, I’d have brought us in that way. It’s closer to where we’re going. As it is, we’ll go over the divide in a few days.”
“The Great Divide?” Willow asked breathlessly.
Caleb smiled at her excitement. “Comancheros crawling all ove
r and you hardly turn a hair, but you get excited over one more mountain pass.”
“All my life the rivers have gone to the Atlantic Ocean. To see water that’s going to the Pacific…” Willow laughed with delight. “I know it’s foolish, but I can’t help it. I grew up with letters from my brothers telling me about China, where a whole city is made of dhows tied together in the harbor, and the Sandwich Isles, where the waves are bigger than the barn before the rebels burned it, and Australia, where there’s an ocean reef bigger than the Thirteen Colonies put together, and all I ever saw was West Virginia sunrises, chickens scratching in the kitchen garden, and a haze over the hills.”
Caleb grinned, intrigued by Willow’s excitement. “Sounds like wanderlust runs in your family. No wonder you had the gumption to come looking for your fancy man when he wrote for you.”
“I’d have come anyway,” Willow admitted. “I couldn’t bear home anymore. There was nothing left but memories of a better time.”
Willow fell silent after that. Caleb didn’t try to lure her into more conversation. It was safer that way, both for his alertness and for keeping the distance he knew was necessary between himself and Reno’s woman. It was far too easy to like Willow, to enjoy her laughter and her silences, to remember what it had been like to feel her body soften and turn to warm, sweet honey in his arms.
Fancy woman. That’s all she is. Sweet Jesus, why can’t I remember that when I look at her? Why is she under my skin and in my blood?
The answer was as simple and as indelible as the instant his hand had slid between thin layers of cotton and felt the sultry woman heat of her licking over his fingertips. He had never had a woman want him that much, that fast, that hot. The memory of it hardened him in a bittersweet rush, leaving him achingly aware of just how much a man he could be with a woman like Willow Moran.
Caleb wrenched his attention from what he couldn’t have to the huge mountain park spreading away on three sides. From time to time he slowed the pace to a walk and checked their position against the peaks. Once he took a compass, a pencil, and his father’s frayed, leatherbound journal from his saddlebags. After a few minutes he drew out his own journal. He compared the compass readings with the lines he had written three years ago, compared his drawing with the peaks to the left, and nodded. Although he had not ridden this side of the peaks before, he knew where he was.
“Where are we headed?” Willow asked, coming alongside.
It was the first word either of them had spoken in several hours. Neither one had found the silence uncomfortable. They were accustomed to their own company.
“You tell me,” Caleb said dryly. “The San Juans are south and west of us. We could go pretty much straight south between ranges for a few days and cut across just north of San Luis peak. Or we could go over the divide west of here and then go south. Or we could do a little of both.”
“Which is quicker?”
He shrugged. “Going south might be easier but would take longer. Going west would be easy for a day, then there’s a long climb over the divide and some zigzagging on the other side. Depends on whether your man really is on one of the Gunnison’s tributaries or if maybe he’s on the Animas or the Dolores or the San Miguel or any of ten other rivers worth naming.”
Willow hesitated. “The Gunnison is the only river Matt mentioned, but I’m not sure he’s on a direct tributary. He did say there’s a hot spring and a creek and a high, tiny valley surrounded by mountain peaks except for a really steep climb to the entrance.”
Caleb made a sound of disgust. “You’ve just described the whole damned San Juan region. Mountains and hot springs. Hell, there are hot springs all around us now and we’re not even there yet.”
“What about the valley?”
“It’s called a hanging valley and the Rockies are full of them.”
“A hanging valley?” she asked, frowning. “What’s that?”
“See that ridge off to the right, on the same line as the beaver pond?”
“Yes.”
“Look straight up from there.”
After a minute Willow said, “All I can see is a cascade jumping down the mountain.”
“That’s it. Hanging valleys are hidden, but the creeks that drain them aren’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
Caleb frowned. “It’s like someone broke a valley in half or quarters, set each piece like a stairstep up the mountainside, and then strung them together with a creek. Since there’s no exit or entrance to the valleys but a waterfall or a steep cascade, and they overhang the park below, they’re called hanging valleys. Good places to graze cattle in the summer, if you can find a way to get cows into them. Hell in the winter, though. Snow comes early, piles deep, and stays late.”
Willow thought about it, then shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like Matt. He hated cold weather.”
“Is he a farmer?”
“If he were, he would have stayed in West Virginia ,” Willow said dryly. “We—that is, the Moran family—owned several big farms before the war.”
“Is he a cattleman?”
She shook her head.
“Trapper?”
She shook her head again.
Caleb grunted. “I hear there’s gold in some of those high creeks.”
Willow flinched.
“God above,” Caleb said in disgust. “I should have known. Your fancy man is whoring after gold.”
She said nothing.
“Well, that explains it,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Why he left you,” Caleb said succinctly. “A man obsessed by yellow metal doesn’t give a damn for anything else—not wife, not child, nothing but the golden bitch.”
And least of all would he care for an innocent girl who gave her love and her body with never a thought for the future, Caleb thought grimly. Poor little Rebecca. She never had a chance.
“Matt isn’t like that,” Willow said.
“Then why did he leave you alone so long that you forgot how to kiss a man? He should have come and gotten you when the war started,” Caleb said flatly, “and you know it as well as I do.”
There were other thoughts as well, ones he didn’t dare speak aloud. If Reno had been with Willow during the war, he wouldn’t have been in New Mexico, seducing my sister. He would have had his own fancy lady to take care of his lusts.
The condemnation in Caleb’s face was clear to Willow. She flushed, but said nothing. If she had been Matt’s wife, what Caleb said would have been true. But she was only Matt’s sister. Like his brothers, Matt had been gone more than ten years with just a few brief visits in between travels. He had no ties to North or South. He was owned by his love of the uninhabited West and the gold that winked like captured sunlight in wild mountain streams.
Silence returned until Caleb reined in abruptly, brought the spyglass to his eye, and swore viciously under his breath. He scanned the countryside all around but saw no other men. The two he had spotted cantered toward him openly, making no attempt to conceal their presence.
“What is it?” Willow asked after a moment.
“Comancheros. Two of them. Get out the shotgun. Don’t make a fuss about it, but keep it pointed between the two men. If they split up, you keep track of the one on the left. If he goes for a gun, give him both barrels and be quick about it. Hear me?”
“Yes,” Willow said tightly. “But I—I’ve never shot a man.”
Caleb’s smile was like a knife sliding from its sheath. “Don’t worry, southern lady. These aren’t men. They’re coyotes jumping around on their crooked hind legs.”
He pulled the rifle from its saddle scabbard, slipped the thong from his six-shooter, and waited. Nothing else was said while they watched the riders grow from pea-sized dots to life size. Willow thought the Comancheros were going to gallop right over them, but at the last minute they reined in so sharply that their ponies sat hard on their hocks.
The ponies were small, unshod, and thin as slats. De
spite that, they weren’t sweating or breathing hard from their long gallop through the meadow. Like the horses, the men were small, wiry, tough, and of mixed blood. The men were also dirty, edgy, and heavily armed. The man on the right was blond and blue-eyed beneath months of grime. The man on the left was mestizo.
From twenty feet away, the blue-eyed man called out, “Ola, Man from Yuma.”
“I see you, Nine Fingers,” Caleb said. “You’re a long way from where we last met.”
The Comanchero smiled, revealing one tooth of gold above and one black gap below. He looked at Willow. The blunt lust in his eyes made her skin cold.
“How much for her?” Nine Fingers asked.
“She’s not for sale.”
“I’ll give you a fat poke of gold.”
“No.”
Nine Fingers gave Willow another long appraisal. “Then how about I just rent her for a time?”
Caleb shifted slightly in the saddle. When Nine Fingers looked away from Willow, there was a six-shooter in Caleb’s right hand and a rifle in his left. At this range, the pistol was the more deadly of the two weapons.
“You’re a mite jumpy,” Nine Fingers said.
“Yes.”
Caleb’s voice was mild despite the rage tightening his gut. No woman, even one who was no better than she had to be, deserved what was in Nine Fingers’ pale blue eyes. The thought of the Comanchero even looking at Willow, much less touching her with his filthy hands, made Caleb’s finger tighten on the six-gun’s trigger.
“Well, I guess I would be edgy, too, was I riding shotgun on a prime piece of woman-flesh and seven prime pieces of horseflesh.”
The other Comanchero spoke abruptly to Caleb. “You want Reno? I see him. I take you.”
“No thanks. I’m on another job right now.”
Nine Fingers laughed gutturally and said something to his friend about the Man from Yuma riding a yellow-haired pony harder and longer than a white-eyes fleeing Comancheros.
Caleb looked quickly at Willow, wondering if she understood the mixture of coarse Spanish and Indian words. Her expression hadn’t changed.
“Seeing as how we’re amigos, how about we ride that yellow pony for you,” offered Nine Fingers in English, spurring his horse closer as he spoke. “Then you’ll have time to chase Reno.”
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