Caleb’s mouth flattened. He knew what Wolfe wasn’t saying—Jed Slater was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted in the most efficient manner possible. His reputation for applied cruelty had been earned during a particularly cruel war.
Wolfe looked at Caleb’s harsh expression and knew what the other man was thinking. Hesitating, knowing he shouldn’t, Wolfe nonetheless found himself asking the question that had eaten at him since the first moment he had realized who Slater’s men were pursuing.
“How did you get separated from Willow?” Wolfe asked.
Caleb said nothing.
Reno swore and admitted, “She wrapped her stud’s feet in cloth and sneaked out of the valley.”
There was silence while Wolfe thought about what Reno had said.
“She got past both of you,” Wolfe said finally.
“Yes.”
“Be damned.” He sighed. “Any idea why she took off?”
Reno didn’t wait for Caleb to speak. “Willow thinks Caleb seduced her to get even for me seducing Caleb’s sister.”
“Bloody hell,” Wolfe said, shocked into using a kind of English he had sworn to forget. “Why did—”
“The horses have rested enough,” Caleb interrupted. “Let’s ride.”
Without waiting to see if the other men would follow, Caleb touched spurs to his horse, sending it forward at a fast canter. A minute later, Wolfe passed him, taking the lead. Nothing more was said until Wolfe signalled for a halt.
“We have to leave the horses here,” Wolfe said.
While Reno tied the horses out of sight, Caleb pulled off his boots and switched to moccasins. Wolfe started up the steep shoulder of a ridge that poked out into the grassland. When all three men were belly down just below the crest, they took off their hats and crawled up the last few feet.
Slater’s camp was at the bottom of the slope, a thousand feet away. There was little cover on the slope itself, for it was too steep and too rocky for anything to survive except bits of grass and scattered, very stunted trees. The only other approach to the camp was up a grassy meadow where ten hobbled horses were grazing and five horses were being slowly walked while lather dried after their long, exhausting run.
Ishmael was one of the horses. Though they had been walked for half an hour already, it would be at least another half hour before they were cool enough to be turned out with the other horses. Then Slater would come back and begin questioning Willow.
Before that happened, Willow had to be gone.
Taking care that no sunlight flashed off the spyglass, Caleb searched until he found Willow. She was off to one side of the camp, tied hand and foot among the supplies. Her arms were pulled awkwardly behind her back. A rope went from her wrists, around a waist-high stump, and from there to her ankles.
Ten feet behind her, a man lay propped against a saddle, cutting his fingernails with a pocket knife. His face looked like he had tangled with a wildcat.
Willow straightened. The movement caught Caleb’s eye. For a moment, the hair on her cheeks slid aside, revealing the livid marks of a man’s hand. A stillness came over Caleb for the space of one breath, two, three. He took a long look at the guard. Only then did Caleb resume quartering the area around Slater’s camp, marking out the positions of other men, of available cover, of possible ambush sites.
While Caleb used the spyglass, Wolfe talked in a low voice that carried no farther than the men who were stretched out on either side of him. “If Slater follows his wartime practice, there will be a man guarding Willow and another guard about thirty yards out from camp where you’d least expect it. At the first sign of trouble, both guards will shoot Willow.”
“I saw a man in the rocks off to the right,” Caleb said softly. “I’ll take care of him on the way in.” He collapsed the spyglass and handed it to Reno. “Same for the man close to her, the one with the scratched face. I’ll take particularly good care of him.”
Reno scanned the slope and the approaches to the camp while Caleb took off his heavy coat and made certain his six-gun was secured in the holster.
“You can’t get close to them without being spotted,” Reno said finally, lowering the spyglass. “And if you shoot them, Willow will be the next to die. We’ll have to wait until dark.”
“Slater isn’t a patient man,” Caleb said. “I’m not going to sit here and watch him ask questions and then cut her to ribbons with his steel-tipped quirt when she doesn’t answer. That’s what he did in Mexico when a woman wouldn’t tell him where her husband was.”
Wolfe’s powerful hand damped around Reno’s arm, holding him down when he would have surged upright. “Easy, Reno. Cal likes it even less than you do, but he’s right. If anyone can get Willow out of that camp alive, he can.”
“Here,” Caleb said, handing over his rifle to Wolfe. “Cartridges are in my jacket pocket. At this range, the gun pulls about a half-inch to the left. Willow and I might be in your line of fire for the first fifty feet. After that, I’m taking her up the ravine at the rear of camp. When we’re over the top, we’ll go to ground and wait for you to bring the horses to us.”
Wolfe nodded and began sighting over the rifle, getting the feel of the new weapon.
Caleb turned to Reno. “How quiet are you on a stalk?”
“He’s better than most and not as good as you,” Wolfe said before Reno could answer. “But then, neither am I, and I was raised among the Cheyenne.”
Caleb grunted. “Reno, you can stay up here with your rifle or you can come part of the way with me and we’ll find out how slick you really are with that six-gun.”
Reno smiled wolfishly. “I’ll be stepping on your heels every bit of the way.”
He was talking to himself. Caleb was already moving. Stalking human game took time, and they had damn little of that left before Slater came back into camp.
WILLOW looked out from behind her screen of hair, saw that the horses were still being walked, and went back to trying to get out of the ropes that bound her. Desperate to be free, yet worried about attracting attention from her guard, she jerked and yanked at the bonds under cover of her long hair. Pain raked up from her wrists. Fear helped her to ignore the hurt. She never wanted to see the cruel promise in Slater’s eyes again. The Comanchero Nine Fingers had made her feel unclean.
Slater horrified her.
Despite Willow’s efforts, the ropes felt no looser now than they had when she first began twisting her wrists until the skin was rubbed raw. Fighting the despair that threatened to overwhelm her, she jerked first one wrist, then the other, hoping if she made herself bleed, her wrists and hands would be slippery enough to evade the tight bonds.
A glance at the guard told Willow that he must have finished hacking at his fingernails. He was lying on his back, his mouth open, dead asleep.
Willow began yanking openly on her bonds, taking advantage of the guard’s midday nap.
“Don’t move, honey. I don’t want to cut you.”
For an instant, Willow thought she had gone mad and was hearing things. Then she felt her bonds giving way and had to bite back a cry of relief and joy.
“Ease your ankles around to the right,” Caleb said in a voice that was barely audible.
There was a soft rustling sound as Willow inched her feet around toward the back of the stump. For a moment she felt a sensation of pressure on her ankles, followed by a slight rocking motion. The rope at her ankles fell away.
“Back up slowly until you’re behind the stump. No! Don’t watch the camp. That’s my job. You watch what you’re doing.”
Willow scooted in slow motion until the stump was between her and the camp. Caleb was lying on his stomach, his body flat to the ground.
“Lie down real slow and crawl like a snake past me toward that little crease in the grass. See it?”
She nodded, lay down, and began wriggling along Caleb’s length. When her head drew even with his chest, he gave her more terse directions, his voice so low she wondered if she
was really hearing the words at all.
“The crease leads to a gully that’s about a foot deep. Go left and keep snaking along uphill until you get to the rocks. Your brother is on the left, behind them. Whatever you do, keep down. Reno and Wolfe will have to shoot over us if we’re spotted.”
Willow wanted to ask questions, but a look at the bleak yellow clarity of Caleb’s eyes closed her throat. She ducked her head and pushed herself forward on her stomach, feeling as exposed as an egg on a fence rail. Each time she looked up to see how far she was from the gully, it seemed that she had made no progress at all. But if she started to go faster, Caleb’s hand clamped around her ankle, forcing her to go so slowly she wanted to scream with frustration and fear.
When Willow finally reached the gully, she discovered that it provided scant cover. Less than a foot deep, with wide, shallow, gently sloping sides, the gully was little better than grass when it came to hiding Willow and Caleb. The rocks he had mentioned were more than a hundred feet away. Willow put her cheek dose to the ground and pushed herself along with arms that were trembling from the strain of moving so slowly and so awkwardly.
They were fifty feet from the rocks when one of Slater’s men glanced over and discovered Willow was missing.
18
T HE shout of discovery was cut off in mid-cry when Wolfe opened up with Caleb’s rifle, raking the camp with bullets. Caleb threw himself over Willow, protecting her in the only way he could. Fifty feet up the ravine, Reno began firing his six-gun. The bullets came so rapidly it was hard to separate the sound of each shot. Other shots came from the camp, pistols and rifles all mixed together in an unholy barrage.
Flattened against the earth, frightened, barely able to breathe, Willow felt Caleb’s big body jerk and heard him curse. More shouts came, more gunfire, bullets whining and thudding into the ground nearby, but she could see nothing, for Caleb covered her completely.
Abruptly, Reno’s six-gun fell silent. The repeating rifle didn’t. It continued to lay down a withering hail of bullets.
“Run for it!” Reno shouted.
The words had barely registered on Willow when Caleb yanked her upright and half-carried, half-dragged her toward the rocks. Reno was crouched to one side of the shallow gully, slamming a second, fully loaded cylinder into his revolver. Willow and Caleb hurtled past Reno as the repeating rifle finally fell silent.
Immediately, Reno opened fire once more, giving Wolfe time to reload. This time the shots came more slowly as Reno coolly picked off men who were foolish enough to stick up their heads to see what was happening. The range was extreme for a handgun, but Reno was extremely good with the weapon.
“Up that ravine,” Caleb said curtly to Willow as he stood behind her and pointed her toward a dry watercourse that angled away from the ridge where Wolfe was. “When you reach the trees, go about a hundred feet, then get behind some cover and stay there until we catch up. Now run.”
Willow scrambled forward just as the repeating rifle began firing once more. Caleb waited to see if she would keep going as directed. To his surprise, she did. He turned and started giving terse orders to Reno.
“I’ll keep them down while you reload,” Caleb said, “but you damn well better be able to do it on the run.”
“You’re wounded,” Reno said without looking away from the camp. “I’ll stay.”
“It’s not my shooting arm. Get going.”
Reno spotted a man’s boot poking out from among the supplies in the camp. “All right. Get ready.”
While Caleb drew his six-gun, Reno sighted on the nearly hidden boot. He squeezed off his last shot, turned, and began shucking spent cases from his six-gun as he ran up the ravine after Willow.
Caleb had already chosen his target. As soon as Reno turned toward the ravine, Caleb opened fire. The bullet sent one of Slater’s men scrambling for a better hiding spot. From the far side of the camp, someone opened up on them with a rifle. The rapid barking of the shots told Caleb it was a repeating rifle. Bullets whined and sang off the rock just below him. Instantly, return fire came from Wolfe’s position, forcing the other rifleman to keep his head down.
Another rifle opened up. It, too, was a repeating rifle. Caleb squeezed off two more shots and counted the times the other rifles fired without pausing. Eight for one, nine for the other. They weren’t the same model or kind as his own rifle, which meant Slater’s men carried less in the magazine and were much slower to reload.
“Ready!” called Reno.
Caleb turned and ran as fast as he could up the ravine. He didn’t bother trying to reload while he went, for his left hand was slippery with blood. He passed Reno, went on another hundred feet, reloaded, and yelled at Reno to withdraw. Working together smoothly, both retreated into the cover of the trees.
Willow was nowhere in sight.
“Find her and get her over the rise,” Caleb said curtly to Reno. “It opens out on the other side. Wolfe will be able to bring the horses right to you.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll cover your backtrail until you get Willow over the rise. Now move!”
There was no time to waste arguing and Reno knew it. They had taken Slater by surprise. That advantage was rapidly evaporating. Slater’s repeating rifles weren’t as good as the one Wolfe was using, but there were two rifles against one. There were also ten men, minus the two guards and whatever Wolfe had done in the way of damage.
However Reno added it up, the advantage was on Slater’s side.
Reno turned and raced into the trees, calling softly to his sister. Willow stood up a hundred feet ahead of him. He ran to her and hustled her up the ravine much as Caleb had—half-dragging and half-carrying her. By the time they reached its head and climbed out into an area of mixed grass and trees, she was breathing as hard as she had going over the Great Divide. Reno was breathing almost as hard.
“Stand with your back to me and keep your eyes open,” Reno ordered.
Fighting for breath, Willow watched uneasily, her glance darting from shadow to shadow. Nothing was visible but clumps of aspen and patches of grass, the forerunners of the basin that lapped at the forested peaks. Gradually her breathing slowed. Time crawled while she strained to separate natural sounds from those that might be made by men sneaking up on her. In the distance she heard rifle fire, but no six-guns.
Finally a wolf’s harmonic cry floated up from behind Willow.
“Don’t shoot!” she said urgently. “It’s Caleb!”
“I never shoot at anything I can’t see,” Reno said calmly. “Come on in, Yuma man. Willy, watch the damned meadow!”
Hastily, she turned around and looked at the empty land, feeling her brother’s back like a wall behind her.
It’s just as well, Willow told herself unhappily. I don’t really want to see Caleb look at me with those cold yellow eyes and know that duty made him risk his life for me.
The thought of how exposed he had been coming into camp chilled her. She hadn’t even had time to thank him but that, too, was just as well. From the look in his eyes back at the valley, he didn’t want anything at all from her.
Let me know when you feel like being treated like my woman. Then I’ll let you know if I still feel like being your man.
“Anyone coming?” Reno asked.
“No,” Caleb and Willow said simultaneously.
“Good. How do you feel about blood, Willy? Does it make you faint?”
“Not since I turned thirteen.”
“Then switch places and go to work patching up your future husband while I watch the meadow.”
For an instant, Willow didn’t understand. When she did, she spun around and stared at Caleb, who was standing less than two feet away from her. The breath rushed out of her with a low sound as she saw blood spreading in a ragged, crimson sleeve down his left arm.
“Caleb, my God…” she said shakily.
“Don’t faint, southern lady. You’re no use to me passed out on the ground.”
“Here,” Caleb said. He reached behind his back, where he had moved his knife sheath to make crawling easier. “You’ll need this.”
With a hand that trembled, Willow took the big knife. When she saw the blood on it, she looked up quickly at Caleb, wondering if he had another wound she couldn’t see.
“Not my blood,” Caleb said.
Willow drew a deep breath and said nothing.
“Disappointed?” he asked sardonically.
She flinched subtly, then took a firm grasp on the knife and put the tip of the blade beneath his cuff. “Hold still.”
“Don’t worry, southern lady. I’m not going to give you an excuse to cut me up any worse than I already am.”
The fabric gave way easily before the lethally sharp knife. Willow peeled the sleeve aside to reveal the wound high on Caleb’s arm. Her teeth sank into her lower lip as she saw the crimson stripe where a bullet had gouged a furrow across his bicep.
“Oh, Caleb,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“You ought to be,” he said flatly. “You and your girlish notions about love damn near got us all killed.”
Willow looked at Caleb, then looked away quickly. His eyes were those of a bird of prey, intent and merciless. He had never looked more like what he was…dark angel of retribution.
Nothing had changed. Nothing would. Nothing could. She had fallen in love with a man who knew only the cold balance of right and wrong, duty and necessity. But she had her own ideas of right and wrong, duty and necessity. None of them included forcing a man into marriage simply because her brother was appallingly quick with his six-gun.
“You aren’t the only one with a sense of duty,” Willow said. She turned to Caleb’s other arm and slipped the knife beneath the cuff. When she spoke, her voice was as raw as the sound of the cloth being ripped into strips with vicious jerks of her hands. “I couldn’t stand by and watch you being forced into marriage with me just because Matt happens to be so damned quick with his gun!”
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