“I was raised up here. When I wasn’t prospecting with my pa and brother, we were riding. When you’re raised riding up and down country”—she hiked a shoulder and grinned with one side of her mouth—“you learn to ride up and down.”
She stared at him, the gold specks in her eyes glinting. He felt as though she’d just shoved a hand down his pants.
Trying to keep his marbles all in place, he said, “You were gold miners?”
“That’s how my pa started up here. He discovered the Ute Field. But he didn’t know how to develop it, and Geist and Judith came in and squeezed him out. Then they got out of mining, too, when even bigger men came in from back east, and Geist and Judith started buying up plots in town and buildin’ up their own businesses. Includin’ Black Diamond Freighting.”
She gave a sour look as she said that last.
Haskell said, “Sounds like you got quite a bone to pick with Geist and Judith.”
“I’ll say I do,” she said with a slow nod, doing nothing to assuage the Pinkerton’s faint suspicion.
She seemed just fine with remaining in his sphere of suspects. She was about as defiant a girl as Haskell had ever come across. He wasn’t at all sure what to make of her. Could she be a killer?
He got out a fresh Cleopatra Federal and bit the tip off as he walked over to the wreck. The bald eagle had left the mule, but now a couple of magpies were rummaging around in the bones that had likely been scattered by mountain lions, coyotes, and a few wolves, judging by the tracks.
There was the sickly-sweet smell of decay everywhere around the wagon, as flesh didn’t decompose all that fast in the cool, dry air of the high country. To help overcome the stench, and also to enjoy a smoke while he looked around—a Cleopatra always helped him think—Haskell lit the stogie and tossed the match into the shallow stream. One of the magpies flew up onto the top of a broken wheel and gave him a good chastising.
Ignoring the bird, Haskell walked around the ore that appeared to have fallen straight down onto the wagon after the big Pittsburgh freighter had plunged onto its side, half in and half out of the stream. The ore was spread out widely around the wagon, but there was still enough on top of it to cover it. Someday a brave prospector would likely haul it out on pack mules, but so far, it looked as though most of it, at least, remained right here where it had fallen.
Haskell walked a broad, slow circle around the wreck, smoking, scrutinizing the ore and the wagon and the dead mules, and saw no sign of Briar himself. Of course, the man might have fallen a good ways out away from the wagon, but even when Haskell had walked up nearly to the line of the forest, he saw no sign of a human body. Not so much as a boot or a bloody bone. The ore wasn’t deep enough to have kept the predators away from Briar’s carcass.
“Maybe he fell into the stream and the current took him down canyon.” Teddy was standing about twenty yards from the wreck, between the ruined wagon and the forest climbing the northeastern ridge. Obviously, she’d read Haskell’s mind.
“Not unless the stream was higher back when this happened.” Haskell doubted that the water sliding and rippling past him was more than a foot deep at its deepest.
Sucking cigar smoke deep into his lungs and blowing it out through his nose, he looked up at the ridge. The drop wasn’t a thousand feet, but it was close. The ridge wasn’t as sheer as it had looked from above—there were nooks and crannies, slender pillars and thumbs, and shelves from which small pines and some shrubs grew.
Haskell supposed that Briar might have been snagged by one of those. Judging by the angle with which the wagon had dropped, though, landing on the far side of the stream, it was doubtful that the body could have landed anywhere but on the canyon floor.
Haskell glanced at Teddy, who stood with her thumbs in her pockets. “His men heard a shot just before he went over?”
The girl nodded. “That’s how I heard it told.”
“A loud one? Like one made by a big rifle?”
She nudged up one shoulder and then the other. “I think so . . . yeah.”
Just then, the sun fell behind the towering western ridges, and dusk instantly filled the canyon with blue-tinged, oily shadows. The temperature must have dropped another ten degrees in a matter of seconds. Teddy grabbed her arms and shivered, staring up toward the ridge.
“Cold,” she said.
Using his thumbnail, Haskell peeled the coal off his stogie. “No point in startin’ back to town tonight. It’ll be dark as a grave soon.” He looked around for a place to camp. “We’ll spend the night here, start back in the mornin’.”
“You had this planned all along, didn’t you?” Teddy said, giving him a knowing frown.
Haskell looked at her. Her image was soft and lithe in the sudden shadows. Bear grinned.
Later, the firelight shimmered like liquid gold across the girl’s pert breasts.
The tender orbs rose and fell as, straddling Haskell naked, squatting over him with her knees jutting before her and slightly out away from their bodies, she rocked up and down, impaling her sweet cunt over and over again on his swollen, thundering cock.
She leaned forward, pressing her hands against his broad chest to steady herself. As she bounced on her haunches, she gazed at him, and her copper eyes were darker now in the firelight, but the little gold specks in them flashed like bright lights.
“You sure had it planned out good.” She grunted, hardening her jaws, swallowing.
“Yep, I sure did.”
“I want you to know, I . . . I’m not usually so willin’.”
Haskell reached down and ran the index fingers of both hands along the insides of her thighs. Her skin was as creamy-smooth as polished marble. She gave a shudder as she continued to bounce up and down on his staff.
Teddy laughed. “That tickles.”
“Sure as hell does.” Haskell grunted. He had a Cleopatra in his mouth, and he was rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other, trying desperately to hold back the tide of his passion.
Her little pussy clutched at him. He imagined that she had several tiny tongues inside her, licking him, each one ensconcing him in its own hot lather.
“You fuck good, Bear.”
“You’re the one doin’ the work, girl.”
Teddy giggled. She sat down on top of him and swung her left leg over his head, lifting her pussy off of his cock. She twisted around and rolled onto her back on the blankets they’d laid out beside the large fire they’d built against the night’s penetrating chill.
“Hey, where you goin’?” Haskell said.
She plucked the cigar out of his mouth and placed it between her lips. Around it, she said, “Don’t worry, I’m stayin’ right here. Just wanna . . . make it laaast . . .”
She puffed the stogie and pulled it out of her mouth, choking, smoke blowing out of her mouth and nostrils and looking blue and red in the firelight and the starlight. “Them’s potent,” Haskell said.
She gave him back the cigar and snuggled against him, scissoring her bare leg over one of his and reaching down to wrap her hand around his rock-hard shaft. “That’s not the only thing that’s potent out here in these woods tonight. Christ, you keep it up a long time.”
“Not if you keep doin’ what you’re doin’.”
Teddy gave a snort and removed her hand from his cock. Snuggling against him some more, she placed her hand on his flat belly and then walked her fingers very slowly, enticingly, up his chest to his throat. She ran her index finger along first his lower lip and then his upper lip.
“Where you from, Bear?”
“Texas.”
“You fight in the war?”
Haskell nodded. Then he shoved her over onto her back and lapped her tits with his tongue.
“I had a feelin’ you did,” she said softly, her voice girlishly singsong.
“How can you
tell?” he said, tonguing her right nipple.
“You got that kinda owly-crazy look in your eyes. And you fuck like it’s the last time you’ll ever do it.”
“Well, hell,” Haskell said between licks, “you just never know.”
“That feels nice. You got a nice tongue to go along with your nice cock.” Scissoring against him, Teddy scrubbed her hands through his hair. “Who do you think’s doin’ the killin’, Bear?”
Haskell lifted his head and hooked his arms under her legs, spreading them wide. “I don’t believe in mixin’ business with pleasure,” he said, echoing Judith.
She lifted her head and looked down between them at his cock jutting darkly above her belly. She ran her hand down it, pumping him gently. “Still hard.”
“Not for long.”
She laughed and lifted her legs until they hung over his shoulders. He plunged into her. She groaned as though she’d been socked in the belly.
Leaning forward, his body board-straight, propped on his outstretched arms and his toes, he bucked against her, fucking her hard. She groaned and sighed. Her heels bounced against his shoulder blades. She panted and cursed and tugged at his hair and raked her fingernails across the back of his neck until he pulled out and was about to spend himself on her belly.
Before he could, she said, “Wait!” and turned around and faced him on all fours, her head in front of his groin. She took the head of his cock in her mouth and sucked and pumped him dry, until his spend was oozing out of her nose and she was choking so hard he thought she’d drown on his jism.
“Gawd!” she cried when she was finally able to speak, kneeling before him.
Haskell chuckled. “God ain’t nowhere around this canyon tonight!” He chuckled again and scooped her up in his arms and tossed her over his shoulder like a fifty-pound sack of sugar. “Nope, not by a long shot,” he said with a grunt, pushing up off his knees.
“Bear!” Teddy screamed. “What’re you doing?”
“We’re goin’ for a swim!”
“Oh, God, nooooo!”
But she liked it a whole lot better when they were lying in the shallow water and he was cleaning her pussy with handfuls of the frigid liquid, fresh from some high-mountain spring. Teddy shook and shuddered and shivered, but she also groaned in pleasure with every scoop of the water he brought forth between her fine, long legs.
He slid his fingers around the rim of her snatch, tickling her until she flailed her legs, laughing, to make him stop.
When he was done with her, she cleaned him with handfuls of the cold water, both of them shivering together and laughing like children for whom the pleasure of sex was brand-new.
When they could no longer bear the nearly heart-stopping cold, they returned to their camp a few yards up from the stream. Haskell built up the fire and found himself fully aroused again, despite the bone-deep chill.
They made love this time instead of fucking.
And then they fell asleep in each other’s arms. In the morning, they woke to a thundering boom.
Like that made by a large-caliber rifle.
26
The blast was followed by a distant yell and a cacophony of hoarse screams that Haskell recognized as the bellowing of horrified mules.
He’d risen onto his elbows and was looking around, pricking his ears and blinking sleep from his eyes. Teddy had pushed herself up to a sitting position.
There was another yell. It was a man’s horrified scream. Teddy gasped. The bellowing of the mules and a low rumbling, like peals of distant thunder, continued. And that’s what Haskell would have thought the noise was—an approaching storm—if not for the screams and the tooth-gnashing bellows, followed by a loud, crackling roar.
Bear cast his gaze up the ridge on the other side of the stream and then up the forest-carpeted rise beyond the trail, toward where he could see the very top of a bald mountain painted charcoal-gray by the first pearl light of the early dawn. The sky around and above the ridge was one shade lighter than purple, with a single star resting just above the ridge and to the right, twinkling dimly.
There was another cannonlike blast. It echoed around the mountains and the forest surrounding the canyon, and Haskell said, “That tears it!” and he swept the blanket off of him and Teddy and heaved to his feet.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Teddy said, bounding to her feet and, like Haskell, scrambling around to retrieve her clothes, scattered when they’d fairly ripped them off each other the night before.
“Don’t know if it is or it ain’t, but it sure sounds like a big gun!” Haskell said, hopping around on one bare foot, trying to shove his right leg into the bottoms of his longhandles.
“Bear!” Teddy was staring at him, her jeans clutched to her naked breasts.
“What?”
She turned to stare up the canyon wall in the direction from which the noise had come—noise that had suddenly, ominously, gone silent. “The North Star is on the backside of that highest peak.”
Haskell was breathless, dressing. “So it is.”
“My brother and our hired man are making a run down from there this morning.” She said it quietly, her voice as ominous as the silence now raining down on them.
Haskell paused and glanced in the same direction she was. Then he continued gathering his duds and pulling them on. Knowing there was nothing that he could say to reassure her, he merely walked over to her, wearing only his longhandles, socks, and gray trousers, and pressed his lips to her forehead.
He wrapped his hands around her bare upper arms. “Get dressed. We’ll ride up and check it out.”
When he had finished dressing, he quickly kicked dirt onto the fire he’d kept going all night so that he and Teddy, sleeping naked, didn’t freeze to death. Then they both wasted no time saddling their horses, mounting up, and galloping down the canyon the way they’d come.
It took them more than an hour to get back up the ridge via the gorge, both having to lead their mounts on the steep, switchbacking slope. When they finally gained the crest, Teddy started to swing up into her saddle, but Haskell grabbed her, convinced her they had to wait at least a couple of minutes to let the horses blow.
A half hour later, they were following a game trail up the side of a mountain through gold-leafed aspens and spruce trees. For a long time, they’d heard nothing from the direction of the apparent wreck, but now, as they rode farther to the northwest, Haskell could hear men’s voices.
They gained the crest of the ridge and stared down the other side. A wagon trail came down from the northwest to disappear over the shoulder of the mountain that Haskell and Teddy were on, far to their right. A large wagon and its hitch of ten mules stood in the trail at the point where the trail dropped down over the slope and into the woods.
A tall man in overalls and a floppy black hat stood up near the lead mules, his back to Haskell and Teddy. He held one hand on the lead mule’s halter as he stared down the slope to the east. A black-and-white collie dog pranced around nervously about ten feet to the man’s right.
Teddy gasped, as though she recognized the mule skinner, and booted her pinto into a gallop down the slope, the pinto lunging hard and grunting each time its front hooves ground into the slope’s thin, gravelly soil. Haskell touched spurs to the black’s flanks and followed Teddy down to where she reined up near the big wagon with its tandem mountain wheels caked with clay and leaped down from the saddle.
The collie barked and ran toward her, wagging its tail. “Not now, Buck,” Teddy told the dog, and ran up to the tall man who had turned toward her, staring at her with a vague befuddlement, flushing sheepishly.
“Sonny!” Teddy cried. “Where’s Burt?”
She hauled up beside the man to stare down the slope through the aspens.
“He’s down there, Miss Teddy,” said the big mule skinner called Sonny, who had a blank cast to
his gaze. Likely a simpleton. Many mule skinners were. It took simple men to do such hard, tedious, dangerous work, especially in country with a man gunning for them.
“Those son o’ bitches!”
She started running down the slope, but Haskell grabbed her. If her brother was down there at the bottom of the mountain and under a wagonload of ore, she didn’t need to see it.
As the collie barked and ran around Haskell, Teddy, and Sonny, the mule skinner said, “Oh, he’s all right, Miss Teddy—Burt is.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Haskell wanted to know, his hand still wrapped around Teddy’s arm.
“We heard the shot and the mules screaming,” the girl said, sliding a lock of hair out of her eyes.
“Yeah, the killer—he got ’im another one, sure enough. One of Pink’s wagons went off the Fancy Lady trail down yonder.”
Sonny pointed straight down the long slope. Through the fluttering aspens, Haskell could make out another freight trail below, about fifty yards out on the bench beyond the forest. Two wagons were stalled on the trail, sitting about fifty yards apart.
Sonny said, “Burt went down to check it out. His wagon’s down the hill a ways. He was ahead of me when we heard the shot and the wagon go over that cliff yonder.”
Haskell went back to the black and slid his Winchester from its saddle scabbard. Racking a cartridge into the action, he said, “Teddy you stay here with Sonny.”
He didn’t want her exposed to the killer, who might still be on the prowl in this neck of the mountains, but he knew even as he’d said it that she wouldn’t listen. He’d taken two strides down the slope when he heard her boots drumming and crunching grass and leaves behind him.
Haskell cursed under his breath. Oh, well. Just because he’d fucked her didn’t put him in charge of her safety. Thinking of that made him wonder vaguely about Raven . . .
They moved down through the trees and across the sloping bench carpeted in low sage, rocks, and little frost-heaved hummocks that made for hard walking. The air up here—probably eleven, twelve thousand feet above sea level—was thin. Haskell could feel the lightness in his head.
High and Wild Page 20
