They were down in a hollow and couldn’t see very far. Scratch heeled his horse into a faster pace, and Cara did likewise. The smell of smoke grew stronger in the air as they trotted toward a rise about a quarter of a mile away.
By the time they reached the top of that rise, Scratch wasn’t surprised to see clouds of gray smoke billowing into the air in the distance. Both riders reined in sharply, and Cara exclaimed, “Damn it!”
“I reckon that was the way we were goin’?” Scratch asked as he nodded toward the smoke.
“That’s the right direction,” Cara said. “What I can’t tell is how far away the fire is. I think it’s on the other side of the hideout.”
“Maybe so, but the wind’s blowin’ it this way mighty fast. You reckon we can get to the cave and get out before the fire reaches it?”
“I don’t know,” Cara said, “but I sure as hell intend to try.”
She leaned forward in the saddle, jabbed her boot heels into the flanks of Bo’s horse, and sent the animal lunging forward in a gallop.
“Cara!” Scratch shouted after her. “Dadgum it, come back here!”
She ignored him and kept riding. For a second, Scratch pondered pulling out his Winchester and trying to shoot the horse out from under her. He decided against it because he wasn’t going to do that to Bo’s horse, for one thing, and for another it wasn’t easy to hit a target moving that fast. He might kill Cara with the shot instead.
And maybe she was right, he thought. It was difficult to judge distances where smoke was concerned. That blaze could be fifteen miles away, maybe even more. They might be able to reach the hideout, retrieve the loot, and then flee ahead of the flames. It was worth a try, at least until he had a better idea how close the fire really was.
With that decision made, Scratch sent his own mount galloping after Cara’s.
She was a good rider, and she maintained the short lead over him as she raced along draws, over ridges, and around jutting piles of rock. The pillar of smoke in the distance had climbed high enough into the sky that it was visible even when they were riding over lower terrain. The gray column stood out in sharp, menacing contrast to the bright blue sky. Scratch thought it was a little wider, too, which meant the leading edge of the fire was spreading out and growing broader.
The air was so dry it tasted like dust in his mouth. That, combined with the high winds and the dead vegetation, was a recipe for pure, unadultered hell.
Up on the Great Plains, Scratch had witnessed a number of prairie fires, and they could be awesome in their destructiveness. Nothing was a match, though, for a Texas wildfire with its sheer deadly speed. The only natural disaster Scratch could think of that was close to a wildfire’s equal was a tornado, and even those usually weren’t as bad because their paths of devastation weren’t as broad.
As they came out on the lip of a rise overlooking a valley, Cara hauled back on the reins and drew her horse to a stop. She leveled an arm and pointed at the long, rugged ridge on the other side of the valley, a couple of miles away.
“The cave is in that ridge,” she told Scratch. “And the fire is still on the other side of it.”
She was right. The spreading smoke was beyond the ridge, but it was impossible to tell just how far away the fire really was.
“We can get the loot,” Cara said. “Then we’ll head east, away from the fire.”
“Until it overtakes us,” Scratch warned. “That wind is blowin’ faster than these horses can run.”
“We can make it,” she insisted. “Come on!”
She kicked the horse into a gallop again, taking the downward slope at a breakneck pace. Scratch rode after her. He couldn’t help but keep casting glances at the steadily advancing smoke.
Those two miles or so across the valley seemed a lot longer with the threat of the wildfire looming over them. Eventually, though, they reached the ridge and Cara started following a winding trail that twisted and turned its way upward. The face of the ridge was such a jumble of boulders that Scratch could understand how the entrance of a cave could be hidden up here. They probably wouldn’t be able to see it until they were right on top of it.
He had caught up to Cara and was right behind her when she suddenly reined in. She jerked Bo’s Winchester from the saddle boot.
“What is it?” Scratch asked as he brought his mount to a stop alongside hers.
“I saw somebody above us,” she said tensely. “Riders comin’ down this way.”
“Folks tryin’ to get away from the fire, more than likely,” Scratch guessed.
“Maybe, but we’re close to that cache now, and I don’t trust anybody.” She jerked her horse toward a cluster of rock slabs that had slid down the face of the ridge in ages past. Over her shoulder, she told Scratch, “We can hole up over here and bushwhack whoever it is!”
Scratch wasn’t of a mind to bushwhack anybody, but there was no point in arguing with Cara right now. Once she saw that those riders she had spotted weren’t any threat to them, they could go on with their own business.
Scratch coughed as he followed Cara into the rocks. The smoke was getting thicker in the air. You didn’t just smell it; now it irritated the nose and eyes and throat. The horses didn’t like it, either. They were getting harder to control.
Scratch and Cara dismounted where they could watch the trail leading down from the ridge without being too noticeable themselves. Scratch hadn’t seen the riders, but he trusted Cara’s eyesight. His own eyes were starting to water a little from the smoke.
He listened intently for hoofbeats, and for the crackle of flames as well that would warn them the wildfire was almost on top of them. He didn’t hear that telltale crackling, but after a moment he caught the steady thud of hoofbeats. Someone was coming down the trail, all right.
Cara lifted the Winchester. Her hands were tight on the weapon.
“Whoever that is, they better not’ve got into that cache,” she said. “I’ll kill ’em before I let anybody steal my loot.”
That struck Scratch as funny, but he didn’t have any laughter in him at the moment, not even a dry chuckle. Instead he waited in silence, holding the reins of both horses while Cara edged forward beside one of the massive slabs of rock to get a better look at the trail.
One by one, half a dozen riders came into view. As they drew closer, Scratch studied them intently. They were all rugged-looking, well-armed hombres. The man in the lead wore a flat-crowned black hat and a black vest over a white shirt. He had a hawklike face and a dark mustache.
Close behind him rode a burly man in a buckskin jacket. He was bare headed and had a wild shock of long gray hair. The next man was lean, with red hair and a face like a fox. The other three were typical hard cases, roughly dressed and with several days’ worth of stubble on their faces. Each of those three was leading a packhorse.
Scratch had never seen any of the men before.
That wasn’t the case with Cara, though. A shock went through him as he realized that she was staring at the men in stunned recognition, especially the man riding in the lead.
Then she cried out, “Hank! Over here! Hank!”
The words were barely out of her mouth when she swung the rifle in her hands toward Scratch and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 29
Brubaker reined in and pointed to the towering column of smoke rising in the distance.
“Morton said he’d send us a smoke signal,” the deputy commented. “You reckon that’s it?”
“That looks like too much smoke to be a signal,” Bo replied with a worried frown. “That’s from a big fire.”
“But it’s in the direction we’re headed, ain’t it?”
“It is,” Bo said. “So I guess we don’t have any choice but to keep going.” He paused, then added, “I just hope that Scratch isn’t right in the middle of it.”
As expected, the Parker County sheriff hadn’t been happy to have three dead men lying in the street outside the livery stable. Neither was the Weatherf
ord city marshal.
At least the elderly hostler had yelped because he was scared and diving for cover, not because he’d been hit by one of the flying bullets. If an innocent citizen had been cut down, that would have made the local star packers even less inclined to cut Bo and Brubaker any slack.
As it was, Brubaker’s standing as a federal lawman, plus the fact that the dead men were all members of a somewhat shady clan from Arkansas, convinced the local authorities to allow Bo and Brubaker to go on their way.
“I’m gonna send a telegram to that Judge Parker in Fort Smith, though,” the sheriff had said, “just to make sure you really are who you say you are. If you’re not, I’ll hunt you down, mister, and see that you answer for these killin’s.”
“Go ahead,” Brubaker had said. “The judge’ll confirm my story.”
After they rode out of Weatherford, though, Brubaker hadn’t been quite so sanguine about it.
“Judge Parker’s liable to pop a vein when he finds out I’m a couple of hundred miles away from where I’m supposed to be, and goin’ in the wrong direction, to boot.”
“He was already going to find out when he heard from the sheriff up in Gainesville,” Bo had pointed out.
“Yeah, but that fella said he was gonna send a letter, not a telegram. That’ll take longer, and I was hopin’ we’d have this whole mess cleaned up by then.”
“When you recover all that stolen loot, His Honor won’t be able to complain too much.”
“If, not when,” Brubaker groused. “And you don’t know the judge as well as I do.”
Bo couldn’t argue about that, but a short time later they spotted the column of smoke and forgot about Judge Parker. They might have much bigger worries before the day was over.
“The way the wind’s blowin’, that fire’s gonna move fast,” Brubaker said. “And as dry as everything is ...” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “Anybody who got caught out in front of a blaze like that would be in a heap of trouble.”
“I know,” Bo said. “I’ve seen some pretty bad wildfires. I’m not sure I’ve ever been around one when the conditions are as perfect for destruction as they are today, though.”
A grim expression on his face, Brubaker nodded and said, “We’ll keep an eye on that smoke. If it starts to get too close, we’ll have to turn around and head back, at least until the fire burns itself out.”
“And what about Scratch?” Bo asked, his own features taking on a solemn, worried cast.
“I reckon he’ll be on his own,” Brubaker said. “The same way he has been ever since he rode off with that devil woman.”
As soon as the name Hank came out of Cara’s mouth, Scratch knew what had happened. He didn’t have any idea how or why, but he was certain that Hank Gentry and the rest of the gang had somehow beaten them to the hideout.
Scratch knew this meant that Cara had no need of him anymore. No need whatsoever.
And to her warped mind that would mean she might as well go ahead and shoot him.
So he ducked, shot out a hand, and grabbed the rifle’s barrel as she pointed it at him. He wrenched it up and to the side just in time. The blast was stunningly loud and he felt the sting of burning powder grains against his cheek, but the bullet tore harmlessly past his ear.
Cara cried out in frustration as Scratch ripped the Winchester out of her grasp before she could work the rifle’s lever and try again to shoot him. He didn’t throw the gun aside because he heard horses pounding toward them and knew that Gentry and the other men were responding to her cry.
He was outnumbered six to one, so he didn’t hold out any hope of surviving this fight, but he planned to take as many of the varmints with him as he could. So he might need the Winchester.
He didn’t get the chance, because Cara, shrieking incoherently, threw herself at him. Her fingers, hooked like talons, clawed for his eyes. When she slammed into him unexpectedly, he had to take a step back to catch his balance. She kept driving against him as he tried to fend off her harpy-like attack, and the rifle slipped from his fingers and clattered to the ground.
He felt a couple of her fingernails gouge fiery lines down his cheeks before he was finally able to grab her wrists and hold her off.
But by then it was too late, because the six riders surrounded them, and every man had a gun in his hand pointing at the silver-haired Texan.
“Cara!” Hank Gentry exclaimed in astonishment. “Is it really you?” He threw back his head and boomed out a laugh. “By God, it is! It really is!”
The big man with the shaggy gray hair growled, “You’d better let go of her, mister. At this range, we can blow you to doll rags without hittin’ Cara.”
Scratch knew the threat was true. He looked intently into Cara’s face, only inches from his, and played the only card in his hand.
“I’m gonna let you go, but don’t come after me again,” he said. “You got no reason to want me dead. I’ve done nothin’ but help you.”
He let go of her wrists and took a step back, lifting his hands so they would be well away from his Remingtons. These outlaws might well kill him anyway, but he didn’t want to give them an excuse to start shooting.
“You!” Cara cried. “You haven’t done anything but help me? If you hadn’t stopped me in Fort Smith, I would’ve gotten away! I wish I’d cut your throat then!”
She looked like she was about to start after him again, but Gentry reached down from the saddle and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Cara, take it easy,” he said. “It’s a miracle we all wound up here together, but you need to settle down. Who is this old fella?”
“He’s a lawman!” Cara practically spat. “He’s workin’ for that damn Judge Parker!”
Gentry regarded Scratch coolly.
“Is that true, mister?” he asked. “You’re a deputy U.S. marshal?”
“I was, but only temporary-like,” Scratch replied. The way he saw it, as long as they were talking, they weren’t shooting. “A saddle pard and I signed on to help one of Parker’s full-time deputies deliver some prisoners to Texas. But I gave up on that job when somethin’ better came along.”
His glance at Cara made it clear what that something better was.
Gentry’s face hardened slightly.
“You been up to your old tricks, Cara?” he asked. “Playin’ up to a fella to get him to do whatever you want, like you did with me?”
Cara just folded her arms across her rapidly rising and falling breasts and glared at Scratch.
“And you probably didn’t care that he’s old enough to be your grandpa,” Gentry went on. “You figure that anybody wearing pants is fair game for your little schemes, don’t you?”
Scratch said, “You’ve got it all wrong, mister. I just wanted to help out the little lady. She told me she never set out to be an owlhoot, that she was forced into it.”
Gentry let out another laugh.
“She told you that, did she?” Now Scratch could tell that the outlaw leader wasn’t really upset. He told his men, “Keep him covered,” and holstered his own gun. He swung down from the saddle and pulled Cara into his embrace.
She struggled for a second, then used both hands to grab the back of his head and hold him while she plastered her mouth to his in a frenzied kiss that lasted for a long moment before Gentry pulled back and asked her, “What are you doing here? Where are Dayton and Jim?”
“I wasn’t able to get them loose and bring them with me,” Cara said. “I barely escaped myself.”
Gentry nodded toward Scratch.
“By getting this old-timer to help you?”
“That’s right.”
“You had to know that I was coming after you,” Gentry said. “You knew I would never let you hang.”
“I knew that.”
“So why did you come after the loot that was hidden here?” Gentry asked.
“I figured I’d retrieve it so we’d have it when you caught up to me,” Cara answered without hesitatio
n. “Indian Territory’s too hot for us now, Hank, just like Texas was. I was thinkin’ we ought to head west. To Arizona, maybe, or California.”
“Speaking of hot,” the fox-faced man said, “that fire’s getting closer while we’re sitting here jawing.”
“Bouchard’s right,” Gentry agreed with a nod. “We’ll hash out everything later, Cara. Right now I’m just damned glad to see you again.” He looked at Scratch. “The question is, what do we do with you, mister?”
“Morton,” Scratch said.
“What?”
“That’s my name, Scratch Morton.” Figuring that they were likely to shoot him anyway, Scratch spoke bluntly. “Listen here, you owe me for gettin’ Miss LaChance loose from the law and bringin’ her here. She’d have been locked up by now in Tyler if it wasn’t for me. If you want to be fair about it, you’ll take me with you.”
“Make you part of the gang, you mean?” Gentry asked harshly.
“I’ve turned my back on my old pard and the law,” Scratch said. “I got nothin’ to go back to. I’ve skirted pretty close to the shady side plenty of times in my life. Might as well go all the way.”
Gentry grinned. “You’ve got gall, I’ll give you that.”
Scratch shrugged and said, “At my age, why the hell not?”
Gentry looked at Cara and asked, “What do you think? Take him along ... or kill him?”
A couple of tense seconds ticked past before she said, “Oh, hell, we might as well take him, at least for now. He’s pretty good in a fight.”
Gentry nodded and looked at Scratch.
“Do I need to ask you to turn your guns over, Morton?”
“You don’t think I’m loco enough to slap leather against all six of you boys, do you?” Scratch asked.
“I guess not. But I’ll be keeping my eye on you, and if you try anything even a little funny, I’ll blow a hole in you.”
“Fair enough.” Scratch cast a glance at the billowing clouds of smoke filling the sky to the west. “Right now I just want to get out of here before that fire catches up to us.”
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