Blood Bond: Arizona Ambush

by Johnstone, J. A. ; Johnstone, J. A.

  She nodded, although he could tell she was reluctant to do so. He ducked through the entrance before she could say anything else.

  The older woman gave him a stern look when he came in, as if she were scolding him. He ignored her and sat down on the blankets, and as he did, he realized just how weary he really was. He stretched out on the soft, thick pile of blankets. It felt good, and before he knew it he had closed his eyes and dozed off.

  Matt didn’t know how long he had slept before he woke up to the sound of angry voices outside the hogan. Some sort of squabble was going on.

  He probably would have ignored it, but then he recognized one of the voices as Elizabeth’s. He rolled over and pushed himself to his feet. Ignoring the exclamations from Juan Pablo’s wife, he stepped out into the late afternoon.

  Elizabeth was there, all right. She looked angry and more than a little frightened as she tried to pull away from a man who had his hand clamped around her arm. He was holding her so tightly it had to hurt, Matt thought. Without pausing to ponder what he should do, he said, “Hey! Let go of her, mister!”

  The Navajo released Elizabeth’s arm, but as he did, he turned toward Matt. His hand dipped instead to the knife tucked behind the red sash at his waist. With a whisper of steel, the blade came out. The warrior lunged at Matt and lifted the knife to strike.

  Chapter 20

  Instinct took over. Matt’s left arm came up to block the thrust of the blade.

  At the same time his right fist shot out and smashed into the warrior’s face. He twisted at the waist as he launched the punch so he could put as much power into it as possible, and pain jabbed through him as the move pulled at the healing bullet holes.

  That was a lot better than standing there and letting the man sink the knife in his chest, though. As the man reeled back a step, Matt grabbed the wrist of his knife hand with both hands and wrenched on it. The Navajo grunted in pain as bones ground together in his wrist and the knife slipped from his fingers.

  The warrior swung a left at Matt’s head. Matt moved aside just enough to cause the blow to glance off his ear. It hurt anyway.

  Matt hooked a left of his own to the Navajo’s jaw. He knew that the longer this fight lasted, the less chance he had. The wound he had suffered and the long days of lying around had depleted his reserves of strength. He was already breathing hard, and his pulse hammered inside his skull in a wild, discordant drumbeat.

  A loud, angry voice bellowed words Matt didn’t understand, but the tone of command was unmistakable. The man he’d been battling abruptly stepped back. The man’s chest heaved, and his face was flushed and twisted with fury. But with a visible effort, he restained himself from attacking Matt again.

  Caballo Rojo stalked up and planted himself between Matt and his opponent. For a moment the chief shouted at the warrior who’d been manhandling Elizabeth.

  Then he turned to Matt and said, “White man go back in hogan!”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Matt protested. He pointed at Elizabeth. “I was just protecting Miss Fleming!” He looked at her. “What in blazes is this all about, anyway?”

  Elizabeth was pale and obviously upset.

  “The young women have been gossiping about us, Matt. Pino here thinks that I’m corrupting them by being here. Many of the Navajo harbor such resentment toward white people that they don’t like me being here in the first place.”

  “So he was trying to get you to leave?”

  “Yes, and some of them think we should both go.” Elizabeth shook her head. “But I won’t leave, not as long as I can help these people.”

  Whatever she was teaching them, Matt had his doubts about how much it really helped the Navajo. He wasn’t sure a young woman from Vermont could know anything that would help these people survive in this rugged wilderness.

  Even so, he wasn’t going to stand by and let her be mistreated. That went too much against the grain.

  On a practical level, however, there wasn’t much he could do. A number of men had gathered, and from the way they were glaring at Matt it was obvious whose side they were on. Outnumbered, weak, and wounded as he was, he couldn’t stop Pino from doing whatever he wanted.

  Caballo Rojo leveled an arm.

  “Go back in hogan,” he ordered Matt again.

  “You’re gonna just let him get away with it?” Matt demanded. He didn’t expect Caballo Rojo to do otherwise, but it wouldn’t hurt anything to try ... he hoped.

  Caballo Rojo didn’t budge. His face was hard as a rock as he pointed at the hogan. Matt reined in the anger he felt boiling up inside him.

  He wouldn’t be doing Elizabeth any good by getting himself killed, and Caballo Rojo looked just about riled up enough to go back on his word.

  Matt jerked his head in a curt nod.

  “All right,” he said. “But this is wrong.”

  “Wrong for white man not wrong for Navajo,” Caballo Rojo insisted.

  Matt looked at Elizabeth and said, “Sorry.”

  “I appreciate you trying to stand up for me, Mr. Bodine.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Maybe when I leave here, you ought to go with me.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Like I told you, I intend to stay. But when you’re gone ...”

  She didn’t have to finish what she was saying. When he was gone, then the young women of the clan wouldn’t have anything to gossip about where he and Elizabeth were concerned. The trouble would probably blow over.

  Fine, he thought. If that was the way she wanted it, he could oblige her.

  “As soon as I’m strong enough to ride, I’ll head out. I need to catch up to Sam, anyway.”

  Elizabeth nodded and said, “Of course.”

  With a last glare directed at Pino, Matt turned toward the hogan. Juan Pablo’s wife had come out to watch the confrontation. He brushed past her and went inside. He heard a lot of low-voiced talking outside, but he didn’t understand it and didn’t care.

  He told himself he didn’t care, anyway. It was easier like that.

  But not by much.

  The canyon settled down as night fell. The brief ruckus between Matt and Pino seemed forgotten. Juan Pablo’s wife gave Matt his supper, as usual, and this time when she removed the poultices from his wounds, she didn’t pack more in there.

  Instead, she simply covered the bullet holes with a thin layer of moss and bound it into place as a makeshift bandage. Matt took that to mean they thought he no longer needed the medicinal powers of the roots and herbs the woman had been using on him.

  His sleep was restless again that night. He couldn’t stop thinking about Elizabeth and wondering how she was doing. He admired her determination but questioned her good judgment.

  The next morning he slipped on the wool shirt again and left the hogan. The woman didn’t even try to discourage him this time. He supposed she had given up on getting him to do what she wanted him to do.

  He didn’t know where Pino’s hogan was, or he would have avoided it. He definitely didn’t want to encounter Caballo Rojo this morning, either, so he steered clear of the chief ’s hogan and walked along the creek toward the mouth of the canyon instead.

  He wouldn’t get too close to it, he decided, because he didn’t want to alarm the guards posted there, but walking part of the way and then coming back would be good exercise for him.

  None of the Navajo tried to stop him as he left the hogan, although he saw several of them watching him. He supposed they knew he wasn’t a prisoner here, so he couldn’t be trying to escape. When he came closer to the mouth of the canyon, he was able to see out over the vast sweep of the plains, and it looked mighty appealing to him. He had always been fiddle-footed by nature and never liked to stay in one place for too long.

  Luckily, Sam was the same way, so they had always been good trail partners as well as blood brothers.

  Matt stopped suddenly and frowned as he spotted something unusual out on the prairie. Several miles east of the canyon, a large c
loud of dust rose into the morning sky.

  His first thought was that it might be coming from a cavalry patrol, but after watching the cloud for a few minutes, Matt decided it was unlikely so much dust would be kicked up by horseback riders.

  That looked more like the sort of dust cloud that would come from a herd of buffalo on the move, or a bunch of cattle being driven to market.

  Out here in this big, mostly empty country, only one of those things was a possibility. The closest buffalo herds were hundreds of miles away, in western Texas.

  There were some ranches in these parts, though, and the punchers who worked on them might be moving some cattle.

  Matt wished he was out there on a good horse, getting a close look at whatever was going on. He didn’t have any particular reason for feeling that way, just curiosity and restlessness. He watched the dust cloud until it finally moved out of sight to the northwest. The wall of the canyon itself cut the cloud off from his vision.

  He turned to walk back toward the hogans. As he did, his instincts told him he was being watched. He looked along the creek and thought he saw a flash of movement from the brush that lined the stream. Matt headed in that direction, but when he got there he didn’t see anyone.

  Maybe it was his imagination, he told himself, although he didn’t really believe that. He had never been the sort to see things that weren’t there.

  No, it was more likely that someone had been spying on him, he decided. Elizabeth, maybe? She could have noticed him leaving the hogans and followed him out here, even though she had to know by now that wouldn’t be a wise thing to do.

  Or maybe somebody who wasn’t his friend, like Pino, was lurking around and keeping an eye on him.

  Matt didn’t like the feeling that crawled along his spine when he thought about somebody watching him. Most of the time, when somebody spied on an hombre like that, they were up to no good, he thought.

  He would just have to keep his own eyes open for trouble.

  No one bothered him during the rest of his walk. When he got back to the hogan, he told Juan Pablo’s wife, “See, I’m doing better. Getting stronger. I walked halfway out of the canyon and back, and I’m fine.”

  Some of that was bravado on his part. He was pretty tired. But he was convinced that he was getting stronger with each passing day. Another couple of days, he told himself. Then maybe he could start thinking about riding out on Sam’s trail ... assuming that his blood brother hadn’t returned by then.

  “Still no sign of Juan Pablo?” he asked the woman. She ignored him, which came as no real surprise. He was starting to think that she understood more of what he said than she let on, but she didn’t want him to know that.

  During the afternoon, the woman left the hogan on some errand. That was all right with Matt, because he’d gotten drowsy. He stretched out on the blankets to take a nap, and he was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

  He slept lightly. That habit had kept him alive on more than one occasion. And like a wild animal, he had the ability to go from sleeping to being fully awake in an instant, which also came in handy.

  In this case, it allowed him to realize something was wrong as soon as a faint noise came to his ears and his eyes popped open. Even in the middle of the day, the interior of the hogan was dim and shadowy. Matt caught a glimpse of an indistinct figure looming over him. That was all it took for his muscles to burst into action and send him rolling to the side.

  At the same time, the intruder’s arm swept down, driving a knife through the buffalo robes where Matt had been a split second earlier.

  Chapter 21

  Matt snapped a kick at the man and caught him in the side. The impact knocked the man across the hogan.

  He was able to hang on to his knife. As Matt started to scramble up, the intruder bounced off the far wall of the hogan and came at him again, slashing back and forth with the blade.

  Since Matt was still kneeling, he stayed low and threw himself forward in a diving tackle. The knife sliced through the air above his head, missing him as he caught the attacker around the knees. The man yelled as Matt knocked him off his feet.

  Matt levered himself up and made a grab for the man’s wrist. Before he could catch hold of it, though, the intruder struck again. The knife had a brass ball at the end of the handle to keep a man’s grip from slipping off it. The intruder smashed this ball against the side of Matt’s head.

  Stunned, Matt fell to the side. His muscles refused to respond to his commands.

  Which meant he was as good as dead, he thought, because the intruder would need only a second to slash his throat from ear to ear.

  Amazingly, that didn’t happen. As the world spun crazily around Matt, blurring his vision, he realized that somehow he was still alive. The man hadn’t killed him after all.

  Footsteps thudded on the hard ground somewhere nearby. Matt rolled onto his uninjured side, got an elbow under him, and lifted himself so he could raise his head and look around.

  He was alone in the hogan.

  The knife-wielding intruder was gone.

  Matt was baffled why the man had fled instead of completing his mission of murder. The only explanation he could think of involved the involuntary yell the man had let out when Matt tackled him.

  The would-be assassin must have worried that his outcry would draw attention to the hogan, and he didn’t want to be seen emerging from the dwelling where Matt’s murdered body would be found later. So he had abandoned his plan and gotten out quickly.

  That didn’t mean he wouldn’t try again to kill Matt later on.

  Matt sat up and took stock of himself. The bullet holes in his side hurt from all the activity, but as far as he could tell, they hadn’t opened up and started bleeding again.

  He was still sitting there when a figure loomed in the doorway, blocking the light. Matt looked up and saw Elizabeth Fleming standing there.

  She hurried into the hogan and dropped to her knees beside him. Juan Pablo’s wife followed her. The older woman’s usually stolid face actually wore a worried expression for a change.

  “Matt, are you all right?” Elizabeth asked. “Someone said they heard a shout from this hogan, and then a man ran out.”

  “That’s right,” Matt said. “Somebody snuck in here and tried to knife me.”

  Elizabeth’s beautiful green eyes widened.

  “Who in the world would try to do that?”

  “I can only think of one fella I’ve had a run-in with lately.”

  “You mean Pino?” Elizabeth asked.

  “He was ready to stick a knife in me earlier,” Matt said.

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  “That was just a spur of the moment thing, because he was angry. I don’t think Pino would deliberately murder anyone. He’s one of the clan’s spiritual leaders.”

  “Who else would come after me like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth had to admit.

  A harsh voice spoke outside the hogan. She turned her head toward the doorway.

  “That’s Caballo Rojo,” she said. “He wants to know if everything is all right.”

  “Not hardly,” Matt said. He started to get to his feet.

  Elizabeth took hold of his arm to help him. Out of the habit of being fiercely independent, he started to shake her off.

  But he had to admit, having her there to lean on felt pretty good. When he was standing, she kept her hand on his arm.

  They went outside and found Caballo Rojo standing there with his arms crossed, waiting to hear what had happened. Juan Pablo’s wife followed Matt and Elizabeth out of the hogan and started talking before they could. A steady stream of Navajo words came from her mouth.

  When she finally finished, Matt said to Caballo Rojo, “I don’t know what she told you, but someone snuck into the hogan while I was dozing and tried to kill me.”

  The clan leader nodded solemnly.

  “Who would do this?” he asked.

  “Well, I think i
t was Pino.”

  Caballo Rojo shook his head.

  “Not Pino. Pino is good man.”

  “I haven’t had trouble with anybody else from your clan,” Matt pointed out.

  Stubbornly, Caballo Rojo said, “Not Pino.” He jerked his head in an indication that Matt and Elizabeth should follow him. If that wasn’t clear enough, he added, “Come.”

  They exchanged a glance. Since they were both here because Caballo Rojo had extended his hospitality to them, they couldn’t very well refuse.

  They followed the clan leader along the creek, past several of the other hogans and the grazing herd of sheep. When they came to another hogan, Caballo Rojo called out to someone inside.

  Matt wasn’t surprised when Pino emerged from the dwelling. The man gave him and Elizabeth unfriendly looks, then spoke to Caballo Rojo in Navajo.

  When Pino was finished, Caballo Rojo turned to Matt and said, “Pino here.” He made a flat, slashing motion with his hand. “All day.”

  Matt wanted to point out that Pino could be lying about that. Even if the members of the man’s family backed him up on that, they could be lying as well.

  But while Caballo Rojo might be a judge of sorts, this wasn’t a court of law, Matt realized. No rules of evidence applied here. What Caballo Rojo believed was the only thing that mattered, and clearly the clan leader was on Pino’s side in this dispute.

  Anyway, to be absolutely honest about it, he hadn’t gotten a good look at the intruder, Matt reminded himself. All he could be sure of was that the man had been dressed like a Navajo ... and Pino was hardly the only one in this canyon who fit that description.

  “All right,” he told Caballo Rojo. “Maybe Pino didn’t try to kill me. But somebody did.”

  Caballo Rojo shrugged as if to say that wasn’t his worry.

  “Fine,” Matt said. “But I’ll be sleeping with one eye open from now on, you can count on that.”

  Caballo Rojo grunted and turned away. Matt had the distinct impression that the clan leader was washing his hands of the whole matter.