Deep Trouble

by Mary Connealy

He stalked off in a direction that would bring him into the camp from the east, while Shannon could approach from the south. Behaving just exactly like a sneak, like a man who was ashamed of his actions.

  He’d put a couple of big rocks between himself and that maddening woman when he heard Hozho say, “There you are. Why didn’t you answer me when I called?”

  “Just enjoying the sunrise. I’m sorry I was slow to call out.”

  The two voices faded as they headed for camp. Gabe kept walking until he’d gotten his temper under control. When he calmed down, he remembered how Shannon felt in his arms, and it was either stay mad or fall completely in love with her.

  He found to his dismay that he might be capable of doing both.

  “They went into the Grand Canyon?” Abe’s hands came up as if he was going for the Navajo man’s throat.

  Pa grabbed him. Tyra was one beat slower, but she had Abe’s other arm.

  “Why? What fool notion made my baby brother ride into the Grand Canyon?”

  The smiling Navajo, who called himself Doba, had quite a tale to tell, and he seemed to fear nothing, not even a whipcord-lean, heavily muscled rancher with a bad temper and a clenched fist.

  Doba Kinlichee kept talking fearlessly as he told his story of midnight riders, gunfire, cave dwellings, treacherous canyons, and lost cities. A confident man, and Tyra had to admire it.

  “A map sent her to the west of the trail when anyone else would have told you to go south,” Doba went on. “I’ll point you in that direction. You’ll probably meet them coming back. There’s no way into the canyon in that direction.”

  “Sure there is.” A man, tanned until he was brown and so skinny he looked like skin draped over bone, stood from the watering hole.

  Tyra hadn’t paid him much mind. Mr. Kinlichee had come out to meet them, and he’d had enough to say to keep her attention riveted right on him.

  “You know a way into the canyon, Hance?”

  “Yep, been scouting it for a while now. I found me a trail, I did, right down off the edge of the world. Hard one to get along on. Steep, my oh my, it’s shore enough steep. But it can be done. Only trail on the whole east side of the canyon that goes to the bottom. The next one is all the way south at the Supai village. And I’m the only one who knows about it.” Hance wore a fringed buckskin jacket and a floppy brimmed hat. He had a beard and moustache as wild as this country and eyes sharper than a rattlesnake.

  Tyra took his measure and believed what he was saying.

  “And is there truly a city down in the canyon?” Doba asked.

  “An old one, abandoned. I can lead you to it.” The man’s brow furrowed and his sharp eyes got a little shifty. “For a price.”

  Abe relaxed enough, so Tyra dared to release him.

  “I’d be glad to hire you to guide us to this abandoned city,” Buck said as he came up beside her, his arms crossed.

  Kinlichee interrupted the business arrangements. “You oughta know, there were varmints on their trail. Bad men. We laid a false trail, so hopefully they’ll ride all the way to the canyon where it goes down by the Supai village. Most folks don’t know of any way into the canyon straight west.”

  “Including me.” The Navajo man scowled at the man who offered to guide them. “Why haven’t you told me of your trail into the canyon?”

  Hance shrugged, his eyes wily. “Found a way down is all. Man’s got a right to make some money off his hard work. If someone wants to go down there on my trail, they can pay for the privilege.”

  “How much?” Buck asked.

  Buck was no cowpoke. But this was about money, and suddenly Tyra could see that the city man did know a few things. Like how to make a deal.

  Hance named a price that nearly closed Tyra’s throat.

  Buck made a counteroffer.

  She glared at him. He was dickering over Shannon Dysart’s life, and that was his right, but he was also trying to save money on Gabe’s and that made her mad.

  Then Hance came down a few dollars and Buck came up. They’d worked it all out before Tyra could glare a hole in Buck Shaw.

  “We’re in a hurry. Can we leave now?” Buck’s question was smooth. His gaze was calm, almost lighthearted. It was the right way to handle Hance. Nothing like Tyra’s chosen method, similar to Abe’s with Kinlichee—go for the man’s throat until he helped them.

  “Yep, reckon we might as well get on our way.” Hance turned toward his horse and ambled over. Before he’d turned away, Tyra saw the gleam in his eyes. The man was thrilled with the deal he’d made. She suspected, though the man was greedy, he wasn’t evil. Just a businessman who’d made the best deal of his life.

  “Good.” Buck still sounded smooth. “We can get a few hours down the trail before sunset.” He swung up onto his horse smoothly enough.

  There was no denying that Buck rode a beauty of a mare, a thoroughbred, sleek and tall with strong muscles. The horse was pure black except for a white blaze on her face and four white socks. She’d make a fantastic colt teamed with the stallion her pa had back on the ranch.

  The horses ridden by his men were excellent horseflesh, too. The horses of a rich man. And from the sound of some of the talk, they all belonged to Buck. They’d moved tirelessly all day, too. So even though they looked pampered, they were well exercised. Buck showed good sense in taking these horses on this journey.

  But they were heading into rugged land. The kind of land better suited to a tough, little mountain-bred mustang. Tyra hoped the thoroughbreds came through.

  The horses were watered and ready to go, and they had a good supply of food still from Flagstaff, so they headed out.

  As they left the little settlement, Buck rode up beside Tyra. “Tell me more about Gabe. Is Shannon in good hands?”

  “For a man who’s worried about his woman, you drove a real hard bargain with Hance.” Tyra tried to glare at him, but truth was he’d handled Hance real well.

  “I’ve known men like Captain John Hance before.” Buck smiled. “He wouldn’t have respected me if I hadn’t bartered with him.”

  Tyra knew men like that, too. “He got the best of you, you know. You’re paying him about twice what this trip is worth.”

  “That’s because I didn’t drive a hard bargain over Shannon.” Buck looked ahead. Hance was well in the lead. “I talked with Doba a bit more about those men on their trail. He told me they left Shannon to die about a day’s ride to the east of here. Your friend Gabe found her and brought her into Doba’s settlement. He said she convinced a few people to follow her to the Grand Canyon. She had a map that leads to a city of gold. Doba doesn’t believe a word of it, and neither do I, but the important thing seems to be that Shannon believes it. She’s been working over her father’s notes for a long time to the exclusion of everything else.” There was a touch of something sad in his voice.

  “Including you?”

  The man smiled, and Tyra had a very hard time not looking at his shining blue eyes and his amazingly white teeth. “Sure, including me. But that’s just Shannon. I understand how important her father was to her.”

  “Are you in love with her?” Flinching, Tyra wished someone would come and gag her. She hadn’t meant to ask that.

  “Shannon is—” Buck fumbled for an answer. “I—I don’t know.”

  Hance picked up the pace, and they began trotting toward the setting sun.

  “You said she was your friend.” Tyra’s horse was comfortable on the easy trail, and she gave all her attention to Buck. He was a good-looking man, no denying it. Shame his hands were bleeding where he should have had calluses, and he was sunburned when he should have been darkly tanned. Shame, real shame.

  It occurred to Shannon that they had the same coloring. Dark hair, blue eyes. If he hadn’t been such a greenhorn, they’d have been a good match. She shook her head to dislodge that ridiculous thought.

  “Shannon and I grew up together. Our main connection is our mothers. Both of us spent a good part of our chi
ldhoods hiding from them.” Buck smiled again, but his words didn’t strike Tyra as particularly funny. “And, since they visited each other almost daily, Shannon and I often had the opportunity to hide from them together.”

  “Hide from them? How? Where?”

  “We both lived in big mansions in St. Louis, just a few doors from each other.”

  “Mansions, really?” Tyra thought of the cabin she shared with her pa. It was big, but there’d been a lot of them.

  “Oh, sure.” Buck shrugged and looked a little sheepish. “We were raised on how important our families are. I am a Shaw. My mother is a Chatillon. Shannon is a Fontaine and even more importantly an Astor.”

  “Never heard of none of those families.”

  That earned her a smile from Buck. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  She added, “I thought her name was Dysart.”

  “It is, but her mother wasn’t overly fond of her father and tended to ignore that part of the family, even though obviously Shannon is half Dysart and the connection to the Astors is distant.”

  “But Shannon is living her whole life to follow in her father’s footsteps. Her ma might not like the Dysarts, but Shannon seems to.”

  Buck nodded. His mind seemed distant.

  “Why didn’t you come out here with Shannon?” Tyra wanted to figure out just what the connection was between Buck and Shannon. She wanted it something fierce. She saw no spark in Buck’s eyes when he talked of her, no romance. But Buck’s presence here said more clearly than words that Shannon was important to him.

  “She didn’t ask me. And I thought it was a stupid idea. I’ve had things really comfortable back home. The notion of coming west was appalling.”

  “What is it you do back east that’s more important than taking care of your friend?”

  “Do?” Buck furrowed his brow as if the word made no sense.

  “Yes?”

  “Uh, do?” Buck stumbled over the question and fell silent. “A job?”

  “Job?”

  “Yes, a job. That thing people have so they make money, so they can eat and keep a roof over their heads.”

  She might have imagined it because he was sunburned, but she thought there was a faint flush to his cheeks, like he had the grace to be embarrassed for not recognizing the word job. It wasn’t as if she’d started speaking Navajo. “My pa is a rancher. I help him on the range, and my ma is dead, so I do a lot of the work inside. I cook and clean, haul water, and garden. Do you drive a wagon? Run some store back in the city? Help run the railroad? What?”

  “I don’t have a job. I have money from my family, enough to live on.”

  Tyra’s opinion of him sank to the sandy desert floor. “Doesn’t that get boring? I mean, what passes your day when you wake up in the morning? Surely you don’t just sit around the house all day, waiting for bedtime.”

  “No, I keep busy with… things.”

  “And Shannon, too? Does she have so much money she doesn’t need to work or get married to get by?”

  “If anything, Shannon’s family is wealthier than mine. Of course she doesn’t have a job, and she doesn’t need a husband to support her.”

  Tyra was unable to stop a snort of disdain. “Well, no wonder she’s running around out here in the wilderness. She was probably half crazy from all that time hanging heavy on her hands.”

  Buck was silent for a while. Finally he said, “You know, you might be right. Honestly, in some ways, that’s how I ended up here, too.”

  “And you said your family money came at least partly from a fur trader?”

  Buck nodded. “Since I’ve headed west, I’ve enjoyed thinking I can feel a bit of Henri Chatillon’s blood in my veins. We talk a lot about heritage, our roots, how important our families are.”

  “You and Shannon?”

  “No, well, some I guess, but more my parents, my mother, and her friends. I think since I’ve been out here, away from that talk, I’ve started to realize I want more for myself than rich, powerful ancestors. I think there is a little Henri Chatillon in me.”

  Tyra shook her head. “Never heard of the guy.”

  “He was a fur trapper.”

  “So you said.” Tyra nodded. “Out here?”

  “In the Rockies. I think he traveled all over. Don’t think I’ve ever heard of where exactly he trapped. Just the Rocky Mountains.”

  “That covers a lot of territory. The tail end of the Rockies reaches all the way south to Mexico. Though some folks say different names for the mountains, different ranges, to me it all seems part and parcel of the same big old bunch of mountains. We could be riding straight along your grandpa’s trail right now.”

  “He’s not my grandfather. He’s more distant than that, a cousin a few generations back. But he’s part of me.” Buck sat more erect in the saddle. Tyra heard a ring of iron in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

  “Tell me about him. The name isn’t familiar, but maybe some of the stories will be good’uns.”

  Buck told a winding story about his mountain man kin. She thought, from his tone of affection, maybe there was some of the guy’s blood flowing in the city boy’s veins. The city boy with so much money he thought the word job was some foreign language.

  Seventeen

  Shannon’s day started out with dreamlike beauty and ended up being a nightmare.

  Yesterday when she’d set eyes on the canyon, she’d been awestruck. Plain and simple. Every word she said was faint praise, every thought, ever flight of poetic language, all so pale and insufficient.

  She would have told anyone in the world that she could never stare long enough, never get close enough to the beauty.

  One day later, she was heartily sick of it.

  They were riding along the east wall so they had shade until about noon, though the heat was stifling. She’d ridden in a daze of confused pleasure after Gabe’s warm kisses and quiet strength. The lure of him was wonderful, added to the surrounding beauty, and yes, Shannon’s morning had been a walk in paradise.

  Then the sun rose high enough to slip over the canyon rim, and the whole world became an oven that burned every ounce of poetry and romance clean out of her heart, mind, and soul.

  The trail they’d set out on this morning had nowhere to stop, nowhere to rest, nowhere to graze the horses or refill canteens. Shannon sipped carefully, drinking only enough of the tepid, sulfuric-scented water to wet her throat.

  The horses’ hooves ground steadily against rock until it was sand scraping on Shannon’s ears. The group ate jerked meat, and there was plenty, so they wouldn’t starve. So great, they’d live a long, miserable life unless the oven managed to cook them to death.

  Water was nowhere to be found though. With no end to this trail, she worried about having enough to keep the horses going.

  They were virtually crawling along the canyon wall. A layer of rock, barely wide enough for the horses, formed a terrace that stretched ahead of them as far as they could see—which wasn’t far. The vista out into the canyon was undeniably spectacular. The striped colonnades glowed red and white and blue. But the view didn’t give them a respite from the heat nor a drink of water. The terrace followed the rattlesnake curves of the canyon. They jutted out then curved in. They climbed in places then dropped.

  And if that had been the only problem, she might have been fine. But every few hundred yards or so the trail was cut by talus slides, a crumbled stretch that reminded Shannon of the way those ledges at the cliff dwellings had broken off under her feet. The sure-footed horses picked their way across slopes Shannon would never have attempted.

  Her throat went dry every time they had to face another obstacle, which made the water shortage even more punishing.

  There was no talk. They were strung out too far to make that practical, though occasionally Hozho, in the lead, would shout a warning or instructions as she neared another death-defying spot. Hosteen followed her. Then Shannon. The parson came next, and Shannon could hear the stea
dy grumbling the man did at his horse. Gabe brought up the rear.

  Hozho and Hosteen were calm. They moved as if they were part of this land, as if they needed no water, felt no heat. They left the work to their animals and never shifted or wiped at sweating brows. It gave Shannon a notion of how differently they’d lived, how much a part of this hard land they and their people were.

  Shannon pulled her map out often, more to distract herself from the thirst, the burning of the sun, and her fear. But as the day wore on and the heat baked into her bones, she grew dull and stupid and quit caring what lay ahead. She’d been following all day; she’d continue to follow. It took no effort on her part.

  Studying her map for what had to be the tenth time, inspired more by boredom than need, she barely noticed when her horse suddenly stepped onto a talus slide, already crossed by two horses.

  The rocks gave. She wasn’t even holding the reins.

  The horse slid, screamed in fear, and then leaped forward. Shannon tumbled backward, and the pinto left her behind.

  She landed hard. The terrible drop she knew lay below her drove her to claw and scramble. A scream hurt her ears. She only distantly realized it was her own.

  Fighting to hang on, the rocks skittered away. A stone slammed into her face. She slid, belly down. Dug in with her toes and knees. An agonizing jerk on her arm stopped her. With a sickening swoop, she seemed to take flight.

  Then she landed with a dull thud flat on her back. Swinging her hands, hunting for something to grab hold of, the pain felt like a knife rammed to the hilt in her shoulder.

  She was no longer falling. She was stabbed, pinned like a bug to the canyon wall, her back and arm in agony.

  Blinking, it took a second for her vision to clear. She could see Gabe kneeling beside her. The parson was past Gabe’s shoulder holding the reins of two horses.

  “She’s all right,” Gabe yelled.

  Craning her neck, Shannon saw the Tsosis across the treacherous trail with her horse firmly in hand. When she moved her head, the whole left side of her body caught fire. She instantly stopped moving.