“I—” The need to breathe shut off Willow’s words. Panting from a mixture of altitude, exertion, and fear, she fought for oxygen.
Caleb took the short-barrelled shotgun from Willow’s hands, pointed it downslope, and waited for movement. When it came, he let go with both barrels. He didn’t expect to kill anyone at that range, but he sure could raise welts on their hides with doubleaught buckshot. At the very least, the Comancheros wouldn’t stick their heads up for a minute or two.
When Caleb reached into the saddlebag for more shotgun shells, the correct box was thrust into his hands. He reloaded quickly, fired, reloaded, and glanced back to see how Willow was doing. She had two other boxes of ammunition out and opened, ready to be used, and was puzzling over how to reload his rifle. Though she tried to conceal it from him, her hands trembled when she wasn’t actually using them.
“I’ll do that,” Caleb said. “Take the shotgun and sit with your back to me. If you see anyone sneaking up, don’t waste time telling me about it. Just shoot.”
Willow nodded and took the shotgun, relieved to have something to do with her hands. She sat cross-legged and looked from side to side, hoping she wouldn’t see a man creeping up on them.
They aren’t men. They’re coyotes jumping around on their crooked hind legs.
Silently, Willow repeated Caleb’s grim reassurance and watched for movement. At the back of her mind she counted the shells Caleb was loading into his rifle with a speed that spoke of great familiarity.
“You are a one-man army,” she said finally.
“You’re not half as surprised as those raiders were,” Caleb said, smiling wolfishly. “They were sure they had me after I fired that one lone shot. It won’t last, though. Sooner or later they’ll find someone to sell them repeating rifles. Then the civilized folks will be in a hell of a mess.”
Rifle fully loaded once more, Caleb shifted position until he could peer through a notch between two boulders. The raiders’ wiry, ugly little ponies were scattered across the meadow, feeding eagerly, indifferent to the booming of guns around them.
“How bad is Deuce?” Caleb asked.
“He’s burned across the chest. His left foreleg is swelling, probably strained when he fell. I don’t think he’ll be able to take a rider very far.”
“You’d be surprised, honey. Is he bleeding much?”
“No.”
“Any other horses hurt?”
“The mares are done,” Willow said, trying to keep her voice as unemotional as Caleb’s. “They’ll follow as long as they can, but—”
A big hand squeezed Willow’s shoulder gently. “What about Ishmael?”
“He’s tired, but still strong enough to take me anywhere I tell him to go.” “That’s one game stud,” Caleb said admiringly. “Makes me understand why Wolfe is so set on mustangs.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mustangs are descended from the Spanish horses, which came from Arabian stock. Don’t judge all mustangs by those ponies out there. They’re as mongrel as their riders. Tough, though. Damned tough. Give them a hatful of hay and less water and they’ll go a hundred miles a day for weeks at a time.”
While Caleb spoke, he reached into one of the saddlebags and came out with the spyglass. Methodically, he began covering the ground in front of him, quartering from side to side. The glass brought up each blade of grass, each shift from sun to shade, each suspicious bit of color or movement. Caleb looked up from the glass, then through it, mentally marking the spot of every raider the spyglass picked out.
The glass confirmed what Caleb had already suspected. The Comancheros were scattered out in such a way that there was little or no chance of sneaking through them to the pass trail—especially with seven tired horses.
Caleb turned and began studying the land behind him through the spyglass, seeking anything that looked like a possible route out or enemies sneaking up. He saw nothing human moving, even after several very careful sweeps. Yet something kept nagging at his mind, something about the shape of the land itself.
“Dad’s journal,” he whispered suddenly.
“What?”
“Switch places with me.”
Willow scrambled around Caleb.
“If something starts moving downslope, shoot,” he said.
While Willow kept an eye on the raiders, Caleb pulled his father’s journal out of the saddlebags and flipped through the pages quickly. He studied first one page, then a second, then the first again, flipping back and forth and checking the peaks rising behind the boulders.
“There’s another pass,” Caleb said in a low voice, reading quickly. “It’s a righteous bastard, eleven thousand feet and then some, but it can be climbed by a horse.”
“Do the Comancheros know about it?”
“Doubt it. According to Dad, no one had used the route for a long time when he saw it. It’s from the time before Indians had horses, when going twenty miles out of the way for an easier pass meant losing a lot of travel time.”
The silence was destroyed by a single shot that whined off the rocks shielding them. Despite herself, Willow flinched and made a low sound.
“It’s all right,” Caleb said, setting aside the journal and sighting down the barrel of his rifle. “They just want to see if we’re still awake up here.”
The rifle leaped and a crack of sound made Willow flinch. Even before the echo reverberated, Caleb shot again and again, pouring bullets into the areas where he had seen raiders through the spyglass. He fed shells into the rifle in the pauses between shots, mentally thanking Winchester’s cleverness in making a weapon that could be reloaded almost as fast as it could be fired.
Several choked screams told Caleb that his aim had been good. He kept firing until one of the raiders broke and ran for better cover. Carefully, Caleb shot once more. The runner took a step and fell face down. He didn’t move again. Two shots came in return, but only two. The remaining Comancheros weren’t in any hurry to collect the bounty on Caleb’s scalp.
Sound cracked through the area, making Willow flinch in the instant before she realized that it was thunder rather than rifle fire rolling down the mountainside. Before she could take another breath, a barrage of water pelted down, announcing the beginning of the afternoon thunderstorms. Within minutes it was raining so hard that she couldn’t see more than a hundred feet in any direction.
“Take the shotgun and run for the horses,” Caleb said as he fired downslope once more, hoping to discourage the Comancheros from coming up the slope under the cover of rain.
“What about you?”
“Run,” he commanded.
Willow ran.
Caleb’s shots rang out behind her, yet by the time Willow saw the horses, he had caught up and was running right beside her.
“Watch for raiders,” Caleb said curtly.
While Willow watched their backtrail, Caleb yanked the riding saddle off Deuce, relieving the injured horse’s burden. For a moment he considered using one of the mares as a pack animal, but a single look at their hanging heads and the lather dissolving on their coats beneath the driving rain told Caleb the mares were worse off than Deuce. Working quickly, he transferred as much equipment as he could to the saddlebags and bedrolls tied on behind the riding saddles. When he was finished, Deuce was carrying less than thirty pounds, none of it vital for their survival.
Caleb pulled on his shearling jacket and lifted Willow into Ishmael’s saddle.
“It will be a hard, steady climb,” he said in a low voice. “Stick with it even if Deuce and the mares don’t. Promise me, Willow.”
Biting her lower lip, Willow nodded.
Caleb reached up and brushed her cheek with his fingertips, leaving a trail of warmth in the cold rain. Then he swung up on Trey’s back.
“I’m not going to stop short of the summit,” he said. “We need every bit of daylight to get over that pass.”
Even as Willow started to say something, Caleb merged with the rain and vanis
hed. The horses filed out in the driving rain, with Deuce limping in the rear.
After the first thirty minutes, Willow stopped listening for Comancheros and looking over her shoulder every few minutes. After the first hour, she stopped checking to see that the Arabians were following . They were keeping up well enough, but Willow didn’t know how much longer the mares would be able to go on. Despite the slow pace, they were breathing as though they had been trotting for hours. True to Caleb’s prediction, Deuce kept on coming despite his game leg, walking quickly enough to overtake the slowest mare.
They climbed steadily, relentlessly, until Willow couldn’t remember a time when the land hadn’t tilted steeply in front of her. Willow alternated between a headache and a lightheadedness that made her fear for her health. Beneath heavy curtains of rain, the dark shape of spruce trees appeared more frequently among pines and aspen. Every few minutes she peered through the sheets of water to where Caleb was, clinging to his presence as the only certainty in a world gone the color of rain.
Thunder boomed occasionally, but no longer startled Willow. They forded a stream and climbed a forested, rolling ridge on the far side. Gradually the route leveled out somewhat, then ascended into another grassy park. A clean, racing creek boiled down the center of the clearing between shrub-covered banks. Caleb crossed the water and turned upstream. The land rose steadily beneath the horses’ feet once more, making even a slow walk an effort.
Once, when it was very steep, Caleb dismounted. Willow followed suit before she led Ishmael toward the rain-shrouded figures ahead. After thirty feet she went to her knees and swayed dizzily.
Caleb appeared from the rain and caught Willow up in a hug. “You should be riding, honey. You’re not used to the altitude.”
“It didn’t bother me—this much—in Denver,” she panted.
“You were four thousand feet lower in Denver. We’re almost two miles high here.”
Willow looked at Caleb with dazed eyes. “No wonder—my horses—”
“Yes,” he said. “But they keep on going just the same. Like you.”
For the first time Willow noticed the bruise on his forehead.
“You’re hurt!”
“I’m all right. You’re dizzier than I am and there’s not a mark on you.”
The relief in Willow’s hazel eyes was as transparent and intense as her concern had been. Caleb held her even closer, savoring her emotion. It had been a long, long time since anyone but Willow had worried about him.
“Thank you,” he said finally.
“For what?”
“For coming back after me when bullets were flying and a lot of men would have cut and run. For having the sense to know I’d need the saddlebags and the courage to bring them to me. For laughing when other women would have cried or whined or yelled at me. For being a hell of a good trail partner.”
Willow’s eyes widened in the instant before she looked away from Caleb, feeling lightheaded again. The blaze of his whiskey-colored eyes warmed her as no fire could have.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said huskily.
“I’m not a kind man.”
“Yes, you are. I know I’ve caused you trouble. Because of my stubbornness about the Arabians, you’ve had to risk your life again and again.” Willow smiled wearily and glanced up at him from beneath her eyelashes. “So when I want to scream or yell or whine, I think of what it would be like without you and I keep my mouth closed.”
Caleb laughed and held Willow even closer. He heard her ragged sigh, felt her body leaning trustingly against his, and tried not to think about a man called Reno.
She’s far too good a woman for a rounder like Matthew Moran.
No sooner had the thought come than it crystallized into a vow within the silence of Caleb’s mind. Willow’s capacity for courage and loyalty and passion deserved better than a man who seduced and abandoned young girls. At the very least, Willow’s deep sensuality deserved better than a man who left her alone for so long she forgot how to kiss.
But not how to respond. She hadn’t forgotten that. The memory of her headlong passion and soft, sultry body was an ache and a wild hunger within Caleb.
No woman who loved another man could respond like that—so quick, so deep. She’ll be mine before she sees her fancy man again. I’ll seduce Willow so completely that when he’s dead, she’ll turn to me instead of mourning a fancy man who isn’t worth a single one of her tears.
She can’t love him. She simply can’t.
Caleb bent and caught Willow’s mouth beneath his own, sealing the silent vow. The kiss was unlike any he had ever given a woman, tender and yet so deeply passionate he felt as though he was sinking into Willow, sipping from her very soul. When he finally lifted his head once more, she was trembling. He carried her to Ishmael and put her in the saddle. The look he gave her was as intense as the kiss had been.
“Stay close to me,” he said almost roughly.
Before Willow could answer, Caleb had turned away. He mounted Trey, turned the big horse upstream, and began leading the way toward the remote, difficult notch in the ramparts that his father had named Black Pass.
Wind moaned down from the unseen heights, ruffling the horse’s long manes. Caleb knew what waited on the far side of the pass, for his father had fallen in love with the series of high valleys leading down into an immense park. The park was known to white men, for eventually it provided a much more accessible passage between high peaks and mountain ranges than Black Pass. The side valleys leading up to Black Pass were unknown to white men. Even Indians avoided them, for game could be found in far easier places. Ancient tribes, however, had used the pass for their own reasons. No man knew what those reasons were, but the ghostly trail still remained, whispering of men long dead.
Caleb turned aside from the stream, for beavers had built several dams, killing the pines and gnawing down the aspens for a thousand feet in all directions, turning the meadow to a shallow lake. Several creeks came in. A few miles beyond, another valley joined the first, isolating the ridge whose flank they had been following in order to stay beyond the reach of the bog that edged the beaver pond.
After an hour the beaver dams receded behind the horses. The meadow narrowed to no more than fifty yards across, then forty, then ten. The route climbed up, leaving the stream to cut its way through solid rock below them in a canyon far too steep for a horse. The forest thinned, vanished into a kind of scrub, then reappeared as they descended the shoulder of the mountain into another valley where they could walk beside the stream once more.
Soon the route began climbing again. Mountains closed in on either side and the land pitched up beneath the horses’ hooves. The forest crowded in, but somehow Caleb always found a way around deadfalls and aspen groves where the trees were so tightly interwoven they offered no passage to a man, much less a horse. The sound of the stream became deep-throated and the way steep.
Caleb checked his compass every time a side creek came in, searching for the brawling little ribbon of water that would lead to another, higher valley, and from there to yet another and another until finally the highest level of the notch was reached and the divide was crossed.
There were no pines now, only spruce, fir, aspen, and a stunted form of willow that grew in avalanche chutes and in the small, boggy meadows cut by the stream. Caleb sensed the increasing openness of the country around him, the falling away of lesser peaks and ridges as the horses climbed up the backbone of the continent. His father had said the view from the top was as breathtaking as the altitude. Caleb had no way to check his father’s observation. Rain fell steadily, obscuring anything farther than a few hundred feet away.
Lightning danced on the heights of an invisible peak, sending thunder belling repeatedly down the mountain, violent cannonades that sounded like explosions and rifle fire mixed together. Heads down, ears back, the horses walked into the teeth of the storm with tall, dark evergreens whipping and moaning overhead. The surrounding forest shielded t
hem from the worst of the wind, but not from the ice-tipped rain that gradually turned to sleet.
They climbed with the violence of the storm all around them, sound and light hammering down until Willow screamed in fear but the storm drowned even that, leaving her feeling as though she were suspended in a cauldron of sound so overwhelming it became a punishing kind of silence. The air thinned until she was breathless just sitting on Ishmael and doing nothing more than hanging on with hands numbed by wet and cold.
And still the trail climbed. Sleet slowly was transformed into fat white flakes of snow swirling on the wind like petticoats of icy lace. Thunder came less frequently, at a greater and greater distance, finally becoming a muttering of the air, as much sensed as heard. Snow fell until it was ankle deep. The stream took on a dark, oily sheen.
Caleb checked his compass, turned Trey to the left, and began a long, ascending diagonal across the mountainside. In the fresh snow, the ancient, abandoned trail gleamed in a different shade of white than the snow falling on ground that had never been disturbed by the passage of man. Caleb looked at the ghostly thread snaking away to the overhanging clouds and wondered if any of the horses had the strength to take it.
The aspen vanished first, then the fir, then the spruce, until the forest was nothing more than a black-and-white fringe licking down sheltered ravines that lay a thousand feet down the mountain. Caleb and Willow were suspended between a mercury sky and a white ground. Veils of snow lifted and rippled, sporadically concealing and revealing the sweeping landscape. Far below, the creek was a black ribbon coiling through a steep, narrow, snow-choked ravine.
Gusts of wind tore aside the falling snow, unveiling a lid of clouds across rugged mountains whose very tops were still hidden in mist. For the first time Caleb saw an end to the climb…but not soon. There was at least another mile to go, another thousand feet to climb on a ghost trail slanting across broken rock, clawing up and up until finally the last ice-shattered ridge was climbed and melted snow flowed west, not east.
Caleb reined in and dismounted. Ishmael and Deuce were within two hundred feet of him. The mares were more spread out as they struggled upward. The last two mares were lost in the veil of snow that the others had climbed free of. Caleb waited, but no more Arabians appeared. Then the wind wailed and pushed aside more curtains of snow, revealing two mares a mile below, laboring slowly up the trail.
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