After the first few hours, Willow was able to keep her balance automatically, as though she had always ridden astride. Caleb had been correct about one thing, however. The saddle was indeed harder than Willow’s bottom.
Suddenly, Caleb’s horse came toward her from the darkness ahead. When the two horses were side by side, Caleb bent over until his lips were so close to Willow’s cheek that she felt the warm rush of his breath.
«I smell a campfire up the draw. I’m going to scout a way around. Hold onto Trey until I get back. And don’t let Ishmael start hollering if he scents other horses.»
After handing over the pack horse’s lead rope, Caleb vanished into the darkness.
Willow waited with increasing uneasiness, feeling the minutes move with the slowness of ice melting on a cool spring day. Just when she was certain something had gone wrong, Caleb materialized in front of her as silently as the night itself. At his gesture she followed him back down the draw, retreating from whatever lay ahead. A hundred yards later Caleb turned his horse and came alongside Willow.
«Trouble?» she asked very softly.
His hand snaked out, pulling her even closer. He spoke with a bare thread of sound that couldn’t have been heard a foot away.
«Two men with dirty clothes, clean guns, and fast horses. They were bragging about what they’re going to do with all the money they get from selling your damned fancy horses.»
One of them had also been wondering if Willow would be worth breaking to a different kind of saddle, but Caleb wasn’t talking about that. All that had kept him from drawing on the man right there was the fact that the sound of shots carried, and he couldn’t be sure there weren’t other gunnies camped nearby.
«Are they part of Slater’s bunch?» Willow asked.
«Doubt it. They were northern men. Slater is as southern as cotton.» Caleb listened for a moment, then continued. «There’s another draw a few hundred yards over. We’ll have to dismount so we don’t skyline ourselves. Can you walk in the dark without tripping over shadows? There’s no wind to mask any noise we make.»
«I sneaked past more than one soldier boy,» Willow said. «I got caught once. I never got caught again.»
Caleb thought of what might have happened to a girl caught by soldiers and felt a cold rage congeal in his gut. He wondered if that was why Willow had become a fancy woman-once lost, no matter how, a girl’s virginity couldn’t be regained. And after the first time, no man could know how many men had been there before him, so a girl might as well make the best of a bad situation. More than one widow had.
With quick motions, Caleb ducked out of the shotgun sling and settled it over Willow so that the weapon hung muzzle-down. A single motion would pull it into firing position.
«It’s loaded,» Caleb said tersely. «Any man gets close to you, blow him straight to Satan. Hear me?»
Startled, Willow whispered, «Yes.»
There was a whisper of sound as Caleb took the thong off his revolver and slid it in and out of the holster, making certain that the gun wouldn’t hang up if he had to draw quickly. He reined his horse toward a place which showed as a narrow shadow across the moonlit land. Holding Deuce to a walk, Caleb rode with his hand on his belt gun and his eyes searching the land. Behind him, the sounds of six other horses lifted into the darkness. A lazy breeze stirred, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cover the beat of so many hooves against the land.
Like trying to sneak dawn past the night, Caleb thought savagely.
He cast a bleak look at the sky. The clouds weren’t getting any thicker. The moon wasn’t getting any dimmer. And the crease in the landscape they were descending into was narrow and barely four feet deep.
As Caleb dismounted, he slipped his repeating rifle from its scabbard. Carrying the rifle in his left hand, he walked forward noiselessly. Deuce followed without urging. Roped together as they were, the mares had to walk so close together that they were all but stepping on one another. Inevitably, they made more noise than a horse walking singly would have.
It seemed to Willow that half the night had gone by before Caleb abandoned the inadequate cover and came back to lift her onto Ishmael’s back.
«Do you want to keep the shotgun?» he asked in a low voice.
«Yes, please. If you wouldn’t mind…?»
«I’ll get its scabbard.»
A few minutes later Caleb led the horses off in a northerly direction at a brisk walk. When they were beyond possible earshot of the two men, Caleb touched Deuce with spurs. He held the pace at a canter as long as the land and the illumination permitted. As moonlight waned beneath a thickening lid of clouds, he dropped back to a fast trot. Only when the land pitched up steeply did he allow the pace to slacken.
Not once did he dismount to rest the horses. Before dawn came, he wanted as much land as possible between Willow and the two men who had lounged at ease around their small fire, listening to the night with senses honed by years of living beyond the law.
As the dark hours wore on, Willow clung to the saddle numbly, balancing herself with saddle horn and stirrups, trying to move with Ishmael rather than against him. The first, faint sign of the darkness lifting had never been more welcome. Eagerly, she watched each hint of the coming transformation of night into day. When Caleb reined aside and led them to a small creek, she almost groaned with pleasure at the thought of hot food and a chance to stretch out full length on the ground. Dismounting, she braced herself for a few moments against her patient stallion before she began to walk slowly toward a nearby thicket.
Caleb watched the stiffness of Willow’s movements and considered stopping for more than the few minutes he had planned. Then he remembered the muscular, racy lines of the horses picketed near the gunmen’s campfire and knew he couldn’t take the chance. Those horses were deep-chested, long-legged, and in top condition, able to run all day. His own horses had hard days of riding behind them.
After Caleb put Willow’s saddle on one of the sorrel mares, he stripped the gear from his own big horses and switched riding saddle for pack saddle. By the time Willow returned, he was ready to ride once more. When she saw they weren’t going to camp after a long night of riding, she had to bite her lip against a protest.
Willow’s first effort at mounting failed. Before she could try again, Caleb lifted her into the saddle.
«The only way we can hope to stay ahead of those two men is by riding longer hours than they do,» he explained as he mounted his own horse.
«Do you really think they heard us going by?» Willow asked.
He looked into her hazel eyes, trying to measure her strength. Dawn showed the dark smudges beneath her eyes, silent testimony to her exhaustion.
«Two horses might have sneaked by that campsite, or maybe even three,» Caleb said finally. «But seven? Not a chance in hell. Along about first light those men will be casting around for our trail. Shouldn’t take them more than ten minutes to find it. The ground is damp, just right to hold tracks. Seven horses leave a trail a blind greenhorn could follow. Those men aren’t greenhorns. They’ll be able to track us at a dead run.»
Willow looked at her horses and knew what Caleb wasn’t saying. Without the Arabians, they would have a much better chance of evading any pursuit. Leading extra horses slowed the pace as well as churning the land with tracks.
«Our only chance of staying in front of anyone trailing us,» Caleb continued, «is to ride and keep on riding and pray that a good storm comes along to wash out our tracks.»
Shifting in the saddle, he reached back into a saddlebag and pulled out a dark bandanna that had been tied around the remains of their last meal. «Here’s what’s left of our bread and bacon,» he said, tossing the knotted cloth to her. «Eat when you have the chance. There’s fresh water in the canteen on your saddle.»
«What will you eat?»
«Same thing you will when that’s gone. Jerky.»
Before Willow could say anything more, Caleb touched his horse with spurs and set off at
a hard trot.
The transition from night to day was so gradual that Willow couldn’t be certain when one ended and the other began. The clouds had thickened to the point that sunlight threw no shadows. All that was visible of the mountains were low ridges lightly clad with pine and wholly capped by clouds.
The land rose and the clouds lowered until no more than a thousand feet separated the horses from the bottom of the mist-shrouded sky. Rain fell occasionally, but never enough to blur the signs left by the passage of seven horses as they pressed higher and higher into the first range of the Rocky Mountains.
Gradually, trees became more common on the hillsides. These weren’t the cottonwoods Willow had become accustomed to seeing scattered along the stream courses, but evergreens lifting their elegant arms to a gray sky that was almost close enough to touch. The tracks the horses left beneath the trees would be more difficult to follow. The realization comforted Willow, but not much.
Apparently, it didn’t comfort Caleb at all, for he kept up a hard pace, letting the horses rest only infrequently despite the steepness of the route. Centuries of pine needles softened the impact of hooves on the ground, giving a silence that was almost eerie to the horses’ passage. Other than the creak of saddles and the occasional snort of a horse, the only noise was a distant, fitful rumble that could have been repeated thunder or the sound of a waterfall carried by an unpredictable wind.
And once. Willow was certain she heard gunshots.
As the land rose, the air became colder and more restless. The wind strengthened into a steady moan. Willow tightened the chin string of her hat and settled more deeply into the saddle, hunched against the cold. Through the trees she caught glimpses of land falling steeply away. The horses were breathing deeply now, working hard even at a walk. Finally, they topped out on the shoulder of a mountain whose upper half was swathed in opaque veils of mist and rain.
Caleb pulled a gleaming brass spyglass from one of his saddlebags and looked out over theirbacktrail. Willow reined Ishmael in next to Caleb. Her breath came with a surprised gasp when she realized how much of thebacktrail they could see from their vantage point. The land was as empty as the wind. No smoke rising from the forested areas. No wagon roads or clear trails through the meadows. No buildings or tilled fields. No tree trunks or stumps with the mark of a steel axe upon them.
«What’s that?» she asked finally, noticing a dark thread over lighter meadow grass a thousand feet below.
«Seven horses flattening the grass,» Caleb said grimly. «Even if those two gunnies can’t track worth sour apples, they’ll find us at every meadow we had to cross. We’ll be damn lucky to avoid theUtes, too. Usually I don’t have any trouble with them, but usually I’m not trailing a chief’s ransom in horses behind me.»
«I didn’t realize…» Willow said. Her voice trailed off in dismay. Nothing in her previous experience had prepared her for a land so little traveled that tracks were like signal fires burning until a heavy rain came to put them out.
Caleb put the glass down long enough to look at the worried face of the young woman who was standing so close to him that he could hear the slow drawing and exhalation of her breath. In the gloomy morning light, her eyes were almost silver, with only a few hints of the warm splinters of gold and brilliant blue-green he had come to expect. Her lips were a soft rose, the same shade of pink that wind had teased from her cheeks, and her braids were the color of the absent sun. He wondered how her hair would feel spilling over his naked skin.
With a silent curse at his unruly desires, Caleb collapsed the spyglass and urged his horse forward again. The route he chose took them through forest much of the time, skirting meadows and the gentle, parklike clearings that Willow found so unexpected in such a wild land. Around them, shrouded in clouds, the land rose more and more steeply with each mile. Creeks fell awaydownslope in a racing white froth.
After a time it began to rain in earnest. At first, Willow welcomed the downpour as a means of blurring their tracks, but soon realized that rain was making their passage much slower and more difficult. Riding through a storm in gently rolling countryside was one thing. Riding through a storm in asteepsided, stone-bottomed landscape was quite another.
The heavy wool jacket Willow wore repelled most of the water, but eventually it become as wet as her Levis. Water ran off the brim of her hat onto the saddle. Low-sweeping evergreen branches added their lot to the miserable going, shedding sheets of water at the lightest touch. From time to time the ghostly, slender trunks of aspen trees appeared among the dark evergreens. The aspen leaves were light green on top, silver underneath, and trembled at every touch of rain. In many cases, the trunks grew so close together that Caleb avoided the groves whenever he could, knowing the packhorse and mares would come to grief in the tight spaces between trees.
A cold wind came wailing down the slope, tearing apart the clouds. Willow barely noticed, for the trail had become very steep as they worked around the shoulder of a mountain. Way down below and to the left, there was a stream. It was invisible beneath the shroud of rain, but Willow was certain a stream had to be there. The sheets of water washing down off the mountain guaranteed it.
Without warning the clouds parted ahead. Sunlight streamed over the land, setting ablaze the countless drops of rain clinging to the forest.
Caleb glanced up, but had little heart for the beauty of the land. He knew what was coming next, and he knew Willow would fight it. But he had no choice. He had known this moment would come since she had refused to leave her horses in Denver and refused again to leave them the night he had seen WolfeLonetree.
Grimly, Caleb urged his horse forward to the edge of aparklike clearing in the forest. There were many such places in the Rockies, some so high that tundra rather than grass grew. Watching the land for movement, Caleb waited for Willow to come alongside. Across the park, deer watched in return. After a few minutes of alert scrutiny, the graceful animals resumed browsing along the opposite edge of the park.
Green, shimmering with raindrops, bright with a crystal ribbon of water winding through its lush center, the grassy basin was so beautiful that Willow made a sound of pleasure when she reined in next to Caleb. Then she looked up from the grass to the mountain tops finally free of clouds, and she froze.
The mountains were overwhelming. Lashed by snow, swept by wind, naked in their bleak granite heights, the peaks dominated sky and earth alike. She had never seen anything to equal them in her life.
«It’s like seeing the face of God,» she said in a shaking voice.
The emotion in Willow was echoed in Caleb’s eyes. He loved the mountains in a way he loved nothing else, a soul-deep feeling of belonging to them and they to him. But he understood the Rockies as deeply as he loved them. The mountains were special to man.
Man was not special to the mountains.
Caleb dismounted and systematically began tying the mares’ lead ropes around their necks, releasing them from the relentless tugging at their halters.
«Does Ishmael have a favorite mare?» he asked.
«Dove. The sorrel you’ve been leading.»
«Get down. I’ll saddle her for you, unless you think Ishmael won’t follow us at all unless he’s on a rope.»
«I don’t understand.»
«I know you don’t.» Caleb’s mouth flattened. He didn’t like what he was going to do, but that didn’t change anything. It had to be done. «Your Arabians are tough and quick and well-trained. Now we’re going to find out if they’re smart. If they are, they’ll follow without a lead rope, no matter how tired they get or how rough the trail. If they aren’t smart…» He shrugged. «So be it. I’m not getting us killed for any horseflesh, no matter how fancy.»
«Surely the storm washed out our tracks,» Willow said urgently. «We’ll be able to keep ahead of anyone following unless they know the area as well as you do.»
«I doubt if they do, but whether or not they know the high, little-used passes just doesn’t matter.»
<
br /> «What?»
«It doesn’t matter,» Caleb repeated flatly. «We’re through leading horses. It’s too damned dangerous. From here on out the trail gets rough.»
«Getsrough?» Willow’s voice was faint, appalled.
«That’s right, southern lady.» He fixed her with a fierce, tawny glance. «What we’ve been over so far is a few lumps set in the middle of a lot of valleys and parks. Nothing special. A horse can lose its footing, go down, get scuffed up some, get up, and go on its way.» Caleb took off his hat, whipped his fingers through his hair, and yanked the hat back into place. «It’s different where we’re going. Up ahead it will be worth your life to lose your footing. There are places where you could scream for a long time before you hit bottom.»
Willow turned away and looked at her horses. The altitude and the days of hard riding had told on all of them. They were thinner, less alert, and they grazed hungrily on any grass within reach. The Arabians were strong and willing, but they were being ground down. So was she, even though she had done little more than hang on.
Saying nothing, Willow looked back to the park and to the magnificent, uncaring peaks blocking out the sky wherever she turned.
«Is there really a way through them?» she whispered.
«Yes. It isn’t obvious from where we are, but it’s there just the same. Finding the route isn’t a problem. Getting to it before we’re overtaken by those two gunnies is.»
Wide hazel eyes searched Caleb’s face. «Don’t you think the rain washed out our tracks?»
«Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on how good at tracking they are. It’s not something I want to bet your life on.»
Willow closed her eyes, trying not to show how much her composure was costing her. She would have argued with Caleb, but she knew there was no point. She had refused to leave her horses behind. Now she had to live with the result of her refusal.
At least there was an abundance of natural food around. Even if the Arabians wouldn’t follow without being led, they wouldn’t starve. She and Matt could come back for them.
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