.45-Caliber Firebrand (22 page)

“It's not on Trent's map,” Cuno said.

“Maybe he did not know about it,” Camilla said. “But it is there—a shorter way to the fort. There is no need to swing north and then return south.”

Serenity frowned and wiped grease from his beard with his coat sleeve. “How do you know, senorita?”

“I worked at the camp before the silver disappeared.” Camilla turned her gaze straight west. “At the bottom of this ridge is a stream, and a horse trail follows the stream southeast through a canyon and then up and over the ridge.”

Cuno turned his own gaze to the southeast. He thought he could see, in the far distance and obscured by sunlight, a gap through that devil's backbone of red sandstone that ran the entire length of the Rawhides and which, in fact, looking so much like a long strip of bald, dry, weather-gnawed leather, gave the Rawhides their name.

Cuno walked over to Renegade and dropped his field glasses into his saddlebags. “I'll scout it, make sure we can get the wagons through.”

“Head straight south from here,” Camilla instructed. “It will save you time. You can meet the wagons at the stream.”

Cuno swung up into the saddle as Serenity closed the tailgate and latched it, and Karl Lassiter crawled up into the driver's box of the passenger wagon.

“You better show me,” Cuno said, putting Renegade up beside the wagon and extending his hand to Camilla, who stood amongst the hides. Not knowing the country, he was liable to get lost down there and never find his way back to the wagons, much less the gap that the Mexican girl spoke of.

Camilla looked down into the wagon uncertainly, apparently expecting Margaret to object to her leaving. But the girl had already fallen asleep beside her younger brother, her doll peeking out from between the folds of her blankets. Jack Lassiter squinted against the sunlight as he shuttled his gaze uncertainly between Cuno and Camilla.

Her back to the front of the wagon, Michelle was staring at Cuno as though she could see right through him. For a moment, he wondered what she was thinking, and then Camilla stepped to the side of the wagon, extending her hand. Cuno took it, and the girl hiked a leg over the panel and sat down behind Cuno's blanket roll on Renegade's back.

Serenity was climbing into his own wagon as Cuno kneed the paint up beside him, Camilla's hands wrapped around his waist. “I'll meet you at the stream. If I'm not there first, come on south and we'll meet up with you somewhere before the gap.”

“Fine as frog hair,” Serenity said, casting a wary glance along their back trail. “Good luck.”

Cuno gigged Renegade into a trot south of the wagons, heading down the rounded shoulder of the grassy ridge and dropping toward the wild canyon country beyond.

“You two mind your topknots.” The old man's raspy voice tore on the wind behind them. “Dancin' Wolf might be on the lurk behind any rock or cactus!”

“It's Leapin' Wolf, ya ole mossy horn,” Cuno muttered.

20

“CRISTO!” CAMILLA SAID over Cuno's right shoulder.
“De que es una oso grande!”

Cuno studied the trunk of the pine tree ahead of him. It was scarred with the long, deep slashes of a bear's claws—some a half inch deep and nearly eight feet up from the ground. Some of the bark around the tree's base looked damp.

Cuno swung his right leg over the saddle horn, dropped straight down to the ground, and hitched his deerskin breeches up his thighs as he crouched. He picked up a chunk of the damp bark, and made a face as the vinegar and raw-alcohol scent of the bear piss, mixed with the tang of pine sap, assaulted his senses.

“Not only a big bear,” he said, looking around warily as he straightened and dropped the fetid bark, “but a recent one. This marking is only about a half hour old.”

“What are you waiting for?” the girl said, turning her head this way and that, her large brown eyes fearful. She grabbed the saddle's cantle and leaned forward as though to launch the paint into a run. “Let's go!
Vamos!
”

Cuno had already grabbed the apple and was hauling himself back into the saddle. He didn't care to tangle with any grizzly, especially the size of the one who'd marked the pine, any more than the girl did.

As he settled into the saddle and loosened his Winchester in the sheath under his knee, the girl wrapped her arms tightly around his waist. Nudging Renegade with his heels and starting forward, he studied the pine-studded canyon floor around him, hoping the bear had headed in a different direction than the one he and the girl were heading.

However, after having ridden an hour away from the wagons, angling southeast, he was no longer sure he was following the course he'd intended.

As Renegade clomped forward, toward a slight clearing in the canyon where the sunlight splashed down unimpeded on scalloped sand and boulder snags, he said, unable to keep the irritation from his voice, “Are you sure this is the right way? When we were higher, you said it was the next canyon south.”

Camilla said, “No, I am no longer certain. I told you to go back and we would try the other one.”

“I thought this one would
lead
to the other one, and it still might. I'd just like a little assurance that we're even still headed toward the gap.”

“It looked simpler when we were higher up.”

“It usually does,” Cuno grunted.

“Go here,” Camilla said as a lightning-topped cedar slipped past them on their right.

“Where?”

“Here.” Camilla pointed her mittened hand to the left, rocking back and forth impatiently once again. “Down that passage, see? That should take us to the passage we are looking for. I remember that one now.”

“Sure you do,” Cuno grunted, his unease about the bear and his fear of getting lost raking his tender nerves.

He heard the girl mutter something behind him in Spanish. She'd spoken too softly and quickly for him to be sure but he thought she'd called him a bullheaded gringo who lies down with mules or somesuch. He snorted and watched the walls of the canyon drop down around him, purple shade angling out from the ridge to his right.

He didn't see any more bear sign here, but in the gravel and sand of the wash's floor he spied the tracks of two horses. Not Indian ponies; Indians didn't shoe their mounts, and both these horses were shod.

Camilla saw the tracks as well, and she said, “We are not the first ones through here today.”

“They might be soldiers scouting out from the fort.” Cuno looked around at the canyon's steep walls, which, a hundred yards up, leaned back away from the canyon, strewn with large boulders pushing out velvet shade wedges contrasting sharply with the sun-blasted rock around them. “Or market hunters.”

“They might be desperadoes,” Camilla said dully. “Like the lawmen you killed last night. These mountains are honeycombed with
all
kinds.”

Cuno glanced over his shoulder. “How did you know I killed the lawmen?”

“I heard you speaking to Senor Parker.”

Cuno turned forward. “I figured you were asleep.”

“Who can sleep out here, with men like that lurking, and Indians chasing us?”

“Well, you read the lawmen right,” Cuno said, moving with the horse's sway. “They weren't all that law-abiding.”

“It takes a woman to read a man.”

“I reckon.”

Camilla was right—the narrow canyon led into the one she'd been looking for. The floor of this canyon rose steeply as it curved to the south, and in the mid-afternoon Cuno stopped Renegade on a high, cold saddle showing the deep ruts of many wagons over the years, but few recent ones.

To the left of the saddle was a higher ridge with scattered pines growing out of a sandstone dike. To the right was a deep river canyon in which a violet stream slid, glistening around large boulders and naked pines that had fallen from the slopes during rock slides.

Cuno glanced at the gap between the slope on his left and the canyon on his right.

“Just enough room for the wagons,” he said, as he dropped down from Renegade's back.

“Watch your step.”

Cuno turned to the girl. She nodded at a large plop of bear scat pebbled with bright red berries and bristling with deer fur. Glancing around the plop, he found a paw print as large as the ones that had marked the pine.

“Our friend gets around.”

“And he probably doesn't want anyone else around,” Camilla said.

Cuno stared back the way they'd come, then up toward the ridge crest. Hoping the bear was somewhere up there now, looking for a place to hole up for the winter, he turned to peer down the eastern side of the saddle.

Low ridges—some rocky dikes, others carpeted with fur or the short, tough grass that grows at high altitudes—tumbled away in the purple distance. There was a slight tan gap marking a broad valley at the edge of the Rawhides before more ridges rose, shouldering against each other and defining another, separate range—either the Mummies or the Never Summers.

He knew he wouldn't see it from here even with his binoculars, but the army outpost lay in the valley at the edge of the Rawhides. Still a good two- or three-day pull with the wagons, but at least he could see their destination from here.

Relief swelled in him, and he glanced back at Camilla. “You were right. This pass should take us down to the fort.”

The girl just stared at him, her dark brown face and almond-shaped brown eyes expressionless as her hair whipped around in the cold breeze.

“Right,” Cuno growled, grabbing Renegade's reins. “We ain't there yet . . .”

The horse dropped down the gradually sloping ridge with his head hanging and his knees starting to get that flop that meant he was tired.

When they gained the narrow valley bottom, Cuno gigged the horse down through pines to a stream in a deep, rocky bed and dismounted. The wind whooshed in the tops of the pines and firs. Squirrels chattered angrily. Occasional branches broke and fell with a muffled crash.

“We'll rest here.” Cuno reached up and placed his hands around Camilla's waist. “Gotta give Renegade a breather and a few oats before we head back to the wagons.”

He pulled the girl out of the saddle. He smelled her earthy fragrance—an odd mix of cherry, wood, and salt—and felt her long, coarse hair blowing against his windburned cheeks as he set her down.

He kept his hands around her waist for a moment, staring down at her. He hadn't been this close to her before, and he hadn't realized how pretty she was. Aside from the scar along her jaw, her cheeks were incredibly smooth, her hair the color of dark chocolate. Her lips, too wide to be called delicate, were alluring just the same.

Her brown eyes were guarded and grave, as though she were withholding a terrible secret. With hands laid flat against his chest, she looked up at him, frowning, a vaguely puzzled, faintly annoyed expression in her gaze. She held her lips in a straight line.

Blood warmed Cuno's ears as he felt a primordial pull in his loins. What bliss it would be to ignore the peril they were all in and pull this girl to him and kiss her and make love to her for the rest of the day, here in the crisp sunlight with his bedroll wrapped around them. His heart thudded as he realized his hand was moving up to slide a lock of hair from her right eye. At once chagrined and incredulous, he dropped his gaze and stayed his hand and turned toward Renegade.

“We'll take about twenty minutes,” he grunted, loosening the latigo cinch with a single, hard pull. “Best tend to business, if you got any. I'll build a fire, brew some coffee.”

In the periphery of his vision, he saw her standing behind him, flanking him, not moving or saying anything. He tightened his jaws and took his time with the buckle and then untying his blanket roll from the saddle. When he turned, she was striding off through the wind-tossed trees, ducking under pine boughs, her heavy wool skirts blowing out around the tops of her beaded moccasins.

When she returned, he had a small fire going and the coffeepot was chugging on a flat stone. He'd fed Renegade a couple handfuls of oats, and now the horse stood droopy eyed in the golden sunlight shafting through the trees, latigo and reins hanging free.

Cuno sat on a fallen log from the end of which a chipmunk kept appearing to read him the riot act before ducking back inside the log, which apparently was nearly hollow. The warmth of the fire felt good, for even at midday the temperature hadn't risen much above thirty degrees.

Eyes down, Camilla strode up to a tree kitty-corner to Cuno and slumped down on the ground, in a broad patch of sunlight, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. She leaned her head back, still not looking at Cuno, but gazing off through the trees and lifting a hand to slide her blowing hair away from her eyes.

Cuno tossed his bedroll toward her. It hit the ground and rolled to her right. “Cover up with that, if you like.”

She looked at the bedroll almost angrily, then lifted her face again to the golden light shafting through the trees. “The sun is enough.”

Cuno shrugged, then dropped to a knee by the fire to fill the two tin cups he'd set out. He'd filled one of the cups when the girl rose suddenly and strode out toward the stream murmuring in its narrow, rocky bed.

He lowered the pot to watch her, frowning. A few yards from the water she stopped and raised a hand to shield the light from her eyes. She was staring up the opposite slope sparsely studded with pines, cedars, and firs, with here and there a lumpy boulder sheathed in dead brush.

Suddenly, a bugling scream sounded behind Cuno. Heart hammering and ears ringing, he whipped around.