Cowboy PI (23 page)

“I don’t care,” he had instructed her on their way back to camp after their emotional scene behind the fir. “From now on, you’re never to be alone with any of them. And if for any reason I have to be away from your side, you stay with the group.”

Fine. If he insisted on accompanying her everywhere, even on so basic an errand as this one, then he could just sacrifice his sleep to escort her. Still, she experienced a moment of guilty hesitation after removing herself from her sleeping bag and leaning over him where he was stretched out close to her side. She could tell by his even breathing he was sound asleep.

Not so soundly, however, that he wasn’t instantly awake and fully alert when she lightly shook him. “What is it?” he demanded.

Samantha whispered a quick explanation. “And, no, I can’t wait until morning. Sorry.”

Rousing himself from his bag, he pulled on his boots and groped for the flashlight while she collected a roll of tissue and a package of premoistened wipes. Samantha shivered. There was a strong chill in the air, made clammy by a mist that had gathered since she had left her own sleeping bag.

None of the others stirred as they silently stole away from camp and headed up the slope to the juniper thicket on the crown of the knoll. Looking back, Samantha could see the longhorns drowsing peacefully in the broad hollow beyond the campsite.

Bands of mist drifted through the hollow. Through their ghostly layers, she could make out two figures on horseback watching over the herd. Too far away to recognize them, and she couldn’t remember who had drawn this particular shift. Shep and Dick Brewster, she thought. Not that it mattered.

The beam of the flashlight in Roark’s hand cut an eerie swath through the mist that swirled around them as they climbed the knoll. When they neared the thicket, which
loomed out of the mist with all the substance of a wraith, Roark pressed the flashlight into her hand.

“I’ll wait right here,” he directed her. “If you have any problem, you call me.”

“I’ll only be a minute,” she said, bearing the flashlight, tissue and wipes as she squeezed through an opening between the junipers and found her way to a tiny clearing at the heart of the thicket.

But what with juggling the flashlight and wipes, dropping the roll of tissue on the ground and having to retrieve it, then managing to snag her clothing on the prickly junipers, Samantha was longer than she’d promised.

Roark checked on her. “You all right in there?”

“Fine.”

She wasn’t fine. The flashlight quit on her, and she had no luck in restoring it. Damn, she would be so glad when she was back in civilization again. The wilderness was all right until nature called and you had to deal with its primitive conditions. Then she wanted plumbing, electric lights and a nice, cozy furnace to warm her on a cold, damp night like this.

Samantha was relieved after she’d finally completed the essentials, though finding her way back out of the junipers without a light was a bit of a challenge. Relief turned to dismay when she stepped into the open. In her absence, the mist had thickened into a heavy fog. The moonlight barely penetrated its gray mass.

Even more bewildering, there was no sign of Roark. Had she emerged on the wrong side of the thicket? That would have been an easy thing to happen without light and the thicket being the maze it was. She thought she detected a slight rustle off to her left.

“Roark,” she called out softly, “are you there?”

There was no response. Straining to listen for any sound of movement that might offer her his location, she heard nothing. Where was he? What had become of him? He
wouldn’t just desert her. Not without telling her he was leaving. He must be on the other side of the thicket.

Unable to bear the eerie silence, Samantha opened her mouth to call out to him again, this time with sufficient volume. But the memory of that rustling sound, and Roark’s failure to hear her first soft call, which he should have done if he was close by, had the words freezing on her tongue. Wisdom suddenly told her to keep quiet. A wisdom she neither liked nor fully understood, but she obeyed it. Because if there was someone else in the area, someone who was not Roark or a friend, then any loud call she made would betray her location.

What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t go on just standing here like this. Quelling the urge to panic, she decided that her best course was to grope her way as silently as possible back to camp. Stumbling around in this fog in search of Roark would be useless. He could be anywhere. And if he was in trouble, then she needed to rouse the others to help her locate him.

However, finding her way back to the campsite proved to be far more of an undertaking than she’d anticipated. She hadn’t traveled three yards from the thicket when the fog completely enveloped her, blotting out all landmarks, destroying any inner compass that might have provided her with a sense of direction.

Fumbling her way blindly forward, hands stretched out in front of her to avoid smacking into any invisible obstacle, Samantha crept on through the dense shroud. She paused after every few feet, struggling to get her bearings. But all she could tell for certain was that she was descending the incline.

That was a good sign, wasn’t it? It meant she was headed in the right direction, that sooner or later she would encounter some evidence of their camp. Except the route seemed longer than she remembered, the slope steeper. An illusion created by the fog? She convinced herself this was the explanation.

Feeling her way with each careful step, she moved on. The fog licked at her from all sides. She could smell it, taste its wetness.

She stopped again. Surely, she was close enough now to the camp to shout a plea to the outfit. Should she risk it? Samantha was prepared to make that effort when she heard it…the whisper of a movement somewhere in her vicinity. Impossible to tell from where it came or exactly how far away it was. The fog confused all direction, muted sound.

Roark? It must be Roark. His name formed on her lips, but another inner warning prevented her from eagerly voicing it. It couldn’t be Roark. If it were, he would have been calling out to her long before this.

It was then, with a chilling awareness, that Samantha knew for certain she was not alone here in the fog. That she didn’t dare to reveal her position by crying out to either Roark or the others. Someone was with her. Someone who didn’t want her to know he was seeking her.

An animal? It could be an animal. But her sense of danger told her it wasn’t an animal. It was human, and it was hunting for her. Lifting her head like a frightened doe striving to detect the exact location of her enemy, Samantha could swear she heard a harsh breathing.

Stifling a sob that would have revealed her presence, fighting the alarm that had her trembling now, she started cautiously to move away. She must have stepped on a dry twig. Something snapped under her foot. Not a loud sound but treacherous in all this silence.

There was a rush of movement behind her, someone charging in her direction. Samantha bolted, plunging down the hill through the blank wall of the fog. A dark shape rose up in front of her, and for a horrified second she thought her stalker must have circled around and was waiting to ambush her.

The phantom turned out to be nothing more menacing than a fir tree. She had no memory of a fir along the route
to the juniper thicket. Nor had the grade been this rough in places and in others dangerously slick. Slithering down one wet stretch, she lost her balance and fell to her hands and knees.

Picking herself up, knowing she was hopelessly lost now but too terrified to turn back, Samantha fled onward through the fog. Disoriented, worried sick about Roark, she failed in her mindless dread to realize just where she was going. And she paid the penalty of her error.

In one second there was solid earth in front of her. In the next there was nothing but empty space. Samantha suddenly found herself teetering precariously on the sharp lip of a precipice. Too late she understood that she had not been headed for the camp at all. She had come the wrong way!

Samantha knew where she was. Below the camp lay the deep canyon on whose brink Shep Thomas had earlier stood and where she was now trapped between a yawning void and a deadly pursuer.

Recovering her balance, she started to back away. Somewhere behind her sounded the crunch of a foot on gravel. He was here, close by! He had found her! Choking on both fog and fear, she altered the direction of her escape and began to edge along the rim of the canyon to her right. It was another fatal blunder.

With one wrong step the earth was crumbling beneath her, threatening to pitch her into a hideous oblivion. Throwing herself sideways, she landed on her knees where, in desperation, she fought to save herself, feet scrabbling for a purchase, hands clawing at ground that continued to disintegrate.

And then she was fighting another horror. A human one whose arms reached down and wrapped around her, snatched her back from the edge, and dragged her forcefully to her feet. Battling her enemy, her breathing quick and ragged, she struggled in his grip, tried to beat at him with her fists.

“Samantha, it’s all right. It’s me.”

When the familiar deep voice finally penetrated her panic, she went limp in his arms. For a long moment, as Roark continued to hold her, she surrendered totally to the blessed relief of his solid body comforting her. Then, drawing her head back, she challenged him with an accusing “Where have you been? Why didn’t you answer me when I called?”

“I didn’t hear you. What did you do, come out on the wrong side of the thicket?”

“I guess that’s exactly what I did. Roark, there’s someone else out here with us. He was hunting for me.” She looked around wildly, but the fog continued to veil everything.

“I know. When I finally realized something was wrong and came looking for you, I could hear the two of you playing cat and mouse in this damn mess. All I could think of was finding you before he did. Thank God I did.”

“But if you had called out for me—”

“You would have answered, and it would have led him straight to you. So I kept quiet and used my ears. I could swear I heard him once whispering your name. I almost had him then, but he gave me the slip. Are you all right?”

“Yes, but if he’s still here somewhere—”

“I think he’s gone. Let’s get away from this edge before one of us takes another wrong step. Looks like the fog may be breaking up. Let’s see if we can find our way back to camp.”

“What if we run into him?”

“I’ll regard it as an opportunity to introduce him to my fists. But my guess is he isn’t hanging around long enough to get himself identified. Not this time, anyway.”

Roark was right. The fog was easing, leaving patches like smoke as it slowly drifted away. Between those patches, the moonlight revealed the route up the long hill. They were climbing it when Samantha realized that somewhere on her flight she’d abandoned the tissues, wipes and
useless flashlight. They weren’t important. What mattered was learning who had stalked her in the fog.

“If one of them back at camp is missing,” she said, “it’s a good bet he’s our culprit.”

“He’s much too cunning to be caught like that, Samantha.”

She was still hopeful that one of their members would be absent from camp, but Roark proved to be right. The fog that had filled the air only moments ago had shrunk to nothing by the time they reached camp. It was possible to count occupied sleeping bags without approaching anyone. Everyone who was supposed to be there
was
there, rolled in his bag on the ground. Ramona, Ernie, Alex, Cappy.

“What about Shep and Dick?” she whispered.

It was a possibility that was easily checked. Roark drew her off to the top of a rise where they could look down into the hollow on the other side. A light mist still lingered at its bottom, but the moonlight was enough to reveal the figures of Shep Thomas and Dick Brewster on horseback stationed on opposite sides of the quiet herd.

“All of them accounted for,” Roark said as they turned back to the campsite.

Yes, Samantha thought, but the fog must have been even thicker in the hollow than on the knoll. That meant either the trail boss or the horse wrangler could have slipped away under its cover without his partner being conscious of his action, then managed to return before he was missed.

One of them, she thought, focusing on the still figures on the ground as they regained the campsite. One of them either here or back in the hollow saw his opportunity and came after me. And after he’d struck and failed to achieve what he’d intended, the fog swallowed him again, permitting him to steal back to camp without detection.

Which one? she asked herself, wondering if one of them there on the ground was only pretending to be asleep. The rest of them remained undisturbed, not aware of the des
perate drama that had been enacted out there in the fog just moments ago.

“Let’s turn in,” Roark whispered. “Get what rest we can before daylight.”

Samantha was dismayed by his casual suggestion. “Aren’t you going to wake them? Tell them what happened? Question everyone?”

“What for? If anyone saw one of the others sneaking off, he’d already be up and talking about it. And whoever did sneak off isn’t going to admit it. Assuming it was one of our outfit, that is. We still don’t know for certain our man is one of us.”

That was true. They had no hard evidence yet to support the belief. Even so, she couldn’t fall asleep again after she’d crawled back into her bag, though Roark was close beside her in his own bag, his gun within his reach.

She kept thinking about her fellow drovers. Thinking how she was almost certain one of them wanted her out of the way, while at the same time struggling with this probability. It still seemed incredible to her. Who? And why?

Equally disturbing was her awareness of the man at her side. Of the hopeless issues that continued to divide them. Where Roark Hawke was concerned, her emotions remained in turmoil. She wanted him while knowing that she shouldn’t want him.

I
T WAS MORNING
and the camp was stirring when Samantha first noticed that something was wrong. She had managed to drift off an hour or so before daybreak just as the fog made another appearance, though it had burned off altogether by the time she emerged from her cocoon.