Only You (14 page)

They were almost to the horses when rifle bullets began crashing and whining around them, screaming off the slickrock. Reno made no attempt to take cover. He simply tightened his grip on Eve and ran faster toward the ravine ahead. He knew their best chance of survival lay in reaching the ravine where the horses were hidden before Slater’s Comancheros reloaded their single-shot rifles.

Breath tore in and out of Eve’s lungs as she sprinted beside Reno, captive to the iron grip on her arm. Just when she thought she could run no farther, a bullet ricocheted nearby. She ran faster than before, trusting Reno to catch her if she stumbled.

Suddenly the rock sloped away beneath their feet. Together Eve and Reno skidded down the steep incline. The mustangs snorted and shied with alarm as he threw her into her saddle, vaulted onto his own horse, and headed up the ravine at a gallop.

All too soon the way began to narrow and climb steeply toward yet another slickrock terrace. Reno kept the horses pointed uphill, not stopping even when the way became so narrow that stirrups scraped against stone. Scrambling and clawing like
cats, the agile mustangs climbed through stony debris.

Abruptly they were in the clear. A wide mesa opened up before them. Reno didn’t stop to congratulate himself on their good luck at not finding themselves smack up against a slickrock cliff. He spun the blue roan around and raced back to the Shaggy that carried the small barrels. He jerked one barrel free, grabbed a leather sack from the back saddle, and turned to Eve.

“I’m going to try to close the trail,” he said curtly. “Take the horses about a hundred yards up the draw and hobble them.”

She grabbed Darlin’s reins, kicked the dun, and took off up the shallow, grassy ravine that drained the plateau. The two Shaggies followed. A scant one hundred yards later, Eve threw herself off the dun, hobbled her, and ran back to Darlin’. The mustang snorted in alarm but was too tired to bite when strange hands slapped hobbles around her forelegs. The two Shaggies were already cropping grass eagerly. They were hobbled before they knew what had happened.

Eve yanked the repeating rifle out of Reno’s saddle scabbard, grabbed her own shotgun, and ran back to where Reno worked at the lip of the plateau.

“Can you see them yet?” she asked breathlessly.

He spun toward her in surprise. “What are you doing here? I told you to—”

“They’re hobbled,” Eve interrupted.

“They better be, or we’ll be afoot.”

Reno bent over the ground once more. Working quickly, he poured black powder into a second tin can.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting set to bring a chunk of slickrock down
around those boys’ ears.”

The sound of voices came up the ravine.

“Hell’s fire, but they’re fast,” muttered Reno. “Can you shoot a rifle?”

“Better than a six-gun.”

“Good. Keep those Comancheros pinned down while I finish. Leave the shotgun with me.”

As Eve started for the lip of the mesa with Reno’s rifle, he grabbed her.

“Keep down,” Reno ordered in a low, hard voice. “Go on your stomach for the last few yards. There are three of them, and they don’t have a repeating rifle, but it takes only one bullet to put you six feet under.”

Eve crawled to the lip of the mesa and stared down the narrow ravine. No men were in sight yet, but their voices carried clearly, as did the sound of hooves on stone.

“The next time goddamn Jericho wants me to go chasing goddamn Reno Moran, I’m gonna make goddamn damn sure I—
goddamn!
”

The sound of Eve’s shot echoed and reechoed through the narrow ravine. She levered in another shot and fired again. The bullet whined and caromed from stone to stone. She fired one more shot for good measure.

No one fired in return. They were all too busy diving for cover.

Eve looked over her shoulder. Reno was hammering the edges of the second can shut with the butt of his six-gun. A two-foot fuse dangled from each can.

“Keep them pinned down,” he said.

With a silent prayer, Eve sent bullets flying down the ravine while Reno crawled over to a ledge of smooth rock that jutted out to one side of the ravine
. Carefully he shoved both cans into a deep crack.

“Keep firing,” Reno said.

While rifle shots echoed, he struck a match and lit both fuses.

Eve kept firing until she was snatched to her feet and set to running flat out away from the ravine. Scant seconds later, a sound like double thunder came from behind them. Reno took Eve down to the ground and covered her with his body while rock exploded and fell in a hard, sharp-edged rain.

Behind them a piece of the plateau sheared away. Skidding, bouncing, grinding, groaning, the stone avalanche went down the narrow ravine until it hit a barrier and piled up in a boiling cloud of dust and grit.

“You all right?” Reno asked.

“Yes.”

Reno rolled aside and came to his feet in an easy motion, bringing Eve with him. He approached the edge of the plateau cautiously and looked over.

The ravine was choked with stones of all sizes.

“Be damned,” he said. “That crack must have gone farther down than I thought.”

Numbly Eve stared, astonished at the change two cans of black powder had made.

Above the sound of random debris settling along the slope came the rhythmic beat of hooves. The sounds retreated farther and farther down the ravine as the mustangs fled the unexpected thunder.

“Even if those boys survived, they’ve got a long walk ahead of them,” Reno said with distinct satisfaction.

“Then we’re—safe?”

Reno gave Eve a rather dark smile.

“For a time, yes,” he said. “But if there’s another
way onto this plateau, Slater’s Comancheros will know about it.”

“Maybe there isn’t,” Eve said quickly.

“You better hope there is.”

“Why?”

“Because their way up is our way
down
,” Reno said succinctly.

Eve rubbed her dusty forehead against her equally dusty sleeve and tried not to show her dismay at the thought of being trapped on top of the plateau.

Reno saw anyway. He squeezed her arm reassuringly just before he turned away.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see how well you hobbled the horses.”

E
VE
watched the blue roan scramble back up the head of the steep ravine. It was the fifth chute down the plateau Reno had tried in the past two hours. So far, each ravine had ended in a cliff that horses couldn’t descend.

This time, however, Reno had been gone at least half an hour. Though Eve didn’t say anything, she couldn’t keep a look of hope from her face. Without realizing it, she ran her tongue over her lips. No shine of moisture followed.

“Take a drink,” Reno said as he rode up. “You’re as dry as stone.”

“I can’t drink when my horse is so thirsty, she tries to crawl in my pocket each time I pick up the canteen.”

“Don’t let the sweet-faced fraud fool you. She sucked one of those little
tinajas
dry while you were a quarter mile back, trying to fall into that big slot.”

“
Tinajas?
” Eve frowned, then remembered what the Spanish word meant. “Oh. Those holes in the
rock where rainwater collected. Is the water good?”

“The mustangs liked it.”

“You didn’t drink any?”

“The horses needed it more than I did. Besides,” Reno admitted with a slight grin, “I wasn’t thirsty enough to strain all those little critters between my teeth.”

Eve’s laughter surprised Reno. She was dusty, worn-out, scuffed from crawling over rock…and he had never seen a woman who appealed to him more. He tucked a tawny lock behind her ear, ran his fingertip over the line of her jaw, and touched her lips with the ball of his thumb.

“Mount up,” he said softly. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Curious, Eve stepped into the stirrup and rode alongside Reno as far as the trail allowed. To her surprise, the shallow ravine didn’t get deeper right away as the others had. Instead, it got wider and wider, descending gently through piñons and cedar.

Gradually the slickrock became buried under dirt. More and more small gullies joined the ravine, widening it, until they were riding through a valley that was nearly surrounded by steep walls of stone.

Eve turned and looked at Reno with hope on her face and a question in her eyes.

“I don’t know,” Reno said quietly. “But it looks good. I rode another mile and nothing changed.”

Eve closed her eyes and let out a breath she hadn’t even known she was holding.

“No water, though,” Reno added reluctantly.

For several miles there were no sounds but that of an eagle keening on the wind, the creak of leather as the horses walked, and the muffled beat of hooves on the dry earth. Though it was late in
the afternoon, the sunlight still held an amazing amount of heat.

Clouds gathered into groups high overhead. Their color ranged from white to a blue-black that promised rain. But not on the plateau. It wasn’t high enough to trap these clouds. Only the mountains were. Nowhere had Eve seen running water on the plateau.

“Reno?”

He made a rumbling sound that said he had heard.

“Does it rain here?”

He nodded.

“Where does it all go?” she asked.

“Downhill.”

“Yes, but where is it? We’re downhill from something, and there’s no water.”

“The streams only run after a rain,” he said.

“What about the mountain streams?” she persisted. “It rains there all the time, and snow melts. Where does the water go?”

“Into the air and into the ground.”

“Not down to the sea?”

“From here to the Sierra Nevadas of California, I know of only one river that gets all the way to the sea before it dries up—Rio Colorado.”

Eve rode silently for a few minutes, trying to understand how there could be land and no water.

“How far is it to California?” she asked.

“Maybe six hundred miles as the crow flies. Hell of a lot farther the way we do it.”

“And only one river?”

Reno nodded.

Eve rode in silence for a long time, trying to comprehend a land so dry, you could ride for weeks and find only one river. No streams, no creeks, no brooks, no lakes, no ponds, nothing but
red rock, creamy stone, and shades of rust where any vegetation stood out like a green flag on the dry land.

The thought was both frightening an oddly exhilarating, like waking into a landscape seen before only in dreams.

As the valley slowly dropped down to an unknown end, the buff-colored cliffs that rose on either side became more and more of a barrier. From time to time Eve turned and looked over her shoulder. If she hadn’t known that a way onto the plateau existed behind them, she wouldn’t have guessed it from the view. The rock wall looked seamless.

Gradually the valley changed, becoming more narrow as the stone ramparts closed in once more. Twice they had to dismount and lead the mustangs over a particularly difficult patch of land, squeezing between massive boulders and sliding down gullies floored with water-polished stone.

The sun descended as they did, but with more ease. Long shafts of light gilded the stones and painted dense velvet shadows behind the least irregularity of the land.

“Look,” Eve said suddenly, her voice low. “What’s that?”

“Where?” Reno asked.

“At the base of the cliff, just to the left of the notch.”

Silence, then Reno whistled softly and said, “Ruins.”

Air rushed out of Eve’s lungs. “Can we get over there?”

“We’re sure going to try. Where there are ruins, there’s usually water somewhere nearby.”

He glanced sideways at her and added, “But don’t count on it. Some of the Indians depended
on cisterns that have long since cracked and let out all the water.”

Despite Reno’s warning, it was hard for Eve not to show her disappointment when they finally worked their way through the piñon and juniper to the rubble-strewn base of the cliff and found no sign of permanent water.

As the sun descended beyond the rim of the canyon, she sat on her tired mustang and looked at the broken walls, oddly shaped windows, and walled-up rooms of the ruins. The silence in the canyon was complete, as though even the animals avoided the broken reminders of people who had come and gone like rain over the face of the land.

“Maybe that’s what happened to them,” Eve said. “No water.”

“Maybe,” Reno said. “And maybe they lost too many battles to hold on to what they had.”

Half an hour after the sun slid behind stone ramparts, the sky overhead was still bright with afternoon light. Gradually the breeze shifted, coming from a different quarter. One after another, the mustangs threw up their heads, pricked their ears, and sniffed the wind.

Reno’s six-gun appeared in his hand with startling speed, but he didn’t fire.

Gooseflesh prickled over Eve as she saw an Indian walking toward them from the direction of the ruins.

“I thought Indians avoided places like this,” she said softly.

“They do. But sometimes a very brave shaman will go to the old places on a medicine quest. From the looks of his silver hair, I’d guess he’s come to ask his last questions of his gods.”

Reno’s six-gun went back into its holster as soon as the Indian was close enough for Reno to see that
he was painted for making medicine rather than war. The once colorful paint was cracked and dusty, as though the shaman had been a long, long time in his quest. Reno reached back into a saddlebag for the small sack of trade goods he always kept, pulled out a pouch of tobacco, and dismounted.

“Stay put,” he said. “Don’t speak to him unless he speaks to you first.”

Eve watched curiously as Reno and the shaman silently exchanged greetings. The sign language they used was oddly graceful, as fluid as water. After a time, the pouch of tobacco was offered and accepted. Privately Eve thought that food would have been a better gift; the shaman looked drawn and worn, as lean as a mustang that had never known the touch of a man.

And like a mustang, the shaman was alert, aloof, fierce in his freedom. When he turned and looked directly at Eve, she felt the force of his presence as clearly as she had felt Reno’s when they held the Spanish needles.

It seemed like a long time before the shaman looked away, freeing her from his clear, uncanny eyes.

When the old man faced Reno once more, the Indian’s arms and hands described graceful arcs, quick lines, flashing motions that Eve could barely follow. Reno watched intently. His very stillness told Eve that something unexpected was happening.

Without warning the Indian turned and walked away. He didn’t look back.

Reno turned and looked at Eve strangely.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head slowly. “No.”

“What did he say?”

“Near as I can tell, he came here to see the past and instead saw the future. Us. He didn’t like it, but the gods had answered his quest, and that was that.”

Eve frowned. “How odd.”

“Shamans usually are,” Reno said dryly. “The really curious thing was his medicine paint. I’ve never seen an Indian use the old signs from the rock walls.”

Reno looked over his shoulder. The shaman was gone. Frowning, he looked back to Eve.

“He told me there was water ahead.”

“Good.”

“Then he told me the gold I was seeking was already in my hand,” Reno continued.

“What?”

“Then he told me I couldn’t see the gold, so he would tell me how to get to the Spanish mine.”

“He knew?” she asked.

“Seemed to. The landmarks match.”

“And he just told you?”

Reno nodded.

“Why?” Eve asked.

“I asked the same thing. He said it was his revenge for seeing a future he didn’t want to see. Then he walked off.”

Reno reclaimed the blue roan’s reins and mounted in a muscular surge.

“Revenge. Dear God.”

“Let’s see if he was right about the water,” Reno said. “Otherwise we may not live to worry about the revenge.”

He turned Darlin’ toward the long shadows flowing out from the base of the cliffs.

“Deer sign,” Reno said after ten minutes.

Eve looked, but could make out nothing in the dusk.

“No sign of wild horses,” he continued. “Strange. Damn few water holes that a mustang can’t find.”

As the sky and clouds overhead became touched with scarlet sunset, a narrow side canyon opened in the stone cliffs. Reno turned the blue roan in to it. Within minutes the side canyon narrowed so much that they had to go in single file. After a few yards of sand, the floor of the channel became smooth, water-polished stone. A shallow pool shimmered in the failing light.

Darlin’ tugged at the bit eagerly.

“Slow down, knothead,” Reno muttered. “Let me check it out first.”

While Eve held the horses, Reno read the sign left in the very fine silt that bordered the shrinking pool. He came back to the horses, stripped off canteens, and began filling them. When he was finished, he stepped back.

“Let them in one at a time,” Reno said.

While Darlin’ drank, he watched the level of the pool intently.

“All right, girl. That’s enough. Let the dun have a turn.”

Under Reno’s quick eyes, the four horses were allowed to drink their fill. When they were finished, little remained but a churned, silty puddle barely a quarter the size that the shallow pool had been before the horses arrived.

“Will it fill again?” Eve asked.

Reno shook his head. “Not until the next rain.”

“When will that be?”

“Could be tomorrow. Could be next month.”

He looked beyond the puddle to the place where the stone walls pinched in.

“Look!” Eve said.

Reno turned to her. Silently she pointed to the
wall behind him. There, on the rusty face of the rock, someone had chipped out a symbol. It was the same as one of the symbols in the Spanish journal.

“Permanent water,” Eve translated.

Reno looked at the puddle and then at the dry, unpromising slot that was so narrow he would have to enter it sideways.

“Take the horses back to grass and hobble them,” Reno said. “Sleep if you can.”

“Where are you going?”

“To look for water.”

T
HE
following Reno slept until a rising tide of sunlight crested the high canyon walls and flowed through the hidden valley. He awoke as he always did, all at once, with no fuzzy twilight between sleep and full alertness. He rolled on his side and looked across the ashes of the small campfire at the girl who slept on her side with her hair a tawny glory spilling across the blankets.

Desire tightened Reno’s body in a rush as silent and deep as the sunlight filling the valley. With a whispered curse, he rolled out of bed.

The crackle of the campfire startled Eve. She awoke in a rush, sitting up so suddenly that blankets scattered.

“Easy,
gata.
It’s just me.”

Blinking, Eve looked around. “I fell asleep.”

“That you did. About fourteen hours ago.” Reno looked up from the fire. “You woke up when I came in.”

“I don’t remember.”

Reno did. When he had covered her, she sleepily kissed his hand and then snuggled deeper into the blankets, for the nights were always crisp.

The trust implicit in Eve’s caress had burned
through Reno like lightning through night. He had almost slid in bed beside her. The amount of self-control it had taken not to peel off the blankets and run his hands all over her had shocked Reno.

It told him how much he wanted a girl who didn’t want him. Not really. Not enough to give herself to him out of sheer passion.

“Did you find water?” she asked.

“That’s why we’re not on the trail right now. The horses need rest.”

So did Eve, but Reno knew she would insist they get on the trail if she thought he was stopping only for her. The exhaustion implicit in her deep sleep last night had told Reno how close Eve was to the end of her strength.

They ate breakfast in a lazy kind of silence that was more companionable than any conversation could have been. When they were finished, he smiled at her as she hid a yawn.

“Feel up to a little walk?” he asked.

“How little?”

“Less than a quarter of a mile.”

Eve smiled and got to her feet.

She followed Reno into the narrow slot at the head of the feeder canyon. Her shoulders fit without walking sideways, which gave her an easier time of it for the first few yards. Then she, too, had to wriggle and twist to make any progress. Gradually the stone passage widened until two people could walk abreast. The rock walls became cool and damp. Puddles gleamed on the solid rock floor of the canyon.