Petticoat Ranch (39 page)

There it was again—Sophie’s sweet voice. The first time it had been laced with desperation. This time she sounded resigned and very tired. A thrill of fear cut straight to Clay’s heart. He looked behind him. Luther and Adam had gotten the message, too.

In an odd way, hearing her prayer made Clay feel better. He hadn’t given it much thought, but it had occurred to him that Luther and Adam had been hearing her prayers when he should have been the one God was calling to go help Sophie. Of course, up till now, he’d been on the spot, not in need of being called by a miracle since he was within shouting distance.

They had five miles to go, but it was five rugged miles, some of it up and down instead of across. They’d be an hour or more getting home. If he pushed his horse to the limit and the horse fell and broke a leg, he might not get there at all. He pushed his horse to the limit anyway. The Appaloosa was so game, Clay wondered if he hadn’t heard Sophie calling, too.

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W E N T Y - 
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reckon asking God for help is about all most of it boils down to anyway.” Beth squared her shoulders and started for the opening.

Sophie nodded and patted Beth on the arm.

“Then why does the parson have to go on so long on Sunday morning with his praying?” Beth asked.

“Well, we need to say thank You, too.” Sophie pulled her riding skirt close against her legs to keep the fabric from rustling. “And usually when you get to counting up, we’ve got way more to thank God for than to ask Him for, so it can take awhile.”

Beth seemed skeptical. “It’s not that I mind saying, ‘Help me’ and ‘Thank You’; it’s that I mind the parson saying it so slow for so long.”

Sophie didn’t have anything much to say to that, so she changed the subject. “Let’s get down to saving this ranch.”

Beth got in position just outside the cave entrance behind the lookout.

Sophie moved through the tunnel to a lower level and slipped out to hide behind some rocks. The rocks were in a tall, jumbled pile. When she was setting her traps, Sophie had moved the pile around a bit so there was a small opening she could see through without being seen. Carefully surveying the area for others in the gang before each movement, Sophie crept up behind the rocks. She watched the man, who was only about twenty feet away from her, most of it straight up. Sophie lifted a small rock and pulled a folded oilskin paper out from under it. She unfolded
the paper and took out the prettiest hanky she’d ever owned. She touched the delicate thing, all white linen and tatted lace, then she picked up a few tiny rocks and a little damp earth and slapped it into the middle of the handkerchief to weigh it down. Then she waited for Elizabeth.

Sophie couldn’t hear what Beth did, but Sophie knew her little girl. She wouldn’t make too much noise, nor too little. The man turned away from watching.

Sophie deftly rose from her hiding place and tossed the weighted handkerchief onto a spot about a dozen feet off the trail, in plain sight of the outlaw. She ducked back out of sight.

When the man turned around from studying the land behind him, he went back to his careful watch. It took him ten minutes to spot the hankie, and Sophie was about to explode from frustration by the time he saw it.

The man straightened. Sophie was close enough to see his eyes sharpen. Sophie had to give him credit. He was a good lookout. He didn’t go down to look at the handkerchief right away. He waited, made sure there was no one around, and then started sidling down the steep trail.

He walked over to the handkerchief, and as he bent to pick it up, Sophie heard him mumble, “Was this lying here before?”

Sophie yanked the rope that released the net the man was standing on. With a startled yell, the man was jerked thirty feet in the air as the sapling sprung up straight. Just as Sophie had planned, the man ended up dangling very close to the steepest drop-off. Before he could make a second sound, Sophie stepped out from the clearing and brandished her hunting knife near the hemp rope that stretched from the ground to the tree. “If you yell again, I’ll cut the rope and you won’t quit falling until you’ve rolled all the way to the ranch house.

The man looked frantically at the knife, then he looked at the jagged rocks that covered the hillside for half a mile, mostly straight down, and didn’t make a peep.

Sophie ducked back behind the rock and called out softly, “I’m waiting for your friends back here. Don’t make me regret letting you live.”

Sophie sat quietly behind the rock for a few minutes until she started to believe the man was actually going to remain silent. Then she soundlessly slipped back into the cave and ran up to meet Beth. Beth had Rio untied, but although breathing steadily, he was out cold. He had a good-sized welt on his forehead.

Sophie said, “We’re not going to get much help from him.”

Beth shook her head. “Let’s drag him into the cave so no one bothers him.”

It took a lot of tugging to move the burly Mexican. Sophie paused to rest several times, mindful of the unborn baby she was supposed to be coddling. They got him hidden, then they headed through the honeycomb of caves for the next most likely lookout.

“I hear someone coming in the back,” Mandy hissed at Sally.

Sally lay Laura down. “The braces?”

“All out,” Mandy answered. Both girls fell silent. Mandy gripped on the pigging string in her hand and two more in her mouth and waited. She’d played this game so many times with her ma that she knew exactly what to do. The only thing was, she’d never actually had to do it before. This time, it looked like it was really going to happen.

She moved to the back of the house and peeked through a hidden slit. It definitely wasn’t one of the McClellen men. It was a dirty-looking man with no good on his mind, judging from the rifle in his hands. The man stepped up onto the back porch, and it collapsed under him. His head cracked with a solid
thud
on the crossbar Ma had rigged for just this reason. It left the man stunned as it was meant to.

Mandy dove at the man. She whipped the leather around his hands behind his back, then took another pigging string out of her teeth and whipped his feet together. She’d hog-tied a two-year-old steer many times, and this man didn’t wiggle a bit more than that. She had him tied up tight and gagged before the dust had settled from the fall. She tossed
his rifle to Sally, who caught it deftly and set it aside. Mandy dragged the man away from the hole in the porch floor with quick, practiced moves, while Sally reset the porch boards. The trap was ready again.

“I wonder how Ma and Beth are doing?” Sally asked calmly.

Mandy didn’t like the way the man was staring at her, all meanlike, so she put a blindfold over his eyes from the supply of pigging strings, ropes, and neckerchiefs Ma had stored down here for just such an occasion. The man struggled as she covered his eyes, but she had him bound tighter than a year-old calf at branding time. Then she turned to her little sister.

“Ma planned this trap and it worked. No reason the others shouldn’t.”

“I sure wish Pa would get here.” Sally settled herself to watch through the slits in the front porch steps.

Mandy checked the load in the rifle, snapped it back shut, and laid it well out of reach of the outlaw. “Me, too.” She went to her lookout in the rear of the crawl space. “Someone needs to get here and save us.”

“I think there’s someone coming from the front.” Sally backed out of the way to let Mandy through.

“Got it.” Mandy caught up the pigging strings and clamped them with her teeth.

The second man Sophie and Beth snared didn’t yell, because he cracked his head smartly on the trunk of the tree when he got snapped into the air and hung unconscious in the net Mandy had woven from hemp.

They freed Andy, another ranch hand, but although his eyes flickered open once, he was in no shape to help them. He had a nasty gash on his head, and when he tried to talk, he mumbled something Sophie couldn’t understand. Sophie took the time to stop the bleeding and bandage him; then she and Beth left him lying in another cave to recover.

A quick but thorough check of the mountainside didn’t turn up any more outlaws. “If the sheriff was right about there being eight men,
six of them might be down there right now with the other girls. We’d better get down there and help.”

“Ma, look!” Elizabeth pointed to the cabin, which they could see from their vantage point. Sophie looked just in time to see a man fall through the front porch floor. In seconds, Sally was visible covering the porch back up. She wouldn’t have done that if the man had given them trouble.

Sophie looked around the ranch yard to see if anyone had noticed one of their own disappearing. No one else was in sight.

“All right. That takes care of three of them. Five left.” Sophie studied the terrain all around them. Frustrated, she muttered to herself, “Where are they?”

Beth was silent, also looking the land over. Finally she pressed her hand to Sophie’s. “Right above us, off to the left.”

Sophie turned and saw two riders. “They’ll be passing right in front of one of our rock slides.”

The two of them silently ducked back into the cave and ran.

Clay saw the final turn in the trail that would give way to a view of the ranch. The trail widened and flattened out. Adam and Luther caught up to him and galloped with him, three abreast.

Luther said, “No shooting.”

“We’d’ve heard gunshots all the way to Sawyer Canyon, Clay.” Adam raced his roan, bent close to its neck until he was talking into its mane. “I haven’t heard a one.”

“I haven’t heard Sophie calling for help again either.” Clay couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.

They kept pushing and just rounded the corner of the trail that put them within a long uphill mile of the ranch, when they heard a thundering
crash
in the hills behind the cabin.

“What’s that?” Clay sat up straight on his Appaloosa, but he didn’t slacken his pace.

Luther stared at the distant hills behind the ranch house even as they charged on. “It sounds like an avalanche.”

“It’s a booby trap being sprung.” Adam laughed over the thunder of hooves. “It’s something I taught Sophie to do years ago.”