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Authors: Dani Amore

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Fifty-Three

T
ower’s
saddle leather creaked as he turned to Bird. He had given the war party a long
look, as well as the trail behind them.

“We’ve
got a few choices,” Tower said. “None of them very good.”

“Let’s
hear them,” Bird answered.

“We
can turn around and go back the way we came, but we stayed just ahead of some
bad weather, and going back over the mountains isn’t my idea of a good plan.”

“Agreed.”

“Or
we can stand our ground, try to talk to them,” he said. “But we don’t really
have much to trade with.”

“Don’t
even think about offering my whiskey,” she said.

“Or
we can take our chances out there,” Tower said, ignoring her.

He
gestured toward the bleak country to their west.

Bird
studied the Indians again. They were a little closer, and now there was no
doubt about it; she recognized at least half a dozen Paiute.

“A
Paiute war party doesn’t do a lot of talking,” she said. “And that’s exactly
what we’ve got up there.”

“From
what I hear, they’ve been raiding settlements all over the place. Seems they’re
tired of talking,” Tower said. He hefted his canteen. “Half-full,” he said.

“About
the same with mine,” Bird said. She pointed west, toward the black desert that
showed no signs of life.

“What
do you think about that?”

Tower
sighed.

“I
know it’s mostly a lava field, broken rock and desert for miles on end. It’s
probably a quicker way through, but a lot of people have died out there with
the same thought.”

“Here’s
how I see it, Mr. Tower,” Bird said. “If we try to talk to them and they aren’t
in the mood for talking, we’re dead. But if we take off and head out there,”
she said, pointing out toward the black lava desert, “there’s a chance they
won’t bother with us. Too much work to chase us out there when there are easier
pickings elsewhere.”

She
patted the neck of her Appaloosa. “So I vote to take our chances out there. Hell,
if they don’t follow us, we can always turn around and come back.”

Tower
glanced back behind them, then up again at the Indians, who were slowly but
steadily coming toward them.

“I
believe I agree with you,” he said.

“You
agree with me?” Bird said. “It’s a miracle. Write it down — maybe they’ll write
about it in the next Bible. When are they coming out with a new one, anyway?”

Tower
didn’t answer. Instead, he turned his horse and headed down from the ledge that
sloped into the edge of the lava desert.

Fifty-Four

B
ird
had ridden through places like this before. Years back, in southern Idaho, she
had been drunk, gotten caught in a storm, and wandered around for a full day in
a lava field that stretched as far as the eye could see.

Luckily,
she’d come across an outlaw on the run from a posse who knew the way out.

The
dangers in a lava desert were plenty. When volcanoes had spewed out the rivers
of lava hundreds of thousands of years ago, they had done so haphazardly.

There
were pockets of lava rock as thin as paper, others hundreds of feet thick. There
were literally bubbles of rock, nearly perfectly formed, that could break and
reveal a chasm hundreds of feet deep.

There
was also the occasional oasis — sometimes as small as ten feet across — where
grass grew and a tiny stream of springwater gurgled.

Outlaws
loved the fields for two reasons. One, it was very hard to track a horse, or a
man for that matter, across bare rock. There were virtually no tracks, at best
a slight disturbance in lava dust, that might reveal the presence of a human
being.

Second,
in places where the rock had been broken, the edges were as sharp and jagged as
knives. They could cut a horse’s legs to ribbons in no time. Same thing for a
man forced to walk; a pair of leather boots could be shredded in hours.

Bird
let Tower take the lead, and she followed along behind.

He
had not asked any more questions of her. As they rode, the hours turning into
more hours, the sun sinking and the cool chill of night enveloping them, she
was thankful for his silence.

As
long shadows began to surround them, it became too dangerous for them to
proceed. A wrong turn on the lava field, and a horse and its rider could fall
twenty feet to their mutual deaths.

No,
Bird knew there was no reason to risk going any farther in the dark.

They
spotted an overhanging crop of rock, with a narrow vein of grass in a gap in
the lava. They let the horses graze and threw down their bedrolls beneath the
rock.

“Are
you sure you don’t want a drink?” Bird asked.

Tower
shook his head and leaned back against his saddle.

“Here’s
to our health,” she said and took a long drink from the bottle.

She
was tired but not sleepy. The scrapes and scratches on her body from being
dragged by Toby Raines no longer stung. It was only the memory of being under
his control once again that continued to burn.

“So
what did you do after the war?” she asked.

Tower
sighed.

He
hates to talk about himself
, she
thought.
Well, that makes two of us.

“My
commanding officer in the army invited me to work for him in Saint Louis after
the war.”

Bird
took another drink of whiskey. She had to be careful; it was easy to get
dehydrated with only half a canteen of water.

“And
what kind of business did he have?”

“A
private detective agency.”

“You
were a Pinkerton?”

“No,
they’re in Chicago. But same idea.”

“So
how did you switch from a detective to — ”

“Good
night, Bird,” Tower interrupted with a little more force, enough to surprise
her.

Bird
took one more drink of her whiskey and closed her eyes. Images of Toby Raines
dragging her behind his horse taunted her. She awoke in what seemed like
minutes, but the early sun had already crested the far horizon.

She
sat up and found it hard to believe it was morning already. Bird took a small
sip of water from her canteen and got to her feet.

Mike
Tower was awake, standing, looking back toward the direction from which they’d
come.

Bird
sensed something in the way he was looking at the horizon behind them.

“What’s
wrong?” she said.

“The
Paiute. They’re following us.”

Bird
spotted them, and hid her surprise at how close they were.

“Looks
like they didn’t stop to sleep.”

Fifty-Five

T
hey
had no choice but to move on. Their shelter for the night offered no protection
in a gun battle; in fact, the rock overhang was a perfect place to feed
bullets and let the ricochets do the work. Bird knew of some soldiers who had
massacred a group of Indians who had made the unfortunate decision to make a
rock cave the site of their last stand.

It
hadn’t worked out well for them; the crisscrossing bullets had cut them to
shreds.

This
time, Bird took the lead, and she pushed it as fast as she could, at times her
heart racing, as she took chances on lava that looked questionable.

Only
once did rock crack beneath her horse’s hooves, but it had only been a single stone
and not a thin sheaf of rock camouflaging a deep, deadly ravine.

For
most of the morning, Bird kept the pace as quick and steady as she could. Despite
that, she could sense the Paiute warriors behind them. At times, she felt her
shoulders tensing, and she realized that she was unconsciously worrying about a
bullet or arrow piercing her back.

The
sun was nearly directly overhead when Bird saw that a steeply pitched slab of
lava rock made going straight an impossible path, so she pointed her horse
south and worked her way through a rough patch of jagged rock. The wall of rock
was almost an optical illusion; only a slight disturbance in the rocky sand told
Bird that an animal had used this path, probably a little-known game trail.

The
path between the two rock walls was narrow, and there was just enough room for
the Appaloosa. She was worried that it might not lead to a way out, and she had
no idea how they would turn around.

“Where
do you think this leads?” Tower said from behind her.

“I
won’t even pretend to know,” Bird said. “I can tell you, the Paiute would love
to catch us here. It would be awfully easy for them to cut us down.”

Just
when the first tinges of claustrophobia began to prick at Bird’s mind, the
trail widened out, the rock walls fell away, and Bird stumbled into one of the
largest oases she had ever seen.

And
they weren’t the first people to discover it, because, suddenly, she and Mike
Tower were no longer alone.

A
group of a half-dozen armed men stood with their rifles pointing directly at
Bird.

Tower
stopped his horse next to her.

Bird
looked at the men.

“Got
any whiskey?” she said.

Fifty-Six

T
he
standoff was over as quickly as it started.

Bird
and Tower held up their hands, and most of the men lowered their rifles.

“Did
we all take a wrong turn somewhere?” Bird said to the apparent leader, a burly
older man with a full beard and a barrel chest.

They
swung down from their horses and approached the men.

The
man thrust out his hand and Tower shook it. He tipped his hat to Bird.

“Name’s
Wilson,” he said. “Tyler Wilson. And, no, we most certainly did not take a
wrong turn. I was about to ask you the same thing!”

The
men weren’t there alone. Once they realized Bird and Tower meant them no harm,
women and children emerged from behind a series of vertical thrusts of lava
that had formed yet another hidden wall.

“Sir,
we aren’t going to lie to you,” Tower said, after they had introduced
themselves. “We’ve got a Paiute war party hot on our heels.”

Wilson
nodded. “Oh, we know all about them, Preacher. We were right on course for Platteville
until a small group of folks came upon us — they were riding hell-for-leather. Told
us there’d been a damn massacre at Platteville. Paiute killed most of the town.
They were heading for the mountains, but with these young ones, we had to take
cover out here.”

Bird
glanced at the group. There were a half-dozen men, four or five women, and a
little less than a dozen children. There were horses and two small wagons.

“How’d
you get those wagons in here?” Bird said.

Wilson
pointed out another man, a cadaverously thin man with a thick black beard. “Hopkins
knows these lava fields like the back of his hand, don’t ask me why,” Wilson
said. “Maybe from some previous occupation of his that he has now turned his
back on.”

Hopkins
gave Bird a shy smile and shrugged his waferlike shoulders.

“Wasn’t
but a few minutes after we’d been warned that these damned renegade Indians on
the warpath started chasing us,” Wilson said. “They nearly caught up to us
before we could even make it in here!” He spat out a stream of tobacco juice. “We
had no choice but to head for this godforsaken place.”

“Sounds
like our story,” Tower said. “In fact, we might have gotten in between you and
your Indians. I’m afraid we may have led them right to you.”

Wilson
eyed Bird’s two tied-down guns. “Well, the more guns we have, the better. You
shoot, too, Preacher?”

Tower
nodded. “If I have to, I will.”

“He
won’t hit anything, though,” Bird said. “I’ve seen him shoot.”

The
man smiled around his tobacco. “That’s okay — it doesn’t look like you miss
much, ma’am.”

“I
reckon I don’t,” she said.

Wilson
turned to the people behind him. “Grace, come on out here, say hi to Bird Hitchcock
and Mr. Mike Tower.”

A
woman even shorter and stouter than Wilson appeared with three young children
behind her.

“Pleased
to meet you folks,” she said.

Tower
tipped his hat and Bird nodded. She always felt a twinge around children,
remembering the other foster children she had sometimes cared for, but usually
her method of providing had been with a hunting rifle, supplying meat for the
table.

“How
far behind you are they?” Wilson asked.

“Not
far enough,” Tower said. “And if she and I can’t outrun them, there’s no way all
of us can. I think it’s time to start thinking about a perimeter defense.”

Wilson
nodded.

“I
agree, we are a slow-moving bunch here,” he said. “But we have rifles and a
fair amount of ammunition.”

Bird
looked the men over. Farmers, for the most part, not gun hands, that was
obvious. Maybe Hopkins had done some shooting, but the rest of them didn’t look
the part.

Bird
rested her hands on her guns. It always came down to the same thing for
surviving.

While
Mike Tower had turned to God for a savior, Bird had always placed her faith in
the same things.

Herself.

And
her guns.

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