To Hell and Back (14 page)

“Did you?”

Amanda shook herself as if coming out of a trance. “Did I what?”

“Kill him?”

“No.” She sighed. “It turned out I was as pitiful a mouse as my mother. I swore to my father I wouldn’t marry Andrew. He beat me. Promised to disinherit me if I said another word about it. Two days later I took the small savings I had, got a train ticket west to the end of the line and worried about stage connections later. I had barely enough to get me to Phoenix.”

“Canan’s really the reason why you wanted to learn to handle a gun.”

“Yes. Well, no. Actually he was only part of it. Andrew Canan is my past. I’d kill him now, and gladly, but I’ll never see him again. More importantly, I’m not that helpless mouse any more.”

Hollander shook his head. He captured the small, defiant chin in his hand, turning her head firmly so he could gaze down into her eyes.
 

“You’ve never been that. You just have a well-honed sense of justice and no way to do much about it. You’ve had more than your share,” he commiserated, brushing the hair back from her face, studying her fine profile in the darkness while she determinedly kept her face averted.

Her voice was brittle, but Amanda had a few questions of her own. “How did you lose your family?”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“
I
talked about it when you asked.”

“You better get some sleep.”

“As soon as you tell me.”

Somehow he couldn’t break eye contact with Amanda, and he couldn’t leave her question unanswered. His pain, too, had festered within him far too long.

“We were camped with her people along the Mississippi. It was early summer. There must have been incredible rains far up-river because we never saw a cloud. One day the river rose abruptly, turning into a wall of water washing everything in its path from the riverbanks. My wife and son were on the shore when it came as were many of the other people of the village. Those who survived followed the river south for days, collecting bodies where we found them and burying them Indian fashion. I couldn’t stay with them after we found the bodies of my wife and son. I came West again and haven’t been back.”

“That wasn’t your fault either.”

“I know. Now get some sleep.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll sleep some,” Hollander admitted with a raw chuckle. “Just not as hard as you do. We’ll pull out in a few hours.”

With a deep sigh, Amanda curled up tightly against him, the blankets pulled nearly over her head, blocking out the cold of bad memories and the desert night.

Chapter 13

It was still dark when Hollander nudged Amanda awake with a less than gentle elbow. He was up and saddling the horses before Amanda sat up. Consciousness hit her like a dash of cold water. She sat back on her heels and braced by the breath-taking bite of the morning air, rolled their bedrolls into tight bundles for travel. She pulled on her blanket poncho, tying it tightly about her, then stood, buckled on her gunbelt and found the sack that carried their supplies. By the time she dug out their meager morning fare, a cold, jaw-exercising repeat of the dinner they’d shared the night before, a spill of golden orange and honey rolled up from the eastern horizon to wash down over the mountain peaks.

“It’s going to be a wall-banger of a sunrise,” Hollander noted when Amanda shoved some of their jerky and hard biscuits into his hand.

A couple of stray clouds drifting high above rode the winds with reddened underbellies as Amanda skip-vaulted into the saddle.

She smiled warmly at him. “You’re an amazing man.”

Hollander almost choked as he both chewed and swung into the saddle. He didn’t reply, but instead raised an eyebrow.
 

“No, it’s true. I’m awake, but you’re as alert as a hunting cat. And you’re that way from the moment your eyes open. I can move, do things, even keep an ear tuned to danger, but you’re able to see the beauty in a sunrise as well.”

He grunted. “You’ve got a lot of years of sleeping in a quiet, peaceful place to overcome before you can wake up like that. You’re learning.”

“Was that a compliment? At night, even when I’m standing watch, a sound that doesn’t belong rouses you as fully as if you’d never been asleep. I swear to God you know what’s going on in your sleep.”

“I do mostly. It’s how you stay alive out here.”

“But how do I learn to do that?”

“You just tell yourself before you go to sleep to hear anything that isn’t normal night sounds.”

Amanda held her reins in one hand, the animal beneath her fresh and ready to go, and munched on her breakfast. He gave her a crooked grin.
 

“You do just fine when you’re awake.”

Hollander picked up the trail of those they pursued again as the sky turned brilliant yellow-washed gold, fading into the sky-blue of the desert morning. Amanda loped her horse right alongside his crossing the open country.
 

No more had passed between them on the subject of her past or his since she had told him about Andrew Canan in the quiet of the night past. He had listened and pursued it no further. She hugged that memory close to her. It was possible too, in the fresh, clean light of the new day, that some of her other memories held some merit. That her mother had been right. That once she hooked up with the right person, she would settle down, and be happy. It cast Hollander in a new light.

The outlaws obviously believed themselves secure and were making no real attempt to hide their tracks, their trail easy to follow. Hollander pondered the things that had passed between himself and Amanda the night past.

He felt he should say something to Amanda, but there didn’t seem to be much that could be said and so he said nothing. The woman didn’t know it yet, but she’d been born to the wilderness life. There was a bond growing between them, a closeness he wasn’t sure he was ready for. When fate threw two people together with physical hardship it had a funny way of forcing them together or creating out of them the most bitter enemies. It had driven a wedge between himself and his mother long ago when his father, a dirt farmer, had died, leaving them alone on a small ranch in Texas. He’d worked odd jobs in town where he could find them. When he’d been fifteen she’d married again and Jake had taken his first job cowboying on a nearby ranch. From then on he’d drifted, never really found his way back to her and while he wished her well, he had no desire to return to that dusty little Texas town to seek her out.

When this was over he’d be forced to untangle his feelings for Amanda. He’d drifted so long, moving from one spread to another, riding one herd, then ram-rodding another, that it was hard to think again of putting down roots. But, in all the years of drifting he’d never come across a woman quite like Amanda Cleary. She was a different breed entirely. She didn’t give an inch. At times she overstepped the boundaries of good sense, but even that was preferable to a dainty piece of fluff who wouldn’t lift a lily white hand if someone’s life depended on it. He and Amanda were partners. They could be more, but they wouldn’t know how much more until this thing was over.
 

Amanda galloped her horse alongside his. They were making good time, miles rolling beneath their horses’ hoofs in an unbroken rhythm. They ate and drank in the saddle, climbing down only to water the horses, give them a breather when they walked them a while letting them blow, and to tend to their own needs. Her poncho was tied again behind her saddle and the warming rays of the sun beat insistently down upon them since they’d passed out of range of the shadows cast by the mountain peaks that lay to the East. Insects raised the mid-day chorus, and, in the distance, Amanda saw the rippling, water mirage appear on the desert in shimmering waves.
 

Hollander signaled another stop, swiftly dismounted and found the first signs of the trail they followed getting fresher.
 

“They couldn’t have left here more than a few hours ago,” he said as Amanda dismounted beside him.

He pointed first to the sharply defined hoof prints at their feet.
 

“Those are fresh, the edges haven’t even had time to be worn smooth by the wind. That’s fresh too.” He pointed to some horse droppings that had not yet been dried to a powder.

He stooped over the blackened remains of a fire which was sheltered and shaded by some large rocks. He took Amanda’s hand and held it close to where the fire had burned. “Coals are still warm. We’ll catch them before sundown if they don’t guess we’re coming after them.”

Hollander’s statement sent a thrill of anticipation and a wave of fear washing up Amanda’s spine. Her mouth went dry with the weight of his statement. She unhooked the canteen from her saddle horn and took a small sip.

“What then?” she asked as the reality sank in thoroughly that within a few hours they could be standing face to face with the outlaws who had so altered the course of their lives.
 

Hollander’s wide mouth curved into a broad grin above that buttress of a chin. “We figure that out when we find them.”

He looked closely at her, accurately reading the play of conflicting emotions.

“You know which direction they took?” he asked, gathering his reins and stepping back into the saddle.

Amanda nodded. “Still south.” She pointed to the tracks that swerved around a clump of brush and rocks.

“You’ve got an eye like an eagle,” he teased her, preferring not to think about what they were riding into.

“But not the courage of one.”

“Fear will keep you alive, little eagle, don’t toss it away.”

She collected the reins in her left hand over the saddle horn and, with a hop, Amanda was back astride Colorado.

“Let’s ride.”

They set a hard pace, Amanda’s smaller mount matching Hollander’s stride for stride. The terrain got rougher, but the combination of the killing pace and leg-breaking terrain little affected the two well-fed and rested horses. They galloped then trotted, then walked, then trotted again. The pattern repeated as they skirted large mountains and roamed over low hills. The time of rest in the canyon was paying off.

Amanda, too, had gained much from the weeks spent in the mountains. She had developed an ease of movement which blended her movements with her horse. A smooth accuracy with a gun had developed, and a strength of body and spirit that she had not known she could possess had surfaced.

Confidence, born of her weeks with Hollander, supported her and she understood now the desert’s harsh, unforgiving ways with the foolish or the inexperienced. Still, she had come to love it as much as her companion did though he never spoke of such things.

That was the one thing she understood clearly about Jake Hollander. He more than loved the land, he was a part of it. Amanda had a way to go before she would shed the feeling of being an outsider.

They pressed on until mid-afternoon when Hollander climbed down beneath the glaring rays of the sun to give the trail a closer look. What he saw he didn’t like. He snatched his hat from his head and slapped it against his thigh. The dust rose in a thick plume as Hollander began to curse softly.

Amanda stepped down to join him, no stranger now to the imprecations he uttered.
 

“They separated,” he announced, though he knew he didn’t have to. “Two of them heading southeast now, the other still heading due south.”

“What do we do now?”

Hollander slapped his hat back on his head. “Tracks are still fresh, not much more than an hour or two ahead of us.” He gestured toward the southeast. “We follow the pair.”

“Why?”

He grinned but there was no humor in it. “Gives us two chances instead of one.”
 

They were back in the saddle, moving more slowly when the tracks at their feet took a more meandering route. The pair up ahead were heading into a mountain range that rose up off the desert floor in a twisted, winding, seemingly impenetrable wall. But Hollander and Amanda wound their way in amongst them and pressed on. Hollander pulled up at the mouth of a canyon that enticed them with the sight of tall cottonwood trees rising from the wash cutting through the canyon floor ahead, and the faint, distant sound of flowing water.

Amanda waited while Hollander evaluated the situation. He looked for the world like a predatory animal with all senses on alert, turning his head slowly, body stiff and erect in the saddle, eyes sliding over everything near and far. When he shifted his weight in the saddle the creak of the leather seemed abnormally loud.

“Could be a trap,” he said quietly, eyes on the canyon mouth. “If they picked up on our dust or just have an itch that there’s someone after them the third one could’ve circled around.”

“I don’t think so.”

Still, Amanda was nervous. It was getting on toward dark. They wouldn’t have much time.

“I don’t either,” he agreed, then half turned to Amanda sitting astride Colorado close beside him. “Won’t be easy going in there after two armed men. I might have to kill one of them if there’s trouble. It’d be better if you stayed out here.”

Amanda pursed her lips and held him in the steady regard of her dusky green eyes, glowing with the reflected light of the day’s end, and shook her head slowly.