To Hell and Back (6 page)

When they stopped again the mountains loomed nearer, appearing now to Amanda like some unscalable battlements. She drew her mount up alongside Jake.

“There’s a way through that?”

“Yep. But we’re gonna have to do some riding first. If we don’t throw that posse off, they’ll follow us right up the trail.”

“There’s a trail . . .”

Amanda fell silent. The two of them didn’t dismount, but just let the horses blow while they stood hip-shot on a stone and cactus-littered hillside. She reached into the saddlebag behind her for the remnants of their previous night’s meal. There were several biscuits, a couple of chunks of steak and some shriveled potatoes. She opened the napkin and offered it to Jake. He accepted the cold meat and a biscuit with an encouraging grin, but his eyes never ceased their movement.
 

Between them they gulped the bits of food down very quickly and Jake passed her a canteen that sloshed ominously with its lack of water. She took a couple of small sips, letting the warm, tinny-tasting water trickle down her cotton-dry throat, then, still parched, Amanda passed the canteen back to Jake.
 

He couldn’t help it, he eyed her closely as she sipped the barest amount from the canteen. The way she sat a horse made him doubt she’d been on one more than once or twice before in her life. Nonetheless, she didn’t complain despite the fact the going was rough, the pace brutal, even for an experienced hand. She had only sipped at the neck of the canteen, and when she handed it back he knew she was still thirsty. He was the same. Amanda, Jake decided, had the instincts of a trail rider though she lacked experience. He had an uneasy feeling that she was about to get all her lessons in a condensed package—with him as the appointed tutor.
 

“You doing all right?” Jake asked her, his voice roughed by the dryness of his throat.

“No. But I’m doing better than I would be doing at the end of a hangman’s rope.”

“You’ve got grit, lady, I’ll give you that. We’re have to push it some now. I’m going to back-track, cover our trail and then head for the hard rock. Hang on, we’ve got a ways to go yet.”

He touched his heels to his horse and moved out swiftly. He was keeping a close eye on the horses and they weren’t faltering at the grueling pace Jake set. He tried not to glance back at Amanda with much frequency as the miles rolled out behind them, but his ears were always attuned to the sound of the beat of her horse’s hoofs, the rhythmic cadence always there. He couldn’t look because he couldn’t slow down. That could well be the doom of them both. The desert had its own set of rules. A man or woman had to learn to live by them from the moment he or she set foot on it, or join the bleaching bones of the ancestors that already littered the sands.
 

When they pulled up again to give the animals a breather, Jake gave serious consideration to their back trail.
 

“It’s harder to see the dust. Are they losing ground?” Amanda asked.

“I used a few tricks. If we can keep this up and slow them down we’ll make it to the mountains well ahead of them. Once we hit the Superstitions we’ll be able to travel without leaving much of a trail. Few days from now the wind will have erased everything.”

The steep slopes loomed directly before them and Jake looked squarely at Amanda for the first time in a couple of hours. She was a vision, her dusky green eyes solemn, her black hair shimmering, twisted by the wind, but the only thing Jake was aware of was her skin. Fair and smooth, her face and hands were seared by sunburn.

“Dang it! Why didn’t you say something?”

Amanda blinked, startled by his outburst.

“About what?”

“You’re frying like ham on a griddle.”

Amanda didn’t appreciate the comparison.

“Well,” she shot back, “what could you have done about it if I had?”

She was angered by his short temper, but even more, she wanted to climb down, sit down on the hard-packed earth and bawl. She would yield to neither impulse, and wasn’t quite aware of the sunburn as yet. The warmth of it was only a secondary echoing pulse to that of the sun overhead. Every joint burned and grated. Every muscle ached, and now this.

Jake gave her a sour look, jumped down from his horse, drew a knife from a saddle sheath and chopped at the petrified earth. Big chunks were reduced smaller and smaller beneath the silver blade flashing in the dazzling sunlight.

Amanda was torn between misery and curiosity.

“What’s that for?”

The small clods were pulverized nearly to dust.

“Hold out your hands,” Jake commanded and slid the knife back in the saddle sheath.

Amanda did as he said without thinking—not a good habit to get into she reprimanded herself. He immediately filled her hands with the gritty dust, then lifted the canteen from his saddle horn, uncorked it and poured a few drops of the precious liquid into the bowl of her hands.

“Mix that up and spread it on your face. It’ll help that burn you’ve already got and keep it from getting worse.”

A repugnant look drew the corners of Amanda’s lips down as she worked the mass into mud, then, tentatively, smeared it on her face. Initially the mud felt good against her skin, cool and soothing despite its grittiness. Then, when it almost instantly dried, it formed a tight mask that made her cheeks feel like they were going to crack. She slapped the remainder on the backs of her hands, rubbed her soiled palms on her skirts and gathered the reins once again.

“Let’s get moving,” Jake swung gracefully back into the saddle.

They headed into the mountains. Then, hours of daylight still before them, almost as if they had crossed over a barrier, they were cutting into the foothills, canyons twisting off into the distance. There was an eerie feel to the mountains that made the hairs at the nape of her neck rise. Logic told her that the forbidding feeling had no roots in sound reasoning. Still, it persisted.

“Where the devil are we?” she asked, her voice, though muted, harsh against the quiet of the canyon.

“Peralta Canyon.”

Jake answered her question abruptly. The name meant nothing to her, but Amanda took in her surroundings, cataloging oddly shaped cactus and boulders. The creek bed, dry and brittle beneath their horses’ hoofs, creaked and crunched in their passage. A sycamore, a willow, and some huge cottonwoods lined the banks, roots clutching at the stone and sinking beneath the riverbed for the moisture that lay there.
 

Amanda couldn’t shake the crazy feeling that there were hidden eyes following their progress down the canyon, waiting.

The horses were again at a steady walk and Jake lifted his hat to resettle it over his shock of startlingly blonde hair.
 

“You hear about the Dutchman and his mine?

Amanda nodded.

“Quite a story huh?”

“I thought it was sad.” She shivered. “Do you think he’s still here, somewhere, watching, guarding his mine?”

“Might be. Might be dead too. A man out here alone. Who knows?”

“But if we got too close to his gold mine and he was there?”

“He’d probably shoot us both.”

The horses continued to plod along, heads drooping. She frowned at Jake. There was no comfort in the idea of a real bullet as opposed to an imagined ghostly presence. Amanda shook her head to clear it of such nonsense. She had no intention of letting her imagination run away with her. Instead, she was going to watch Jake Hollander, study his actions. She’d learn to take care of herself in this country, whatever the circumstances.

They pushed on in silence until she was staring up at the Weaver’s Needle. It rose directly before them, majestic in the fading light of the day, the slender spire rising to pierce the indigo sky.
 

Jake signaled another halt and passed the canteen to Amanda. Every drought-stricken cell in her body cried out for her to swallow the contents of the canteen in one gulp, but again she only sipped the tinny, tepid water and handed it back. She ignored her stomach, knotted with hunger, and swayed in the saddle.

Her companion caught the movement and looked at her more closely.
 

“We lost them a while back,” he informed her. “Couple of more hours and we can stop at a place up ahead where there’s water. Horses need it bad,” he added as if his and Amanda’s needs were secondary to that of their mounts.

And it was true. Out here horses meant the difference between life and death. Without one it would take a miracle to survive for even a man of the land such as Hollander.

Jake occasionally used a bit of rolling brush to erase a stray track or two, but mostly he kept to the hard, rocky surfaces with her following closely behind. She’d watched when he had allowed dust to drift on the breeze above a place where a metal shod hoof had scarred the rock, the powdery dust sifting down to mask all signs of their passage.

“You’re doing just fine,” Jake encouraged her. “Every mile we move into these mountains, the safer we are from any posse.”
 

Amanda was just plain numb. There was nothing left for her to feel. Pain. Exhaustion. Fear. What was the point? They would just keep plodding on—forever.

Jake watched her apprehensively seeing she was right on the edge. They’d be able to rest son with confidence.

“Keep to the rocks,” he admonished her once more as they started down a trail only he could see.

Chapter 5

That night they camped on a low rock ledge concealed by a thick growth of scrub brush circled by prickly pear cactus. Jake had grudgingly called a halt when the glowing sky had faded from its iridescent display of pinks and purples into total, impenetrable darkness.

“No fire tonight,” Jake barked the order, stepping down from his horse.

Amanda slid off with exhausted relief, knees rubber when her feet came in contact with the ground. She couldn’t help a touch of resentment at the fact that they were going to spend this night in cold misery.
 

Jake stripped the saddles from their horses and rubbed them down with a hand full of leaves and green branches torn from the sheltering brush.
 

He caught her looking at the horses as he worked.
 

“Horses will be right as rain by the time we have to pull out.”

“Good for them,” Amanda muttered. “Wish I could say the same for myself.” She paced heroically in an effort to un-kink the sore and cramping muscles she preferred to think of as not her own.

She dropped to the ground in an untidy heap, bracing an elbow on her leg, cupping her chin in her palm. Her skirts were askew, her face dirt caked, and her small, laced half boots were all but destroyed. She didn’t even want to think about the intense burning sensation of her skin and the accompanying itch beneath that dirt on her face.

“You’re doing fine,” Jake said softly.
 

Amanda grunted, appalled by her behavior, but still didn’t move from where she was. Jake drew his knife and began hacking away at the stand of prickly pear.

He felt her watching him. “We’re going to have to take a chance that the posse’ll pass this spot without seeing the cactus all torn up. The horses have to eat, and so do we.”

“Eat?”

“Prickly pear’s good.”

After he devastated a good portion of the patch for the animals, peeling and de-spining, he started working on the small red fruits he’d set aside, peeling them and cutting them into small chunks. He added a few of the pads, de-spined and peeled.

“Eat,” he urged Amanda.
 

She was too exhausted to argue. She just ate.

“I wouldn’t call it good.”

“It fills your belly and
that’s
good.”

She couldn’t argue with that so she finished her share and just stretched out on the patch of still faintly warm sand on the ledge instantly falling into an exhausted sleep.

Jake threw his bedroll over her, then stood watch until the first streaks of dawn cast a golden glow across the eastern horizon. Nipped by the chilly sting of early morning he roused her from her dreamless stupor.
 

“Got to get moving,” he said shortly.
 

Instantly awake, Amanda bolted upright, quickly regretting it as pain rocketed through her body. Muscles, sore and cramped from many hours of hard riding, had knotted into steel during the night spent on the cold, hard earth. Legs ached where hip met socket and calves cramped in twisting, knotting pain. She was still exhausted.
 

He squatted down beside her, empathetic but impatient and thrust a pair of saddlebags into her hands.

“Duds in here ought to fit you well enough. Put ’em on. It’ll make the riding easier. I’ll saddle up while you’re changing clothes.”

Amanda nodded numbly, climbed to her feet, aware of a dull pounding at the back of her head. Lifting her encumbering skirts, she moved off behind a meager screen of brush and fumbled the saddlebags open. Inside she found a red and black plaid shirt, worn leather work gloves, a bandanna and a pair of tough, homespun pants. She changed quickly. The shirt was loose all over, though not overly so. The pants were much worse. Even with the shirt tail stuffed inside, the waist was laughable. The hips, on the other hand, were snug enough to be almost indecent. The cuffs dragged in the dirt, but she quickly remedied that by rolling them up enough to clear the ground.