Holding her robe tight about her shoulders, Crazy Kate, flanked by Sebastian Kirk, had made her way southward down the boardwalk. She now stood parallel to the two strangers, regarding the horse with fascination.

  Before either could say another word, Kate said, “You men say that horse is for sale?”

  They both looked at her skeptically. A cunning light grew in Salon’s brown eyes, slitted against the sun’s glare. “Yes, ma’am, he shore is.” Salon grabbed the rope from Pauk’s hand and led the angrily snorting black to the boardwalk.

  The banjo had ceased playing in the beer parlor on the other side of the street. Two men in canvas coats stood under the tavern’s brush awning, one holding a banjo, both staring at Kate, the horse, and the two strangers.

  Crazy Kate stared at the horse. The horse drew up before her and shook his head. Then his eyes met hers, and they stood staring at each other, their breath puffing around their faces as the horse pushed his regal head forward, working his nose.

  “If you ever seen a better horse than this one here, ma’am,” Salon said, “then you sure got a leg up on me!”

  “Where did you get him?” Kate said.

  “Bought him off a half-breed,” Salon told her. He glanced at Pauk, who’d heaved himself up and was walking toward his six-shooter half buried in the snow along the street. “Didn’t we, Alvin?” He turned back to Kate and Sebastian. “Back along the trail somewheres.”

  “What was a half-breed doing with a horse like this?” Sebastian said, stepping forward to run a careful hand along the black’s sleek neck.

  “We didn’t converse about it, ’ceptin’ he assured us it weren’t stolen. He probably needed money to provide for the blond gal he was ridin’ with.” Salon had spoken to Sebastian. Now he turned his eager eyes to Crazy Kate. “If you got five hundred dollars, ma’am, he’s yours. Hell, you rent him to stud three times in a month for more—!”

  Kate cut him off, snapping her keen green eyes from the horse to Salon. “Did you say ‘blond woman’?”

  Salon looked at her dubiously, frowning. He shrugged a shoulder. “So I did.” He paused. “The point is, a horse like this one here is a damn good investment.”

  “Why are you selling him?” Sebastian asked.

  Kate was only half listening. She stared at the horse, remembering her dream about the black stallion and the blond woman.

  What did it mean? What did this horse and the blonde have to do with her?

  “Well,” Salon said with a sheepish grin, “me and Alvin here ain’t exactly horse men. We’re gamblers. We prefer to spend our time in gambling parlors and leave the horses to the stableboys, if you get my drift.”

  “I’ll take him,” Kate said, still staring at the horse but snapping out of her reverie. Something in the back of her mind was telling her that in order to find out what the dream meant, she had to have the horse.

  Salon grinned.

  Kate turned to Sebastian. “Give the man five hundred dollars. Add it to my note.” She looked at Salon. Pauk now stood beside Salon’s dun, staring at the woman, his lower jaw slack.

  “Stable him at the Occidental, over yonder,” Kate said, jerking her head to indicate the big barn half a block up on the other side of the street. “If you boys want gambling and the best women in the Rockies, you’ll find ’em both at Crazy Kate’s.” She turned and, as if in a dream, moved back toward the brothel, hearing her voice say automatically, “Don’t make yourselves strangers now, hear...?”

  Chapter 21

  Yakima crouched atop a rocky scarp and used the freighters’ German-made glasses to scout his and Faith’s back trail.

  A high hill strewn with black boulders rose on his left, about fifty yards away. To the right, the land dropped gradually to a distant, pine-choked ravine.

  Straight south lay a lake in a broad hollow, unseen from this distance. Yakima and Faith had stopped for lunch by that frozen lake. He’d glassed their back trail thoroughly from a hill on the other side of the lake and had seen no sign of the three men he’d thought were trailing them.

  He saw nothing now, either, except drifting snow and purple shadows bleeding out from the trees and boulders, brown weed tips protruding above the scalloped snow covering the ground where the wind hadn’t swept it clear.

  There weren’t many places to hide up here among the ridges, where trees grew mainly in the ravines and valley bottoms. If the pursuers were still stalking him, he’d no doubt have spotted them by now, especially through the good German field glasses. It wasn’t likely—Thornton had probably put a high price on his and Faith’s heads—but maybe he really had lost them.

  His heart feeling lighter, Yakima straightened, turned, and hopscotched the boulders to the brow of the ridge behind him. He’d crested the hill and was descending the other side, leaping from one rock to the next, when he stopped suddenly, dropping to his haunches atop a flat rock and raising his rifle to his chest.

  Below, the tea fire he’d built at the base of the hill bent and tore in the wind. Faith was perched on the same rock she’d been sitting on when he’d climbed the hill to glass their back trail.

  On the other side of the fire from her, five riders approached her from across a snow-dusted, weed-tufted hill dome. They were not the ones Yakima had spied following them before.

  The first of the riders strung out in a shaggy line was only ten or so yards from the fire. So intently were they staring at Faith, lascivious grins on their faces, that they hadn’t seen Yakima yet, perched halfway up the hill. Faith sat holding one of the freighters’ rifles across her denim-clad knees, her back stiff, blond hair whipping in the wind.

  “Hello, there, ma’am,” hailed the lead rider. He wore a rabbit hat with ear flaps, and a long, ratty buffalo coat. Long brown chin whiskers brushed the medallion hanging around his neck by a rawhide thong.

  Faith jerked a tense look up the hill behind her. She turned back toward the strangers, then jerked her gaze up the hill again, her eyes finding Yakima perched on the boulder. The strangers followed her gaze, all stiffening slightly as they stopped their horses five yards beyond the coffee fire.

  Yakima loudly levered a shell into his Winchester’s breech and straightened, holding the rifle low across his thighs. “Help you, boys?”

  The leader glanced at the others riding behind him. Their horses stood hang-headed. They’d been riding hard. Fleeing the law? They had the scruffy, tattered look of renegades, their weapons prominently displayed. One wore his Navy Colts in crisscrossing shoulder rigs on the outside of his buffalo coat.

  Turning back to Yakima, the leader grinned. “We saw the lady out here alone and was gonna offer our assistance.” A couple of the others chuckled. “Pretty high up in the mountains for a lady to be out here alone.”

  Yakima smiled solemnly as he ran his eyes over the other riders—one was an older, gray-bearded gent who used to ride for a ranch east of Thornton’s—then back to the leader. “It would be.”

  No one said anything for a time. The riders stared at Yakima, who stared back. Faith turned her head between them, her eyes wary.

  The wind blew the snow around under the crystal blue sky. Gray mountain jays fluttered among the rocks behind Yakima. The gray-bearded man’s sorrel suddenly shook its head, its bit chains jangling.

  The lead rider dropped his gaze to Faith. “Miss, you’d be better off with us than that savage up there. We got us a shack not far from here.”

  Because of the fire and the breeze rustling around him, Yakima couldn’t hear her reply, only saw her head shake slightly.

  The others glanced at the lead rider, who shrugged a shoulder. “Have it your way. It’s gonna get mighty cold tonight.”

  With that, he pinched his hat at Faith, reined his horse away from the fire, and touched his spurs to its flanks. In a minute, all five were drifting over the crest of the north-western hill and into the woods on the other side.

  Faith stood and turned to Yakima as he continued striding down the hill to her. Her chest rose and fell sharply. “Well, that was a little rattling.”

  “You all right?”

  “Getting to be so a woman can’t trust anyone in these parts.” She looked off across the fire. “Think they’ll be back?”

  “I wouldn’t bet against it.” Yakima reached down, removed the teapot from the fire, and kicked snow over the flames.

  They traveled just below the ridgelines, sometimes climbing above timberline, then plunging through snow-socked valleys before climbing to another pass, until the sun had fallen and an impenetrable chill had descended from the starry, black sky.

  Yakima built a fire in the hollow of a large, uprooted spruce, the tree’s massive, curling, snowcapped roots forming a wall to one side, blocking the wind and the view of the fire from down the sloping ravine.

  That was the direction from which trouble would come, if it came. Yakima was relatively certain it would come. At least, you always had to assume so.

  While the horses pawed for grass beneath the deep snow, Faith made coffee and roasted the rabbits Yakima had snared.

  That night, he sat atop the spruce trunk, above the fire, holding a steaming cup of tea and whiskey in one hand as he stared down the ravine, his right hand holding his rifle around the brass receiver. The whiskey was more booty from the freight wagons. Yakima’s legs were curled beneath him, Indian style. The ravine was a trough, with towering spruces and tamaracks studding its slopes under a cold, black velvet ceiling dusted with stars.

  Behind him, the small fire popped and the teapot wheezed.

  “Yakima?”

  He turned to Faith, who sat huddled beside the fire, a blanket draped over her coat, a tin coffee cup steaming between her mittened hands. “Shh.”

  She whispered, “Yakima?”

  “What?”

  “How much farther to Gold Cache?”

  “Not far.” He kept his ears pricked to the night and replied, “We should be there tomorrow, late.”

  Silence. An owl hooted and a tuft of snow, warmed by the fire’s updraft, fell in a clump up ravine of the camp.

  “Yakima?” Faith whispered again.

  He lowered his cup from his lips. “What?”

  “How long are we gonna have to whisper?”

  “As long as we keep talking.”

  “You think they’re really that randy for me?”

  In spite of himself he turned full around and cracked a smile. “If they have blood in their veins.”

  She chuckled without mirth and sipped her toddy. After a while, her whispers rose to him again above the cracks and pops of the fire. “We’ll have us a fine place in Gold Cache, Yakima. The banker I know told me anytime I wanted to go into business on my own—if I ever got away from Thornton, that was—he’d back me any way he could. I’ve got a recipe for beer an old German gave me. He said—”

  “Quiet!” Yakima rasped, staring intently down ravine. He’d heard something. The soft snap of a twig beneath snow.

  Bracing himself with one hand, he swung down from the spruce trunk, dropping soundlessly onto the cleared ground, and hunkered beside Faith.

  Her wide eyes regarded him worriedly. He squeezed her arm. “Just like we said.”

  She swallowed, nodding.

  Grabbing her Winchester carbine, she stood and crept off into the brush on the other side of the fire, into the snag of another downed tree. Listening to the faint rustle and snaps of the brittle twigs as she burrowed deep under the prone trunk, Yakima squatted beside the spruce and pressed his back to the roots rising a good eight feet above his head.

  He glanced across the fire. He and Faith had piled their blankets and robes over a couple of long wood chunks, then scattered their spare clothes beside the mound. It looked like two people “bundling” together against the cold, enjoying each other’s warmth.

  He hoped the renegades would think so. If that was who’d made the sound he’d heard.

  He’d waited ten minutes, breathing through his parted lips, when his horse nickered softly up ravine.

  He squeezed the Henry in his gloved hands and stared into the woods beyond the fire, not wanting the flames to ruin his night vision.

  After another couple of tense minutes, boots crunched snow along the wooded slope to his right. More crunches and weed snaps rose from down ravine. Very faintly, he felt the roots behind him vibrate, as though someone had stepped onto the fallen trunk.

  A shadow moved to his right. The man came down the slope and sidled up to a fir about ten yards from the fire. The fire shone red on the high cheekbones above his scruffy gray beard and reflected off the brass housing of the Winchester in his hands.

  Footsteps grew behind Yakima, faintly crunching snow. There was a phlegmy sniff, as of a man with a head cold. The roots jostled faintly against Yakima’s back, and bark scraped under boot heels straight above his head.

  He could hear breathing up there, see the vapor puffing in the air above the roots.

  On the slope, beside the fir, the other man waited, his forehead shaded by his hat brim. The hat was canted down toward the mound of blankets and quilts.

  In another few seconds, they would realize it was a trap.

  Yakima stepped out away from the roots. He pivoted, saw the man looming over him, a rifle in his hands. He reached up with one hand, grabbed the man’s cartridge belt, and pulled.

  The man gave a startled cry as he flew forward over the tangled roots, snapping off several as he plummeted into the camp and landed facefirst in the cook fire. The teapot clattered on the rocks. Steam from the spilled tea sizzled. The man screamed and rolled out of the fire ring, his arms and legs flailing as the flames chewed at his fur coat and buckskins.

  Fluidly, Yakima raised the Yellowboy to his shoulder, drawing a quick bead on the man who’d been standing by the fir. The man had just snugged the Spencer to his shoulder when Yakima’s Winchester boomed.

  The Spencer coughed at the same time Yakima’s bullet plunged through the man’s deerskin coat, throwing him straight back against the fir with a strangled scream.

  Though Yakima couldn’t hear much but the screams of the man fighting the flames from his clothes by the fire, he knew the third man was bolting toward him along the spruce’s prone trunk.

  With few movements, Yakima slipped around the opposite side of the root ball, leapt atop the bole, and hunkered on his haunches.

  The third man now stood where Yakima had been a moment ago, yelling, “Where’d you go, ya goddamn savage?”

  A voice rose from the black slope to Yakima’s left. “On the tree, Bill!”

  The voice hadn’t died before Yakima fired twice through the spruce’s roots, drilling one neat hole through Bill’s startled face, then one through his right ear as he turned away, falling.

  Rifles snapped on the slope, blue-red flames stabbing toward the camp. One bullet plunked into the spruce just below Yakima’s fur-lined moccasins. Another cracked a stubby branch to his right.

  Yakima ejected a smoking shell, the brass casing clattering on a rock below the tree, and raised the Yellowboy to his shoulder as he seated a fresh cartridge. He could see no movement amid the velvet black of the wooded slope, but he keyed on one of the two gun flashes and fired.

  A half second later, both rifles flashed again, the reports following as both slugs whistled just shy of Yakima’s head.

  Squatting on the spruce trunk, Yakima cut loose with the Yellowboy until five more casings littered the snow beneath the tree, sizzling softly. By his third shot, the small fusillade from the slope had died, and now in the quiet night—the burning man’s cries had died to a low, intermittent keening as the flames engulfed him—he heard crunching snow, thrashing brush, and the rasps of labored breathing.

  The two shooters were fleeing up the slope.

  Yakima leapt into the snow beneath the spruce, instinctively zigzagged to the base of the slope, and bolted up through the woods, lifting his feet high above the snow and the brambles grabbing at his moccasins.

  Ahead and to the left, a shadow moved.

  Yakima stopped, raised the Yellowboy, and cocked it. The shadow was gone. Yakima aimed a little ahead of where he’d last seen the shadow, between the black columns of the birches and firs, and fired.

  “Eeenggg!” the man cried. There was the crunch of a body dropping into the snow.

  Yakima couldn’t see the wounded man. It had been a lucky shot, but he’d take them any way he could get them. If these two got away, they might try to avenge their companions.

  He ran forward, hearing the other man’s strained breaths ahead and to the right. Seeing the dark shape on the snow before him, between two pines and tangled in brambles, Yakima crouched over the man.

  He lay facedown, trying to push himself up on his hands and knees. Yakima couldn’t tell where he was shot, but he could smell the warm, metallic odor of the blood in the cold air.

  Yakima looked around, then leaped atop the man’s back, forcing him down to the ground with a low groan, and rammed the brass-shod butt of the Yellowboy hard against the back of his head.

  The skull cracked. The man loosed a long sigh and lay still.

  Crouching atop the dead man, Yakima cast another quick glance around. He saw nothing but the inky black tree columns and nebulous bramble thickets, but he heard the other man fleeing up the slope to his right. He was probably about fifty yards away.

  Yakima wanted to let him go, to return to the camp and Faith. But bushwhackers, like wild dogs, had to be turned under.

  Yakima leapt into the snow and continued running uphill, taking long, fluid strides as he angled to the right. He dodged around pines and firs, leapt deadfalls, swerved around snow-flocked boulders.

  He saw the short figure beside the lightning-topped birch just in time. As the rifle flashed, Yakima threw himself behind a spruce.

  The bushwhacker’s shot shattered the night.

  Yakima rolled off his right shoulder on the other side of the spruce and came up firing the Yellowboy from his right hip.

  Boom-rasp! Boom-rasp! Boom!

  Silence. Slowly, Yakima ejected the hot shell and slid another into the chamber.

 

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