He ran, slipped on some loose rock, and ended up sliding, head first, belly down, right up to her side. He rolled sideways so he wouldn’t skate into her, careened into a pile of rocks, and came to a sudden, stunning halt. He scrambled on his hands and knees to her side.
Her face was covered in blood. She had on chaps and a leather jacket. Men’s clothing. Shredded and tattered but protected by the rugged clothing far more than she’d have been in gingham and petticoats.
God, the poor soul, bless her. Take her into Your arms.
He reached a shaking hand to press against the blood-soaked front of her shirt, to feel for a heartbeat. Before he even touched her, her chest rose and he snatched his hand back. She was alive.
Logan looked up—forever—to where she’d fallen. The top of this cliff wasn’t visible with the many trees in the way. Logan remembered the gunfire. It was well no one could see down here.
He turned back to her. She lay flat on her back, arms outstretched. Her hair spread wild and white-blond in all directions. Her face was covered in blood. He thought of Wise Sister, his housekeeper. She knew healing, but he was miles and miles from his home and Wise Sister’s help.
Stopping her bleeding was within his skill. Logan stripped off his buckskin jacket and cast it aside, glad for the warm day. Then he tore his shirt off so fast he popped a few buttons. He tried to rip it in half, but the sturdy fabric wouldn’t give.
He snatched the knife out of his boot. As he did, Logan noticed a fetid smell. For some reason the smell poked at him like a warning of danger, as if he wasn’t already enough on edge.
He shook off the strange tension caused by that scent and cut through his shirt’s tough bottom hem, then ripped it in two up to the back of the neck. He needed the knife again to get through that. Then he formed a pad of cloth. Because the woman was so still, he spoke, if only to keep himself company. “I’m going to just press on the fastest bleeding wound on your forehead.”
Pausing, he knew he was wasting time speaking to her. But it pushed down his fear of harming her. “I won’t move you at all. Just let me staunch the blood. We don’t want you losing any more, now do we? I’d say you’ve got the amount you need in your veins and we shouldn’t waste a drop of it.”
A second rivulet appeared out of a spot farther back on her head. He used a corner of the cloth pad to stop that.
The woman was wearing an outlandish getup—men’s clothing from top to bottom—but Logan thanked God for whatever had prompted her to dress this way. The top button of her broadcloth shirt was torn away, and he caught a glimpse of pink ribbon right at the hollow of neck. Somehow that pleased him, though he had no idea why it should.
A closer look and he saw a little scar, tiny but nasty looking, right at her throat, as if someone had stabbed her in the neck. What in the world had caused that? And how had she managed to survive it?
As he knelt there, pressing gently but firmly on the worst of her cuts, he had time to study her and saw a rifle on her back. He noticed the strap holding it there and that the buckle, right at gut level on her left, was smashed. A flattened bullet protruded from the metal. A bullet that would have killed her if the strap hadn’t stopped it.
A small breeze kicked up, swirled around him, and stirred up that smell again. He looked around while he pressed on the woman’s wounds. There were dense woods all around the pile of avalanched rocks. The smell seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
Death.
Old death.
How old was this avalanche? There were slides like this all over in the mountains, and it was a normal thing to come upon shale slides blocking a trail. Logan had done enough reading about land formations in the Rockies that he knew it was called talus. Most likely this slide of broken rock fragments was recent and it had killed an animal as it swept down.
He did his best to ignore the stench and fussed with the wounds until he’d stopped all the bleeding he found. He’d been forced to work at his father’s side as a child and knew a bit about doctoring. She should have stitches on these largest cuts, and a quick check showed him no broken bones that he could find. As for her insides, her spine, her neck, who could say what damage had been done?
“I’d say you’re all fixed up now, except you’re still out cold.” Kneeling by her side, he watched her breath, and then he watched some more.
“I don’t think I dare to move you. But then I don’t really dare leave you lying here, either.” He glanced up that cliff. No more gunfire. His fingers itched for his Colt and he took an oath then and there to never walk away and leave it in his saddlebag again. But he had her rifle if there was trouble.
“My horse is just down the hill a ways, picketed on grass. This hill turns much flatter about a hundred yards down past these trees. I could take you home.” Her chest rose and fell a bit more deeply. He pressed a hand against her wrist and found a steady pulse. He’d been trained to the extent his father could jam knowledge into his stubborn head. But for the most part back then, he’d daydreamed about the great outdoors and wondered about the next picture he’d paint. And now, when doctoring skills might save a young woman’s life, he was stuck here with a sketchbook and little else.
“If you’ve got parts inside broken up, you’d be getting weaker, and you don’t seem to be.” He didn’t know what he was talking about. Still, it stood to reason. “You seem to be all in one piece. No unnatural twists in your arms and legs.” Of course her arms and legs were completely covered. “I’ll bet you’d be fine if I hauled you on a long horseback ride.”
Her response was as expected. Total silence.
Logan stared at her, willing her to come back to him, answer him. Praying she would. He really wasn’t much good for anything but drawing pictures. And, though he definitely excelled at that, it was a foolish mission in life, or so his father said. And in many ways Logan agreed. The only real reason he didn’t stop was because he couldn’t.
“I think, from the look of you, you’d consider my drawing as foolishness, too. Although I suppose your clothing is a bit foolish for a woman, so maybe you understand someone who’s a little different. Of course you’ve chosen clothing that is, above all else, practical. So I suspect you’re dead set on being practical.” Logan sighed. She’d be as annoyed with his painting as Father.
He could do nothing other than stay, keep a vigil over her. She’d wake up or she’d die. The thought hurt deep in his chest, and Logan prayed silently for a long while, hoping up here in the mountains they were just a bit closer to God in heaven. That was foolishness, too, because God was right inside Logan’s heart no matter the altitude.
“What happened up there, anyway?” Logan looked up, up, up. There’d been no shout from above. No one climbed down to search for this young woman. Of course, who could scale that slope to come down and check?
And if someone did come, well, would that be good or bad? There’d been a lot of gunfire up there. “Which usually means good guys and bad guys. No way of saying whether someone coming down here had it in mind to make sure you’re dead or to save you if you’re alive.”
Although if someone was worried about her being alive, there should have been a shout or two. Calling her name. It didn’t bode well for whoever had been with her. He looked down at her.
Her eyes flickered open.
He scrambled on hands and knees and bent over her.
“All dead.”
He read her lips more than heard her. He leaned down to within an inch of her, hoping to catch any other words she uttered.
“Shot. Dry-gulchers. God, have mercy.” The young woman reached to her side with a trembling hand and fumbled for the muzzle of her rifle. The muzzle barely showed by her right hip. The butt was visible above her left shoulder. She’d fallen all that way, was only semiconscious, yet her first act was to reach for her weapon.
“I’ll protect you.” He said it and knew it was an oath before God. “I’ll take care of you and see you get home.”
L
ogan was no gunman, no cowboy, no mountain man. He hunted elk … to draw them. He would rather sketch a grizzly bear than shoot it for its hide. The wild things seemed to know that and leave him alone. But he’d been living in a hard land for three years and he’d learned a few things. Wise Sister and her husband, Pierre Babineau, had seen to it.
Wise Sister, the wizened Shoshone woman who tended to his home, was in charge of putting meat on the table, and she did her job well. Logan didn’t concern himself with how.
“Can you move?”
The young woman blinked at him, and her beautiful blue eyes focused a bit as if she were trying to force herself to understand.
Logan pointed upward. “You fell from way up there. I can’t get you back up there, not without about a full day of winding around. If I did get you up there, we wouldn’t want to see what happened. And there might be danger if we rode that way.” Logan would have faced it if he’d been alone. But with this young woman, so injured, there was no possible way.
The woman stared at his lips as if focusing every ounce of her efforts on comprehension.
It made Logan overly aware of his lips for some odd reason. “I’m going to take you to my cabin. It’s a long ride. We’ll be pressed to get there before dark. But it’s the opposite way from whatever trouble happened up on that mountaintop. I’ve got a woman at home who is a Shoshone healer. She’ll help take care of you.”
“Help?” The woman lifted the hand that had reached for her gun and rested it on his upper arm.
Logan smiled at the life that seemed to burn like blue fire out of her eyes. She was a tough one, all right. Maybe she had been up there alone. Maybe that’s why no one had come. Dry-gulchers, she’d said. All dead. Maybe she’d been referring to her horse. Horses, there’d been two. But maybe one was a pack animal. He glanced around and didn’t see either of them. Either they’d fallen farther down the mountain or gotten stuck higher up.
Such violence, such a waste of life. He knew that nature was full of violence. Bears ate fish. Mountain lions ate deer. Wolves ate rabbits and a pack could pull down an elk. Yes, there was violence out here and he respected that as the way of nature. But only man killed senselessly.
“I’m going to carry you to my horse now, miss.” He looked down at her and wondered if she could think clearly enough to tell him her name. “I’m Logan. Logan McKenzie.”
“Logan?” Her eyes blinked slowly and she stared at him as if her vision was blurred and nothing she saw made sense.
“What’s your name?”
She might have been carrying papers in one of her manly pockets. Those would tell her name. But Logan hadn’t gotten around to searching her before she awoke, and now that she was conscious, he certainly wasn’t going to be frisking her. She just might be able to get to that gun. He didn’t underestimate her.
“S–Sally.”
She definitely sounded like the West. Her few words carried a drawl that was in stark contrast to the clipped tones and upper crust accent and snooty vocabulary he’d been raised with in New York City. His voice set him apart and he’d been trying to learn Western lingo. Learning the culture fed his art.
“I’m Sally Mc—”
A low growl cut off her words and pulled Logan’s gaze up.
Wolves. Three of them, crouched low, barely visible in a clump of quaking aspen trees just across the talus slide.
Ah yes, violence in nature indeed. They smelled the blood. Or they smelled whatever scent of death lingered at this place.
“Rifle. Get my … my Winchester.”
Logan was more inclined to get his sketchbook. They were beautiful creatures. But one of the wolves inched forward, ears lying back, looking ready to attack.
Logan slid his hand behind her neck and lifted her carefully to ease Sally’s rifle off her back. She reached for it but he stood, the heavy iron steady and familiar in his hands. He realized just how much he’d learned in his years in the wild and how little he fit with the people back East, where he spent his winters.
“Are there more of you?” He raised his voice, hoping the wolves would back off. Wondering if there might be more than these three. Hiking and studying nature had taught him that a pack was usually larger. Although in the summer they weren’t as likely to gather in large groups.
The wolf wasn’t impressed with his shouting and inched closer.
He cocked the rifle, a Winchester ‘73 like Babineau favored, aimed at the nearest really fat tree, and pulled the trigger.
The animals vanished as swiftly and silently as wraiths.
Wise Sister had scolded him when he’d admitted he often left his Colt in his saddlebag. This proved her right. He should keep it close to hand. Of course, he usually didn’t hang around in the forest soaked in blood.
“You missed.” The woman, Sally Mac, tried to sit up, levering herself forward with one elbow as if to wrest her rifle from his hands.
“No reason to kill them.” He admired tenacity, and Sally had a bundle of it.
“They’re wolves, what … other … reason d’you … n–need?”
Logan smiled. “You seem to be recovering.” He remembered how she’d carried the weapon. He’d do the same. He slung it over his own shoulders, adjusted it like she’d had it, then crouched and eased his arms under her.
He hiked long miles and was prone to climbing trees and rocks and wading in fast-moving streams to experiment with angles on a painting, so he was fit enough. And she didn’t weigh much anyway. He carefully lifted.
She gasped in pain.
“I’m sorry.” He looked down at her and she quickly suppressed the sound, closing her eyes as if she’d shamed herself with that sound of pain. He began walking, careful to jostle her the least possible amount.
He skirted the avalanche, taking a longer but more easily hiked path to the lower grassland where he’d picketed his horse. As he reached the end of the talus, he passed through a thick stand of trees and kept his ears and eyes open for any sign of the wolves. None jumped him. And then he stopped, the shock so sudden he jerked poor Sally Mac and squeezed another gasp out of her.
Her eyes flew open. “What?” Then she looked in the direction he was staring, shouted, and struggled against his grip.
“No, stay still. There’s nothing we can do for him.” If it was a him. A … skull. A human skull, someone obviously long dead. Logan thought of the wolves and looked more closely at the skull. It was possible it hadn’t been so very long.
“That one?” Sally pointed away from the skull Logan stared at.
Logan gave her a startled glance then followed the direction of her eyes and saw another skull. As his vision widened, he saw a bone … likely a human arm but possibly not. Logan didn’t want to believe he stood in the middle of a ghastly burial ground.
Then he looked back, all the way up to where he’d heard the gunfire.
Three
I’m not riding down there.” Tulsa rubbed his arm. The man was always moving, nervous, with weasel eyes. Fergus got tired of it, but Tulsa didn’t miss much and that was a worthy skill. But without Curly around, Fergus found Tulsa wearing on his nerves worse than usual.
Fergus had torn strips of cloth off the dead woman’s skirts and saw just how deep that gouge was that cut Tulsa’s forearm. No doctor around to make pretty stitches so Tulsa was going to have an ugly scar to remember taking his first bullet, and that was if the wound didn’t turn septic and kill him.
“I am. That cowpoke killed my brother. I’m hunting up what’s left of him and taking it for myself.” Fergus was so sick of Tulsa’s whining he had a very pleasant daydream about putting a bullet in the man. He restrained himself. He didn’t want to ride these hills alone. Three had been the perfect number for waylaying those who came riding through.
“Long trip down for a rifle.” Tulsa turned back to stripping their victims of valuables. Tulsa was skin and bones, except for a potbelly. His legs were so bowed no one had to say out loud he’d been next thing to born on
horseback and wasn’t a man to walk when he could ride. He was a hard man for all his whining, and a dead shot. He’d never been so much as scratched before. That creasing bullet had cut into his pride as much as his arm.
Fergus could use that. “If you ain’t in, I reckon I’ll meet up with you in town later. It don’t sit right to not take somethin’ back after that no-account killed Curly Ike and shot you. He might have a few dollars in his pocket.”
“Lookee here.” Tulsa pulled a fat envelope out of a saddlebag. Money, paper money, spilled out and Tulsa hurried to grab it. Then he looked up at Fergus. “Two horses went over with that cowpoke.”
The horses that had lived had run off. Fergus saw one far down the trail that had stopped to graze. Those saddlebags looked fat, too.
“It’s a rich group.” Fergus’s eyes narrowed as he added up the wealth he’d have if every saddlebag had this kind of money. “By the time we round up that horse down there, we’ll be halfway to the bottom of this cliff anyway. I say we go down there and have a look around.”
Tulsa frowned, greed warring with his desire to do as little work as possible. Then a gunshot rang out from far below.
They both rushed to the edge of the cliff but could see nothing.
“Whoever you shot must have survived the bullet and the fall.” Tulsa scowled. “We’ve never had anyone live to go to the sheriff before.”
Fergus looked at the dead horse beside him. “We can’t hoist this horse over the ledge, so someone’s gonna see we’ve left trouble on this trail.”
“We have us a stake, ‘specially if we find good money in the other saddlebags.” Tulsa’s eyes slid back and forth like a sneaky ferret. “We might want to move out for a while. Take it easy. We might have enough to have an easy-livin’ winter in San Francisco.”
“And we’ll let this trail cool down for a while.” The bitter loss of his brother was almost forgotten as Fergus counted the money he might well find in the saddlebags at the bottom of this cliff. “When our cash runs out, we’ll come on back. Plenty of curious folks comin’ into the area. Most head for those geysers in Yellowstone, but there are always a few fools that come up here.”
Sophie's Daughters Trilogy Page 33