From up here they were out of rifle range. There was no chance to even draw a bead on the Linscotts because the trees blocked their line of sight. Which was fine. That let the Cooters get close without being detected.
Cord slid his belly over the drop-off and, with his rifle in one hand, hung for a second from the other, then dropped. Simple.
He looked up into the eyes of one of his cousins above, nodded, and turned. They still had plenty of time to set up at that overhang, take aim, and fire.
“Reeves!” The trail was too narrow to ride two abreast, but for a few seconds, if they were careful, they could manage it.
Mark eased up beside him.
“Take Catherine.” Tom slid the boneless, sleeping girl into Mark’s arms. “I don’t want Jarrod on my back when we ride through there.” Tom swung Jarrod around front and held the sleeping toddler, sheltering him as well as possible.
Mark jerked his chin and dropped back. A glance told Tom he fell behind Mandy, too. Guarding her from the rear along with six more men behind Mark. Good men, men to count on in a fight. None of that would protect them if lead started raining down on them from overhead.
They’d be in that tight neck and out before those Cooters could take aim. And, considering that the Cooters weren’t even there, it’d be fine.
Still, Tom saw no reason to hope for the best. His eyes rose to that overhang of rock. Perfect cover for an ambush.
Tom asked everything of his horse, himself, and his God as the trail narrowed.
Sliding more than walking, Cord didn’t try and stop his descent.
He needed to get down there in time to take aim, and all his cousins with him.
From behind he heard all the men coming. Dust and small rocks dislodged under his boot heels, and a few clattered down on his head kicked from above. The dust rose up until a small cloud formed. Was it visible to riders below?
Cord clung to his rifle and kept heading down.
Tom pulled Jarrod close to shield him, then raised his fist and spurred his horse.
Teeth gritted together with rage, he hated to think those coyote Cooters were so bent on their feud they might kill one of Tom’s children—and they were Tom’s children. Whatever their father’s name, they were his, and they were Linscotts to the bone because Tom decided they were.
He pushed ahead fast without checking those behind him. The men were solid. Mandy was as dependable as the sunrise. They were right where they needed to be.
The trail continued to rise, and it was more narrow by the stride. His horse was game, though, and it didn’t falter as it raced for a stretch of trail that could become a death trap.
With a tight hold on his rifle, Cord hit a slightly less treacherous stretch of the trail. It still slanted sharply downward, but he was on his feet now instead of his backside. He ran flat out. Closing the distance, listening, hoping he didn’t hear the sound of oncoming hooves.
Not yet. He threaded his way through a clump of aspens, hitting one with his shoulder and setting it to quaking. The shiver of the tree startled a deer out of the brush slightly down the trail. Running, the deer vanished into the trees, but his direction went right along this trail.
“We’re on the right track.” The deer was leading them, proving this was an established trail. He chanced a quick look back at his family, all racing along after him. His heart pounded hard, as much from excitement as from exertion. All these Cooters working together. He was proud of his family. Proud of their loyalty to each other. Lady Gray was about to finally realize just how foolish she’d been to aim her rifle at a Cooter.
With his eyes squarely on the path ahead, Cord risked a smile.
All they had to do was get there in time.
Trees on both sides slapped at Mandy’s shoulders. Galloping as they were, she ducked a branch and still took a swipe in the face from whipcord-thin branches of aspen.
The aspens grew more up than out, which told Mandy just how narrow the trail was. If they’d wanted to turn around, they’d be hard pressed to manage it. The horse could rear and wheel around probably, but it would be difficult and slow, especially with so many riders packed tightly and traveling fast. They were as good as forced to go forward.
Tom rode this trail every time he went to Divide. He should have widened it. Cut trees for his cabin from this spot. She’d spend awhile nagging him to do just that as soon as he’d worked out all the other trouble that came along with marrying her.
Pine trees occasionally replaced the aspen and clawed her. She focused on speed and protecting her little girl. With one hand busy blocking blows to Angela’s precious face and the other guiding her horse, she wasn’t able to spare herself.
A ponderosa pine nearly unseated her. She crouched lower, using her shoulders and her stinging face to protect Angela the best she could.
She’d ridden this trail once with Tom, the day they’d gone to town. They had come from another direction when they’d ridden in from Gray Tower and from yet another way when they’d come back from the Flatheads’ valley and the Harden place. This tight passage had been hard to endure on the earlier trip when she didn’t feel like she had a gang of outlaws on her trail.
Now, knowing the Cooters might have regrouped and come back, it was a hundredfold worse. Every breath she drew was a struggle as her throat tightened with fear. She felt the cold creep into her blood, her muscles, her nerves.
Surely Cord, the only one of those last four men unaccounted for, hadn’t found more cousins already. But Mandy and Tom had taken three men into the sheriff, one dead and draped over his horse. They’d ridden to the Flathead village and back.
A good chance he couldn’t gather any help in that time, but Cord could be up there alone. And he could do terrible damage from that overlook.
Mandy desperately looked forward to getting through this gauntlet.
Cord saw the deer ahead of him. Then he saw it leap gracefully over … nothing. Straight ahead he saw the end of the world.
He threw himself flat on his back.
“Stop! A cliff!” A strangled yell of warning was all he had time for. His shirt tore on a projecting scrub pine and he felt his back being cut and scoured by the rock and grit of the mountain. He slid to a stop just inches from the ledge.
A cousin came sliding fast. Cord grabbed at him. His cousin stopped with his legs hanging out over … Cord wasn’t sure what.
The next few seconds were a fur ball of tumbling and grabbing and muffled shouts. But when the dust settled, no one went over the ledge. When they all lay, scattered like battered branches after a wind storm, Cord finally had the time and gumption to lean forward and see the pit he’d almost gone flying into. There was nothing but a huge crack in the mountain.
Straight across the crack stood the deer that had led them this direction. It had jumped, probably without giving it a thought. The deer arched its neck, and a rack of proud antlers rose as the animal seemed to sneer at Cord. Then it whirled and ran straight to that outcropping of rock and posed there as if it was the king of this whole mountain. Then it vanished into the woodlands beyond. Of course this trail worked for a deer.
Cord looked down. This crack dropped into a pit so deep Cord couldn’t see to the bottom.
Heart pounding, gasping for breath, Cord’s stomach clenched so hard at the near miss he thought he’d toss his breakfast right into the depths. He fought that off and then had time to really look, up the mountain and down. If they could get across, that outcropping of rock that overlooked the trail was only a few dozen feet on the other side of this split in the earth.
It might as well have been on the moon. The crack stretched as far as the eye could see up, and on the downhill side looked to go all the way to the trail Linscott was on.
He could just faintly see where Lady Gray and her guards were riding through the trees far below. And he wouldn’t have known he could see it at all if he hadn’t watched riders, visible for fleeting seconds, passing.
“We missed
them.” Cord’s terror twisted into fury. But they wouldn’t miss them for long. “Let’s get down there and finish this.” Cord turned, ignoring his kin, and charged back up the slope, twice as hard and half as fast as he’d come down.
He heard his family grousing, but he didn’t wait. The Cooters would come. He knew the kind of men they were. They’d bellyache maybe, but they were loyal. They were men who understood what was important.
In the end, Cooters stuck together.
“Did you hear something?” As they cleared the narrow stretch of trail without incident, Mandy rode up beside Tom.
“Nope.” He lifted his head and listened with keen concentration for a few seconds, then looked up and behind him as his horse moved along at a gallop. “Smells like dust or something.” Tom shook his head and pulled his horse to a fast walk. “Probably kicked up by the horses. Who knows.”
Looking over her shoulder, Mandy saw a magnificent mule deer with a huge set of antlers step up on the rocky overhang as if he were their lookout. As if he ruled the world.
“That must be what I saw.”
Tom looked back just as the deer turned and darted away. “Well, no one up there, or a deer wouldn’t be hanging around.”
Mandy felt the chill recede as she accepted the movement and slight sounds of the deer as the reason why she’d felt so itchy. For a second she’d been ready to reach for her rifle, and she already knew exactly where she’d have aimed and fired. And Mandy was one to trust her instincts.
“We made it through that gap. There’s no real good place to stake out the trail from here on in.” Tom’s horse emerged from the heavily wooded stretch into a flatter land, grass and some scrub brush but no highlands edging the trail. And no trees big enough to hide behind.
“Those back-shooting Cooters won’t face us head-on, so with that bad stretch behind us, we’ll be fine now.” Tom smiled then looked down at sleeping Jarrod. “Can you imagine feeling this safe?”
Mandy reached across and brushed the flyaway brown hair off of Jarrod’s forehead. “I think I already knew how to load Ma’s rifle at this age. Definitely by Angela’s.” She tightened her grip gently on the child in her own arms. “And Sally could already rope a moving calf from the back of a good cowpony when she was just a bit older.”
“We can get started training the girls to rope and shoot as soon as we get done building Reeves’s cabin. Get ’em their own rifles.”
“Tom, I don’t think—” Mandy looked up and saw the sparkle in her husband’s eye.
“Maybe we wait a little longer, huh?” He chuckled.
“Maybe just another year or two.” Shaking her head, Mandy smiled. “Let’s get to Divide. I’m going to be mighty glad to be done with this trail.”
They walked awhile, the heat of the summer, the scent of the pines at their backs, the jagged white peaks all around them, the soft clop of the hooves.
Mandy dropped back when Angela woke up and started chattering. Her horse was inclined to move along following Tom, and it required almost no effort from Mandy. Jarrod riding on Tom’s lap was chattering, but the boy wasn’t a big talker yet. Mandy heard Tom’s deep voice—probably going over and over that the boy was to call him Pa. The thought made Mandy smile, and it eased her tension. She looked back and could see Catherine sitting with relaxed contentment on Mark’s lap.
Mark smiled at Mandy and gave her a reassuring nod. A world where Mark Reeves was mature and helpful just made no sense to Mandy at all.
When the horses were rested, Tom picked up the pace, and it wasn’t long until they rode into the sleepy little town of Divide.
Mandy had told herself she was safe before, but now the weight that lifted off her shoulders told her she hadn’t really believed it.
“I want to see Sheriff Dean first thing,” Tom said to Mandy. Then he turned to his cowhands. “See to that list of supplies. Mark, do you mind keeping Catherine? We can take her.”
“I’m fine.” Mark smiled down at Catherine as if to ask her if she was happy. Catherine giggled.
Mandy was a bit surprised at the way Mark accepted the children’s attention. He’d never shown much patience as a child. Though his little brothers had begun popping up in school before Mandy had grown up. And he’d always included them in his nonsense. Mandy had considered him more a bad influence than a caretaker.
Tom rode straight up Divide’s single dirt street for the jailhouse, and Mandy followed.
She’d only been in town briefly, but she was struck by how quiet it was. No tinny music coming out of the Golden Butte. No wagons or horses on the street. Not a single soul anywhere.
Tom swung down, carrying Jarrod as if he didn’t weigh an ounce. As Mandy’s feet hit the ground, the sheriff’s door burst open, and she saw—
“Sally!” Mandy ran and threw herself into her sister’s arms.
Angela was between them, but Mandy didn’t let that stop her from hugging Sally tight and long and deep.
Twenty – four
Luther came next. Tom remembered him and Buff and Wise Sister. They all poured out of the sheriff’s office, talking a mile a minute.
Well, at least Mandy and Sally were. Sally snatched Jarrod out of Tom’s arms. Tom didn’t even try to keep up with the chatter. She might have asked nicely for the little boy.
“Mark Reeves?” Sally shouted the name, sounding stunned.
Tom saw Reeves, carrying Catherine, turn, flash a smile, and come back at a near run.
It burned a little. Tom had told the men to lay up supplies. But there were more than enough men for that. He just hadn’t wanted the whole bunch of them crowding into the sheriff’s office.
Mark swept Sally up in his arms just as Logan McKenzie came out of the sheriff’s office … and started scowling.
Tom hadn’t seen any of these folks since Jarrod was born, and then he’d met them once and not for very long. But he felt an instant brotherhood with any man who didn’t like Mark Reeves hugging his wife.
Tom reached out a hand to Logan and drew his attention. “We’re brothers now, I think.”
“Why, because you don’t like that guy touching my wife either?” Logan didn’t take his eyes off Sally.
“No, because I married Mandy. We really are brothers.”
Logan’s brow smoothed, and he smiled. “You finally got Mandy to marry you, huh?”
For some reason it gave Tom fierce satisfaction that someone else had known how he felt about Mandy. And how much sense it made that they’d be married now.
“That kid with his hands all over your wife is one of my cowhands. He knew Mandy—Sally, too, it looks like—back in Texas.”
“Hmm—” Logan’s smile faded.
“All those years I told everyone you were born to hang, Mark Reeves.” Sally grinned and slapped Mark’s shoulder. “Guess I owe Beth five dollars. I bet her you’d never live to be an adult.”
“It’s not ladylike nor Christian to wager, Sally.” Mandy looked stern, but Tom saw the twinkle in her eye.
“You’re right. But with Mark I never figured it for any kind of a gamble.”
Mark laughed and slid an arm around Sally’s waist, and she let that arm stay right where it was.
“That’s how Mandy talks to him, too.” Tom drew Logan’s eagle eyes away from the little group. “In fact, she called him her childhood enemy. I’ve decided he’s no threat.”
Then Mark put his other arm around Mandy, and Tom wasn’t feeling quite so charitable.
“Still don’t like it,” Logan muttered.
“I’m planning to fire him.” Tom nodded.
Luther bulled his way into the reunion and had Mandy in a bear hug.
Tom waited until the fuss had calmed down, not that hard considering Luther, Buff, and Wise Sister barely spoke, and Logan was busy glaring. It boiled down to Mandy, Sally, and Mark, who were talking like magpies, and Mark was touching them again.
Finally Tom reached for the sheriff’s door. “Let’s go see what Merl found.”
“He’s not there.” Logan shook his head.
“He left the door unlocked?”
“Yep, he rode out this morning to check on some cattle rustling in the area. He said he wouldn’t be gone long.”
Looking around, Tom realized there wasn’t a single horse tied at a hitching post. Not a single man walking down the street. No music coming from the Golden Butte.
“What’s going on? Divide’s a little town, but this is too quiet.” Tom frowned. He’d thought that a town full of rough Western men meant safety.
“A cattle drive came through the other day hiring and paying top wages. Took every able-bodied man in town. Even Seth and Muriel at the general store hired on as camp cooks. Thought it’d be fun to get away for a couple of weeks. They left one of the few women in town to run things.”
“How long have you been in town?” Tom asked Logan.
“Just a few days. Sally decided she wasn’t going to put up with Mandy living on that mountaintop anymore. We came through Divide on our way north and met Luther here, just coming from Mandy’s castle. The sheriff told us you weren’t at the ranch, that you’d headed off for Denver. But we knew you hadn’t gone to Denver because we came up that trail. He told us to wait here for you.”
Belle Harden chose that moment to ride into town with Emma. She came from the west, crossing the train tracks that bordered the town on that side.
“Reeves!” Tom had to yell to get Mark to quit with the girl talk. Maybe if the halfwit didn’t have the sense to keep his hands off his boss’s woman, he’d figure out he shouldn’t be hugging his boss’s woman in front of his fiancé. When Mark looked up, Tom jabbed a finger toward Emma.
Sophie's Daughters Trilogy Page 86