Cowboy PI

by Jean Barrett

  “Back!” Roark bellowed a warning. “Get back! The whole thing is coming down!”

  Horses and riders, together with the heifer, retreated through the arch, scrambling for safety. Above the panicked cries of the animals came the ominous splitting noise of tons of rock parting from the high face of the wall. The ripping sound became a rumble that grew to a roar as the avalanche descended, crashing to the floor of the defile with such force that the earth trembled beneath them.

  In the aftermath came the rattle of a last few stones falling, and then there was silence again. A cloud of dust rose like thick smoke from the mouth of the arch. When it cleared, they could see from where they huddled under an overhang that the opening on the other side was buried by massive boulders from ceiling to floor.

  Roark cursed. “Blocked! Not so much as a gap!”

  Samantha voiced her own frustration. “Nature has lousy timing.”

  But Roark wasn’t so sure it was an accident. That crack he’d heard just before the landslide had sounded very much like the one that had stampeded the cattle the other night. Could the blast of a firearm trigger a rock fall of that magnitude? If so—

  He didn’t get to finish his thought. Samantha interrupted him anxiously. “Even if we wanted to leave the horses, the walls in here are much too steep for us to climb, aren’t they? But there must be a way out.” Before he could stop her, she goaded her mare out from under the shelter of the overhang to investigate the possibilities for herself.

  “Samantha, no! Keep back!”

  He didn’t hear the bark of gunfire, not this time, but the ping of a bullet biting into the sandstone within inches of Samantha’s exposed body was unmistakable. Leaping from his horse, Roark dashed forward and dragged her from the saddle, throwing his own body in front of her to shield her.

  Another bullet struck, missing them again but so close he felt the bit of rock it chipped hit his shoulder. He didn’t wait for a third bullet. Gathering Samantha into his arms, he flew with her back under the protective overhang.

  Dolly had the good sense to join them, but neither the horses nor the heifer liked being targets any more than Samantha and Roark did. They were snorting in fear and threatening to bolt. As soon as he’d released Samantha, Roark dealt with them. They shied away from him, dancing nervously, but he was able to catch their reins.

  When he’d managed to calm them, including the heifer, he turned back to a bemused Samantha. Her eyes were wide with fear and disbelief. “Who?” she whispered.

  “Couldn’t tell.” But whoever it was, he’d wager it was the same someone who had fired on Joe Walker in a similar situation back in Texas. And none of us believed the old man, he thought wryly. Not then. “Maybe I can find out. Stay here and try to keep the animals quiet.”

  “You’re not going out there again!”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Sliding his gun from its holster and hugging the wall, he sprinted a few yards along the passage, trying to keep under the overhang as he searched for a place to get a look at whoever was up there on the rim above them. His movements must have been detected because they drew a rapid fire. Bullets ricocheted all around him, but none of them came close to touching him.

  Sounds like a rifle, Roark thought, though he couldn’t be certain of that. Ernie Chacon had a rifle, but then so did the others in the outfit, including Ramona.

  Roark returned the fire. The angle and height were impossible, both for him and their assailant. But one of Roark’s bullets must have found his target. He could swear he heard a yelp from the rim. Either he had wounded the enemy or come so close that he’d scared him into a retreat. A long silence followed. The bastard had gone. He must have realized how useless it was to try to keep them pinned down. He hoped.

  In any case, Roark had been unable to identify him. Only briefly had he caught glimpses of a figure up there, no more than a shapeless shadow against the blinding glare of the sunlight on the mesa above him.

  Roark waited, and when the silence remained unbroken, he turned and made his way back to Samantha’s side. “Couldn’t recognize him,” he reported, returning his gun to its holster. “I think he’s gone, though.”

  “What now?” she asked. “Do we stay here?” She glanced up nervously at the rock hanging over their heads. “Maybe it isn’t safe. Maybe this will come down, too.”

  He shook his head. “This section looks solid enough.”

  “The others must have missed us by now. They’re probably out searching for us.”

  And one of them found us, Roark thought grimly. And at this moment he’s hoping we never find our way out of this place, that we die down here trying. But he didn’t say that to Samantha. She was upset enough as it was.

  “Roark, I’m so sorry. It’s my fault we’re in this mess. If I had been thinking at all—”

  “Don’t,” he interrupted. “You did what you felt you had to do. Beating yourself up over it is just a waste of time. We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  Her gaze strayed to the cell phone clipped to his belt. “Do you suppose we could call out for help?”

  He looked up at the towering walls that surrounded them on all sides. “Not much chance of any reception in here, but it’s worth a try.”

  Roark paused with his hand on the instrument. Shep had a cell phone of his own, which made him the logical choice. Providing he wasn’t the enemy himself, and he could be. Well, he would have to risk it.

  Samantha watched him tensely as he turned on the phone’s power and checked the display. It informed him there was no signal.

  “No good?” she asked.

  He shook his head and returned the phone to his belt.

  “Then we’re trapped down here!”

  “Not necessarily. Just because we can’t go back the way we came in doesn’t mean there isn’t some other way out. We’ll try the other direction.”

  “Do you think it’s safe to move? What if you’re wrong and he’s still up there just waiting for us to show ourselves again?”

  “My instincts say he isn’t, but let me go first.” Leading the roan out from under the overhang, he lifted himself into the saddle and waited. Silence. “All right, let’s risk it.”

  There was no further threat from the enemy when Samantha emerged with Dolly, mounted up, and with the heifer trailing behind, followed him along the twisting defile. But he knew she was nervous about another sudden burst of gunfire. Hell, he was nervous himself. They were vulnerable down here.

  The possibility of another ambush lessened as they proceeded along the winding trench, only to be replaced by other concerns. The loss of daylight, for one. This blasted gorge had already been as dim as a cavern, but Roark judged by the slowly fading light that the sun was low in the sky now. It would go down in another half hour or so, leaving them caught here in the darkness.

  Bad enough, but what if there was no way out? That was also a possibility, as they discovered when the channel divided. Roark chose the left branch. They had traveled along it for a hundred yards or so when it abruptly dead-ended in sheer rock.

  “We have to go back to the fork,” he said.

  “Yes,” Samantha said hopefully, turning the mare. “Maybe we’ll have better luck with the other branch.”

  But he could detect the first threads of panic in her voice, and he knew he had to distract her, to occupy her mind with something other than the gravity of their situation. And, anyway, he wanted the knowledge she could provide him.

  “Tell me about them, Samantha,” he said as they arrived at the fork and made their way along the right branch. “The members of our outfit. All I know about them as individuals is what I’ve been able to observe on the drive. But you grew up on the Walking W. You must have a lot more than just impressions.”

  “Not really. Not when you consider I left the ranch not long after my mother died and never went back, except for a single visit, and by then the staff had changed.”

  “Like who, for instance?
”

  “Shep Thomas, for one. The foreman before him had quit, and my grandfather replaced him with Shep. He and his wife occupy a cottage on the ranch. I think they came from somewhere near Dallas, but I’m not sure of that. In fact, I’m not really sure of anything about Shep, except I get the feeling he’s a lot deeper than he seems. Another fork! Which one this time?”

  They took the wider of the two passages.

  “Go on with what you were telling me,” Roark encouraged her.

  “Why do you want to know? Is it that useful, or are you just trying to keep me busy?”

  She was no fool. “Both,” he said honestly.

  “You think my information is going to bring you closer to learning who wants me out of the way?”

  “It’s possible. What about Dick Brewster?”

  “In his case, he was hired on a few months before I left the ranch. Long enough for me to learn that, where Dick is concerned, what you see is what you get.”

  Maybe, Roark thought, and maybe not.

  “This is no good, is it?” Samantha said.

  She was referring to their route. It had narrowed, was so tight in places that it barely accommodated horse and rider. But it hadn’t dead-ended. Yet.

  “Let’s give it a chance.”

  They continued to pursue it, claustrophobic though it was.

  “And Cappy?” he prompted.

  “There isn’t much to know about Cappy. He’s been on the Walking W forever. He and my grandfather went way back. Cappy gave me my first riding lesson. Roark, we’re losing the light.”

  The shadows had thickened in the gorge.

  “I know. How about Ramona?”

  “She was hired as housekeeper to replace my mother. That happened after I was gone. She was there when I came back for the one visit, which wasn’t long enough to learn anything about her history. We did get to be on friendly terms, though, and I could see how efficient she was. I suspect that’s all that mattered to my grandfather.”

  “So Ramona is something of a mystery.”

  “Not as much as her son is. Roark, what are we going to do if it gets completely dark before we find our way out of here? If we ever do.”

  “We still have time, and we will.”

  But he was less confident about that than he wanted her to think, particularly when the route divided again. There were three galleries this time, and the first two they tried turned out to be impassable after a few yards.

  The third artery allowed them to proceed, but Roark realized by now that this entire section of the mesa was seamed with deep rifts. A network nature had carved into a bewildering maze of fissures. For all he knew, they were riding in circles, crossing routes they had already traveled.

  “It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” Samantha said in a small, bleak voice. “We’re lost.”

  “Don’t give up. We still have enough light left to guide us. Come on, you haven’t told me about Alex yet.”

  “Yes, Alex. Well, his father’s ranch adjoins the Walking W. They’ve always been good neighbors. But you know that already. After all, the McKenzies are your neighbors, too.”

  “What with keeping my own spread going, along with the agency in San Antonio, I never had the time to learn much of anything about my neighbors. Like, just how serious is this crush Alex McKenzie has on you?”

  Samantha laughed softly. “It’s a leftover from our high school days. He used to leave notes for me in my locker, but since he was a freshman and I was a senior…well, you know what it’s like at that age. We were light-years apart. Satisfied?”

  “For now.”

  There was a pause, and then she said quietly, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Keeping me from going hysterical on you. But maybe I should have been screaming my head off. Do you think the others would have heard us if we’d hollered?”

  “Not much chance of that down here.”

  There was another silence between them, no sound but the steady clopping of the horses’ hooves on the hard bed of the defile. The precious light continued to fade. The silence lengthened.

  “Roark, stop!”

  He drew rein. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you hear it?” she asked, her voice excited.

  He listened, and now he could hear it, too. The murmur of water over stone. It came from somewhere in front of them.

  “Do you think…”

  But Roark was afraid to count on anything. Snapping the reins, he moved forward again, leading the way toward the source of the water. It was louder now, identifying itself as a stream tumbling over rocks.

  There was something else. The deepening gloom had lessened. He was puzzled about that until he realized that the walls on either side had diminished considerably in height, permitting the last light of day to enter the trench. The channel had also widened. He and Samantha could ride comfortably now side by side.

  Smelling the water, the animals quickened their pace without urging. They rounded a last bend, emerging from the mouth of the defile into a low canyon. And there in the gray, lingering twilight, situated above the stream that had beckoned them, was a sight that astonished them.

  Chapter Eight

  “Look at them, Samantha! They’re incredible!”

  She was looking, and she was impressed, though her interest couldn’t begin to match Roark’s excitement over the spectacle of the tumbled sandstone walls. In fact, she found more pleasure in his enthusiasm than in the reason for it.

  “I’ve seen the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde,” he said, “and they’re more extensive than these. Probably in a better state of preservation, too, but it’s not the same as stumbling onto our very own ruins like this!”

  She knew he realized, just as she did, that they couldn’t possibly be the first to discover these crumbling structures, isolated though they were in a remote region. But it was fun to claim them as their own.

  They went on standing there, feasting their gazes on the mass of finely crafted masonry above them in a deep alcove under the overhanging rim of the mesa. From what Samantha could tell in the rapidly dwindling light, the compound consisted of a series of connected rooms and towers, some square, others round, all of them positioned on terraces at various levels.

  Roark, who could scarcely control himself, started to climb down from his roan. “I’ve got to have a better look at this while we still have a glimmer of light.”

  “Do you think we should?” she said, hating to temper his exhilaration. “I mean, while we have any light left at all, shouldn’t we be concerning ourselves first with a few practical matters? Like how we’re supposed to find our way back to the outfit when we’re still lost in the wilderness? And, if we can’t manage that, where we’re going to spend the night and what we’re going to eat?”

  “Samantha, we’re looking at prehistory here. This stuff has got to be centuries old.”

  “I know, but I’m hungry, and I’m thirsty. I imagine the animals are, too.”

  “You’re right.” Muttering something about the joyless necessity of reality, Roark directed a last, regretful glance at the roofless ruins before turning his attention to their more immediate needs. “I don’t see any point in our trying to go on in the dark.” He looked around. “We couldn’t ask for a better spot to camp. There’s the stream here and grass for the horses and Irma.”

  Which didn’t solve the problem of what she and Roark were going to eat, Samantha thought, but she had to agree that spending the night here was the wisest plan. “There’s another advantage,” she pointed out to him. “If we’re here when the sun comes up, we’ll have some real light to explore the ruins.”

  She anticipated the chance to share an interval like that with him and hoped that he felt the same. It pleased her when he responded warmly, “You and me playing archaeologists together sounds good.”

  Unsaddling the horses, they watered them and the heifer. There was no risk in turning the animals loose afterward. They were too exhausted t
o wander, including Irma, and were content to graze in the immediate area.

  It was completely dark by then, but the moon had risen. Its pale glow shed sufficient light for their other chores. There were cottonwoods along the stream and the ever-present quaking aspens elsewhere in the canyon, providing a supply of fuel.

  Samantha gathered wood and built a fire in a level spot beside the stream while Roark tried his hand at fishing in one of the pools. Or his version of it, anyway. This amounted to whittling the end of a long stick into a sharp point. It was hard to have faith in his intention, especially when he was operating by moonlight. But, miracle of miracles, he actually managed to spear and land a fat trout.

  Impressed, she watched him as he cleaned the fish with his knife before crouching beside the fire to toast his catch on a makeshift spit. “Survival skills you learned in cowboy class, I suppose.”

  “Actually, it was the Boy Scouts, and not out on the open range either. It was back in Illinois where I grew up.”

  Samantha knew very little about his history, only that he came from a big family and that all of them were PIs like him, including his parents, who operated the home office of the Hawke Detective Agency in Chicago. She wondered if they were a close, loving family.

  For a moment she was tempted to ask him about that, suddenly longing to know more about him. But then she decided her interest wasn’t smart. Not when he looked the way he did hunkered down by the fire, the flames lighting his strong face shadowed by a day’s growth of whiskers, his black hair tousled from his Stetson. The image was a sexy one, all male. It also reminded her of how much Roark had in common with her rugged grandfather, and this was a subject that always made her uneasy.

  “It’s ready,” he said, dividing the trout and handing her her portion on a plate. Or what passed for one in the shape of a hunk of birch bark. “Careful, it’s hot.”