Rory watched Piah judge the distance between the crate in front of him and the entrance.
“You’ll never make it, Piah. That dynamite will go off before you’re halfway to the door.”
“At least I will have a chance. What about you? Are you ready to die, Burnett?”
Rory didn’t feel safe, even in the mouth of the cave. If the crates were full of dynamite as Piah claimed, if they should explode, he risked being thrown over the edge of the cliff behind him.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” he said honestly.
Piah smiled again. “I had your woman, Burnett. I had her before she died.” He lowered the torch still further.
The other Ute yelled something at Piah and ran toward Rory, willing to risk a bullet rather than be blown to pieces. Rory fired.
The man reeled back and fell over the crates.
Piah made his move and tried to leap over the body.
Rory raised the rifle and fired again. He hit Piah between the eyes.
The torch fell from the Ute’s hands. Rory realized immediately that it was going to hit one of the crates. He dove for the entrance, hit the ground, gathered himself into a crouch, and ran up the path. Halfway to the top an explosion rocked the mesa followed by a second tremendous blast. Rock and sandstone burst out of the mouth of the cave, shot out into the canyon below, and scattered down the bluff. The cliff face gave way and slid downward. Rory clung to a piñon branch protruding over the pathway as the ground beneath him trembled and threatened to give way. He started to slide down the path as the earth continued to rumble.
Deep within the mesa, in the very bowels of the cave, the reverberations continued as the interior was sealed for all time. When the rumbling finally subsided, when the dust settled and began to clear, Rory raised his head. His rifle was gone, he’d thrown it aside as he jumped away from the blast. He felt for his gun and found it in his holster. He still had his hat and he didn’t seem to bleeding anywhere.
His ears were ringing so badly that he shook his head and tried to clear them. The roar in his head went on, but he managed to struggle to the top of the mesa once again. His horse was gone, frightened away by the explosions. He looked at the sky, guessed there were at least two hours before dawn. He started walking back across the mesa to the place where Jessica had fallen over the cliff.
Come dawn, his men would be riding the mesa looking for him. They could help lower him to the canyon floor, to Jess.
EVERYTHING HURT.
Jessica tried to sit up, but couldn’t move her arm and shoulder pinned beneath her. She lay still for a time, ignoring the pebbles and rocks that pressed into her side. She wondered exactly where she was and how she got there as the cool night breeze drifted across her face. She closed her eyes.
As the memory of her escape from Piah and her plunge over the cliff slowly came back to her, she wished she had dreamed the entire episode. What of Rory? Where was he? Was he alive or dead? All she remembered was the sight of him as he burst into Piah’s camp, the gunfire, his commanding her to run.
She shuddered, afraid of the dark, afraid Rory might be dead somewhere on the mesa. Terrified, she prayed that Piah was not on his way to take her captive again. »
Forcing herself to move, she started slowly, one limb at a time. She wriggled her ankles, her legs, and found, incredibly, that nothing hurt. The shoulder she had landed on was numb with pain. Her right arm was twisted beneath her. She rolled over to her left side and pushed herself to a sitting position.
She could hear water somewhere below her. The stars canopied the sky above, but the display offered little comfort tonight. Examining herself by touch, she felt along her collarbone and determined it was broken. Her shoulder had separated above it. Her arm was numb. She cradled it against her, trying to hold it rigid to prevent further injury.
Forcing herself up to her knees, she tried to stand, but dizziness swept over her and she slowly lowered herself to the ground. Glancing over her shoulder, she realized she was inches from the face of the cliff.
She scooted back carefully until she could lean against the rock wall. It was hard, but offered some comfort, and no one could slip up on her from behind.
For a few moments she might have dozed, she couldn’t be sure, but she jerked awake with a start when she thought she felt sand sifting down on her from somewhere overhead.
Jessica pressed up against the wall, determined to stay hidden and escape capture. She nearly cried out when she bumped her shoulder against the wall behind her.
A hoot owl called out of the dark. Jessica shivered and pulled the edges of her torn bodice together over her breasts. She reached for the now familiar necklace of beads and found them missing. Her heart sank. She had lost Martha Burnett’s necklace in her struggle with Piah. Her mind was wild with images of what had happened to her in the last few hours. Worse yet were the nightmares of what the morning might hold in store.
When she weighed her options, they were few. She was hurt, lost somewhere in a canyon deep in the middle of the mesa. Rory might be dead or dying somewhere above her. She had no food or water, no way to get out of the canyon except on foot. She might wander for miles without seeing another living soul.
Stop it.
Think of something else.
She began to recite the bone structure of diplodocus, one of the most massive sauropods ever discovered. “Vegetarian’s skull, thin pencil like teeth at the front of the mouth. Weak lower jaw. Neck bones jointed and hollow. Spines along neck for muscle attachment . . . ” Something small rustled in the dust beside her. She tried to move away and realized with shock that she was on a ledge, and one that was not very wide at that.
Jess snuggled up to the rock wall again and recited faster. “Scapula, humerus, ulna, radius, wrist, hand, ribs, hip socket, ischium, pubis, femur, tibia, fibula, feet.”
Oh, God, Rory. Please don’t be dead.
“Tail vertebra with elongated chevron, flatter toward midtail. Joints between tailbones; as they narrow, the joints disappear. Narrow cylindrical bones at the very end.”
Somewhere very close by, a coyote barked. She whispered, “Diplodocus’s tail could be used as a whip.”
Her shoulder was throbbing. She licked her lips, discovered the side of her mouth was tender where Piah had hit her.
A drink of water might be nice. Yes, a drink of water would be wonderful.
She forced herself to think, to structure her thoughts so that she might hold on to her sanity. Jessica whispered softly to the night, “Geological ages. Quaternary, Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic.”
Before tonight she had begun to feel so akin to this land. Now everything held a threat.
She tried to conjure up a picture of the rainbow-hued canyons, the mesa, the high desert plateau. Rory, Myra, the cowhands, and even Scratchy. Methuselah as he tried to burrow into corners of the ranch house.
Jessica fought against sleep, but eventually her eyelids grew heavy and finally closed, effectively blocking out the night sky and the emptiness of the darkened landscape.
RORY SAT STARING at the ashes of the burned-out fire, watching them break apart as he poked them with a twig. Colorful beads were scattered on the ground near the fire ring. Reflecting the light, they cruelly teased him into recalling the way Jessica was never without his mother’s necklace.
He thought back to the day he told her to keep it. The piece had been a rare gift from his father to his mother many years ago and the fact that Jessica found the colorful strand attractive warmed his heart.
“The beads are so beautiful. I couldn’t take them,” she had protested, although she ran the string of beads reverently through her fingertips even as she refused.
“They’re yours,” he remembered telling her without a hint of sentiment. “They just hang around gathering dust anyway.
”
He wished now that he had made more ceremony of giving her the beads, wished he had presented them with a kiss and words of love that would tell her how much she meant to him. Now the strand was broken and the beads lay scattered in the dust like the empty hours of a future without her.
The sleeve of his black shirt was ripped at the shoulder, he noticed. His ears had stopped ringing some time ago, but it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered.
Words didn’t come to him. The poetry had left his soul.
The sky took on a ghostly gray tint that soon came to life in a deep rose and then pink as the sun started to rise.
He forced himself to stand, worked the usual stiffness from his joints, and walked to the edge of the mesa again. The canyon was still lost in shadows and mist that hugged the floor along the creek bed. The oak and willow growing along the canyon floor were stained dark green in the weak morning light.
He couldn’t see Jess on the bottom, but saw enough to know that no one could have survived the fall. Rory balled his fists at his side and threw his head back, unwilling to fight back tears any longer.
“Jessica!” he bellowed. “Jess . . . i . . . ca!”
The canyon taunted him. It threw the word back again and again until he covered his ears, unwilling to hear the sound be swallowed by the land the way his Jess had been.
He wiped his eyes, cursing his tears, his weakness, and walked back to the fire ring. He watched the sky deepen to pale blue.
He heard the hoofbeats first, then shouts and whistles as his cowhands rode into the clearing on the edge of the mesa. They were trailing his horse, Pancho, along with them, as well as Jessica’s mare.
Barney Tinsley was the first to reach him. “You find Miss Jess, boss?” He looked around hopefully. The others gathered near.
Barney had called him boss. It was the first time any of the men had done so and Rory wished he hadn’t. Not now. Not when he had lost everything.
He looked around at the expectant faces of the men. No single moment in his life had ever been as difficult. “Yes.” He nodded and felt his Adam’s apple work as he swallowed the emotion that threatened to choke him. “Piah had her. But there was a fight and she . . . she fell.”
“Is she all right?” Woody Barrows pressed in closer, pulling up his pants. He looked confused, unwilling to believe the worst
The men shifted uncomfortably. Gathers spat out a word none of them would ever even whisper in a lady’s presence.
Rory looked them each in the eye as he said, “She went over the rim of the canyon.”
There, he thought. I’ve said it. It’s true.
“You seen her? You been down there?” Woody was so close he was nearly standing on Rory’s boots.
Rory shook his head.
Woody, a foot shorter, stood looking up at Rory with a bewildered expression. “Then how do you know she’s not alive?”
Fred Hench shoved his friend on the shoulder. “Hell, Wheelbarrow, she went over the cliff. No man could survive a fall like that. What makes you think Miss Jess could?”
Woody shoved past them all and with his distinctive, squat-legged walk, marched to the edge of the mesa. He tried to see down into the canyon, but could only lean over so far without the risk of going over the edge himself. He knelt down, then lay flat on his stomach with a grunt.
Gathers walked over behind him. “See anything?”
Rory watched them, afraid to hope. They hadn’t heard her screams and the deafening silence afterward. He would hear them forever in his mind.
Hench and Tinsley left him and went to join the others. Curious, unable to do more yet unwilling to admit the loss, Gathers, Tinsley, and Hench lay down beside Barrows and peered over the edge of the mesa.
If he hadn’t felt so utterly lost, Rory would have laughed at the sight of his weathered cowhands lined up on their bellies staring down into the canyon.
“What’s that?” Hench pointed downward.
“Hell if I know, I can’t see farther than I can spit,” Woody complained.
Tinsley hit him on the shoulder. “Then what the hell are you lookin’ for?”
Woody ignored him and bellowed, “Miss Jess!”
Only his echo answered him.
Rory massaged his temples. They were going to drive him insane.
SOMEONE WAS CALLING her name over and over again.
Miss Jess! Miss Jess! Miss Jess!
Jessica moaned as she came awake. Groaned when she moved and pain shot through her arm and shoulder. Whimpered when she opened her eyes against the morning light and fully realized her predicament.
She was seated in an indentation in the cliff, a ledge not four feet wide. The gnarled roots of an oak that had tenaciously clung to life in the sandstone wall hung eight feet over her head. Jess looked up and realized the tree roots must have broken her fall.
Oak leaves and pebbles covered the ledge. She shifted, trying to ease the aches and pains that racked every inch of her body. A sound caught her attention. She sat perfectly still, listening.
Voices, indistinguishable words, were coming from somewhere above her.
Piah.
Her fear was so great she couldn’t believe the whispers belonged to anyone but him and his men. She couldn’t risk calling out, couldn’t risk capture, even if it meant she would eventually starve to death here on the ledge.
“Miss Jess!”
Miss Jess. Miss Jess. Miss Jess.
Jubilation swept through her when she recognized Woody Barrows’s voice. Before the echo died, she took a deep breath and yelled back. “Here! I’m here!” The words rebounded off the canyon walls.
A cheer went up from the men.
Rory’s knees almost went out from under him when he heard her cry. He hurried over to the canyon rim, nearly trampled all of them as he got down on his knees and shouted, “Jess? Are you all right?”
Her heart nearly burst when she heard him call out to her. She waited for the echoes to die and shouted back, “My shoulder is hurt, but otherwise I’m fine.”
“Where are you?” he wanted to know. None of them could see her at all.
She frowned, wishing she could be exact. “On a ledge. I think it must be about thirty feet below you.”
“I’m coming down to get you,” Rory shouted.
“No,” she yelled back. “Just pull me up somehow.”
Rory turned to Gathers. “Let’s put that long rope of yours to good use.”
Gathers got to his feet and hurried over to his horse. He was back in seconds, a coiled, braided rope in his hand. He handed it to Rory.
“Will it hold me?”
“It will,” the lean, scar-faced man assured him.
Rory looped the rope about his waist and knotted it carefully.
Fred Hench stood up and joined them while Tinsley and Barrows continued to call assurances down to Jessica.
“You sure you want to do this, boss?” Hench asked. “I’ll go if you want. I’m lighter ’n you.”
“Try and stop me.” Rory shook his head with a smile. “I’ll be fine.” He looked to Gathers. “Let’s do it.”
They walked back to the rim of the canyon and Rory looked over. He took a deep breath and then called out, “I’m comin’ down, Jess. We think we’re right above you, so when you see me give a holler.”
“That is totally unnecessary! Don’t you dare come down here, Rory Burnett!” she shouted back. The echo drove the order back to him again and again.
Rory shook his head. “Damn, but I never thought I’d be so glad to hear that woman boss me around again.”
He got down on his hands and knees and then shimmied up to the edge until he was able to lower his legs over the side. His heart was beating triple time. If Gathers’s
rope didn’t hold, if the knot slipped, he might not be as lucky as Jessica had been. He refused to look down, because whenever he did, he felt his stomach rise up to his throat. Instead he looked at the cliff face in front of him.
“Ready?” Gathers asked.
“Shoot.” Rory felt them lower him down the rock wall and braced himself away from it with his boots.
One foot. Three. Six. Ten. They lowered him down.
“I see you!” Jessica called out. “I see you through the tree roots! Go back!”
“I’m not going back.”
“Then move to your right.”
Rory tried to work his way along the wall. He glanced down once, saw the oak growing out of the side of the cliff, and then made the mistake of looking all the way to the canyon floor. He closed his eyes and swallowed as he tightened his grip on the rope.
“More rope!” he yelled up to the others.
They let him down again, four, five, ten more feet. He could hear Jessica below him. She was calling out encouragement, warning him to be careful, telling him to go back. He ignored her and tried to concentrate on every move.
Finally, after he was low enough to reach out for the tree roots, he pulled himself closer to the ledge, told the men to give him eight more feet, and then finally stood on solid ground beside her. As Jessica struggled to her knees, her face awash with tears, he pulled her into his arms.
“Aw, Jess. Please don’t cry.”
She ignored him and sobbed against his neck while he cradled her, careful not to hurt her injured arm and shoulder.
It was enough for him to hold her, to feel her warm and alive in his arms. He finger-combed her hair and pulled pieces of twigs and leaves out of it, kissed her ear, rocked her gently. Finally, when her tears subsided and his men were insisting he call out to them, Rory pulled out of her arms and smiled down into her eyes.
His smile faded when he saw the bruise across her cheek and her split lip. Her blouse was rent down the front, her eyes shadowed. Piah’s words rushed back at him.
I had your woman, Burnett.
Rory gently fingered the bruise as Jessica pulled the front of her blouse closed.
Past Promises Page 32