She moved toward Colter, leaned down, and kissed his cheek. “This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have tried to parade you around the dance hall, caused you so much trouble and pain. You see, Colter, I really do like you, and I wanted so much to spend the bulk of the night with you. Not him. I was being very selfish.”
She turned and walked back toward Northwest, leaving the cream ground-reined just outside the cave.
Colter bit into the chicken sandwich that she’d built thick on crusty wheat bread, with onions and mustard and strips of bacon. Ignoring his chipped tooth and torn tongue, he devoured half the sandwich in under a minute, and was about to reach for the second half when he realized his stomach wasn’t quite as happy with the food as his mouth had been.
He set the sack aside and looked around for his second canteen. It lay beside his saddle, against the cave wall behind him, about five feet from the opening. He turned gingerly, crawled over to it, popped the cork, and took a long drink of the water no less refreshing for being stale and tepid. When he’d had his fill, he poured some over his head and ran his hands through his wet hair, shivering as several drops slithered under his collar and rolled down his back.
Footsteps sounded behind him. He started to turn toward Lenore, saying, “Sure do appreciate the grub, Miss . . .”
It wasn’t Lenore behind him. It was three men in cavalry blues, all three holding Spencer repeaters—two resting their rifles on their shoulders while the third, a young, yellow-haired sergeant with a darkly tanned face with pinched, belligerent eyes, aimed his carbine straight out from his left hip at Colter. He wore a hard smile. The other two looked just as self-satisfied.
Colter rose slowly.
“Easy, now, killer,” said the yellow-haired sergeant, whose name Colter believed was Gustafsson. “No sudden moves or we’ll gut-shoot you and leave you here.”
Colter studied the three men. One more came up behind them from the direction of Northwest’s stone stable. The fourth man was a tall, gangly corporal, and he was holding Lenore in front of him, one hand over her mouth. Lenore was red-faced with shock, and tears dribbled out of her brown eyes. The corporal removed his hand, and Lenore said, sobbing, “I’m sorry, Colter. I tried to make sure I wasn’t followed!”
Colter wasn’t surprised she’d been shadowed. He wouldn’t have expected her to cover her tracks. But these four soldiers were not going to take him back to Camp Grant. They’d have to kill him and take back a corpse tied over his horse.
The blond sergeant said, “Take that six-shooter out of your pants. Slow. With two fingers. Then toss it over here.”
Still, blond Sergeant Gustafsson was the only one of the four aiming a gun at him. The others obviously didn’t think he’d be much trouble, as beat up as he was. They were likely already planning the furloughs that Major Fairchild would award them with for bringing his late prospective son-in-law’s killer back to the fort.
“Please, don’t!” Lenore beseeched the solders. “It was all an accident. Won’t you please let him go?”
“Let him go? We can’t let him go, miss. Your father wants his head. I reckon that’s all we really need to take back to Grant.”
Sergeant Gustafsson grinned sadistically as he flicked his eyes sideways toward Lenore. It was just a split-second lapse of attention, but it was all Colter needed to close his hand over his Remington’s walnut grips and whip the gun up with practiced speed, cocking the gun as he leveled it and then blowing a hole through the dead center of Sergeant Gustafsson’s dusty blue tunic. The sergeant groaned and triggered his Spencer into the cave ceiling beyond Colter as he stumbled back on his boot heels and fell.
The casual sneers on the faces of the four others disappeared behind a mask of unbridled fear and exasperation as they began pulling their own shooting irons off their shoulders. Colter turned sideways, automatically making as small a target as possible, and extended the Remington straight out from his shoulder, shooting the private in the middle of the group first, then summarily dispatching the other two before any had even gotten the hammers of their rifles drawn back.
One by one, spaced about a quarter second apart, they flew backward, dropping their rifles, hitting the ground, and rolling. The three yelled or screamed curses. The yells or screams were quickly replaced by gasping groans as their shredded hearts stopped beating.
The tall corporal threw Lenore aside and, sidestepping wildly and cursing, raised the Colt Army revolver he’d managed to claw out of his covered holster while Colter was dispatching his brethren. He raised the gun amidst the dust kicked up by the soldiers still rolling in the rocks and sand around him, and Colter drilled a slug through the middle of the corporal’s forehead, just below the leather brim of his forage cap.
The corporal triggered his Colt Army into the ground near his right foot, staggered back as though drunk, eyes rolling back into his head as though to view the bullet that had just killed him. He dropped heavily to his butt, sat there for a time, jerking, before he sagged against a boulder and rolled awkwardly onto a shoulder.
Colter lowered the smoking pistol and turned to Lenore. She was standing with her rump pressed against the boulder behind her, leaning forward slightly, her palms pressed flat against the rock. She stared at Colter, eyes wide with shock, lips parted slightly. Her face was as pale as rock dust.
Slowly, her knees started to shake and buckle behind her skirt drawn taut against them. Colter ran to her and caught her just as her knees touched the ground. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her face against his shoulder, shielding her from the grisly view of the dead or dying men.
She shivered as though in a January snowstorm. Colter said nothing. There was really nothing he could say to assuage the shock of what she’d seen. All he could do was comfort her for a while before getting her back on her horse and sending her home.
“You,” she said finally, her voice quavering as she turned her head to stare up at him, deep vertical lines cut into the bridge of her nose and just as deep horizontal lines slashed across her forehead. “You’ve . . . you’ve done that before.”
“Yeah.” Colter took her face in his hands, smoothed her hair back, nodding. “I have. A few times. I ain’t proud of it, but I have.”
In the periphery of his vision, he spied movement down the canyon below the cave. Quickly, he pulled Lenore into the cave behind him, grabbed his Remington out of his belt once more, and began shoving .44 cartridges into it from his shell belt.
Chapter 8
“What is it?” Lenore said, her voice still trembling, fearful.
“Don’t know, but I spied movement down-canyon a ways.”
Colter flicked the Remington’s loading gate closed, then went over and grabbed his rifle and his saddlebags. He set the saddlebags down, leaned his rifle against them, and pulled his ancient, brass-chased spyglass out of a pouch. He glanced at Lenore, who sat on her knees, hunkered low behind him, hands on her thighs.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
The girl said nothing as Colter, staying low, raised the spyglass. The canyon below was a devil’s maze of stone escarpments forming several winding corridors. He’d studied the terrain for nearly a minute before he saw a blue-clad soldier atop an army bay ride around a bend in the wall of a corridor straight out from the cave and about seventy yards away. The man was moving fast and staring in Colter’s direction, showing his teeth inside a shaggy blond goatee. Colter recognized the man a second before the horse and rider disappeared around another bend in the corridor he was following toward Colter’s cave.
“Hobart,” he muttered.
Behind Colter, Lenore said, “He and Lieutenant McKnight were leading a patrol out before I left the fort this morning. They were heading straight south. I came east, following Mr. Tappin’s direction, and . . . I thought I’d made it through without being seen.”
; Colter continued to stare through the spyglass. “They must have split up. Probably several groups around here now.”
Lenore said in a voice pitched low with self-disgust, “I’m sorry, Colter.”
Colter turned to her. Her eyes were still bright with the shock of seeing four men die before her, but the color in her cheeks had returned. She’d been raised on military forts throughout the West, and, while she might never have seen men killed up close, death could not have been new to her.
Colter returned the spyglass to his saddlebag pouch. “I’m obliged for the grub. Without it, I might not have made it a mile from here.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, something he’d only dreamed about doing before this day. Odd, how easy it was now, the emotion compelling it being his desire to send her away. “Leave here,” he said with passion. “Go now. Before they get here and the bullets start flyin’.”
“But what. . . . ?”
“I’m pullin’ out.”
Quickly, despite the ache in his ribs and other sundry bruises, cuts, and abrasions, he began gathering his gear.
“I’ll help you,” she said, starting to roll his rumpled blankets.
He grabbed her arm and shoved her brusquely toward her horse, now standing to the right of the cave, rooting for some spindly brown grass growing amongst the rocks. “No, go!”
“All right,” she said, stepping over the dead sergeant as she strode to her horse, a purposeful flush in her cheeks. “I’ll go and try to waylay Hobart and the others. “That’s the least I can do.”
She grabbed the cream’s reins and swung into the silver-trimmed Texas saddle. Colter whipped his head toward her as he tied his blanket roll. “Lenore, go back the way you came. Steer wide of Hobart!”
She swung the cream around and turned once more to Colter. “Good-bye, Colter.” She studied him, her thin brown eyebrows furling slightly above her penetrating gaze, as though she were seeing a different person than the one she’d thought he was. She tapped heels to the cream’s flanks, and the hooves clattered on the rocks as the gelding began picking its way down the slope, lifting copper dust behind it.
Colter continued to gather his gear, gritting his teeth and muttering against the dreadful feeling in his gut. Quickly, he retrieved Northwest from the horse’s stone alcove and threw his tack onto the horse’s back, adjusting buckles and tightening straps while his heart tattooed a dire rhythm against his breastbone and he stared down the rocky slope.
Lenore had reached the bottom and disappeared behind a pinnacle of towering rock.
Colter shoved his Henry into its scabbard and swung gingerly onto Northwest’s back. He put the horse down the slope, following Lenore’s path for fifty yards and then, finding a natural corridor angling south across the side of the slope, swung onto it.
A pistol cracked, the report echoing. Colter jerked his head to look over his left shoulder.
Hobart sat his bay in a sandy-floored, horseshoe-shaped bowl in the canyon floor about a hundred yards away. Lenore’s cream was there, as well—pitching wildly and whinnying as Lenore flopped down the horse’s left side. Colter blinked his shocked eyes as though to clear them, but when he held his gaze on the clearing in the canyon, he saw Lenore fall from the cream to land on the ground. The lieutenant held a pistol in his right hand as he sat staring toward the girl.
Colter thought that the lieutenant had triggered a shot at him, Colter, and that the bay had been startled by the shot and thrown the girl. But a look of keen horror and disbelief slid across his face as he realized that that was not what had happened.
Hobart had shot Lenore.
“You son of a bitch!” Colter screamed, reaching for his Henry and heeling Northwest across the slope in Hobart’s direction.
The lieutenant snapped his head up, facing Colter, and then he turned sharply to stare behind him. As he followed Hobart’s gaze, Colter pulled back on Northwest’s reins, and the coyote dun’s rear hooves skidded across a talus sliding, nearly losing his footing and going down. Behind Hobart, rounding a bend in the canyon, several blue-clad riders were galloping toward the lieutenant. Hobart shouted something that Colter couldn’t make out from this distance. Then he saw Hobart jerk his arm and his pistol sharply toward Colter.
As Hobart faced Colter, Colter could make out the shouted cry as the lieutenant waved his pistol at him, “. . . killed the major’s daughter!”
Raw fury was a pack of blood-hungry wolves charging through every vein in the redhead’s body. He slid his Henry from its sheath, held Northwest steady, and planted his sights on Hobart’s chest.
Ka-bam!
Rock dust puffed from the slope just left of Hobart. The lieutenant jerked his head down and threw an arm up with a start, then cast his exasperated gaze toward Colter. At least, Colter figured it was an exasperated gaze. From this distance he could see only a pale oval beneath the brim of the killer’s tan hat. He hoped the look he cast back toward Hobart was as easily read despite the distance between them, because it was Colter’s sincere promise that he would kill the man no matter what it took.
He wanted Hobart to know that Lenore’s killer was going to die bloody. Like a rabid wolf, he was going to die howling.
Now the six or seven other soldiers put their mounts into ground-eating gallops, heading toward Colter and disappearing amongst the steep stone walls of the canyon. Hobart, recovering from the shock of Colter’s near miss, shouted something else that Colter couldn’t hear and gigged his bay after the others.
Colter stood with his rifle butt pressed against his thigh, his eyes hard, his nostrils contracting and expanding as he stared at Lenore sprawled belly-down on the ground where the soldiers had left her. He felt a knife twist in his chest, tears of fury glaze his eyes.
Lenore . . . dead. He sat feeling slack and dead in his saddle, his shoulders weighing down on him like a yoke. How could such a sweet, kindly, and beautiful girl be dead? Killed so savagely?
Colter would have faced all the soldiers now if he thought he’d had a chance. But they’d likely get around him, and others would come, and he’d be dead and Hobart would still be alive, spreading his lies.
So he reined Northwest around and continued following the path across the shoulder of the hill and down toward the canyon floor. He’d stay ahead of the soldiers for now, until the time was right. And then he’d turn to face them, and they’d wish like hell they’d never known him.
He spent that night in a long-abandoned stone shack a good ten miles from the cave. The shack, likely belonging to a Mexican farmer or goatherd at one time, was hidden in a deep crease between two hills. Its covered well still held cool, sweet-tasting water. There was an old garden patch long since grown up with weeds.
It was a cold, bitter night despite the fire he’d built inside the roofless hovel and the whiskey he’d thinned with the cool well water and sipped from a tin cup to dull his sundry aches. The memory of Lenore lying in a lifeless pile at the bottom of that canyon was crisp in his mind, firing him with a fury he hadn’t known since he’d crippled and branded Bill Rondo.
It was a killing fury. He sat with his blankets draped about his shoulders, sitting near the fire but facing the dark night beyond the shack, sipping his whiskey and trying to replace the image of the beautiful, dead Lenore with pictures of a dead Hobart.
No. Of Hobart howling as he died . . .
He ate the last sandwich Lenore had made for him, and for which she’d given her life to bring to him, finished the whiskey and water, and swiped a fist across his nose, trying to puzzle it out.
Lenore.
Such a senseless, tragic killing. Why?
But Colter knew why. She’d been a headstrong girl, and in her zeal to stop more killing she must have told Hobart that she knew the real story of Belden’s death. To keep her from revealing his and McKnight’s lie, Hobart had shot her. How
easy it had been to blame Colter for her death, to say that she’d been killed by the man she’d ridden into the desert to see.
How easily one lie led to another.
Now, because he’d danced with a pretty girl, the pretty girl was dead and Colter was on the run for his life.
He slept fitfully only a few hours, his dreams tormented this time not from pain, but from images of Hobart’s gun blasting into Lenore. Rising early, when dawn was a pale, shallow streak behind the eastern ridges, he ate some beans and jerky washed down with water and whiskey, saddled Northwest, and headed out.
He saw no sign of the cavalry all that morning and into the afternoon. They wouldn’t give up on him, he knew. He was wanted now for killing not only the major’s intended son-in-law but the major’s daughter, as well. He especially hoped that Hobart didn’t give up on him. Likely, a contingent had taken Lenore’s body back to Camp Grant, but there would still be a goodly portion of Grant’s soldiers combing south-central Arizona for him.
Something told him he’d see Hobart again soon. The lieutenant would want to make sure that Colter died, so that no one could contest his and McKnight’s claim about the night of Belden’s death and that it was Colter who’d killed Lenore.
Willie’s whiskey made the ride easier on Colter’s ribs. But when he stopped in the midafternoon to take a swig, the bottle slipped from his hands, and it shattered on a rock, giving Northwest a start. The loss of the painkilling whiskey grieved him, but he smiled with relief when, an hour later, he crested a low butte and stared down into a hollow before him in which a collection of log and mud-brick buildings squatted in the Arizona sun. Likely, he’d find a replacement bottle there. A stagecoach was pulled up to the side of a barn, its tongue drooping, and there were ten to fifteen horses in the corral off the barn’s other side.
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