But maybe not Elizabeth.
Sam didn’t let his companion see the frown that creased his forehead. If Juan Pablo had feelings for Elizabeth Fleming, that could lead to trouble sooner or later.
Especially since Matt was back there alone with her now. Sam was confident that Elizabeth wouldn’t return any affection Juan Pablo felt for her, but that might not stop the Navajo from being angry if she got mixed up with Matt.
Before leaving the canyon, Sam had told his blood brother to behave himself.
Now he hoped Matt was doing that in more ways than one.
The knowledge that Sam had gone off on an adventure without him gnawed at Matt’s guts. Sure, he knew he was too weak to stay in the saddle right now, and ten minutes on horseback would probably start blood running from those bullet holes again, but still, it was annoying.
Matt didn’t know what to hope for: that Sam would find those bushwhackers without any trouble and settle their hash for them, or that he’d have to come back here and get Matt to help out like he should have in the first place.
While he was pondering that, he supposed he might as well distract himself in other ways.
Luckily, he had a mighty nice distraction in the person of Miss Elizabeth Fleming.
She spent hours in the hogan, talking to him about growing up as the pampered daughter of a wealthy family that controlled a highly successful shipping line.
“I suppose it was having everything handed to me like that that made me want to do something for people who weren’t so fortunate,” she told him.
“Don’t feel too sorry for the Navajo,” Matt said. “They had it pretty bad when the army rounded them up and forced them all to live down at Bosque Redondo and other agencies like that, but once they were allowed to come back up here to their traditional homeland, they were a lot better off.”
“But they live in ... well, in dirt huts,” Elizabeth said, lowering her voice so Juan Pablo’s wife wouldn’t hear her. “And they raise sheep.”
“Well, I might agree with you about the sheep,” Matt said with the cattleman’s natural disdain for those woolly, bleating creatures. “But as for the rest of it, this is the way the Navajo have always lived. It’s all they know.”
“I suppose you’re right. I can’t help but think they would want to better themselves, though.”
Matt didn’t waste his time arguing with her. Like every professional do-gooder, Elizabeth was convinced she knew what was best for everybody and nothing would shake her from that almost religious conviction.
Anyway, he had a long-standing policy of not arguing too much with pretty, green-eyed redheads, and he didn’t see any reason to change it now.
Elizabeth couldn’t spend all of her time with him, though, and when she wasn’t there he had nothing to do except recuperate from that bullet wound.
Sitting and resting was as boring as all get-out, but Matt forced himself to do it. Any time he heard something going on outside the hogan, he wanted to get up and go see what it was, but he made himself sit quietly.
He slept for a while during the afternoon, then woke up and ate supper with Elizabeth and Juan Pablo’s wife. Juan Pablo hadn’t gotten back yet, or if he had, he hadn’t put in an appearance at the hogan.
Matt dozed off again, gradually settling down into a deep sleep as night closed in around the encampment. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep when something woke him.
His eyes opened. Even wounded, he was fully awake and alert instantly. He couldn’t see anything, but he sensed movement somewhere close by.
“Matt.”
The voice was a whisper. He propped himself up on an elbow and looked around.
Elizabeth was on her knees beside his pile of buffalo robes. The fire had burned down, but it still gave off a faint glow that he could make out behind her, silhouetting her hair and her slender form, which was now clothed in a long nightgown. Juan Pablo’s wife was asleep on the other side of the fire.
“Matt,” she said again, “I ... I know I shouldn’t be here. It’s very improper.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “It is.”
“And I know that you’re ... well ... injured and need your rest, but I ... I’ve been lonely here. I know I’m doing good work with these people and all, but still ... one gets lonely for the company of one’s own kind after a while. I thought perhaps ... if I could simply lie here with you for a while ...”
Matt took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe he was about to do this, but he said, “I don’t reckon that would be a good idea, Miss Fleming.”
“I think you can call me Elizabeth. And I wasn’t proposing anything, well, indecent, Mr. Bodine, just some companionship.”
She might believe what she was saying, and it might actually start out that way, Matt thought, but it wouldn’t stay that way and he didn’t figure that was a good idea.
For one thing, he really was injured, and he wasn’t sure he was up to any romping. For another, that stolid-faced Navajo woman was snoring on the other side of the hogan, and he didn’t know how sound a sleeper she was.
And for another, he just flat didn’t need the complication of a romance with this Vermont schoolteacher, no matter how pretty she was. He had to concentrate on getting better, so he could catch up with Sam and help him settle the hash of those bushwhackers.
“I’m sorry—” he began.
“No, that’s perfectly all right,” Elizabeth said, and now her voice was stiff and formal again. “There’s absolutely no need to apologize. Of course it would be a bad idea. I’ll go back to my own hogan now and leave you alone.”
Now you’ve gone and done it, Matt thought. He had insulted her.
As she stood up, he lifted a hand toward her and said, “Elizabeth ...”
“You should go back to sleep now,” she said firmly. “I’m sorry I disturbed your rest, Mr. Bodine.”
Before he could say anything else, she turned and left the hogan. As Matt looked through the open doorway, he saw the white shape of her nightgown for a moment, floating through the dark night like a ghost.
Then she was gone.
Matt sighed and stretched out on the blankets again. Under different circumstances, he would have been pleased to have Elizabeth pay him a nighttime visit like that, but not here and not now.
He didn’t know what things would be like between them when the sun came up in the morning. If she was so mad at him that she didn’t come to visit him anymore, he didn’t know how he was going to get through the long, empty hours while he regained his strength.
What it amounted to was that Sam didn’t need to waste any time getting back here, so they could go after those blasted bushwhackers together.
Chapter 10
By the middle of the day, Sam and Juan Pablo had reached the place where the Navajo warriors had found the blood brothers. They stopped there to eat some of the dried, jerked venison they had brought with them.
“I suppose you’ll be going back to your home now,” Sam said when they finished with the meal, such as it was.
Juan Pablo said, “No, I will come with you to the place where you and your friend fought those men. I can help you find their trail.”
“I appreciate the offer, but that’s not necessary.”
“The sooner you find them and deal with them, the sooner you can return to the canyon, get the one called Matt, and leave my people alone.”
“Well, if that’s the way you want to look at it ...” Sam shrugged. “I reckon you’re welcome to come along.”
Juan Pablo just grunted and turned away to tend to his pony.
They rode on, backtracking the trail Matt and Sam had left after their encounter with the bushwhackers several days earlier. The terrain had flattened out to the point that there weren’t many landmarks, so it didn’t really look all that familiar to Sam.
After they had gone several miles, though, he spotted a bluff that he recognized in the distance.
“That’s where they were when they st
arted shooting at us,” he told Juan Pablo as he pointed to the bluff that jutted up from the flats. Sam swept his hand back to the south. “The arroyo where they caught up to us is over that way.”
“These men outnumbered you,” Juan Pablo said. “If they wanted you dead, why did they not keep fighting until they had killed you?”
“We’d already ventilated several of them, maybe fatally. I don’t think they had the stomach to keep fighting. They decided to cut their losses and leave us alone instead. Anyway, they knew Matt was wounded, and they may have thought I was, too. Maybe they hoped we’d just crawl off somewhere and die.”
“No man worthy of the name hopes that his enemy dies. He makes certain of it.”
“Well, it’s lucky for Matt and me that they didn’t.”
Sam rode over to the arroyo. He dismounted to study the welter of hoofprints nearby where the bushwhackers had left their horses. He was looking for prints with distinctive horseshoe markings and found a few he might be able to recognize if he ever saw them again.
He saw bootprints as well, but there was nothing remarkable about them. He studied them anyway and tried to commit them to memory.
Sam also found a number of spent cartridges that had been left behind by the would-be killers. Standard .44-40 rounds used in most Winchesters and some handguns, he decided. Nothing there that would lead him to the bushwhackers.
But some scouting around turned up more hoofprints that led southeastward.
“Is there a settlement in that direction?” Sam asked.
Juan Pablo made a face and spat.
“A place the white men call Flat Rock.”
Sam had never heard of the place. When he said as much, Juan Pablo went on, “The first white man to settle there had a trading post. He sold whiskey and women. The town grew around it. Miners and men who raise cattle go there to indulge their lusts.”
“Then I’m not surprised a bunch of bushwhackers would head for there,” Sam said. “How far away is it?”
“A day’s ride. Maybe less.”
Sam glanced at the sun.
“I probably can’t get there today ... but I can sometime tomorrow. Maybe I’ll find some answers there.” He pointed toward the bluff. “I think I’ll ride over there and have a look around.”
“But the trail is here,” Juan Pablo said as he nodded at the tracks on the ground.
“Yeah, but I want to see if I can figure out what those fellas were up to.”
Sam swung up into the saddle. Juan Pablo mounted the pony and rode with him toward the bluff.
As they came closer, Sam saw that it was a fairly common upthrust of rocky ground, probably formed sometime in the dim ages past by an earthquake.
He didn’t know exactly where the bushwhackers were when they opened fire on him and Matt, so the first thing he did was ride along the base of the bluff, keeping a close eye on the ground as he weaved around the big sandstone boulders that littered the area.
After a few minutes he reined in and pointed as he spoke to Juan Pablo.
“Look there. Wagon tracks.”
Sure enough, the iron-rimmed wheels of a wagon had cut parallel ruts into the ground, until the vehicle had stopped right here where Sam had spotted the tracks among the rocks.
It appeared the wagon had been pulled by a four-horse team and accompanied by a number of riders. Sam could tell where the driver had swung the vehicle around and started back in the direction it came from.
Sam rubbed his chin as he frowned in thought.
“Who’d drive a wagon out here into the big middle of nowhere, then turn around and go back?”
“There is no understanding the madness of the white man,” Juan Pablo said. “Even a mixed-blood like you should know that.”
Sam ignored the veiled insult and continued studying the ground.
“Looks like there were about a dozen riders with the wagon. It had an escort. An army wagon, maybe?”
“Did you and your friend see a wagon when you rode by here the other day?”
“No. At least I didn’t. I’d have to ask Matt to be sure, but I think he would have said something about it if he had. You have to remember, though, we weren’t really paying any attention to this bluff until the shooting started, and once the lead was flying, we lit a shuck for that arroyo as fast as we could. The wagon could have been here, and we just didn’t notice it among these rocks. We were several hundred yards away.”
“Or maybe it was here some other time and had nothing to do with the men who tried to kill you. There has been no rain and not much wind to disturb the sign.”
Sam nodded.
“That’s true. My hunch is that this bluff ’s not that popular a place, though. I think it’s all connected. Let’s take a look and see if there’s a trail to the top of the bluff anywhere around here.”
As it turned out, there was a narrow trail that angled up the bluff about fifty yards away. It was only wide enough for one man at a time, but Sam found several marks on the rock where boot heels had scraped it recently.
He put everything he had seen together in his mind to form a theory and tried it out on Juan Pablo.
“That wagon and about a dozen outriders came here for some reason. The man or men in the wagon stayed below, along with some of the riders, and the rest of the bunch went up to the top of the bluff to keep an eye on all the country hereabouts. As flat as it is, they could probably see a long way. Then Matt and I came riding along, and for some reason the men on the bluff didn’t want to take a chance on us noticing what’s going on. So they tried to kill us.”
“That makes no sense,” Juan Pablo insisted. “What could they have been doing to make them feel that way?”
“I don’t know, but it had to be something pretty bad, probably illegal.”
“Madness,” Juan Pablo muttered.
Sam turned his horse.
“I want to take a closer look at the place where those wagon tracks stop.”
He rode back to the spot and dismounted, being careful not to disturb any marks he might find on the ground. As he walked slowly back and forth, his keen eyes searched for anything out of the ordinary.
After a few moments, he hunkered on his heels to get an even closer look at an area a short distance off to the side of the wagon tracks.
“Did you find something?” Juan Pablo asked.
“Maybe.” Sam pointed a finger. “Right here, the corner of something has gouged a little place in the dirt. There’s a line leading away from it.” His finger traced the faint mark on the ground. “There’s another corner mark, about eight feet away.” Sam moved around. “And another line in the dirt where the sharp edge of something was sitting. It goes to a third corner ... and back along there to a fourth one ...”
Sam looked up at Juan Pablo, who hadn’t dismounted.
“Somebody brought a crate of some sort out here on that wagon, unloaded it, and set it on the ground here. The crate, or what was inside it, was heavy enough to leave those marks.”
“A crate,” Juan Pablo repeated. He sounded skeptical. “What sort of crate?”
“Well, there’s no way of knowing how deep it was, but we can tell that it was about two feet wide and eight feet long.”
Juan Pablo shook his head.
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Not to you, maybe,” Sam said. “But to me that sounds an awful lot like a coffin.”
Chapter 11
“The box you white men bury your dead in?” Juan Pablo asked. He sounded slightly disgusted. The Navajo did not enclose the bodies of their dead in boxes.
“That’s right.”
“There is no grave here.” Juan Pablo pointed at the ground. “No one has dug in this dirt. We would be able to tell.”
“You’re right. Maybe it wasn’t a coffin. But it was sure shaped like one.”
“None of this makes sense,” the warrior said.
“It will, sooner or later. Once I find the men who tried to kill me
and Matt.”
“You thought that some enemy might have sent them after you. Now, according to what we have found, that is not what happened. You and your friend were shot at simply because you rode along here at the wrong time.”
“That’s the way it looks,” Sam admitted.
“Then why seek them out?” Juan Pablo wanted to know. “It had nothing to do with you. You and the one called Matt still live. Why not return to the canyon, wait until he is fit to travel, and ride on? Why search for the men who shot at you?”
“Because I don’t like it when somebody tries to kill me,” Sam said. “Besides, if they were that worried about somebody seeing them, they were up to no good. They need to be stopped.”
“Why?” Juan Pablo sounded genuinely puzzled.
“Because they might hurt somebody else.”
From the warrior’s expression, it was obvious he thought Sam was completely loco.
“Look, you can go back,” Sam went on. “I never expected you to come this far with me. I’ll handle things from here on out.”
“You are being foolish.”
“Maybe, but it’s my choice to make, isn’t it?”
Juan Pablo scowled.
“If you die, what will happen to the man in my hogan?”
“If I don’t come back, as soon as Matt has recovered he’ll come looking for me. And if they’ve put me under, he’ll avenge my death. You don’t have to worry about being stuck with Matt.”
“Do what you want,” Juan Pablo snapped. “I am going back.”
He stalked over to his pony, leaped on the animal’s back, and galloped off, soon vanishing except for a thin pillar of dust that rose in the west.
Sam was glad to see him go. He was glad for Juan
Pablo’s help, but the warrior wasn’t the best company in the world.
Several hours of daylight were left. That was enough time for Sam to cover some of the ground between here and Flat Rock.
He rode back to the arroyo and picked up the trail there. He could have followed the wagon tracks, but there was still a slim possibility that the wagon and its escort weren’t the same bunch that had jumped him and Matt.
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