Relief washed over Lonnie, and he led Casey through the willows to where the horses stood where they’d tied them, nervously switching their tails. He helped Casey climb onto her chestnut, and reached up to give her the bridle reins. Casey was staring back in the direction from which they’d come, looking worried.
“Awful quiet back there,” she said.
Lonnie had been so relieved to have found the horses and to have gotten Casey safely onto her chestnut’s back that he hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t heard anything behind them since he’d opened up on their pursuers with the Winchester.
He was torn. He’d wanted to shed them from his trail, but the ensuing silence was ominous. He might have hit one but he certainly hadn’t hit them all.
And Dupree wouldn’t stop following him and the stolen money unless the outlaw was dead. He doubted Dupree was dead. He was coming, all right. He was likely being sneaky about it.
Lonnie swung up onto the General’s back and looked around. The stream glistened in the dark like a snakeskin. The willows formed a thick, ragged line along the stream bank, and a sudden, light breeze ruffled them. The swishing sounds would cover the footfalls of anyone approaching.
Lonnie looked across the stream and the dark, fir-covered ridges rising toward higher, darker mountains beyond. He glanced at Casey.
“We’d best ford the stream, head up into the mountains. It’s the only way we’re gonna lose ’em.”
“That’s how I figured,” she said, keeping her voice low. Lonnie could hear the worry in it.
“Best ride slow,” he said, booting the General up along the stream bank, looking for a way off the bank and into the water. “Try to keep our noise down.”
“Right.”
Lonnie followed a game path through the willows and into the water. He winced at the plops of the General’s shod hooves, at the hollow rushing sound of the water swirling around the horse’s hocks.
He was sure that even as slowly as he and Casey were riding, they could be heard from a couple of hundred yards away on so quiet a night. And they were probably backlit by the starlight reflecting off the surface of the creek.
Ducks. They were like ducks on a millpond waiting to be shot, plucked, dressed out, and tossed into a Dutch oven …
The short hairs were standing up straight on the back of Lonnie’s neck. As the General made his way, slipping now and then on the slippery rocks that lay beneath the water’s surface, he kept an eye on the dark bank behind them, on the willows dancing in the breeze.
Nothing moved in the darkness. But he was sure that Dupree was back there somewhere. There was no way the outlaw was going to let Lonnie and Casey get far with the money he considered his own. It was also clear that not only did Dupree intend to get his money back, but he intended to kill the kid … or kids … who now had it …
It seemed as though a solid month had passed before the General finally reached the creek’s opposite bank. Lonnie felt another wave of relief begin to sweep over him as the General lunged up out of the water and through the willows, Casey’s filly splashing not far behind him.
The bank they’d left was about sixty yards away. Still there was no movement in the darkness back there.
Lonnie turned his head forward as a bulky figure holding a rifle stepped out from behind a fir tree.
Fuego’s teeth showed in the darkness as the stocky outlaw said, “Got me a couple of thievin’ urchins for the killin’!”
Fuego glanced back across the creek. “Dupree, I got ’em both over here!”
CHAPTER 29
Lonnie shouted, “Ah, go flog a boll weevil, you old dung beetle!”
He jerked back sharply on the General’s reins and rammed his spurs into the stallion’s flanks.
The horse gave a shrill, angry whinny as it reared hard, raising its front, scissoring hooves, kicking the rifle out of Fuego’s hands and sending the stout outlaw tumbling.
“Come on, Casey!” Lonnie cried as he smacked his rein ends against the General’s flanks and lunged up the slope beyond the creek through the scattered, dark columns of pines and firs.
Gunfire crackled behind him. He glanced over his right shoulder to see Casey hunkered low over her saddle, whipping her chestnut with her own reins and batting her right heel against the mount’s right flank. She didn’t seem able to do much with her left foot.
Beyond her, the flashes of two guns shone in the darkness on the other side of the stream. Nearer, Lonnie could see Fuego trying to regain his feet, staggering around as though drunk, likely looking for his rifle.
Lonnie had a mind to stop the General, to dismount with his rifle, and pepper the stocky outlaw with .44-caliber rounds. But he nixed the idea. He wasn’t such a great hand at killing men yet, and if he got too cocky, he was likely to get filled so full of lead he’d rattle when he walked.
No, his best bet was to flee. To put as much distance as he could between himself and Shannon Dupree. Which he and Casey should be able to do, because he doubted that Dupree’s men had their horses.
There were still a couple of hours before dawn. Once Dupree, Fuego, and Childress had collected their mounts, they’d have a hard time tracking Lonnie and Casey until sunup. And by then the boy hoped that he and the marshal’s daughter would have put a good, safe distance between themselves and the outlaws.
He and General Sherman rode up over a hump in the steep slope, and then moved downhill from a stony outcropping. At the bottom of the hill, a relatively flat stretch of ground spread out before them in the north, toward the black wall of forested mountain beyond.
The meadow appeared purple in the darkness, mottled with lilac starlight edged in shimmering silver. Sagebrush and small, black spruces and cedars spiked up here and there.
The relatively flat stretch of ground continued for nearly a mile before it began to rise toward densely forested foothills once more. Just before the rise, another, smaller creek stretched across their path, sparkling like a pretty dress.
Lonnie stopped the General, who was breathing hard. The stallion’s coat was silvery with sweat, and his lungs sounded like a bellows, his chest expanding and contracting deeply beneath the saddle.
Lonnie swung down from the General’s back and loosened the saddle cinch to let the horse breathe easier. He slipped the bit from the stallion’s mouth, wrapped his reins around the saddle horn, and stepped aside while the General plunged his front hooves into the creek and immediately began to drink great, slurping draughts of the likely spring-fed water.
“Hey, he’ll founder!” Casey warned. She’d dismounted her chestnut and, putting only a little weight on her bum ankle, was holding her horse’s bridle tight in her fist.
“What’s that?” Lonnie said.
Casey jerked her chin at the General. “You’re gonna let that stallion founder … or get colic … or worse. I’d think a kid from a ranch would know better than to let a hot horse drink his fill like that!”
Lonnie looked at the girl’s chestnut filly, who was trying to push forward while staring hungrily at the stream, her nostrils expanding and contracting wildly, hungrily.
“You think wild horses don’t take their fill when they’re hot and they need it?”
Casey stared at him, incredulous.
“Let her go,” Lonnie urged. “Horses need water when they’re hot, and I was raised around a passel of ’em, and I’ve never known a single horse to founder on water. Grain, maybe. Never water. When they’re hot they need water even worse than we do.”
Casey stared at him. She looked at the General, then at the chestnut. She released her horse’s bridle, and the chestnut plunged into the stream beside the stallion and dipped her snout into the rippling water, lapping loudly.
Without the chestnut to hold onto, Casey was having a hard time standing up. Lonnie hurried over to her, wrapped her right arm around his neck, and led her over to lean against a large rock.
“How’s the ankle?” he asked.
“I think it’s swe
lling.” Casey glanced across the starlit meadow. “You think they’re comin’?”
Lonnie also looked across the meadow. “Oh, they’ll be comin’, all right. But I figure they’ll gather their horses first, and that’ll take a while. And they’ll have to go slow in the dark, trackin’ us. This is pretty big country up here and we could be anywhere.”
“What did you tell that fella to do?” Casey asked. “Flog a boll weevil?”
Lonnie chuckled. “Don’t ask me what it means. An old fella who worked at the ranch one fall used to say it when he was mad at one of the other hands. I think he was doin’ all he could to not take the Lord’s name in vain, or something.”
Casey laughed. “He was right creative.”
Lonnie pointed at Casey’s left foot. “You want me to take a look at that ankle?”
“Why? You a doctor or somethin’?”
“Not official, but I’ve doctored plenty of horses’ feet. The General tends to go lame in his right front hock from time to time, but I used an old Indian cure, and—”
“I’m not a horse, kid.”
“All right.”
They were quiet for a minute, then Casey said, “Sorry. I’m feelin’ a little off my feed.” She turned to gaze worriedly behind them once again.
“Yeah, me too.”
“You didn’t lose your pa.”
“I did a few years back.”
“Yeah, I heard,” she said. “Sorry about that.”
“I suppose you feel like I had somethin’ to do with your pa, on account of Dupree’s been stayin’ out at our place from time to time. I promise you, Miss Stoveville, I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.”
“Oh, hell, I know that.” Casey turned her mouth corners down, lowered her eyes sheepishly. “Like I said, I’m just feelin’ owly. I reckon you’re caught up in this as bad as I am. Why don’t you head on back to your ranch? I’ll get the money over the mountains to the marshal. No point in us both going.”
Lonnie thought about his mother. He felt a hard push to get back to her, to see if Dupree had hurt her, but he couldn’t leave Casey. Not with killers on her trail.
“Nah, you got a bum ankle,” Lonnie said. “You’ll need help gettin’ the money over mountains.”
“Kid?”
Lonnie looked at her.
She gazed at him for a few seconds, then placed a gloved fist on a hip as she said, “I’m older than you by a significant degree. And I am not currently in the market for a sweetheart. Especially a kid from the country. You have no chance with me. None. So why don’t you stop showing off and go home to your mother and let me get the money over the mountains to the marshal?”
She punctuated that with an arched brow.
CHAPTER 30
Lonnie’s cheeks and ears turned so hot that for a second he thought they’d burst into flame. Showing off?
Embarrassment mixed with rage, and he had to suck a hot breath down before saying in as deep and calm a voice as he could muster, “I do declare you got a mighty high opinion of yourself, Miss Stoveville. Rocked me back on my heels to see your true colors so sudden-like. Now, I’d be right happy to let you take that money over the mountains to the marshal, but truth be told, I don’t think you’re up to it. And since my reputation’s sort of tied up with them saddlebags you got on the chestnut’s back, I’ll be showin’ off for you for the next few days, I reckon.”
Lonnie drew another deep, calming breath and started walking toward the General but stopped and turned back to her. “Less’n you’d like to go on back to town and let me ride on alone, that is. I could make better time if I didn’t have you taggin’ along with your clubfoot.”
Casey drew her own deep breath and lifted her chin, looking down her nose at him. “Yes, well, since I’m the town marshal now and you are merely my deputy, I’ll be leading up this expedition, Deputy Gentry. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I and my clubfoot will be needing assistance in getting mounted.”
“Yeah, I figured that,” Lonnie said, and helped her into her saddle.
In a way, he was grateful for her high-hatted tone. As he’d helped her into her saddle, he hadn’t felt nearly as self-conscious. He felt as cool and calm as a big, twelve-point mule deer buck in a herd of does and fawns. Because now that he’d seen who Casey Stoveville really was, he realized he’d been a fool to have set so much store by the girl!
No, he didn’t like Casey Stoveville one damn bit and she’d better be able to keep up to him or he was going to leave her behind, eating the General’s dust!
He was thinking all that while he tightened the stallion’s saddle cinch, shoved the bit back into the General’s teeth, mounted up, and continued riding east toward the black mountains rising before him, blotting out the stars.
They were pretty high in the mountains by the time the sun rose. It was cool up here. Lonnie could see patches of frost, like tufts of gray fur some wolf had shed, lying here and there about the floor of the forest they were riding through. The frost glittered like diamonds, turning clear around the edges when buttery shafts of sunlight found it.
Lonnie and Casey were climbing ever higher toward Storm Peak Pass, which was about the only way over the range to Camp Collins. At least, it was the only route that Lonnie knew. He’d been over the pass only once, when he’d accompanied one of his mother’s hired men last year to push a small herd of two-year-old cattle over to sell to a buyer in Camp Collins, where they could put the cows on the railroad for shipment to Chicago.
The Storm Peak Pass trail was an old Indian hunting and warring trail. More recently, white fur trappers and prospectors had used it. Freighting outfits still used it shipping gold and silver from west to east over the divide. The pass route was shorter than swinging north or south around the Never Summers, over flatter terrain around the vast, outer bulwarks of the mountains, and then cutting east through narrow valleys.
Such a trip would add a good week’s worth of travel. The Storm Peak Pass route was harder but generally shorter, if you didn’t get bogged down by snow in the fall or struck by lightning in the summer.
After October first of every year, snow made the trail impassable until July of the next year.
Another, often worse hazard were outlaws. The remote, high, rugged terrain around the pass was known to hide many a wanted man. Men like Shannon Dupree and “the boys,” though Dupree had likely cut around the range’s southern end of his run from Golden, which lay over near Denver.
Outlaws were something Lonnie didn’t want to think about. He’d had his fill of outlaws. He also preferred not to think about the area being called home to some of the largest, meanest grizzly bears anywhere in northern Colorado …
No, best not to think about outlaws and grizzlies. Best just to think about putting as much ground behind him as he could.
When the sun was about at its nine o’clock spot in the sky, Lonnie reined the General up at a creek that snaked through a clearing surrounded by the low humps of pine-carpeted ridges.
He swung down from the stallion’s back and fixed the General’s rigging like before so he could freely drink from the slow-running stream. Lonnie didn’t look at Casey until after she’d done the same, letting the chestnut walk into the stream to get her fill.
Lonnie hadn’t looked at the girl because, one, he was mad at her for talking down to him. Two, he felt guilty for being mad at her. She’d just recently lost her pa, after all, and she was probably more alone in the world than Lonnie was. At least, he had his ma. He’d heard that Casey’s ma had died when Casey had been a little girl.
She couldn’t be expected to follow every word of the politeness book, he reckoned.
Now when he looked at her, he saw that she was shivering and pale. Her long, canvas coat must not be enough to keep the mountain cold out, and her ankle was likely grieving her. Lonnie also realized that Casey had tied no bedroll onto her horse, behind the saddle. She only had the money-filled saddlebags riding there. She hadn’t expected to be out all night, mu
ch less heading over Storm Peak Pass to deliver the money to the marshal in Camp Collins.
Dupree’s spying her and Lonnie outside the jailhouse had changed all that. Now they had nowhere to go but Camp Collins. There was no turning back.
Lonnie untied his bedroll—two wool blankets stitched together along one side to form a sack of sorts—and took it over to where Casey sat in the grass beside the stream, gently removing one of her riding boots.
“Here,” Lonnie said, holding out the blanket.
“What’s that for?”
“You’re cold. Should have said something.” She’d likely been shivering all night.
She was miffed at him, just as he was miffed at her. He could see it in her eyes. That rankled him, and he was disappointed that he could be affected again by how she felt about him.
She took the blanket and draped it over her shoulders. “Thanks, kid.”
Lonnie ground his jaws at “kid.”
“Don’t mention it, Miss Stoveville.”
He wheeled and walked away from her, not liking her again.
CHAPTER 31
Lonnie knew it was best not to worry too much about Casey Stoveville.
He was stuck with this uppity town girl, so he might as well get used to the idea. No use worrying what she thought about him, because he knew that already. He’d likely be stuck with her for the next two days, because that’s how long it usually took to get over the pass. It might take him and her longer, because they might be wise to at least partly avoid the main trail and sort of skirt the sides of it.
Of course, they could head for Golden, but that was a longer ride. Lonnie wanted to get the money to the US marshal as soon as possible.
Dupree would likely look for them on the main trail, which Lonnie was hoping they’d run into soon. He wasn’t sure, but he figured that he and Casey were somewhere south of it. They should be able to see it snaking over the higher ridges soon. Once on the trail for a time, they might run into a freight outfit they could buy some food from.
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