Apache-Colton Series

by Janis Reams Hudson

  The echo of her own cry had barely faded from the mesa when she heard a shout behind her. Without slowing the buckskin, she looked back. Two of Juerta’s men had just ridden out of the box canyon by the same trail she had taken moments before.

  Joanna faced forward and urged the buckskin on. She told herself the men on her trail meant nothing. That they were after her meant only that they had gotten past Pace. It did not mean Pace was dead. She wouldn’t believe that. She refused to believe that! Pace’s heartbeat was a presence inside her. She had heard his voice when he hadn’t spoken. Surely if he were dead she would feel it. She would know if his heart no longer beat, for the best of all that she was would die with him.

  A shot whizzed by and kicked up dust a few feet to her right. To turn and fire back would be a useless waste of bullets. She leaned down and hugged the buckskin’s neck.

  Pace had told her that the only way off the mesa was ten miles south. There, too, was the nearest place to cross the deep crevice that gouged the land near the base of the mesa.

  With a light signal on the reins, she turned the horse to the south. The rider on her left was gaining on her. If she continued south, he would catch her. Yet to turn north would land her at the mercy of the other rider.

  She turned west again and knew she was trapped. Behind lay the box canyon and Juerta. To her right and left, his men. Ahead less than half a mile, the mesa ended abruptly in what Pace described as a suicidal drop of more than a hundred feet almost straight down. Thirty yards beyond the base of the mesa was the deep gorge. Pace had said the sides were straight down, solid rock, with no way down or back up, and the gorge was too wide to jump.

  Joanna’s mouth turned as dry as the sunbaked ground. The rider on the left and the one on her right edged in closer. They weren’t shooting. Why weren’t they shooting? Their pistols were drawn. Killing her would be easy.

  Juerta must have given orders to take her alive. Joanna hugged the horse closer and urged him faster. If she fired at them, she knew they would shoot back. They would kill her, and Pace’s child would never be born. She had to live! She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. The edge of the mesa loomed closer with each pounding hoofbeat.

  At the last possible minute, she drew up on the reins and halted the horse before he plunged over the edge. The two riders had already slowed down. They rode closer now, only yards away on each side, grinning, laughing, filthy and foul. Menacing. If she did not give them a reason to kill her, they would drag her back to Juerta alive. Then he would kill her.

  Juerta could not afford for her to tell her tale of how his wife had died. He would lose everything, wealth, position, quite possibly even his life. He had to silence Joanna. He had to kill her. And with her, Pace’s son would die, and Pace would have stayed behind and sacrificed himself for nothing.

  Joanna had to escape these men. There was no other acceptable choice. She couldn’t let them take her back to Juerta, and she couldn’t turn her gun on them, for by the time she shot one, the other would kill her. And she had to live, for Pace, for their child.

  But how? How could she escape?

  The men flanking her looked puzzled that she merely sat there in the saddle. She ignored them and stared out across the wide valley that led to freedom. The valley that led to the hidden Apache stronghold, where she might find the only help available to come back and free Pace. Free him, or reclaim his body, she thought as ice formed in her veins.

  No! He cannot die! He cannot!

  And if she were to do anything to help him she had to act, not just sit here waiting for one of these two banditos to grab her out of the saddle and take her back to Juerta.

  “Is he dead?” she asked of them in Spanish.

  “The half-breed?” the Mexican to her right responded. “Not yet. You come back with us, maybe we let him live.”

  Joanna blanked the terrible offer from her mind. Juerta might use Pace to get her to surrender, but once he had his hands on Joanna, she and Pace would both die. It could be no other way. If she thought for a single moment that her surrender might save Pace, she would go back, and gladly. But she knew better. Her only chance, Pace’s only chance, was for her to escape and ride for help. But how?

  To give herself time to think, she sagged in the saddle as if in surrender. With slow, deliberate movements, she holstered her gun to put the men at ease.

  She could not ride south to the trail that led down off the mesa. She could not go north, or east. West, straight off the edge of the mesa, was her only choice. She swallowed and glanced down. Suddenly her heartbeat sped. Pace had been wrong, it wasn’t straight down. It was nearly so, but…if she could hold on tight enough, and if the buckskin had as much heart as any horse Pace Colton valued would have to, it just might work.

  But if she survived the slide down, she would be forced to go south to find a way across the gorge, for from where she sat, she could see that to the north, less than a mile away, the gorge angled sharply toward the side of the mesa. The side of the mesa and the east wall of the gorge became one, and the gorge effectively became a moat at the base of the cliff coming off the mesa.

  She would have to go south. But it would then be a simple matter for Juerta and his men to follow her on the mesa above, if they didn’t follow her down in the first place.

  South was no option. West. She had to get across that gorge. It didn’t look all that wi—

  Joanna quailed. Yes, it did look too wide to jump. The narrowest spot was straight out from where she sat, and it was wider than anything she’d ever jumped on horseback.

  Well, fella, she said silently to the horse, it’s time to find out what you and I are made of.

  “El jefe, he wants you, gringa,” one man said to her. “You come with us, no?”

  Joanna looked at the slightly angling descent before her, at the wide gorge waiting beyond. She looked across the valley to the next tier of mountains. She looked at the sky above, a sky the same color as Pace’s eyes, and wondered if their son would have his father’s eyes.

  “No,” she said quietly, gathering her courage as she gathered the reins in her hands. “I do not come with you.”

  With a burst of movement, she gouged her heels into the buckskin’s flanks and at the same time, gave her best imitation of the same battle cry Pace had given as she’d made her escape from the tiny canyon such a short time ago.

  Startled, the horse took a short leap forward, then tried to stop. Momentum carried his front hooves over the edge. As his rump cleared the rim, the horse sat on his haunches and slid downward. Joanna strained to hold his head up with the reins to keep him from tumbling. She used both hands, and her arms trembled with the effort. Her legs, too, trembled as she used them to cling to the saddle.

  The angle was almost straight down. To keep from tumbling over the horse’s head, she leaned back until her head nearly touched his hindquarters. There was no time to think of consequences, little time to fear. All she could do was hold on, and choke on the swirling dust, kicked up by the horse’s skid, that engulfed the animal’s hindquarters.

  From the corner of her eye she saw the rider on the right start down the steep incline. An instant later, he screamed as he flew over his mount’s head and the horse rolled over him, hooves flashing, bones snapping. The man’s scream was abruptly cut off. He and his horse hit the bottom in a free fall before Jo and the bucksin, with their controlled slide.

  It seemed to take forever before the ground beneath the buckskin’s hooves ran horizontal rather than almost vertical. It was a miracle that Joanna and the horse survived the descent.

  But now came the worst part. Thirty yards ahead lay the gorge. The word, Joanna thought, was ironically appropriate, as her own gorge rose in her throat at the thought of trying to jump the wide chasm.

  The report of a pistol made her flinch. The bullet struck two feet to her left. With a shout, she jabbed her heels into the horse as hard as she could and stretched out flat along his neck. “Come on, boy, you
can do it. You have to do it!”

  Beneath her she felt the bunching of the horse’s muscles, the power in his stride. His hoofbeats sounded like rolling thunder. The ground flew past at an alarming rate as she urged the horse on with her voice and the pressure of her knees.

  Afraid to look up, she kept her eyes on the ground until suddenly there was no ground beneath them. With a mighty lunge, the horse hurled himself through the air and over the chasm. Joanna braced herself, held her breath, and prayed. They seemed to hang there over open space for an eternity, with nothing below them but jagged rocks more than a hundred feet down.

  And then the horse, that sweet, sweet animal, landed safe and true on the other side and kept right on running.

  Joanna cried.

  The wind created by the all-out gallop dried the tears on her cheeks even as it pulled more from her eyes.

  She didn’t know how much time passed, maybe an hour, maybe more. She had long since slowed the horse, convinced that he would run until his heart burst if she asked it of him. Distance meant little to her, except as it related to the tiny speck of black lava barely visible across the valley. She didn’t know how far she’d come from the mesa, or how long she’d been riding. She only knew that there was as yet no dust on her back trail to indicate pursuers.

  Suddenly a prickling feeling crawled along her arms, as if she’d stuck them bare into an oven to test the heat. From out of nowhere a hot, swirling wind slammed into her. In the sudden roaring in her ears came a guttural string of Apache words. “Duunshúńlídádááł” Then the wind stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  Joanna cried out in fear, in hope, for the voice she’d heard had been Pace’s. Her hope was because she knew he was still alive. Her fear was in the words he uttered, for her slight knowledge of the Chiricahua language failed her. She could not translate his meaning, but something in his voice terrified her with its finality.

  The urge to turn the horse around and ride back was so strong she had to grind her teeth against it. Pace had told her to go to Dee-O-Det. Maybe there, in the ancient mountain stronghold of Pa-Gotzin-Kay, she would find help. Dee-O-Det could tell her what the strange words meant.

  Dee-O-Det could indeed tell her what the strange words meant. That same hot wind that struck Joanna also whirled through the small, hidden encampment in the mountains, whirled right straight through the old shaman’s wickiup.

  That same guttural phrase that Joanna heard rang forcefully in Dee-O-Det’s ears and startled the old man into dropping the knife with which he’d been whittling.

  “This cannot be,” he cried in outrage, in dismay at the voice on the wind. Such a thing could not come to pass! It was not time! It was not time! “Fire Seeker, you cannot mean this!”

  The strange, hot wind left abruptly. A moment later, a warm mountain breeze found its way through the wickiup. A softer wind, a friendly wind. A wind, like countless others before it and countless more to come, that spoke only to old shamans who chose to listen. And it told this old shaman that a woman came.

  He would prepare. There would be much to do.

  But the words spoken by Fire Seeker in the hot swirling wind troubled him.

  At the Triple C Ranch outside Tucson, Pace’s mother and sister did not have Joanna’s problem in translating. Like Dee-O-Det, they understood the words, yet their reaction was far more profound than that of the old shaman.

  Spence had ridden out from Tucson to remove Matt’s splint. After poking and prodding and asking questions about pain and discomfort, he finally pronounced his half brother’s leg fit. “But take it easy,” Spence warned as he followed Matt into the parlor. “Keep out of range of that mule’s hooves, or I’ll charge you double the next time.”

  Daniella Colton looked up from replacing a button on her husband’s shirt. “Why, Dr. Colton, shame on you.” There was laughter in her voice as she teased her youngest son.

  Spence rolled his eyes. “She calls me doctor and scolds me like a child, all in the same breath.”

  Daniella’s lips quirked. “That’s because you are a doctor, and you are my child. Mothers are always allowed to scold. It’s in the Mother’s Rule Book, I’m sure.”

  “Give it a rest, you two,” Matt complained. “I’ve just gotten my leg out of splints. Now that I can ride again, I’ll head out in the morning and see if I can meet up with Pace and Joanna. Assuming he even went after her,” he muttered under his breath.

  His words cast a pall over the room and brought back the tension they’d all been living with daily since learning Joanna was missing.

  “He went,” Serena told Matt.

  “We don’t know that.” Matt tested his leg by walking across the room to the table beside his father’s chair.

  “I know it,” Serena told her husband. “You saw the telegram from Fort Sill. It said that Pace rode out right after getting my wire.”

  “That was days ago,” Matt said in frustration. “Where the hell is he? Why haven’t we heard from him? And where the hell is Joanna?”

  No one volunteered answers to Matt’s rhetorical questions.

  Travis took a cigar from the humidor on the table beside his chair, and offered one to Matt.

  Matt declined, but struck a match and held it toward his father’s cigar.

  Daniella was watching as Travis leaned toward the flame, but it was the flame itself that caught her attention. The tiny flame pulsed and grew until it filled the room, but Daniella knew it happened only in her mind. She waited in dread for the vision to come. Her skin turned clammy and her breath shortened.

  Travis was the first to notice her blank stare, and it chilled him. He knew what it meant when his wife’s gaze was trapped by a flame. She was having a vision.

  Looking down to see why his father hadn’t lit his cigar yet, Matt followed Travis’s gaze to Dani. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Do I blow out the match or let it burn?”

  Blow the damn thing out! was Travis’s first thought, but he swallowed the words. Dani hated having visions, for the sights she saw were never pleasant. But they were always important. Always. Joanna was missing, and now Pace, too, seemed to have disappeared. “Let it burn,” he said grimly, forcing himself to stay seated. He knew from experience that until the vision faded, Dani would be beyond his reach.

  Matt held the match until the flame reached his fingers, and still he held it.

  Dani stared at the flame, her eyes wide and haunted, her face ashen. “Oh, God,” she cried. “Pace!”

  The flame could find no oxygen between Matt’s fingers, and it flickered out. Travis leaped from the chair and knelt at Dani’s feet. Serena, Matt, and Spence rushed to her side.

  Travis took her hands in his, alarmed at how cold they were, at how hard they trembled. “Dani?”

  Daniella gasped and blinked. “It was Pace,” she whispered, her eyes filling with horror. “God, Travis! He was…he was being dragged behind a horse!”

  “Pace?” Travis cried, shocked. “Pace caught his foot in a stirrup?”

  “No!” Dani shook her head until her steel gray hair with its streak of pure white tumbled from its pins and fell down her back. “He was…” She closed her eyes and tears spilled down her cheeks. “His hands were tied. The rope…was barely long enough to keep him from being kicked in the head by the horse.”

  Stunned silence filled the room. What Dani told them seemed inconceivable. It was a full moment before Travis spoke, his voice ragged and strained. “Where, Dani? Could you tell where he was?”

  “Was Jo…?” Matt couldn’t finish the question.

  Dani was shaking her head again. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he was. I didn’t see anyone but him. There were rocks, cactus. Maybe greasewood. I don’t know,” she wailed.

  Travis wrapped his arms around her and absorbed the shudders that threatened to tear her apart. God, he would have spared her this if he could. From the first time he’d seen what her visions cost her, he had hated them.

  “What are we
going to do?” Serena whispered. “How are we going to find him?”

  “Find him?” Spence cried. “Nobody can find him without something else to go on.”

  “We have to,” Dani said tearfully. “We have to try.”

  Travis held her tighter. “We will, love, I promise.”

  “How?” Matt asked grimly. “How the hell—”

  His words were cut off by a powerful gust of wind that suddenly whirled through the room. Stunned, they all watched as the pages on the magazine Serena had been reading fanned open. The drapes at the window—the closed window—billowed out.

  The wind was hot, and brought with it a loud roar that filled the room.

  Daniella pushed away from Travis’s arms and jumped to her feet, her chest heaving. She and Serena stared at each other in shock. Once before, many years earlier, a gust of wind had encircled them and touched their souls. It had felt just like this. It had happened the day Cochise, Daniella’s adoptive father, had died.

  “No,” Daniella whispered in horror. “Dear God, no!” She could feel her firstborn son reaching out to her, his soul to hers.

  Serena, too, felt Pace’s breath across her face, as though he were there in the room with them, standing right before her.

  Suddenly on the wings of the wind a deep voice filled the room. “ Duunshúńlídádááł.”

  Daniella and Serena both screamed. Travis cried out and caught Dani as she swayed. Serena and Matt stared at each other in shock. The strange wind stopped as quickly as it had begun, leaving a chill in its wake.

  Spence watched his parents, his half brother and half sister. He was even more shocked than they were. He had been present before during one of his mother’s visions, but this defied description. Wind in a closed room. The voice of a man who wasn’t there. That had been Pace’s voice. Spence had had no trouble recognizing it.

  But how? Good God, how? And why did Spence seem to be the only one who didn’t understand what had just happened? “What was that?” he demanded, shaken.