by Beverly Bird
Jack let her go because Scorpion was drifting. His horse began wandering off to the left of the herd, and Jack watched him, scowling. He wondered again where the money was. He’d kept a close eye on the assassin all morning, and he hadn’t seen a sign of it. No way would Scorpion have left it behind, not even leaving on such short notice as they had, though Jack had been hoping that that would trip him up a bit, make him sloppy.
He sighed roughly. The money didn’t particularly matter. No one had asked him to recover it. But he didn’t like uncertainty. He wanted to know.
His gaze went to Carly again, and then Scorpion moved.
Whatever had drawn the man’s attention over there to the left must have proved innocuous. What was it? The wagon was far behind them and off to the right….
The wagon.
In that moment, Jack knew where the money was. From the left side of the herd, Scorpion could keep an eye on it from an unobtrusive vantage point.
A guy named Mazie Montoro was driving the cook wagon. He wasn’t one of Carly’s regular men. She’d said he was a parttimer, a drifter. And now he was a drifter whose days were dangerously numbered.
Jack put his heels to his mount and cantered to catch up with Carly again. “Question,” he said when he reached her.
Her eyes slid sideways. “Now there’s a surprise.”
“Will Mazie sleep in the wagon?”
She looked at him fully and scowled. He knew she was trying to glean something from his off-the-wall question.
“Why on earth would he want to do that?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“There’s not enough room in there.”
“Oh. Good.” So if Scorpion took his money at night, Jack thought, then the cowboy was reasonably safe.
“Is it?” Carly asked sharply. “Why?”
He didn’t answer. “Do me a favor, cowgirl.”
“You mean another one?”
He grinned fleetingly. “Yeah. Can you keep Mazie as far away from the wagon as possible?”
“So how’s he supposed to drive it?” she asked incredulously.
“I mean later, when we camp.”
Her jaw hardened. “You know, accomplices tend to be much more effective when they know what they’re doing and why.”
“Yeah,” he said softly, “and sometimes they die.”
She flinched. That ought to shut her up, he thought.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said flatly. Then she swerved, suddenly cutting off the bell cow. “Whoa!”
The herd rumbled on for a few hundred yards before most of them stopped. Then some steers began splitting off, wandering. Jack looked ahead, wondering what she had seen.
The ground sloped downward. There was no real grass to speak of, at least not grass as he had ever known it. Spare shoots of green tufted out of earth that was baked orange by the sun. Spiderweb fissures crisscrossed the land. But down below the rim of the rise, Jack thought he saw the tips of trees.
Carly rode back among the other guests. “We’re at a draw,” she called out, explaining. “Actually, it’s the one the ranch is named for. It’s sort of a side gap off a river or stream, where the water drains. Anyway, here’s your chance to play cowpoke. I’m going to need all your help. The herd’s going to stray badly when we hit the water and the grass at the bottom of this hill, and I’ll need you all to flank them. Come on, move up here. You’ve got to ride outside the herd.”
They all came eagerly, even Scorpion.
“Your horses know what to do, and they’ll do it,” Carly went on. “They’re all trained cutting ponies. That means that if they see a steer splitting off, they’re going to move after it and cut it back. They’ll jump around and swerve a lot to do it, so just grab hold of your saddle horn and stay on. The ground gets real boggy the closer we get to the bottom of the draw, so it’s going to be a rough ride.”
“What about the wagon?” Scorpion called out.
Carly’s eyes moved to the man sharply. Jack felt his heart sink hard and fast.
“What about it?” she asked edgily.
“If the ground’s boggy, can it get through?”
She hesitated too obviously. “We’ll let Mazie worry about that. How about if you just concentrate on staying on your horse?”
Scorpion watched her. His eyes seemed to try to probe into her mind, weighing her reaction to a question that should have been innocuous. Jack cursed himself for mentioning the wagon in the first place. He cursed Scorpion for coming right out and asking about it. None of his recriminations mattered. The bottom line was that Carly Castagne might be remarkably good at a lot of things, but hiding her thoughts wasn’t one of them.
She finally started the cattle moving again, and they lowed in anticipation as the ground began sloping downward. They smelled the grass and the water. More tufts of wiry green began to punch up from the earth as they descended the rise. Then, true to her warning, the steers and the cows began to stray. Jack felt his own mount lurch beneath him, spinning right. Its trot was bone-jarring as the ground got softer and its hooves began to suck up mud with each step. He stayed on and the horse leaped to the left, almost unseating him, going after another wayward cow.
He managed to look around at the others. Myra was doing remarkably well, grinning from ear to ear. Leigh looked terrified. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her saddle horn. Winston squeezed his legs around his mount a little too hard in his panic, and the horse lunged forward a little, nearly unseating him for the second time in as many days. Reggie’s spine was ramrod straight, and his eyes were narrowed in concentration. Even Scorpion’s attention was pretty much focused on staying on his horse.
Jack looked for Carly. She was behind the herd now with Plank and Gofer and they were hooting and shouting, waving their hats at the cattle, driving them on. As he watched, she tossed her hat to Holly, who had lost hers. The girl began waving it, laughing, smiling widely enough to blind the sun. Something happened again in the area of Jack’s heart.
The animals plunged into the narrow stream, lowing and bellowing. Even as the last of them passed through and started up the ground on the other side, Mazie began the crossing in the wagon.
It lurched and creaked. Mud clung to its wheels. The team strained, and metal whined and clanked. The cowboy was experienced and determined. He cracked a whip over the horses’ backs and they labored on; dragging their load through the water. But the man knew something was wrong, and so did Carly and the other cowboys.
They rode back to the wagon, scowling. “I didn’t pack it that heavy,” Carly muttered.
“Well, the brutes are old,” Plank volunteered.
“You best not be saying I am,” the grizzled, toothless Mazie warned.
Carly said nothing, only frowned hard at the wheels.
Fifteen million dollars, Jack thought. It was a hell of a lot of paper, any way you looked at it. Come on, cowgirl, let it go.
With a last, great popping sound, the wagon lunged up the bank again. Mazie bounced and his hat went flying. He brought the team to a stop when they reached relatively hard ground, then he climbed down heavily and plodded back to get the hat.
“All right,” Carly shouted. “Let’s keep moving.”
She rode into the herd and mud spattered everywhere as the cattle churned forward again. Scorpion was left behind to bring up the rear, still hovering relatively close to the wagon.
Jack’s breath came back to him harshly and suddenly. He realized that he had been holding it.
He realized, too, that he was going to have a lot of explaining to do sooner or later. Unless he badly missed his guess, Carly Castagne was not going to let that little episode go by without comment.
Within the hour, the caravan stopped above a convoluted twist of land where three chasms came together. Though none of the ruts was especially deep, the knot they formed made for a treacherous series of ridges and gullies.
Carly sat astride
, staring down at the spot, her teeth worrying her lower lip. Jack went to join her.
“What’s the matter?”
She glanced at him. “It’s gotten worse since the last time I came this way.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Is that another spy question?”
Jack stiffened and looked around. The others were all milling about, close enough to overhear them.
“Careful, cowgirl, or you’re going to get somebody hurt,” he said in an undertone.
Her color faded fast. “Oh. Sorry.”
“No harm done.” This time.
She continued to look shaken. “I don’t think I can do this. I can’t…I’m not cut out for all this subterfuge, especially when I don’t know what it is that I’m supposed to be hiding,” she whispered.
No, he thought, she wouldn’t be. She was a woman who said what was on her mind when it was on it. “Can’t you just forget about it?” he asked. “Put it out of your mind?”
She looked at him incredulously.
“You more or less have to, Carly. You’ve got to stop reacting.”
“To what?”
“To anything that seems suspicious to you. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but it’s not your concern. Put it out of your mind.” Scorpion was watching them closely. Jack changed the subject. “So what are you going to do about that glitch?” He nodded down at the forked gullies again.
Carly hesitated. If he was changing the subject, then there was probably a good reason for it and she fought the urge to look around as he had done. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was better not to think too much. Thinking only made her crazy because there was really nothing she could do but go blindly along with him anyway.
“We’re going to have to get through it right here,” she said finally. “I don’t think it’s going to get much better to the north or south. I could spend half a day running us back and forth, looking for a safer way to get through, but I’d probably only end up losing time.”
“You’re a day ahead of schedule,” he pointed out helpfully.
She shot him a withering look. “Don’t remind me.”
“You should thank me.”
“I could choke you.”
“Still mad?”
“And confused. And about scared out of my pants.”
“Now there’s an image with possibilities.”
She didn’t smile.
Jack sobered. His heart moved in a way he was entirely unfamiliar with. “I really am sorry,” he heard himself say yet again.
“Are you?” She thought about it. It was all she would get from him, she knew. She swung down off her horse.
“Now what?” he asked.
“I guess this is as good a place as any to stop for dinner. I’m starving.”
She wasn’t so scared that it interfered with her appetite, Jack noted dryly.
He dismounted as well and his legs nearly gave out. One minute they were where they were supposed to be, beneath him, and in the next, air filled them—hollow, achy air, and it seemed that he had left them somewhere behind him. He looked to see Carly smirking at him.
“Problem, cowboy?”
“Maybe I’m too old for this.”
“And maybe you’re riding wrong.” She hesitated, picking her words carefully, looking around at the others in spite of herself. She was learning. “Too bad we couldn’t have gotten in a few more hours of lessons,” she added carefully.
“Yeah. Too bad.”
“If we had, you might have learned that you should be resting your weight more on the insides of your thighs. You should be keeping your seat with your knees. Then your cute little tush wouldn’t hurt.”
He grinned. “You think it’s cute?”
Carly almost stumbled. She couldn’t believe him. Someone was trying to kill him—at least she thought that that was what was going on—and here he was worried about his backside and what she thought of it.
Then she realized that something must be decidedly wrong with her, too, because her ride had been infiltrated by something beyond her imagination and she gave in to an uncontrollable urge to laugh.
“I do like you, Jack,” she managed finally. He was incorrigible, irreverent…strong. Or at least he had nerves of steel.
“Good. So answer my question.”
“It’ll do.”
“Feel free to inspect the merchandise.”
This time she did stumble. They had led their horses back to the wagon—what is it with the wagon? Don’t think about it. Don’t think—and she tied her mare without looking at him. “No need to,” she answered. “I’m not buying.”
“Well, it’s not actually for sale. But I’d consider a short-term lease.”
Her eyes finally shot back to his. They were wide, so green, and awareness flared in them again, then she just looked scared.
“Thanks all the same,” she said quietly, “but I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. I could get in too deeply with you after all, Jack. And you were right. I don’t want that. I don’t want to take any more chances, especially not with a man who won’t tell me exactly why he’s running around toting a gun.”
Jack felt something kick inside him. It wasn’t entirely panic, even though that kind of words, coming from any woman, had always terrified him before. There was so much inherent responsibility in them. They required a great deal in return. He had nothing, nothing at all, to give back to anyone, and he had accepted that a long time ago.
But her words kept ringing in his head. I could get in too deeply. I don’t want to take any more chances.
Jack looked deliberately out at the tangled, barren land. It was much like his heart, he thought. Yet somehow, incredibly, a few things did manage to grow out there.
He looked at Scorpion again.
“You know what, cowgirl?” he murmured. “I think sometimes chances happen whether we’re real willing to take them or not.”
They got through the tangle of culverts with only one minor mishap. Leigh’s horse balked and she went neatly over its head. In and of itself, it wasn’t much of a problem, but for a good hour afterward the blonde refused to get back on her horse. Carly was disgusted and Jack was amused. Carly threatened her with bodily harm and Gofer oozed sympathy, and together they finally convinced her to continue with the ride.
They set off again, the wagon pitching wildly on its way through the snarl. They rode until twilight began bruising the sky, then they rode a little farther in darkness. Finally, Carly reined in, studying the landscape. Jack stopped beside her, thinking it looked thoroughly inhospitable.
“I guess we should call it a day,” she murmured.
“Here? You want to camp here?”
She looked over at him. “What’s wrong with here? It’s a good spot.”
“If you’re a cow.”
Between and beneath the tough shoots of grass, the ground still looked cracked and hard and parched. Jack tried again. “I don’t suppose that if we go any farther, we’ll find something more conducive to cushioning a sleeping bag?”
“Wimp.”
“Well, I like my creature comforts.”
“Then you should have gone to Acapulco, hot or not.” Then she remembered that this wasn’t a vacation for him after all. Her throat tightened and she breathed carefully past the lump.
“Actually,” she went on, “this is the land I told you about earlier. Rawley Cummings’s. I lease it. I’d have liked to have gotten a little closer to his house, but thanks to Leigh, this will have to do.”
“Too bad,” Jack agreed, and it was heartfelt. A house would have had a bathroom, a shower, padded chairs.
“I’ve got to ride over there and let him know we’re here,” she went on.
Jack stiffened. “Where?”
“What do you mean, where? To his house.”
Night was falling hard, Jack thought, and with it, Scorpion would have a hundred opportunities to leave. He had a strong need to keep Carly in sight so that he was su
re the assassin would be leaving without her. He didn’t want to be worrying about her while he went after the bastard.
Carly saw the reaction on his face. “All right,” she said wearily, “what is it now?”
Jack continued to scowl. “If you went, how long would you be gone?”
Her spine snapped straight. “I am going, and Rawley’s house is about six miles from here. My mare’s tired, but I should be able to make it in an hour. So say three before I get back.”
“Three? You’re going to spend an hour over there? What for?”
“I told you. Rawley’s a friend.”
What kind of friend?
The question leaped into his mind, stunning him. It had never consciously occurred to him that she could be involved with someone else, that there could be a current man in her life, a man besides the one Scorpion had once been. She had said she was a woman alone, and he had taken that at face value. Now he realized that it was a stretch to assume that there hadn’t been anyone else for her in eleven long years.
A strange little beast began to crawl around in his gut, similar to the one that had nailed him when she’d flashed that smile at Scorpion the other day. He felt, irrationally, that she was his, as much as, if not more than, she was Scorpion’s. He had been the one carrying her picture around these past many years.
And then there was the matter of last night.
He wanted to grab her and demand to know what the hell she thought she had been doing with him if there was someone else in the picture. “I’m going with you,” he said instead.
Carly’s jaw dropped. “You’re not invited.”
“I am now.”
“No,” she said tightly, “you’re not.” Then she took a deep, steadying breath. “What is your problem, Jack? What do you think I’m going to do if you let me out of your sight for a few hours? I want to get these cattle into Fort Dodge without any further complications. I’m not going to do anything that’s going to cost me time. So go ahead and play cops and robbers if that’s what turns you on, but I’ve got a living to make here and I owe Rawley the professional courtesy of letting him know that I’m making use of my lease tonight!”