Elizabeth Lowell (4 page)

“Hello, girl,” Janna said softly, rubbing the velvet muzzle. “Did you get lonesome without me?”

Zebra whuffled over her fingers, nudged her hands, and kept a wary eye on Ty all the while. When he moved, her head came up and her nostrils flared.

“Be still,” Janna said. “She’s not used to people.”

“What does she think you are?”

“A bad-smelling horse.”

He laughed softly. The sound made Zebra’s ears twitch. He began talking in a gentle, low voice.

“You’ve got a better nose than my daddy’s best hound ever did,” he said. Without looking aside he asked Janna, “How long have you owned her?”

“I don’t.”

“What?”

“I don’t own her. She likes me, that’s all. Some horses enjoy people, if you approach them the right way.”

“And some horses damn near get people killed,” he said. “I was about ten seconds away from dropping my loop on Lucifer’s neck when Cascabel jumped me.”

Her heart hesitated, then beat faster. Despite Lucifer’s refusal to approach her, she thought of him somehow as her own horse. “How did you get so close to him?”

“I’m a fair tracker when I’m not half-dead,” Ty said dryly.

“The shamans say that no mortal man will ever capture Lucifer. He’s a spirit horse.”

Ty shook his head. “That old boy is pure flesh and blood, and he sires the best colts I’ve seen west of the Mississippi. Lucifer’s my ticket to the future that the Civil War took away from the MacKenzie family. With him I’m going to found the kind of herd that my daddy always wanted. He would have had it, too, except for the war. The four MacKenzie brothers rode off to battle on his best horses. They saved our lives more than once.”

Janna saw Ty’s mouth harden. He shrugged as if to throw off unhappy memories. Into the silence came the rumble of distant thunder and the scrape of branches stirring beneath a wind that smelled of moisture.

“Hope it rains soon,” he said, looking up at the massed thunderheads. “Otherwise that big dog’s tracks are going to lead Cascabel right to us.”

“It will rain.”

The confidence in Janna’s voice made Ty turn and look at her intently.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I just...know,” she said slowly. “I’ve lived with the land so long that I know a lot of its secrets.”

“Such as?”

“Such as—when the air over the Fire range gets an odd sort of crystal shine to it and then clouds form, it always rains about two hours before sundown. It rains hard and cold and sudden, like an ocean turned upside down and pouring back to earth. After an hour or two some of the finger canyons run twenty feet deep with water.” She pushed away the mare’s muzzle and looked at him. “Are you still dizzy?”

He wasn’t surprised that his occasional dizziness had been noticed. He was discovering that not much escaped those clear gray eyes.

“Some,” he admitted. “It comes and goes.”

“Do you think you can get over that rockfall if I help?”

“Count on it, with or without your help.”

She looked at the determined lines of his face and the latent power in his big body and hoped he was right. The rocky hollow had been useful, but it would become a lethal trap the instant Cascabel scrambled up and found his prey. The sooner they left, the better.

There was only one haven she could think of. It lay on the southeast side of Black Plateau, at the edge of Cascabel’s ill-defined territory. It was a spirit place avoided by Indians, whose legends told of a time when the mountain had roared in anguish and split open and thick red blood had gushed forth, spirit blood that made everything burn, even stone itself. When the blood finally cooled it had become the dark, rough rock that gave Black Plateau its name.

There, at the foot of ancient lava flows and sandstone cliffs, she had found a keyhole canyon snaking back into the solid body of the plateau. Once past the narrow entrance, the canyon widened out into a park-like area that was thick with grass and sparkling with sweet water. It was there she wintered, secure in the knowledge that no warriors or outlaws would see her tracks in the snow.

It had been her secret place, as close to a home as she had ever known. She had shared it with no one. The thought of sharing it with Ty made her feel odd. Yet there really was no other choice.

“Soon as I get you patched up,” she said, turning to her bag of herbs, “we’ll go to a keyhole canyon I know about. Nobody else has any idea that it exists, except maybe Mad Jack, and he hardly counts.”

“Mad Jack? I thought he was a legend.”

“He’s old enough to be one.”

“You’ve actually seen him?”

She dug out the herbal paste she had made during the long hours of daylight while Ty had slept. “Yes, I’ve seen him,” she said, and began dabbing the paste on the worst of Ty’s cuts.

“I’ve heard he has a gold mine hidden somewhere on Black Plateau.”

Her hands paused, then resumed slathering on medication. “Whatever Mad Jack has or doesn’t have is his business.”

Ty’s black eyebrows lifted at Janna’s curt words. “Ouch! Watch it, boy, that’s not stone you’re poking.”

“Sorry,” she said in a tight voice.

For several moments he watched the gray eyes that refused to meet his.

“Hey,” he said finally, catching Janna’s chin in his big hand, forcing her to meet his eyes. “I’m not going to hurt that old man no matter how much gold he might have found. I’m not a thief or a raider. I’m not going to build my future on bloodstained gold.”

She searched the green eyes that were so close to hers and saw no evasion. She remembered Ty telling her to leave him and save herself, and she remembered how he had put his own body between her and whatever danger might have been coming into the hollow. Abruptly she felt ashamed of her suspicions.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve had men follow me out of town when I buy supplies with a bit of gold I’ve found here and there. It’s usually easy enough to lose the men, but it hasn’t given me a very kind opinion of human nature.”

The surge of anger Ty felt at the thought of a child having to lose white men in the rocks as though they were Indian renegades surprised him. So did the protectiveness he felt toward this particular child. Uneasily it occurred to him that beneath the shapeless old hat and the random smears of dirt, the youth’s face was...extraordinary.

My God, I
’
ve seen women a hell of a lot less beautiful than this boy. Maybe the men weren
’
t following gold, after all.

Ty snatched his hand back as though he had been burned. The sudden movement made Zebra shy away violently.

“That damn horse is as spooky as a mustang,” he said, rubbing his hand against his chest as though to remove the tactile memory of soft skin and delicate bone structure.

Janna blinked, wondering what had made him so irritable. She wished that he would put his hand beneath her chin again. His palm was warm and firm, his fingers were long and gentle, and it had been years since she had felt a comforting touch from another human being.

“Zebra
is
a mustang,” Janna said huskily. “When she’s not with me, she runs free.”

His head turned toward the mare with renewed interest. He studied her carefully, especially her hooves. They had been trimmed by stony ground rather than by a pair of steel nippers. She was sleek without being fat, strong without being big. Nowhere did she show the marks of man—no brand, no ear notch, no shoes, no rubbed places on her hide where bridle or saddle had rested.

“Do you ride her?” he asked.

“Sometimes, when it’s safe.”

“When is that?”

“When Cascabel isn’t around,” Janna said simply. “He’s been around a lot the past six months, which is why Zebra is so lonesome. I guess the Army is making life hard for Cascabel.”

“Or Black Hawk is tired of being blamed for Cascabel’s raids and is clamping down,” Ty said. “Black Hawk is a war chief and a leader. Cascabel is a butcher and a raider. Hell, I’m surprised that renegade hasn’t tracked you down and cooked you over a slow fire just for the sport of it.”

She shrugged off the implicit question. She had no intention of telling Ty that to most Utes she was Shadow of Fire,
una bruja,
a witch who walked with spirits. He thought of her as a boy, which was both irritating and quite useful—especially as long as he was sitting around stark naked while she rubbed medicine into his cuts.

The renewed realization of Ty’s nudity brought heightened color to her cheeks. It took every bit of her willpower to keep her hands from trembling as she smoothed the herb paste over his skin.

He noticed the fine tremor in the slender fingers and swore under his breath.

“Sorry, boy. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said gruffly. “Once we get free of Cascabel, I’ll take you to the Army post at Sweetwater. You’ll be safe there.”

She shook her head and said nothing, concentrating on keeping her hands from revealing the uncertain state of her emotions.

“Don’t be silly,” Ty said. “You might have survived out here in the past, but it’s different now. The Army has been fighting Black Hawk for nearly three years, since the end of the Civil War. They’ve had a bellyful of fighting Utes. There will be a big campaign before winter. The Army figures to have it all wrapped up by Thanksgiving and to have Cascabel’s ears in the bargain. Between Black Hawk and the soldiers fighting each other, and Cascabel killing everything that moves, it won’t be safe for man nor beast here, much less a boy who’s as skinny as a willow switch.”

“If it’s so dangerous, why are you here?”

“Lucifer,” Ty said simply. “I figured this was my best chance. Once the Utes are quiet, every man with an eye for prime horseflesh will be trying for that stallion. Even if no one gets him, sure as hell some money-hungry mustanger will put a bullet through his black head just to get at his colts.” Ty looked at Zebra again. “He sired her, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“It shows in her long legs and well-shaped head. The barb blood in Lucifer comes through no matter what he breeds with. Does she run with his bunch?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get close to her?”

Janna wiped her fingers on her pants as she looked critically at Ty’s cuts. “Her mother was a runaway ranch horse. She liked salt and grain and human company. Zebra grew up with me petting her. There are others like her in Lucifer’s bunch. They accept me. After a time, so do some of the other mustangs. I take care of their cuts and scrapes and scratch the places they can’t reach, and they tell me when there are men around. That’s how I’ve kept away from Cascabel. Lucifer can smell him a mile off.”

“Does Lucifer let you pet him?” Ty asked intently.

“He’s as wild as a storm wind,” Janna said, not answering the question.

“So is that one,” Ty said, looking at Zebra, “but she followed your trail like a tame old hound dog. Will the next horse through that gap be Lucifer?”

“No. I’ve survived by being inconspicuous. Anyone standing next to Lucifer would be as conspicuous as lightning.”

Thunder belled suddenly, but Ty didn’t look away from Janna’s face.

“Have you ever tried to get close to Lucifer?”

“No.”

“Why not? Is he a killer?”

She shrugged. “Wouldn’t you try to kill a man who wanted to put you in a cage?”

“Horses have been bred by men for thousands and thousands of years. It’s a partnership, like men and dogs.”

“Not to a lot of men.”

“Those same men are cruel to other men. I’m not. I don’t fight for the pleasure of it, but to get the job done.”

Janna looked at her knife, which Ty kept within easy reach at all times. She remembered how he had held the knife—as a weapon, not as a tool. There was no doubt in her mind that he could “get the job done” better than any man she had ever seen, except Cascabel.

The realization should have frightened her, for despite Ty’s injuries he was far stronger than she was. Yet she was no more frightened of him than she was of Lucifer. In the past her instincts had proved to be very good at picking up the presence of senseless viciousness or cruelty. She sensed none in either Ty or the big black stallion so many men longed to own.

But what if I
’
m wrong this time? What if Ty is just another man greedy for whatever he can get from those weaker than he is?

There was no answer to her silent question but the obvious one—if she took him to her private refuge and discovered there that she had been wrong about his essential decency, she would have made the worst mistake of her life.

And probably the last.

The sudden downpour of cold rain was like a blow. In spite of that, the rain was welcome, for it would wash away Ty and Janna’s trail.

“Ready?” she asked.

He nodded grimly. He was still angry at having lost the battle of the shrinking blanket. Over his objections Janna had cut the blanket up into a breechcloth, bandages for his bruised ribs and a makeshift poncho. He hadn’t objected to the breechcloth, had given in on the bandages, but had been damned if he would wear a blanket while a child ran around with no more protection against the thunderstorm than a ragged shirt and pants.

Yet here he was, wearing the blanket, and there the kid was, wearing only a shirt and pants.

“Stubborn as a Missouri mule,” Ty snarled, but his words were drowned out by thunder.

Zebra took the lightning, thunder, and pelting rain with the indifference of a horse born and raised out in the open. She watched with interest as Ty and Janna negotiated the rocky rubble at the head of the hollow. While the mustang wasn’t completely relaxed around Ty, she no longer shied at his every movement.

It was a good thing. He made some very sudden movements as he clawed over the rockfall, hobbled by his injuries and the increasing slickness of the rocks. Though he said nothing, he was grateful that his ribs were bound, despite the fact that it made breathing deeply impossible.

He was also grateful for the small, surprisingly strong hands that helped to lever him over the tricky places—although he had nearly yelped with surprise the first time he had received a firm boost from behind.