High and Wild (24 page)

She laughed and lifted her legs until they hung over his shoulders. He plunged into her. She groaned as though she'd been socked in the belly.

Leaning forward, his body board-straight, propped on his outstretched arms and his toes, he bucked against her, fucking her hard. She groaned and sighed. Her heels bounced against his shoulder blades. She panted and cursed and tugged at his hair and raked her fingernails across the back of his neck until he pulled out and was about to spend himself on her belly.

Before he could, she said, “Wait!” and turned around and faced him on all fours, her head in front of his groin. She took the head of his cock in her mouth and sucked and pumped him dry, until his spend was oozing out of her nose and she was choking so hard he thought she'd drown on his jism.

“Gawd!” she cried when she was finally able to speak, kneeling before him.

Haskell chuckled. “God ain't nowhere around this canyon tonight!” He chuckled again and scooped her up in his arms and tossed her over his shoulder like a fifty-pound sack of sugar. “Nope, not by a long shot,” he said with a grunt, pushing up off his knees.

“Bear!” Teddy screamed. “What're you doing?”

“We're goin' for a swim!”

“Oh, God,
nooooo
!”

But she liked it a whole lot better when they were lying in the shallow water and he was cleaning her pussy with handfuls of the frigid liquid, fresh from some high-mountain spring. Teddy shook and shuddered and shivered, but she also groaned in pleasure with every scoop of the water he brought forth between her fine, long legs.

He slid his fingers around the rim of her snatch, tickling her until she flailed her legs, laughing, to make him stop.

When he was done with her, she cleaned him with handfuls of the cold water, both of them shivering together and laughing like children for whom the pleasure of sex was brand-new.

When they could no longer bear the nearly heart-stopping cold, they returned to their camp a few yards up from the stream. Haskell built up the fire and found himself fully aroused again, despite the bone-deep chill.

They made love this time instead of fucking.

And then they fell asleep in each other's arms. In the morning, they woke to a thundering boom.

Like that made by a large-caliber rifle.

26

T
he blast was followed
by a distant yell and a cacophony of hoarse screams that Haskell recognized as the bellowing of horrified mules.

He'd risen onto his elbows and was looking around, pricking his ears and blinking sleep from his eyes. Teddy had pushed herself up to a sitting position.

There was another yell. It was a man's horrified scream. Teddy gasped. The bellowing of the mules and a low rumbling, like peals of distant thunder, continued. And that's what Haskell would have thought the noise was—an approaching storm—if not for the screams and the tooth-gnashing bellows, followed by a loud, crackling roar.

Bear cast his gaze up the ridge on the other side of the stream and then up the forest-carpeted rise beyond the trail, toward where he could see the very top of a bald mountain painted charcoal-gray by the first pearl light of the early dawn. The sky around and above the ridge was one shade lighter than purple, with a single star resting just above the ridge and to the right, twinkling dimly.

There was another cannonlike blast. It echoed around the mountains and the forest surrounding the canyon, and Haskell said, “That tears it!” and he swept the blanket off of him and Teddy and heaved to his feet.

“It's him, isn't it?” Teddy said, bounding to her feet and, like Haskell, scrambling around to retrieve her clothes, scattered when they'd fairly ripped them off each other the night before.

“Don't know if it is or it ain't, but it sure sounds like a big gun!” Haskell said, hopping around on one bare foot, trying to shove his right leg into the bottoms of his longhandles.

“Bear!” Teddy was staring at him, her jeans clutched to her naked breasts.

“What?”

She turned to stare up the canyon wall in the direction from which the noise had come—noise that had suddenly, ominously, gone silent. “The North Star is on the backside of that highest peak.”

Haskell was breathless, dressing. “So it is.”

“My brother and our hired man are making a run down from there this morning.” She said it quietly, her voice as ominous as the silence now raining down on them.

Haskell paused and glanced in the same direction she was. Then he continued gathering his duds and pulling them on. Knowing there was nothing that he could say to reassure her, he merely walked over to her, wearing only his longhandles, socks, and gray trousers, and pressed his lips to her forehead.

He wrapped his hands around her bare upper arms. “Get dressed. We'll ride up and check it out.”

When he had finished dressing, he quickly kicked dirt onto the fire he'd kept going all night so that he and Teddy, sleeping naked, didn't freeze to death. Then they both wasted no time saddling their horses, mounting up, and galloping down the canyon the way they'd come.

It took them more than an hour to get back up the ridge via the gorge, both having to lead their mounts on the steep, switchbacking slope. When they finally gained the crest, Teddy started to swing up into her saddle, but Haskell grabbed her, convinced her they had to wait at least a couple of minutes to let the horses blow.

A half hour later, they were following a game trail up the side of a mountain through gold-leafed aspens and spruce trees. For a long time, they'd heard nothing from the direction of the apparent wreck, but now, as they rode farther to the northwest, Haskell could hear men's voices.

They gained the crest of the ridge and stared down the other side. A wagon trail came down from the northwest to disappear over the shoulder of the mountain that Haskell and Teddy were on, far to their right. A large wagon and its hitch of ten mules stood in the trail at the point where the trail dropped down over the slope and into the woods.

A tall man in overalls and a floppy black hat stood up near the lead mules, his back to Haskell and Teddy. He held one hand on the lead mule's halter as he stared down the slope to the east. A black-and-white collie dog pranced around nervously about ten feet to the man's right.

Teddy gasped, as though she recognized the mule skinner, and booted her
pinto
into a gallop down the slope, the
pinto
lunging hard and grunting each time its front hooves ground into the slope's thin, gravelly soil. Haskell touched spurs to the black's flanks and followed Teddy down to where she reined up near the big wagon with its tandem mountain wheels caked with clay and leaped down from the saddle.

The collie barked and ran toward her, wagging its tail. “Not now, Buck,” Teddy told the dog, and ran up to the tall man who had turned toward her, staring at her with a vague befuddlement, flushing sheepishly.

“Sonny!” Teddy cried. “Where's Burt?”

She hauled up beside the man to stare down the slope through the aspens.

“He's down there, Miss Teddy,” said the big mule skinner called Sonny, who had a blank cast to his gaze. Likely a simpleton. Many mule skinners were. It took simple men to do such hard, tedious, dangerous work, especially in country with a man gunning for them.

“Those son o'
bitches
!”

She started running down the slope, but Haskell grabbed her. If her brother was down there at the bottom of the mountain and under a wagonload of ore, she didn't need to see it.

As the collie barked and ran around Haskell, Teddy, and Sonny, the mule skinner said, “Oh, he's all right, Miss Teddy—Burt is.”

“What the hell's going on?” Haskell wanted to know, his hand still wrapped around Teddy's arm.

“We heard the shot and the mules screaming,” the girl said, sliding a lock of hair out of her eyes.

“Yeah, the killer—he got 'im another one, sure enough. One of Pink's wagons went off the Fancy Lady trail down yonder.”

Sonny pointed straight down the long slope. Through the fluttering aspens, Haskell could make out another freight trail below, about fifty yards out on the bench beyond the forest. Two wagons were stalled on the trail, sitting about fifty yards apart.

Sonny said, “Burt went down to check it out. His wagon's down the hill a ways. He was ahead of me when we heard the shot and the wagon go over that cliff yonder.”

Haskell went back to the black and slid his Winchester from its saddle scabbard. Racking a cartridge into the action, he said, “Teddy you stay here with Sonny.”

He didn't want her exposed to the killer, who might still be on the prowl in this neck of the mountains, but he knew even as he'd said it that she wouldn't listen. He'd taken two strides down the slope when he heard her boots drumming and crunching grass and leaves behind him.

Haskell cursed under his breath. Oh, well. Just because he'd fucked her didn't put him in charge of her safety. Thinking of that made him wonder vaguely about Raven . . .

They moved down through the trees and across the sloping bench carpeted in low sage, rocks, and little frost-heaved hummocks that made for hard walking. The air up here—probably eleven, twelve thousand feet above sea level—was thin. Haskell could feel the lightness in his head.

The dog ran down beside Teddy, sniffing in rabbit holes and leaping on pocket mice. Haskell looked around carefully.

There was a rocky ridge just north of the wagons, about a hundred yards from the trail. That was likely the place from which the shooter had triggered the Big Fifty.

As Haskell and Teddy drew within thirty yards of the first ore-mounded wagon, two men stepped out from behind it, the one with a long, tangled black beard raising a shotgun to his shoulder and barking, “That's far enough.”

The other one nudged the first man's shotgun down, saying, “Hold on, Early, that's my sis.” Burt Redwine had lowered the carbine he was holding and shifted his glance between his sister and Haskell and back again. “Teddy, what in the hell are you doin' up here?”

“You all right, Burt?” she said, running to the blond young man clad in a
pinto
vest and a funnel-brimmed, weather-beaten Stetson, throwing her arms around his neck. The collie playfully nipped at her heels.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” Burt said. “It was one of Pink's men that—”

Just then, raspy breaths rose, along with the scuffs of boots, and a stocky, ugly, middle-aged gent wearing a wolf-fur vest over a wash-worn longhandle top came up the slope behind Burt and the man with the shotgun. His round, puffy face was red from his climb up out of the canyon into which the wagon had apparently tumbled.

He had a round, hard gut and slender hips from which his filthy patched canvas trousers precariously hung, and he wore a Colt revolver in an old Army-issue holster. He cursed, and as he gained the trail, he bent forward, hands on his knees, catching his breath.

“Dead,” he wheezed finally. “Dale's dead, and the whole damn load of ore is gone for—”

His little pale blue eyes drifted to Haskell and stopped. He looked at the Yellowboy rifle that Haskell was now resting on his right shoulder, and then the stocky gent straightened and pointed an accusing finger at the end of his flabby arm.

“Hey, you're the son of a bitch that was over at Judith O'Brien's the other night!”

“Now, hold on, Pink!” Teddy intoned, stepping in front of Haskell and the man Bear assumed was Pink Cheatum.

“He had no part in it. He was down in the canyon beneath the North Star. We both heard the noise when your man was shot.”

Pink was a small but powerful fat man, and he shoved Teddy easily aside as he palmed his Colt and gritted his teeth at Haskell, who towered over him. “He's one of Judith's boys. I know it. It was all over town yesterday that him and Judith was fuckin' like a coupla minks in that big bed of hers.”

Idly, Haskell wondered how so many in Wendigo knew the size of Judith's bed.

Bear kept his rifle on his shoulder despite the fact that the burly freighter was aiming the Colt at his belly. “Mr. Cheatum, I'm a Pinkerton agent. I was sent here to—”

“Ah, bullshit!” Cheatum said, “I know who you are! It's pretty plain now that it's Judith and Geist, prob'ly with Goodthunder's help, that's been tryin' to drive the rest of us mule skinners out of business! You're just another killer.
Another killer like Kane
!
”

Haskell threw his left hand up, and just as he'd wrapped it around Cheatum's Colt, shoving it down, the gun coughed loudly. The dog gave a frightened yip as the bullet tore into the ground between Haskell's and Cheatum's boots.

Haskell ripped the gun out of the freighter's fat hand. Cheatum gave a scream and sidestepped, clutching his right wrist in his left hand and yelling, “Early, shoot this son of a bitch! Cut him down
now
!”

He'd barely shouted that last before his head exploded.