The Ruination of Essie Sparks (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 2) (14 page)

"Unless you was Chen Lee or one o' his ilk. Then this boy might look real purty. And worth enough for a bath and a night with one of his girls. Maybe even two nights."

"None o' them girls for me. I'll take Ollie's girls any day o' the week."

While they argued, Little Wolf threw himself up on Lalo's back and kicked the pony. But he wasn't fast enough. The men grabbed the pony's reins and jerked her to a stop.

"Oh, no you don't, boy!" Nestor shouted, dragging him from the saddle and all too easily disarming him. Little Wolf kicked and punched at the man, but soon found himself face down in the dirt with the man's knee in his back. Behind him, he heard Lalo rearing in agitation.

"Tie him up good, brother," Payton said, holding Lalo firmly. "But try not to kill him. I got plans for this Injun cub that should make us a pretty penny."

* * *

Cade saw their lead steadily shrink as they raced over miles of rocky terrain, plowed through leaf-littered forests and watched their backs for hours until afternoon had settled the sun low in the sky. The men behind them each had a horse. Náhkohe was struggling beneath the weight of two of them.

The constant pounding against his leg had sunk him into a fog of pain hours ago. Still no trace of Little Wolf, despite watching the ground for sign. They had lost him.

Regret churned through him like a fever. Regret that he'd lost the boy, that he'd taken Essie, that he'd mangled the entire escapade from start to finish. And now, the men behind them were closing in and chances were good they would take Essie down, too, when they killed him. And that would be on him, too.

The blame was his for taking her in the first place. He couldn't say what had compelled him. The sight of that long-ago bastard in the barn, the lost look she had in her eyes. Or something else. Something more primal.

Since the river, he'd fought the pain in his leg, trying to ignore it, but as the hours stretched by, his thoughts blurred and roamed out of his control, sparked by feverish swings between the urgency of their situation and the woman in his arms.

As they rushed across the terrain, he found himself distracted by her womanly softness. Once or twice his forearms had brushed the stiff corset around her breasts where it swelled to accommodate them. Imaginings filled his thoughts for minutes, sometimes hours afterward, picturing what shape they'd take if they were loosed from that corset. Imagining that his hands were cupping them.

Caressing them.

And her mouth... When his good sense failed him, he found himself picturing her mouth, wondering how she would taste. Were her lips as soft as they looked?

With her back pressed up against his chest, he could inhale her sweet scent—something between soap and violets—by simply adjusting his head closer. And despite everything, the pain he was in, the fever he could feel rising in his body, he found himself getting hard for her. Another ache atop an ache.

Foolish want.
A woman like her could never want a man like you
.

None of that mattered now. They were finished. The terrain here offered no shelter. No perch from which to hunker down, and ambush their pursuers. The men behind them had split up some time ago, intending to flank him. The mountains here had flattened out onto a broad grass-covered plateau whose edge seemed to meet the sky in the distance and plunge away.

The men chasing them were stronger of will than he'd imagined and better trackers. He'd done everything he could to lose them. Cut through rivers, up shale mountainsides and across limestone plateaus where no man could track another.

And yet, they had. And there was only so far he could push his horse. Náhkohe would run until his heart burst for him, but then what? What good would it do them only to be cornered by the one she'd called Laddner?

Not long ago, he'd begun seeing things: Little Wolf's mother, White Owl, thin and wasted by the coughing sickness, was standing near a rock, staring at the sweeping vista ahead.
Is she dead already? Or just an illusion? Am I already too late?

His best friend from childhood—Wind On The Water—a boy who had never feared anything until the
vé'ho'e's
smallpox had taken him at fifteen—also appeared, beckoning him to follow. Cade had run a hand down his face to clear his vision, but Wind On The Water just stood near an overhanging rock, making the sign for something beyond his comprehension. And then it struck him.

Hotòame'ko
. Buffalo.

Did Essie see Wind On The Water, too? Or was he losing his mind?

A chill chased through him. The sun was lowering again and he longed to stretch out by a warm fire wrapped in a buffalo hide and sleep. Náhkohe was coming to the end of his strength as well.

But the thought of Little Wolf and the woman in front of him kept him going. Where could the boy have gone? Was he lost up in these mountains? He was only thirteen. And whatever skills his father had taught him must have been ripped away by the damned school they'd kept him locked up in for the last two winters. Would he ever see him again? White Owl—wherever she was—no doubt wondered the same. Was that why she was haunting him now?
Because of your promise to let her see her son one last time
.
A promise you should never have made.

He shivered again. Too many broken promises to count.

The sharp retort of horseshoe against rock somewhere behind them jerked him out of his reverie. He pulled the horse up short and turned to look. There, not a half mile back, were his pursuers. Relentless. Pushing their way past every obstacle.

She saw them at the same time. She glanced up at him, alarm in her expression.

He shook his head with silent warning and kicked the horse into a full gallop and shoved Essie down against the nape of the horse's neck. Náhkohe would not last long at this pace. He was as exhausted as they were. They were all clinging to the end of a very frayed rope.

As they raced toward the vanishing edge of the plateau, it suddenly struck him where they were. He hadn't been here for years. Not since his thirteenth summer on the hunt that would be his last with his mother's people. His mother had died that autumn. After that, there had been too few buffalo to hunt. And the People had left this place for hunting grounds north.

Buffalo.

This was Buffalo Jump. A huge, sheer, unsurvivable drop into nothingness. The bottom was a thousand feet nearly straight down. Whole herds of buffalo had met their ends here, driven off by the Cheyenne and Crow and other tribes who'd been lucky enough to use this gift of nature. And he and Essie and Náhkohe were heading right for it.

"Oh, no! Stop!" Essie gasped. "There's a cliff ahead! Slow down!"

But he didn't stop. He pushed the horse on. The chilly wind tore at them, cutting through their clothes and hair.

She gripped the saddle horn and the horse's mane. "Are you
mad
? You're going to kill us both!"

Cade clutched his mount hard with his legs despite the pain stabbing at him. He held his breath, his sight blurring, as he tried to remember where Wind had gone that day.

The whine of a bullet skidded past his ear in the thin air.
Damn!
He leaned forward and covered Essie with his body.

Then again, up ahead. Wind On The Water was there, beckoning him, as his horse raced toward the edge and he braced himself for what he was about to do.

* * *

Mitchell Laddner and Jacob Moran pulled their mounts up short a good ten feet from the edge of the cliff, staring incomprehensibly at the place where they'd seen the renegade and the woman vanish. They'd seen it with their own eyes from a half mile back. The lunatics had thrown themselves off the horse, sent the animal running and with barely a pause, had jumped off this damned cliff!

Jacob Moran looked white-faced and shaken at the prospect. He gave a low whistle as he cautiously peered over the edge. "That there's one hell of a drop, that is. See there?" He pointed down the steep cliff to the ground far, far below. "A thousand feet if it's an inch. No way we spot their bodies from here. Too far. Too foggy."

Laddner didn't care for heights and certainly not thousand-foot heights. He felt a cold sweat break out just above his lip seeing Moran standing as close to the edge as he was right now.

He cursed foully, wondering why, after two days of desperate running, the renegade had chosen suicide, thereby depriving him of the pleasure of killing the bastard properly. Laddner felt his stomach drop at the mere thought of making such a choice. He would take a rope over a fall like that any day of the week.

Dismounting, he began to remove his gloves. At a safe distance from the edge, he stared out at the big Montana sky with its pink edges curling toward sunset. The plains in the distance stretched on and on and on toward the Missouri River, many miles north of here. If one squinted past the fog hugging the mountains, one might just make out that green snake of water that would eventually roll all the way to the Dakota Territories before it hit the Mississippi. To the west, the mountains rose up like black crow wings against the pale blue sky. And to the east, the plateau they were standing on wrapped itself around the prairie below like a giant arm. It was, he supposed, as good a place to die as any other. Pretty as a painted postcard.

What a waste of a perfectly good day.

Disappointment and a certain sense of failure threaded through him. He heard his old man's voice in his head, berating him for not riding faster, not hitting his mark at a half mile out.
You have a Henry rifle
, the old man would say.
Gun enough to hit your mark. Not man enough to make your mark.

"We should go down there and find what's left," Moran was saying. "It'll take us the better part of tonight to get to the bottom and locate the remains. Guess they'll be wantin' some sort of proof."

"Look again," Laddner urged, though he made no attempt to get closer himself. "Try to spot them."

The other man glanced over the cliff's edge again. "Ain't no spottin' 'em from this height. Anything goes over, it's goin' all the way down."

"The girl jumped right over with him," Laddner muttered. "Guess he just saved me the trouble of what needed doing."

"What's that you say?" Moran asked with a frown.

"She'd clearly lost her mind. Would've been a mercy," Laddner said.

Moran stared at him, dumbfounded.

Laddner tugged the fingers of his second glove and pulled it off. He slapped the pair against his thigh, making Moran twitch and his horse shy sideways. "I suppose you'd have spared her, all broken like a sparrow mangled up by a dog? Even
she
knew there was no choice."

Moran shifted uncomfortably at the edge and scratched at his beard with his dirty fingernails. "She's broken, all right. Broken to bits. I don't reckon I'd have any say about savin' her or not, where she is now."

Laddner shook his head. He didn't expect a man like Moran to understand the intricacies of mercy. Still, it did disappoint him that he wouldn't get to see that Sparks girl get what was coming to her. He'd been looking a little forward to seeing what two days in the wilderness with a renegade savage would do to the snotty look she'd always worn when she spoke to him. Like she was too good for him. Like she had better choices.

Laddner mounted again and tugged his horse away from the cliff. "We'd best get started down and find what's left of them before the scavengers do. Then, all that remains is the boy. And when we find him, he'll wish he'd gone over with these other two."

Moran took another scan of the sheer drop below his feet and shrugged. "It'll sure enough be the Wages of Sin for him for a good long stay. Dumb little bastard. I never
will
understand why them redskin whelps don't—"

But Laddner had already kicked his horse into a gallop, leaving Moran behind in his dust, talking to himself.

With a sigh, he shook his head and mounted his horse. "And you can go fuck yourself, Mr. High and Mighty." He turned to look in the direction the Indian's horse had taken and cupped his hands around his mouth. To the endless valley below him, he shouted, "Run, damn you, horse! Run for your life!" And he added, under his breath, "If you know what's good for ya."

His words echoed over and over again until they faded away.

Chapter 9

Cade let go of Essie after they'd heard the second man ride off, unclamping his hand from her mouth and his iron-like arm from around her.