Winter's Touch (18 page)

Her eyes fluttered open. She groaned softly. “Is it time to leave?”

Carson let out the breath he hadn’t realized was locked in his chest. “Not yet. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you.”

She needed more rest to recover. Real rest. But they couldn’t stay here. He had thought briefly, humorously, last night that he might die for her, but he wasn’t ready to sit and wait for Crooked Oak and his men to catch them. He would die if they did. He had no doubt of that. But his death wouldn’t guarantee Winter Fawn’s safety or health. She would still have to be carried down out of these mountains and back to camp. If, that is, they did not kill her outright for helping him escape.

If she had to be carried, Carson figured it might as well be him doing the carrying. Not back to her camp, but to his ranch. From there, after she was fully recovered, she could decide what she wanted to do.

The thought of watching her ride away from him left him feeling strangely hollow inside in a place he didn’t recognize.

Maybe she wouldn’t want to leave. Maybe she would want to stay.

Yeah, right, Dulaney.

What did he have to offer her? What, if anything, was he even willing to offer her? A place to live? Why would he think she would even consider leaving her people?

For her father.

The thought teased him. Yes, she might want to stay with her father. But from what Carson knew of Innes, the Scotsman roamed the mountains, did a little prospecting here, a little trapping there. There was a cabin, Carson thought he remembered his father saying once, somewhere in the White Mountains, where Innes stayed part of the year.

Would Winter Fawn and Hunter go there? Would Carson ever see them again? Any of them?

He wished for daylight so he could see her face. But the night was pitch black, the moon having set while he’d slept. But judging by the stars, dawn wasn’t far off. Already a few birds were starting to stir.

The birds weren’t the only things stirring. So was his blood, he realized with surprise. If he didn’t take his arms from around Winter Fawn and crawl out from beneath the blankets, something else was going to stir. The way he and Winter Fawn were lying, like two spoons in a tray, with her tucked up against his chest and his thighs and his loins, Winter Fawn was quite likely to come awake and feel something of his he’d rather she didn’t feel, and slap him in the face. And he would deserve it.

He forced himself out of the warm blankets and into the icy pre-dawn air. The fire he started helped a little, but not much. Damn fine time to be down to his undershirt.

But at least he wasn’t wearing a skirt, like Winter Fawn was, which allowed cold air to circulate beneath it when she stood, and which bared her thighs when she straddled the back of the horse.

Thinking of skirts, he hoped that Megan and Bess hadn’t had to spend a cold night in the mountains. Hell, they didn’t even have the buffalo robe or the ground sheet. Only two blankets for all four of them.

Frustrated and angry over their circumstances, and blaming himself, he whacked into the slab of bacon and severed off slices for breakfast. Once it was cooking, he groped beneath the blankets for the canteen, to use the water for coffee.

The back of his hand brushed across something. He turned his palm to it and grasped.

Ah…that, uh, wasn’t a canteen. It was round and firm, but too soft. It was a butt, and a shapely one. He jerked his hand away.

Winter Fawn sprang upright, her eyes flying wide open. The abrupt action caused her to wince.

She must have pulled her wound, he thought, sorry to be the cause of more pain for her. The firelight lent an amber glow to her face. He’d never seen a more beautiful face.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

Incredibly, Carson felt heat sting his cheeks. “Sorry. I was just…looking for the, uh, the canteen.”

“I am not wearing it.”

“I know. Sorry. If you’ll, uh, fish it out for me, I’ll start coffee.”

She frowned. “Fish? Oh.” Reaching beneath the covers, she pulled out the canteen from a spot that made it look as though she’d been hugging it in her sleep.

Lucky canteen.

“Here.” She handed it to him.

“Thanks.”

As soon as he took the canteen from her she shivered and dove back beneath the buffalo robe.

While he put the coffee on and mixed up a batch of biscuit dough, he heard her shifting around in the bedroll. A moment later he felt a gentle nudge on his arm and turned to find her holding out one of the blankets toward him.

“Take this,” she said. “It’s too cold for so few clothes.”

Carson smiled and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. “Thank you.”

After they ate he insisted on checking her wound again.

“It feels much better this morning.”

“Good. But I still want to see it.”

She seemed reluctant to let him, but she gave in and turned her back to give him access.

The condition of the wound impressed him. The fine tremor that started in his hand when he touched her skin shocked him. It was a moment before he could speak. “The, uh, willow bark must have done the trick. It looks good. How’s the pain?”

“Better,” she answered.

Realizing that he was still holding her tunic up and staring at the expanse of smooth bronze skin across her back, Carson dropped the tunic, letting it fall into place, and turned back toward the fire.

They ate in silence, then packed up and headed out as soon as it was light enough to see even a short distance.

“Do you know these mountains?” he asked her.

Seated behind him on the horse, Winter Fawn gripped the saddle rather than the man. Something had happened inside her when he had touched the bare skin of her back that morning. Something hot and wild that she didn’t understand. It had made her heart pound and her breath catch as though she had been running for miles. She wasn’t sure that she liked it. She wasn’t sure that she didn’t. For now, she thought it best not to touch him lest it happen to her again.

“No,” she told him. “I’ve heard my father speak of them, but I’ve never been beyond the foothills until now.”

“There’s a pass,” he said, “north of here.”

“To the north, yes. I remember. A wide, easy pass, he said.”

“On the other side is Ute territory.”

Winter Fawn stiffened. The Utes were old and constant enemies of Our People.

“Will Crooked Oak follow us there?” Carson asked.

“I do not know. With so few warriors, I think not. But he might think the Utes would not be this far east until later in the spring, when more of the snow melts.”

“That’s my thinking, too. I remember seeing a cabin up here when I was here last summer, but we can’t afford to get trapped like that.”

He had come to these mountains because they were the closest ones to the ranch. His father had told him that when a man’s soul was needy, he could usually find peace in the mountains, if he would only allow himself to sit still and listen.

After the surrender at Appomattox, Carson’s soul had indeed been needy. He had gone to Atlanta to see what was left of his family, and while there, realized he could not provide for them in Georgia. The plantation, everything his father and his grandfather before him had worked for, was gone. Only the ranch in Colorado was left. The ranch his father had spoken of with reverence in his voice.

So Carson had ridden west. The ranch had been rundown, neglected, but he’d seen the possibilities. But he’d felt so damn tired. Down deep, soul-deep, weary.

The mountains can heal you, if you’ll let them,
his father had said.

So Carson had headed for the nearest mountains. These mountains. He’d spent a month roaming them up and down, back and forth, and, a great deal of the time, merely sitting still and breathing in the peace of the place.

He remembered one afternoon when he had ridden up out of a steep, winding, red-and-gray-streaked canyon to find a pile of boulders that had tumbled from higher up the mountain to form what to him, that day, had looked like a bear and two cubs. It had seemed magical. Whimsical, he remembered with a smile. Farther up the mountain, in the next valley, he’d come across an abandoned cabin, where he’d stopped for a while to rest his horse before riding on.

But the cabin, near as he could figure, was too far up the mountain. There was no pass up there. They needed to get over the pass at Hardscrabble Creek. For that, they had to head north. And along the way, he had to make tracking them as difficult as possible.

To this end he stuck to rocky ground when he could, or traveled through pine forests whose floors were covered in deep layers of pine needles, or guided the horse into a creek bed. He marveled, and thanked God, when he realized that the mule walked directly behind the horse rather than off to the side.

At the next ridge Carson used the binoculars to study their back trail. He spotted their pursuers instantly as they crested another ridge. “Damn.”

“They still come?”

“Yes,” he said grimly, lowering the binoculars. “They still come.

Angling north toward the pass as best he could, Carson kept mostly to the creek beds, going up one stream, then taking a branch out of that one up another, weaving northeast, then northwest, sometimes having to go south before finding another finger canyon heading north.

Around noon they stopped to give the animals a rest.

At least, it felt like noon. It was hard to tell with the clouds so thick. They gathered all morning around the mountain peaks, then rolled quickly down the slopes and seemed to press down on him like lead weight. The smell and the feel of snow to come was a threat he could have done without.

That, and the bastards still dogging his trail. They were still back there, still coming, although there were only three now. He would have felt a hell of a lot better if he knew for certain that the other three had turned back.

Hoping that his zigzagging up and down the streams was slowing the Arapahos down, he took a chance and followed a game trail out of the stream and up the side of the mountain. At a level spot he stopped and concealed himself at the edge of a grove of tall pines. Using the binoculars again, he scanned the area below them.

After about ten minutes he spotted Crooked Oak and two others, right where he’d feared they would be, less than two miles south and gaining on them.

But where were the other three? Had they turned back? Another ten minutes of searching gave him no sight of them.

Twice more during the afternoon he stopped to look again. It was during the second stop that he spotted the other three. His hackles rose. He recognized a pincher movement when he saw one. The other three had gone down the mountains to smoother terrain, for faster traveling. They were now coming at him from about east northeast.

“What shall we do?” Winter Fawn asked.

Carson whirled, startled. He had left her deeper into the trees with the horses and hadn’t heard her approach. Damn good thing she was on his side, he thought with disgust. If she’d been one of the warriors, he’d be a dead man.

He gnawed on the inside of his jaw. “They’re coming at us from two directions now. If we stay where we are, we’ll be caught between them. If we keep angling north toward the pass, the two groups will eventually rejoin each other and continue dogging our trail. If we head east, we’ll end up down on the plains, on the Taos Trail where they first attacked me. There’s no cover, nowhere to hide, and the warriors aren’t riding double. Catching us would be child’s play.”

What he didn’t say was that if they rode down out of the mountains, they wouldn’t be far from Pueblo. Toward safety. At least for him. Innes, however, had been adamant that Winter Fawn would not be safe there.

Besides, he still had to get to the ranch. From Pueblo, he would still have to take the Taos Trail and ride right past the Arapaho camp. Or, he could head west out of Pueblo up Hardscrabble creek and over the Wet Mountains into Wet Mountain Valley. The eastern edge of Ute country.

“And west,” Winter Fawn said, “means higher up into the mountains, toward the snow.”

“With the possibility of more snow in the air,” Carson added. “Any way we look at it, we need to get over the pass.”

They mounted up and headed north. Not as familiar with the Wets as he’d like to be, he estimated that Hardscrabble Creek was just over five miles away. As the crow flies. Unfortunately, they could not travel like crows. They had the land to deal with, and the land enjoyed throwing obstacles in their path.

Carson’s concern over the weather grew with every step they took. The temperature dropped, the sky lowered. The wind picked up. He had to get off the side of the mountain, or they were likely to be blown off.

Later in the afternoon he found a wide, shallow stream with banks no more than a foot high. He headed upstream, which led them in a northwesterly direction. More or less.

Gradually the wide banks rose and the stream itself narrowed and cut deeper into the rocky earth, leaving an area of about a twenty yards of scattered aspen and pines on either side before reaching the tall banks. The banks themselves grew steeper and higher until they angled several hundred feet straight up from their base.

There was the chance that the stream would end in a waterfall that tumbled down from rocky cliffs above. A dead end for someone on horseback. But Carson noticed deer tracks heading their same direction, and deer weren’t likely to get themselves trapped in a dead end canyon.

Of course, the horse and mule couldn’t necessarily follow where a deer might go, but the red and gray streaks in the canyon walls were starting to look familiar. If this was the same canyon he had traveled before, he would find the bear-shaped rocks at the point where he would be forced up.

But if he took the side canyon that fed into this one from the north, he would end up in a wide grassy meadow, and maybe reach the pass before dark.

Suddenly the dirt and rock in the embankment to their left exploded. A jaybird squawked and took flight. The sound of a rifle shot echoed between the rock walls.

Winter Fawn sucked in a sharp breath. Her arms, around his waist, tightened.