Elizabeth Lowell (17 page)

The result was a maze. A person could stand on one canyon edge and look at the opposite edge only a few thousand feet away—and it would take a day of circling around to get to the other side. Most of the hundreds of nameless canyons that fringed the plateau were blind, having only one outlet, and that was down onto the flatlands rather than up onto the top of Black Plateau itself.

“Do you know of any other trails up to the top?” Ty asked, marking the ones she had already mentioned. “What about all these fringe canyons? Could a man on foot climb out of some of them and up onto the plateau itself?”

She shrugged. “Ask Mad Jack the next time you see him. He knows things about Black Plateau that even the Indians don’t. But the canyons I’ve seen end in sheer cliffs, the kind you’d have to be crazy or running for your life to try to climb.”

“Does Lucifer graze in blind canyons?”

“The biggest ones, yes. The narrow ones, never. Some mustangers must have trapped him once. He won’t even go near the entrance of any canyon that isn’t at least a quarter mile across. He’s smart and wild as they come.”

“No wonder he’s still running loose,” Ty said, admiration and disgust mixed equally in his voice. “I was lucky to get as close as I did before Cascabel nailed me. What are the chances of startling Lucifer and getting him to run headlong into a small blind canyon before he knows what’s happening?”

“It’s been tried by every mustanger who ever came here.”

Ty didn’t ask what the result had been. He didn’t need to. The stallion still ran free.

“No wonder Troon decided to try creasing that black devil,” Ty muttered.

She thought of the rifle shot they had heard and bit her lip.

He saw and had to look away. The idea of gently biting her lip himself was too tempting. In fact, everything about her was too tempting. Though she was no longer leaning over to add marks to his rough map, her hand was still resting on his leg, sending heat spreading out in all directions through his body, tantalizing him with how close those slender fingers were to the very part of him that ached for her touch.

Cursing silently, viciously, he tried to ease from the intimate contact. Half an inch away he came flat up against the crevice’s stony limits. Close beside him, her stomach growled audibly in the taut silence, reminding him that she hadn’t eaten since they had left Keyhole Canyon yesterday morning.

“Scoot over so I can reach my pack,” he muttered.

Even if she didn’t move, the pack was within a long arm’s length of him—if he was willing to press against her in order to increase his reach. She gave him a sideways look and decided not to point out how close the pack was. Without a word she eased backward and to the side an inch or two.

“More.”

The curt command irritated her. “Haven’t you noticed? There’s not much room in this crack.”

“Yeah, and you’re taking up at least three-quarters of it. Quit crowding me.”

“Crowding you? My God, you’d think I had fleas or something,” she said beneath her breath. “Seeing as how you’re the one who’s been to Ned’s saloon recently, you’re more likely to have fleas than—”

“Janna,” Ty interrupted, his voice threatening. “Move!”

“All right, all right, I’m moving.” She pushed herself to the far side of the crevice and hugged the wall as though there were a cliff inches away from her feet. “This better?”

He snarled something she chose not to hear. A pocketknife appeared in his hand. He grabbed his pack and began rummaging through it. A few moments later he pulled out a tin can. He punched the point of the blade twice into the top of the can. The second time he rotated the knife, making a wider opening. He handed the can to Janna.

“Here. Drink this.”

She lifted the can, tilted, sipped and made a sound of disbelief as the thick, sweet, peach-flavored liquid trickled across her tongue. She took two long, slow swallows before she reluctantly handed the can back to him. He refused to take it with a shake of his head.

“Finish it,” he said.

“I can’t do that. Preacher charges a dollar a can for his peaches.”

A look at Janna’s clear eyes told Ty that arguing over the peaches would be futile. He took the can, drank two small sips, and handed it back over.

“Your turn,”
he said flatly.

She said nothing, but she took the can and drank slowly, savoring each drop.

Her undisguised pleasure made Ty smile with the knowledge that he had given her a real treat. He had spent more than enough time on the trail to know how much a person began craving something sweet and succulent after weeks or months of dried meat and biscuits and beans.

They passed the can back and forth several times, and each time Ty swore that the metal became warmer to his touch. He tried not to think about the lips that had been pressed against the rim before his own lips drank. In fact, he was doing fine at controlling the direction of his thoughts until she tipped the can up and waited for several seconds for the last sweet drop to fall from the rim onto the tip of her outstretched tongue. The temptation to suck that drop from her tongue with his own lips was so great that he had to turn away.

“Now what?” she asked, holding the can under his nose.

Hell of a question,
he thought savagely.
Wish I had an answer I could live with.

Using swift, vicious strokes of the pocketknife, Ty cut the lid from the rim, speared a peach half and held it out to Janna. She took the lush golden fruit with her fingertips, ate with delicate greed, and waited her turn for another. They traded turns eating until only one piece of fruit was left, a piece that stubbornly eluded Ty’s knife. Finally he speared it and held it out to Janna.

As she slid the fruit from the knife blade she sensed Ty’s intense interest. She looked up to find him watching her mouth. His eyes were a smoky green that made frissons of heat race over her skin. Without thinking she took a bite of the succulent fruit and held out the remainder to him with her fingertips.

“Your turn,” she said huskily.

For a long, aching moment he looked at the sweetness dripping from her slender fingers. Then he stood up in a controlled surge of power, grabbed his pack, and strode out of the crevice without a word.

A
late-afternoon storm had swept across Black Plateau, making the rocks and trees shine as though freshly polished. The slanting golden light transformed the winding meadow into a river of glistening gold. Once Janna would have felt the beauty of the land like a balm over her hungry soul. Today she only saw what was absent rather than what was present. Lying on her stomach, using a row of evergreen seedlings for cover, she scanned the length of the long meadow in front of her once more, staring through the spyglass until her arms trembled with fatigue.

Ty didn’t bother to go over the land again with his own glass. He knew he would see what he and Janna had seen for the past five days—grass and water and wind in abundance, but no Lucifer standing guard over his herd. Cascabel’s renegades had been present, however. They were the reason that Ty and Janna had had to tiptoe around the plateau like thieves, able to get only as close to the mustangs as the tracks they had made yesterday or even the day before.

“I don’t understand it,” she said, finally lowering the spyglass and wiggling backward deeper beneath the cover of the pines that grew right to the meadow’s edge. “Even if Lucifer had been caught, wouldn’t we at least see some of his herd wandering around? No mustanger is going to want the older mares or the spring foals. Besides, we haven’t seen or heard any sign of Troon or any other mustanger since we came up the east trail.”

“Except for that flurry of rifle shots yesterday,” Ty said. “That didn’t sound like the hunting parties we’ve been hearing. Troon could have run afoul of Cascabel.”

She frowned and said reluctantly, “I suppose I should scout Cascabel’s camp.”

“What?”

“That’s how I found you,” she said. “I heard gunfire, ran over, saw where the tracks of two shod horses were crossed by a bunch of unshod Indian ponies. The ponies turned to follow your horses and so did I. Eventually the tracks led to Cascabel’s camp. I couldn’t get to you right away to free you, so I hid and waited for a chance to help. It finally came when you got through the gauntlet and were still able to run.”

Ty thought of the danger she had risked to save a total stranger and shook his head in wonder. That deceptively slender body hid a lot of plain old courage, but there was no need to spend it on a swamp Yankee like Joe Troon.

“Is Troon a friend of yours?” Ty asked.

Janna gave him a startled look. “Joe Troon? I wouldn’t cry one tear at his funeral,” she said in a low, flat voice. “In fact, he...”

Her voice died. She didn’t like to remember the time Troon had trapped her and started stripping off her clothes before she managed to break free and run. He had spent hours searching for her. The whole time he had yelled just what he would do when he caught her.

The combination of fear and dislike on her face told Ty more than he wanted to know about Janna and Joe Troon.

“Janna,” Ty said softly, pulling her out of her unhappy memories, “from what I’ve heard in towns where I bought my supplies, Troon is a drunk, a thief, a coward, a woman beater, and a back shooter. He deserves whatever Cascabel feels like giving to him. Besides, you don’t even know if Troon has been captured. He could be back in Sweetwater right now, getting drunk on Ned’s rotgut. There’s no point in either of us risking our butt to scout a renegade camp for a no-good bit of swamp gas like Joe Troon.”

“I know,” she said. “I just hate to think of anyone caught by Cascabel. He’s so cruel.”

Ty shrugged. “Cascabel doesn’t see it that way. He’s a warrior who has stood up to the worst the country, the pony soldiers, and his fellow Indians can offer in the way of punishment. He’s never given quarter and he’s never asked for it. And he never will.”

“You sound like you admire him.”

There was a long silence before Ty shrugged again. “I don’t like him, but I do respect him. He’s one hell of a fighter, no matter what the weapon or situation. He has knowledge of how to use the land and his limited arms to his own advantage that many a general would envy.”

“Do you have any idea what he does to the captives who don’t escape?”

“Yes,” Ty said succinctly. “I didn’t say I admired him. But I learned in the war that honor and good table manners don’t have a damned thing to do with survival. Cascabel is a survivor. Black Hawk knows it. He hasn’t pressed a confrontation because he hopes that the U.S. Army will take care of the renegades for him.”

“Black Hawk is lucky that Cascabel hasn’t lured the whole tribe away from him,” Janna grumbled. “Cascabel must have half of Black Hawk’s warriors down here by now, and they’re still coming in by twos and threes every day.”

“Cascabel is half-Apache. The elders in the Ute tribe would never let him be a headman. As for the younger men, they still believe that they’re invincible. They haven’t had time to learn that the same army that flattened the South sure as hell won’t have too tough a time ironing out a few renegade wrinkles in the Utah Territory.”

She started to speak, then caught a flash of movement at the far edge of the meadow. Ty had seen the movement, too. As one they flattened completely to the earth, taking advantage of every bit of cover offered by the slight depression where they lay to watch the meadow.

Four hundred feet away, five Indians rode out into the wide river of meadow grass that wound between the two evergreen forests. The men rode boldly, without bothering about cover or the possibility of ambush, because they knew that Cascabel ruled Black Plateau. The only reason they weren’t laughing and talking among themselves was that human voices carried a long way in the plateau’s primal silence, and the deer they were hunting had excellent hearing.

Peering cautiously through the dense screen of evergreen boughs, spyglass shielded so that it wouldn’t give
away their position by reflecting a flash of light, Ty watched the hunting party ride along the margin of forest and meadow. Usually in any group of Indians, barely half the men were aimed with carbines, rifles or pistols, and there were rarely more than a few rounds of ammunition for each weapon. Part of the problem in getting arms was simply that it was illegal to sell weapons or ammunition to Indians. What they couldn’t take as the spoils of war they had to buy from crooked white traders.

But most of the problem the Indians had in staying well armed was that none of the tribes had any experience in the care and repair of machines or in the art of making reliable bullets. The weapons they acquired through war or bribery quickly became useless due to lack of ammunition or because of mechanical failure.

Cascabel’s men were well outfitted. As well as the traditional bow and arrows, each man had a carbine and
a leather pouch bulging with ammunition. Ty was relieved to see that the carbines were single-shot weapons of the type that had lost the Civil War for the South. None of the five Indians had a weapon that could compete with the new Winchester carbine he had discovered in an otherwise empty box at the store Preacher had rather hastily abandoned.

Ty’s new carbine was the type of weapon Johnny Rebs had enviously insisted that a Yank “loaded on Sunday and fired all week long.” With his new Winchester, Ty could reload as fast as he could fire, an advantage the Indians didn’t have unless they used their bows and arrows.

Ty went over the details of the renegades’ gear with the experienced eye of a man to whom such knowledge had meant the difference between continued life and premature death. The presence of good weapons explained some of Cascabel’s allure for young warriors—on a reservation, these men would have barely enough to eat, no weapons beyond what they could make with their own hands, and no freedom to roam in search of game. With Cascabel, the young men would have a chance to gain personal fame as warriors, they would be well fed and well armed, and they could live the roving life celebrated in tribal legends.