Elizabeth Lowell (38 page)

Janna’s gray eyes scanned the countryside to the left of the slot, alert for any sign of movement. At the edge of her side vision she watched Ty’s long-legged stride eat up the distance between himself and safety.

Only twenty yards to cover. Then ten, then—

There was no time to warn Ty, no time to aim, no time to do anything but fire at almost point-blank range as a renegade sprang from cover just outside the cleft and came at Janna with a knife. Her first shot was wild. Her second shot hit the renegade’s shoulder a glancing blow, knocking him backward. The third and fourth shots were Ty’s. No more were needed.

“Get back,” Ty said harshly, dragging Janna farther inside the cleft. “There are three more out there and God knows how many will come in at the sound of the shots.”

Breathing hard, he shrugged out of his backpack and took up a position just inside the slot. He began refilling the carbine with quick, sure motions. As he worked he looked up every few instants to scan the landscape. What he saw made him swear tonelessly. There was a distant swirl of dust, which was probably a rider going off for reinforcements. One of the remaining renegades was taking up a position that would cover the mouth of the cleft.

The second Indian wasn’t in sight, but he was within rifle range, as a screaming, whining, ricocheting bullet proved. Rock chips exploded, showering Ty with dust and stinging shards.

“Get farther back,” he yelled as he blinked his eyes and took aim.

He fired several times at the most likely patches of cover. Then he lowered his carbine and waited. A few moments later another shot whined past. This time he saw where it had come from. He answered instantly with closely spaced shots, sending bullets raking through the cover. There was a startled yell, then silence.

Methodically Ty shoved bullets into the carbine’s magazine, replacing those he had spent.

No more shots came.

“Janna?”

“I’m back here,” she said.

The odd acoustics of the canyon made her sound close, though she was thirty feet away.

“We’re going to have to get out on foot and try to steal horses from the Indians,” he said.

She had arrived at the same conclusion. Getting Lucifer and Zebra out without being spotted by the Indians would be impossible.

“There’s no moon tonight,” Ty continued without looking away from the bit of cover where the Indian had hidden. “We’ll go out an hour after full dark. Try to get some sleep until then.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll guard the entrance.”

“But the ricochets—”

“If I get out of range of a ricochet,” he interrupted impatiently, “I won’t be able to see the mouth of the slot to guard it.” Ty’s expression softened for a moment when he looked at Janna. “Don’t look so worried, sugar. He doesn’t have a very good angle from where he is. I’ll be all right.”

Turning back to the slot, Ty fired six times in rapid succession, stitching bullets on either side of the place where the renegade had taken cover, forcing anyone who might still be in range to get down and stay down.

Janna hesitated, then went quickly to Ty. She threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. He returned the embrace with a strength and a yearning that made tears burn against her eyelids. In tones too soft for him to hear, she whispered her love against his neck before she turned away and retreated toward the meadow.

But Ty had heard Janna’s words. For an instant he closed his eyes and felt the exquisite pain of having been given a gift he didn’t deserve.

With automatic motions he propped his backpack against a stone, sat on his heels and loaded the carbine to full capacity once more. The angle of the shadows on the canyon walls told him that he had several hours to wait until sunset came, much less full dark.

Leaning against the wall, carbine at the ready, Ty tried to convince himself that when dawn came he and Janna would still be alive.

The meadow’s sunlight seemed blinding after the cool, dim passage into the secret valley. Janna stood on the edge of the opening and sent a hawk’s wild cry into the still air. A second call brought Zebra at a trot, her head high, her ears pricked. Lucifer followed after the mare, for the two horses had become inseparable during the weeks when the stallion was healing.

Janna mounted Zebra quickly and turned the mare toward the ancient ruins where Mad Jack had hidden his gold. She had never pried into the old prospector’s secrets before—but then, she had never been trapped in a stone bottle before, either.

“Jack must have had a way in and out of this valley without coming through the slot,” Janna said aloud to Zebra, “because I never saw a mark in that creek bed. If he had been coming and going from my end of the valley, I’d have heard him or you would have or Lucifer would have.”

Zebra flicked her ears back and forth, enjoying the sound of Janna’s voice.

“But you didn’t hear Jack, and that old man was too weak to carry more than a few pounds of gold at a time, which means there was a lot of coming and going before those saddlebags were full. He had to have left some kind of trail, somewhere. He just had to.”

And she had until dark to find it.

She urged Zebra into a canter, watching the rocky walls and lava flows, probing light and shadow for any sign of a faint trail. The valley narrowed in at the south end, where the ruins were. Beyond discovering that there was a clear spring welling up at the base of the ramparts that were just before the ruins, she had never really explored this part of the valley. The ruins were eerie by daylight and unsettling by night. She much preferred the clean reach of the stone overhang at the opposite end of the valley to the cramped and broken rooms of a people long dead.

But Janna wasn’t looking for a campsite now, or even for temporary shelter. She was seeking the ancient trails that the vanished Indians must have left if they came and went from their home by any route other than the dark cleft. It was possible that the Indians might have built their fortress in a blind valley with only one exit, but Janna doubted it. A tribe that took so much trouble to hide its home was a cautious people, and cautious people knew that the only difference between a fortress and a trap was a bolt hole.

In the country outside the valley, she had spotted ancient trails in the past simply by standing on a ridge and allowing her eyes to go slightly unfocused. When she lost the finest edge of visual acuity, other patterns came to light, vague lines and odd shadows. Most often they were simply random lines in a wild land, but sometimes they were ghost trails no longer used by man.

Crisscrossing the area around the ruins, she searched for any trail, new or old. She found nothing but grass, brush, rocks, sunlight and signs of her own passage. She urged Zebra farther into the ruins. The angle of the sun made shadows spill out from crumbling stone rooms, as though darkness had breached stone dams and was welling up to fill the valley beyond.

A frisson of uneasiness ran through Janna. She had always avoided the ruins in the hours beyond midafternoon, when the descending sun played odd tricks with light and shadow and stone. All that drove her farther into the ancient place now was the certainty that nothing a ghostly Indian had to offer could be worse than what waited beyond the cleft in the form of flesh-and-blood renegades.

No matter how she focused her eyes or didn’t, tilted her head or held it straight, narrowed her eyelids or widened them until her eyes ached, she saw nothing on the ground to suggest an ancient, forgotten trail. Working out from the room where Mad Jack had stored his gold, she quartered the open space. She found nothing she could be sure was the old prospector’s sign rather than her own or a random displacement of pebbles.

The farther back into the ruins she went, the narrower the canyon became. Stone rubble covered the ground. At first she assumed the rocky debris was the result of stones falling from the surrounding cliffs, but the farther back into the narrow throat of the canyon she went, the more she was struck by an odd thing—in some places the rubble looked as though it once had been level, as if broad steps or narrow terraces had once climbed up the throat of the valley.

With growing excitement Janna she the frayed remnants of what might once have been a well-built path snaking back and up the broken ramparts of stone that surrounded the hidden valley.

Behind Zebra a pebble rolled under Lucifer’s feet. The mare snorted and shied at the sound, giving vent to her nervousness at being asked to take a trail that showed every evidence of getting more and more narrow while going nowhere at all.

“Easy, girl,” she said soothingly, stroking the mare. “There’s nothing around but you, me, Lucifer and a lot of rock. The shadows just look scary, that’s all. There’s nothing in them but air.”

Under Janna’s urging Zebra climbed the steepening path. The farther along she went, the more Janna’s hopes sank. What had once looked like a wide path was rapidly degenerating into a jumble of stone that resembled nothing so much as the debris that always built up at the foot of stone cliffs.

Her hopes sank when Zebra scrambled around a tight corner and was confronted by a rock wall. Nothing that in any way resembled a trail broke the sheer rise of stone. Apparently she had been following a random chute paved with fallen rocks rather than a ghost path left by an ancient people.

For a long time she simply sat, staring at the end of her carefully constructed and entirely false logic of hope. However Mad Jack might have come into the valley, it wasn’t this way, and this had been by far the best hope of finding his path. The other possibilities—the random ravines and slender runoff gullies and crevices that opened into the narrowest end of the valley where Janna was—were much less likely to lead to the top of the plateau than the ground she had just covered.

But she had no choice except to try the other possibilities. No matter how small they were, they were better than the chance of sneaking past Cascabel and his renegades while they were camped outside the valley’s only exit like a horde of hungry cats waiting at a mouse hole.

There was barely enough room for Zebra to turn around in order to head back where she had come from. Lucifer saw Zebra turning and followed suit. He led the retreat over the rough ground at a brisk trot, relieved to be free of the narrow passage between broken walls of stone. Zebra was equally relieved. She followed after the stallion eagerly.

They had retreated no more than a hundred feet when Janna noticed a small ravine that she hadn’t seen before, for it joined at an oblique angle to the main passage and was walled off by a pediment of stone. Immediately she turned Zebra toward the side ravine. The mare tossed her head, not wanting to leave Lucifer and enter the narrow gulch.

“Come on, girl. There’s nothing up this trail but stone and shadows and maybe, just maybe, a way out of here.”

Zebra didn’t budge.

Janna stopped using pressures of her hand to guide the mare. Instead, she pulled on the knotted hackamore reins Ty had insisted that Zebra be trained to wear. Reluctantly the mare turned away from Lucifer and walked into the gulch. Once past the rocky outcropping that guarded the ravine’s narrow mouth, the passage opened out again, becoming wider than the slot where Ty waited for a renegade to be brave or foolish enough to show himself.

She didn’t know if it was wishful thinking or truth, but it seemed to her that the new path had once been made more level by a series of broad steps composed of stony rubble, which followed the steep rise of the ravine farther and farther back into the body of the plateau. The steps, or ramps, had since largely crumbled and been washed away beneath torrential rains, but enough remained to give a mustang adequate footing.

To Janna’s surprise, Lucifer followed, as though determined not to lose sight of Zebra in the midst of echoing stone ravines. The path snaked higher and higher, sometimes scrambling over stony ridges to follow a different runoff course up the broken walls that constituted the western side of the valley.

There were places where Janna was certain that rock must have been hammered away to make passage possible. In other places she was just as certain that nothing had touched the trail but wind and water, sun and storm. Then she would see gouge marks on the stone and wonder if they weren’t the result of intelligence rather than past landslides.

The trail came to yet another narrowing of the branching network of runoff channels that covered the eroding face of the western ramparts of the valley. Without being urged, Zebra scrambled and lunged over the small rise, for there had been many such changes of direction in the past half mile.

There was sun shining on the rise, for they had climbed far enough to be beyond the reach of lengthening shadows. Janna shaded her eyes and looked ahead, confidently expecting to find an obvious way to proceed. She saw nothing except a lateral crack in the stone cliff, but the crack was too small to be called a passage. Turning slowly, she looked over her trail. Her breath came in with a sharp sound. She was nearly to the top of the stone ramparts that surrounded her hidden valley.

“There has to be a way to get out from here,” Janna said aloud as she stroked Zebra absently.

For several minutes she looked at the dubious lateral crevice that angled up and across the remaining cliff. The narrow ledge she saw might or might not lead to the top of the plateau. If the ledge ended short of the top, she would be stuck. There was no place for a horse to turn around. If the mustangs entered the crack they would be committed to going up, not down.

She slid off Zebra, then pressed the mare’s nose in a signal for her to stay behind. Ears pricked, nostrils flared, the mustang watched her mistress take the narrow trail. Janna looked back only once to assure herself that Zebra wasn’t going to wander off.

After Janna had gone fifteen feet, she was certain that she was going the right way. The crack became a very narrow ledge, too narrow for a horse to pass safely. Marks that could have been left by a chisel or hammer showed in the stone. Apparently the ancient tribe had widened and leveled a natural split in the rock face until it became a ledge just wide enough to take a man on foot. With overhanging rock on her left, a path no more than twenty inches wide at her feet—and sometimes less, if the rock had crumbled away—and a sheer drop to the valley floor on her right, she scrambled the length of the crack.