He looked east and found the skyline there discernible at last, just a faint difference in shading between earth and heaven at that point but enough to let him know that dawn was not far off. He found himself wishing that Miss Julianne and Miss Fifi and all his friends from the dead golfer's boat were with him. By the Sacred Mother, they would make short work of any agents who attempted to interfere with them. Those mountain men from Nepal, if he remembered, the soldiers she had hired… Gurkhas! He could never remember their unusual names, but he well remembered how fiercely they had fought to protect the boat and his family from pirates down at the bottom of the world.
Miguel shook his head.
Pirates. At the bottom of the world.
What strange paths his life had taken. Midafternoon and storm clouds building up in the west confirmed what Miguel's nose had told him earlier. The road agents were unlikely to get them now even if they had helicopters or planes to help them. The purple thunderheads, livid and bruised at the heart and tinged with green at the edge, already were flashing with a malicious promise of violence. Thunder, distant but ominous, rolled over gentle hills toward them. The weather front advanced rapidly, blotting out the clear sky as it came. At its current speed, Miguel could see it would overtake them long before they left the valley.
The herd stirred with agitation, calling to one another. Flossie snorted, shaking out her mane, struggling against the reins. She started to back-step and fight the bridle.
"Easy," Miguel said, giving the reins a short, sharp tug. He leaned forward to stroke Flossie's neck and whisper a few reassuring words in her twitching ears.
"Don't see many of them at this time of year."
Cooper Aronson had ridden up and was examining the wall of cloud as though it meant to give him personal offense.
Miguel pointed at the storm with his Stetson. In the few minutes he had been watching, the storm front had cut the distance between itself and the herd appreciably. Anxiety sat heavily just beneath his heart, and he cast around for his daughter. She was riding on the far side of the herd, chatting with Trudi Jessup. He had to suppress the urge to cut across and tell her to be wary. They might have a half hour, perhaps even less. "No," he said. "That looks like a summer storm, one of the worst kind, but the weather, it has been loco for years now."
"I had thought it was calming down some," Aronson ventured. "At least these last twelve months."
"Maybe the last twelve months, but not in the next two hours," Miguel said. "I do not like this, Aronson. Look at the land around here. We are driving through a wide valley, and as I recall from your map this morning, there are at least four streams within a few miles of us."
"A risk of flash flood, you think?" the Mormon asked.
"There is a lot of rain in that storm," Miguel said.
The protests of the cattle grew more insistent as lightning strobed through the huge, evil-looking bank of cloud and the trailing thunder grew noticeably louder than before. Miguel could see all the riders turning in their saddles to examine the spectacle as the shadow of the front fell over the tail end of the herd. His dogs began barking, and he called out harshly to them to be quiet. He did not need them spooking the herd any worse than it was already. Sofia, he was glad to see, gave him a querying glance before edging her horse onto slightly higher ground. She appeared to call to Miss Jessup to follow her, and the former restaurant woman did just that.
The rapid clip-clop of thudding hooves preceded Willem D'Age's approach at speed. He and Aronson acknowledged each other with brief nods before D'Age spoke up.
"I think it might be best if we moved the herd and ourselves to the nearest high ground," he said.
"Miguel feels the same," Aronson replied, "but of course on high ground we'll be exposed to the danger of lightning strikes."
Miguel waved off that point.
"That is a concern, Aronson, but a very small one. There is a chance of being hit by lightning but a certainty that many of these animals will drown, and us with them, if this valley floods."
The storm seemed to emphasize his point by unleashing a cannonade of thunder and lightning at that moment.
"How far is the nearest town or settlement; do we know?" Miguel asked. A cold breeze started up, bending long stalks of grass and a few scattered saplings to the west as the giant cell began to draw air into itself, as if to fill its lungs. The cattle, he noticed, had picked up their pace, trotting now, to match the increased urgency of their protesting calls.
"There is nothing close, nothing on high ground for a good twelve or thirteen miles," Aronson said, without consulting a map. "There's a small crossroads village there. I don't know whether it's on the floodplain, but the land does appear to rise in that direction."
He dipped his head to the north.
"Then we should hurry," Miguel said, looking to D'Age for support. He often found the younger Mormon to be the more cautious and reasonable of the two, perhaps as a result of the encounter at Crockett. Miguel snapped his reins and sent Flossie forward at a canter to match pace with the herd and the other riders.
The storm front passed over the sun then, snuffing it out and causing an almost startling drop in temperature. The first real crack of thunder split the sky, and the cattle started moving at speed, the drumming of their hooves becoming a frenzied tattoo. Another quick glance across the vast, seething river of mottled brown cowhide and bobbing longhorns found Sofia and Trudi turned around in their saddles, watching the storm race toward them. His daughter caught him staring at her and gave him a thumbs-up. Whips cracked and outriders yelled, attempting to keep the mob together. Adam and Orin galloped past him, doing their bit. It was no small thing herding thousands of cattle that were already spooked and this close to stampeding in panic. He wished he was over with Sofia. And Trudi, too. She was unusual. Not at all right, yet he could not help but warm to her. The Mormons were good men and women, but by the Blessed Virgin they were a tightly stitched bunch, and Miguel, for all his own hard exterior, did enjoy the company of people who knew how to enjoy themselves.
CRACK!
The flash of lightning and the hard-edged peal of thunder were nearly simultaneous. He felt rain on his face, a few droplets at first but quickening to a downpour that slapped down on them with real force. He was drenched through within seconds by the cold, stinging rain. And then it stopped abruptly, and a sickly green light lay over the valley floor, flattening the scene, as though he were riding into a photograph in a book.
Uh-oh, he thought.
The first hailstone fell as a single white rock, bouncing off Flossie's sweat-streaked shoulders. He just had time to hunker down and cinch the drawstring on his Stetson so that it sat tightly before a huge white fist smashed down on them all, a sudden roaring storm of ice that slammed into the earth, raising a shrieking, braying protest from the cattle, and nearly unseating the rider in front of Miguel with shock.
The vaquero spurred forward at a gallop, ignoring the stinging, burning pain of an Old Testament stoning from above. He recognized D'Age ahead of him, about to tumble from the saddle. Flossie was streaking forward at her top speed now, and Miguel was drawing on decades of horsemanship to maintain his balance. He drew up beside the Mormon and saw the fear in his face, the terror of having lost control of a big beast, compounded by the pounding riot of the stampede a few feet away.
Yes, the cattle had gone over now. No longer a controlled herd but a fear-shot panicking mob, barreling forward, plowing under any of their own number that fell, their cries like the horns of a thousand ghost trains. Miguel leaned across the gap between his horse and D'Age's, precariously teetering on the edge of his balance. He grabbed at the other man's reins and took a firm grip on the first attempt, applying hard but steady pressure, letting the animal know that it was under the control of a higher power. Calming it. Steadying it.