Trent stood, cursing his luck and poor marksmanship. There was a sick feeling in his stomach. He had done the one thing he couldn’t do. He’d missed.
From behind him came a stampede of sound and he whirled to see Chico and Katie riding into the clearing at the top of the bald knob.
“You made time, Chico.” He was still panting from the run and ashamed he’d missed the shots. He silently sent a thought of apology to the captured girl.
“I heard shots.”
He spoke in a disgusted voice. “I missed him, Chico. I had him and I missed.”
“Shit.” Chico’s fervent oath said it all. Then, he brightened. “The girl is alive?”
He didn’t know how long. “So far.”
“This is good. Starking is coming behind us, and he’s going to kill somebody. If not the man we are after, maybe us. He is mad, my friend.”
“I don’t blame him.” He’d already been moving toward the trail down the mountain as they talked, and Katie was continuing to push him in that direction.
“Go. Go,” she cried.
He grabbed Chico by the arm and pointed at the trail. “Where does that trail come out?”
Chico looked down at the trail, and then looked around more closely at the mountain. Abruptly, he grinned. “The trail he is on has cliffs on both sides. He has to stay on it until the other side of the mountain. There is a small park that the trail empties into.”
Mistake number two. “How long?” Trent was relieving Cruz of his favorite leather riata as he talked.
Cruz watched him curiously. “Couple of hours.”
He put the rope around his chest like an ammo bandoleer. “How long to go over the top?”
“For a bird? Not long. But you can’t do it, my friend, even with my fine rope.”
“If I can make it over, I can be waiting for him at the clearing on the other side.” He abruptly turned to his friend. “Get behind him, Chico. Push him. Not too hard, but stay close enough that he knows you’re there. Watch he doesn’t double back on you.”
He disappeared into the trees before Chico could answer.
9
“Chico?” Katie’s voice was apprehensive. “What if the man we’re chasing is Gunny? To me, it’s the only thing about this that makes any sense. He’s the only person who’s unaccounted for.”
It did make sense. Chico sat looking at her, fear in his eyes for the first time. It might make a difference. Could Trent kill his friend? Or, would it slow his hand enough to be the instrument of his death.
Shaking his head, and slapping his horse, Chico Cruz went helling down the mountain, making more noise than he’d made in years. Katie was right behind him, pulling the packhorse. They would push him, all right. Maybe even catch him.
10
Trent stood at the edge of a clearing, half bent over at the waist, holding his side and taking ragged, deep breaths. His hands were torn and bloody, and there was a long gash down his left side, where he had slipped on a jagged edge of limestone. His hat had gone fluttering down a sheer precipice, somewhere behind him.
There was no sign of the man who’d abducted the girl at the Springs. He breathed a silent prayer that he hadn’t stopped along the way, and prayed that Chico had pushed the man hard enough so that he would be careless.
He didn’t have long to wait. With a rustle of leaves and branches, a man rode out of the forest and into the clearing. The man was looking behind him, his face hidden in shadows. It was time.
“Hold it.” Trent’s voice was level and cold.
“Sure.” The man turned in the saddle and faced him. “How you doin’, boy?”
“Gunny?” He almost dropped his rifle as he looked back down the trail. “Did you see…?” He suddenly became aware of the girl struggling to get up from where the man had dumped her in the weeds along the edge of the trail.
Gunny sat facing him, hands folded across the pommel of his saddle—and finally Trent knew the truth. “You.”
“I reckon.” Gunny just sat, smiling at him.
He was speechless for a moment. In all his wildest dreams, he couldn’t figure this. Then… “My God. Why, Gunny?”
“I don’t owe you anything, boy. Least of all, explanations.”
He almost didn’t see the shotgun coming up in Gunny’s hands. Throwing himself to the side, he palmed his revolver. The roar of the shotgun was deafening as the shot went high over his shoulder. A couple of the pellets hit him like bee stings. Trent’s first shot hit the action of Gunny’s shotgun, splintering the stock—the second took the noncom high in the shoulder, punching him out of the saddle.
Gunny sat up groggily in the grass and stuck his finger in the hole in his shoulder. “You like to shot the lights out of me, boy.”
Trent just stood there, his mind still trying to comprehend what his eyes and ears were telling him.
“It’s him, John.” Katie’s soft voice came to him from behind.
He nodded sadly. “I know.”
“Take me to the shade, boy.” Gunny coughed, spat blood. “I could die in this heat.”
Trent walked over and kicked the shotgun away. Reaching down, he relieved the man of his handgun and knife, as well. Pulling him to his feet, he helped his old friend to a pine tree, leaning him against the trunk.
Katie led the girl away. She was quaking, sobbing and cursing in the same breath.
Gunny looked at him with guarded eyes, still trying to bluff it out. “Why’d you shoot me, boy?”
“You had the girl, you were—” He stopped.
Metal and wood clanked at his feet, as Katie calmly walked away again. Looking down, he saw a pile of tent pegs and rope. Half hidden in the tangle of rope was a branding iron. A small blackened cross adorning the end of it.
His eyes slowly came up to meet Gunny’s gaze. “All those women. Why Gunny?”
Gunny slid down the trunk of the tree, oblivious to the blood seeping from his shoulder wound. “What difference does it make, boy? I just do it. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t. None of them women was any good. At first, they act as if they don’t want it. But they do at the end, they all do. They do anything I want.”
“Even my wife?”
Gunny glanced away. “Now I didn’t know that at the time. I’m sorry about that one.”
“You’re sorry.” His voice became dead and lifeless. “What about Saints and Hobbs?”
Gunny shrugged, then grimaced in pain.
The shot startled all of them. Bark exploded from the tree next to Gunny’s head, and Trent threw himself to the side. Coming up off the ground, he saw Cruz taking a rifle away from Starking’s daughter. Whipping back around, his hand streaking for his gun, all he saw was empty space.
Gunny was gone.
Standing in the sunlit clearing, Trent looked past the girls at Cruz. The man shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “I was watching you, not the girl. I didn’t think.”
Starking’s daughter tried to explain. “I’m sorry. I was just mad, I—”
Katie grabbed the girl’s shirtfront. “Don’t you realize what you have done? He’s loose again.”
“Katherine.” His voice was calm as his eyes searched the trees. “It’s nobody’s fault. We all messed up on this one.” He turned to the girl. “Are you all right, Miss Starking?”
The girl nodded curtly. “Yeah, I’m fine. Stupid, but fine.”
“Trent.” Cruz had moved across the clearing. “He got his rifle and knife.”
He was already thinking of the trail. A man on foot would be a lot harder to trail. “I noticed. He must not have been hurt as much as I thought.”