Chapter 8
Louisa trotted the pinto and her five packhorses down a shallow rise. At the bottom of the rise, she stopped and glanced over her shoulder. The redhead was not behind her.
At least, the redhead wasn’t in sight behind her.
Louisa sighed, waited, tapping her left thumb against her saddle horn, looking around. She was in relatively open country now—the heart of a massive prairie, low, rolling hills carpeted in the fresh ermine of last night’s snow. Fawn-colored weeds poked up above the fresh coat of white, like a man’s tawny beard stubble through shaving soap.
The sun was high and bright, but it was also the color of unpolished brass, a customary hue for this time of year. A depressing hue, to her mind. Depressing, too, was the vast, lonely prairie over which shone the occasional small clump of grazing cattle and the straight line of some rancher’s barbed wire fence, some artist’s ever-thinning pencil line foreshortening into the distance of a vast, empty canvas.
Louisa hipped around in her saddle to cast a look over her shoulder. Just then a lone rider, not the girl, appeared at the crest of a distant hogback. It appeared to be a man. He continued riding up over the top of the hill and then down the near side, heading in Louisa’s direction.
Fifteen or twenty feet down the slope of that hill jutted a single, spindly cottonwood. The rider drew rein beside the cottonwood, pulling his reins up tight against his chest. He was a good two hundred yards away, but Louisa thought he stiffened in his saddle a little. He sidled his horse closer to the spindly cottonwood, as though he thought he could merge his figure with that of the tree, and Louisa wouldn’t see him.
“Oh, but I do see you,” Louisa said softly to herself, narrowing her eyes at the distant rider. “I saw you back a ways . . . and I see you now.”
When she’d first spied the man, she’d wondered if he were trailing her and the redhead. Or maybe he was only heading in the same direction. She’d kept an eye on him for several miles as he’d pretty much matched Louisa’s and the redhead’s pace, staying about a quarter mile behind. Now, however, he’d gotten closer. He must have gigged up his horse when he’d been out of Louisa’s view, on the far side of a bluff well behind them now.
He must be intending to overtake them.
Louisa’s pulse quickened slightly. But only slightly. He was only one man, after all. She’d dealt with such men before. In fact, five such men lay slumped over the saddles of the five horses tied tail to tail behind her.
Louisa swung her head around to stare off over her right shoulder. Still no sign of the girl. What was her name again?
Toni?
Louisa cursed. She dropped the reins of the lead packhorse, hoping it was trained to stay with its reins, then swung the pinto around and galloped up and over the top of the low rise down which she’d just ridden. At the bottom of the rise, the girl was having a devil of a time trying to mount the calico. She had her left foot in the left stirrup, and she was hopping on her other foot as the calico turned slowly away from her, a devilish gleam in its eyes.
As the calico turned more sharply, snorting playfully, Toni gave a loud, groaning cry as her left foot slipped out of the stirrup. She fell in a heap. The calico gave its tail a satisfied switch then casually dropped its head and began to crop grass growing up around a cedar post from which three nasty-looking strands of barbed wire stretched.
Louisa reined up before the girl, who, sitting on her butt in the snow, leaning back on her hands, looked up at her angrily, narrowing one eye.
“He stopped to eat grass,” she said bitterly. “I pulled his head up firmly, just like you said to do last time he pulled that. He didn’t lift his head a bit. It was his rear end he lifted. He bucked me off! Then, when I tried to mount again—”
“That was quite a dance you two were performing.” Louisa leaned forward, arms crossed on her saddle horn. She rolled her eyes slightly right to see the rider she’d seen before now riding slowly down the hill, heading toward her.
“He seemed to be enjoying it,” the girl said of the calico.
Louisa sighed and stepped down from the pinto’s back. She grabbed the calico’s reins and pulled its head up sharply by the bridle’s cheek strap. Chewing a mouthful of grass, the calico stared at her with a contrary gleam in its eyes. Louisa swatted its snout with her open palm.
“Don’t think you’re going to defy me, you cayuse!” she warned.
Toni heaved herself to her feet. “He’s contrary.”
“Of course he’s contrary. He’s male. Just like males of the human race, he’s dumb and stubborn. You have to show him who’s boss. Once he knows, when you tell him to jump, he’ll ask you how high. Until then, he’ll think he can do whatever he wants to you, and he’ll laugh while he’s doing it.”
Again, Louisa swatted the calico’s snout. The horse jerked its head up and whickered. The contrary gleam in its eyes disappeared and it stared at her slightly askance, warily, ears straight up.
“Mount your horse,” Louisa ordered the girl.
The girl gave a grunt as she hiked her skirts and poked her left foot into the left stirrup. Holding the horn with her left hand, she swung smoothly up into the leather.
She looked down at Louisa and shook her long red hair back from her face. “You know men right well.”
“Well enough to know the lot of ’em deserve to be gut-shot and left to howl.”
“Wow!” Toni exclaimed. “You really don’t like men. Is it because of what they did to your family?”
“Be quiet.”
Louisa glanced at the rider still moving toward them down the slope of the hill to the northeast.
“I read about that,” the girl persisted. “In a newspaper story about you and Mr. Prophet. I’m sorry about how your whole family was—”
Louisa snapped a sharp-eyed look of pure rage at the girl, hardening her jaws. “Shut up about that!”
The words were like a slap, causing Toni to lurch back in her saddle.
Louisa turned again to the rider. He was coming along slowly, hesitantly, head cocked to one side, holding his reins up close to his chest, clad in a bulky gray winter coat. He wore a broad-brimmed hat tied to his head by a plaid muffler, which was knotted beneath his chin.
Toni turned to follow Louisa’s gaze. She gasped slightly and said, “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know.” Louisa looked sharply up at the girl. “You think you can stay in that saddle, or do I need to tie you to it?”
“I’m going to try!” the girl said in exasperation, her pale cheeks, already rosy from the cold, turning as red as apples. She had a temper almost to match Louisa’s, but the Vengeance Queen stifled any empathy she might have felt for the girl.
“See that you do.”
As Toni gave an enraged chuff, like a young student unduly harassed by her schoolteacher, Louisa swung away and mounted the pinto.
“Come on!” The Vengeance Queen put spurs to her mount and loped up the hill, hearing the girl behind her clucking to her horse.
Fifteen minutes later, Louisa and her charge rode through a fringe of winter-naked trees near the edge of a frozen slough ringed with cattails. Louisa glanced behind. The rider was still on the other side of the last rise they’d crested. He wouldn’t be for long. She’d been keeping a close watch on the man, for he was shadowing them, staying about a city block behind but slowly closing the gap.
Louisa turned to Toni, said, “We’re going to take a little detour,” then swung her mount off the trail’s left side and into the trees.
“What? What’re you—?”
Louisa pressed two fingers to her lips, scowling at the girl, and booted her pinto deeper into the trees, climbing a low hill. Another glance behind her told her that Toni had managed to get the calico off the trail and was shambling along with the packhorses, clinging to her saddle horn but looking as though the next stiff breeze would fling her from her saddle.
When they were roughly thirty feet from the trail, Louisa said, “This is far enough.”
She stopped and curveted the pinto, so that it stood parallel with the hill and the trail below.
Toni stopped her horse several feet down the slope from Louisa.
“Come on,” Louisa said, tossing her chin. “Get behind me.”
“I don’t understand. What’re you—?”
“You don’t need to understand,” Louisa told her sharply. “All you need to do is what I say and keep your mouth shut.”
The girl drew a deep breath, averted her offended gaze, and batted her heels against the calico’s ribs. She put the calico up the slope above and behind Louisa, stopped, and turned the horse back around until it and she were facing Louisa, who was looking down toward the trail and the white expanse of the slough beyond it.
Louisa dropped the reins of the lead packhorse then removed her right mitten and shoved it into her coat pocket. She reached forward with her right hand and shucked her Winchester from its scabbard. Quietly, she pumped a cartridge into the action then off-cocked the hammer and rested the rifle across her saddle horn.
She thrust her index finger through the trigger guard, ignoring the sting of the cold air—it must have been down around ten degrees—and waited.
Shortly, the thuds of horse hooves sounded on the chill air. Growing gradually louder, they came from the right. Louisa saw the rider moving down the hill, just now entering the trees. Horse and rider were obscured by the bur oaks and box elders. The hoof thuds grew louder and louder until the man was nearly directly below where Louisa waited with the girl and the five horses packing the dead cutthroats.
The man had his eyes to the ground. When he reached the place where Louisa and the girl had left the trail, he drew back on the reins of his apple bay and said, “Whoa, now—whoa.” His voice was clear in the crisp, clear air.
Holding his reins taut, he leaned out slightly from his saddle’s left side, eyes scouring the trail. He turned his head toward the slope rising with the trees, following the scuff marks Louisa’s horses had left in the freshly fallen snow.
When he turned his face up toward where Louisa waited on her pinto, rifle resting on her saddle horn, surprise flickered across the stranger’s eyes behind a pair of small, steel-framed spectacles. “Oh, uh . . . hello, there.”