Stanhope threw Erin up onto the back of his horse as though she weighed little more than a sack of flour. When he’d climbed aboard the horse himself, he glanced over his shoulder at her, grinned, and slid his Colt from its holster. He held it up in front of her face, taunting her, then wedged it somewhere in front of him, likely behind his belt buckle.
Out of her reach.
She didn’t care. She didn’t have the energy to try to kill him again so soon after her first attempt had gone awry and he’d taught her another lesson. She was sore deep in her womb. Fatigue lay heavy in every fiber of her being.
Still, behind the pain and fatigue, rage smoldered like the ominous, unseen heat that remained in the wake of a deadly wildfire. Threatening a blowup and an even worse firestorm than that which had come before.
The gang rode out across the mesa and then down a switchback trail along its western side. Erin leaned forward against the broad, sweaty, smelly back of the man who’d killed her son and raped her and beat her, and she fell not so much asleep as into a semi-awake trance.
She was only vaguely aware of the rugged country sliding around her. She was more aware of her half-waking dream of somehow slitting Stanhope’s throat from ear to ear with a sharp knife as he stared up at her, screaming, pleading for his life, and squealing his regret over taking that of her boy.
The waking dream caused her upper lip to curl slightly as her head bounced against Stanhope’s back. It was a very faint hope buried deep in her soul, but a hope just the same—similar to that heat festering beneath the forest-like duff of her nearly unbearable torment, threatening a blowup.
The ride seemed everlasting.
The gang stopped a few times to rest their horses, but mostly they continued heading straight west—walking, trotting, galloping. Walking, trotting, galloping. Stopping for another short time, passing a bottle around, laughing and cajoling each other, then climbing back into the leather and walking, trotting, and galloping their horses by turns. Saving them for the long pull they still had ahead of them.
Erin gritted her teeth and endured, her dream of Stanhope’s death the only thing keeping her soul even halfway intact.
The sun dropped. Cool darkness came, a relief from the searing sun.
Erin lifted her head when she felt Stanhope’s grulla slowing. Lights lay ahead, sort of shifting back and forth along the wagon trail they were on. Then she made out a log ranch portal adorned with elk antlers and a board across the top into which WAYLON HUMPHREYS BOX BAR B RANCH—COOL SPRING CREEK had been burned.
Stanhope and Erin passed beneath the portal and rode on into the ranch yard. The gang followed, hooves drumming. There were a couple of barns and several corrals and small log buildings whose windows were dark. The main house sat on a small rise, lamplight glowing behind most of its sashed, first-floor windows.
It was a small ranch, Erin saw. The buildings, including what appeared to be the main house, were crude, mud-chinked log affairs. There was no bunkhouse. She could smell wood smoke and the smell of cattle and pine resin from the dark forest that pushed up all around the buildings. There was the faint murmur of a creek, though she couldn’t see the stream for the darkness relieved by only the sparkling starlight.
Erin’s heart squeezed, and she felt her lips pinch together as she looked around at the crude but homey place. It was the kind of place that she and Jim’s father, Daniel, had once wanted for themselves. But then Dan’s father had died and passed the mercantile on to them, and they’d had no choice but to stay in town and try to give the business a go.
But they’d still hoped of one day having their own little ranch—a shotgun ranch—somewhere out in the piney foothills of the Big Horns, where the creeks ran cool and clear, and the nights smelled like wine.
Stanhope reined the gulla in before the main house. There was no porch, just a Z-frame door banded with iron. A hide-bottom chair sat to the right of the door, between it and a wooden washstand on which a rusty tin basin sat. A hand brush and a small, cracked mirror hung from nails over the stand. A rain barrel stood left of the stand, half-covered with a wooden lid.
A shadow moved in one of the windows. The curtain over the window opened slightly and a face appeared. After a few seconds, the curtain slid back in place, and the door opened with a wooden scrape. A tall, slightly bent man in an underwear shirt and suspenders came out, stooping beneath the door’s low frame. He held a shotgun in his right hand.
Erin saw the curtain in the window part again. Another, narrower face appeared in it, silhouetted against the lamplight in the room behind the person looking out.
“Help you fellas?” asked the man with the shotgun.
Neither Stanhope nor any of the gang said anything for a time. Erin could hear the revolting, liquid sound of Stanhope moving tobacco around in his mouth before he leaned out to his right and spat into the dirt. Wiping his lips with the back of his left hand, he drawled, “This your place?”
“That’s right. Mine and my boy’s.”
“You be Humphreys?”
“That’s right. Who’re you?”
“The man that’s gonna kill you and your boy and bed down in your place for the night.”
Humphreys stared up at Stanhope. Erin could see the lamplight from the windows flanking him glittering in his eyes. He looked uncertain, beetling his heavy brows, not sure if the ugly stranger before him was funning with him or not.
As tired and hopeless as she felt, Erin’s heart leapt in her chest. “Oh, god,” she moaned. “No. No!”
She raised a fist and hammered it against Stanhope’s back. Too late. She heard the blast of his shotgun, saw the flash reflect off the cabin and the wide-open eyes of the man standing before the grulla. Erin rammed her fist again between Stanhope’s shoulder blades to little effect. The killer laughed and crouched and the shotgun thundered one more time, the grulla skitter-hopping beneath him. The echo of the shot off the cabin was like a punch to Erin’s face.
“Oh, god!” Erin cried when she heard the thump of a heavy body hitting the ground.
Just then the grulla turned sharply. She wasn’t holding on to Stanhope or his saddle. She was flung sideways off the horse’s right hip. As she piled up in the dirt before the cabin, she heard a boy cry, “Pa! Pa!”
In the corner of her vision, she saw a figure run out of the cabin. Then Stanhope and several of the other gang members opened up with their pistols. The guns flashed like lightning, the booms echoing loudly around the ranch yard. Erin flung her face down in the dirt and buried her head in her arms, sobbing.
“No,” she cried so softly that she could barely hear it herself. “No, no…no…”
She must have passed out for a time, hearing voices only distantly. She woke to someone prodding her belly with a boot toe.
Opening her eyes, she saw that the horses were gone. Shadows moved in the cabin windows. Men talked and laughed loudly, drunkenly. Erin could smell meat cooking and tobacco smoke wafting out the cabin’s front door.
She looked up to see Lester Stanhope, Clell’s brother, standing over her, smoking a cigarette. He blew smoke out his slender nostrils, then glanced behind him and said to someone in front of the cabin, “Get her cleaned up.”
“Why should I do it?” It was the faintly defiant voice of the whore, Trixie Tate.
“’Cause Clell says so.” Lester turned away, taking another drag from his cigarette. “She’s gonna have a job of work to do tonight.”
He drifted into the cabin, chuckling.
The next morning, as they rode along the shoulder of a formation known as Anvil Ridge, on their way to try to break the trail of the Vultures who’d likely angled through the mountains two days before slightly north of the lawmen’s position, Dusty Mason cast another wary glance over his right shoulder. He peered up the sparsely forested, tan slope that rose in the north toward the rocky, anvil-shaped crest of the mountain.
“What is it?” Spurr said, riding to his left. “That’s the third time in about fifteen minutes you looked back. You think the Vultures cut around behind us, or you got the jitters over some jealous husband?”
Mason was on edge, all right. But there was no jealous husband. He wasn’t that kind of jake, and Spurr knew it. The old federal lawman just tried to get Mason’s goat whenever he had the opportunity, which was pretty much always.
Ignoring the older man, as was Mason’s habit, he continued looking up the long, gradual slope that was the light brown of a mule deer’s coat and sparsely stippled with firs and cedars. He felt as though there were a pair of eyes up there somewhere, staring down at him.
Occasionally, in the periphery of his vision, he thought he spied movement, but when he turned to look, as he was doing now, there was nothing. Maybe a pinecone falling from a fir bough. Maybe a cedar branch bobbing lightly with a breeze. But in the corner of his eye, he’d thought he’d seen a rider—a dark figure on a dark horse—moving amongst the trees. Moving along with Mason and the other lawmen. But furtive. Very furtive.
Finally, Mason brought his gaze back down and over to Spurr riding on the opposite side of the slope from him. “You don’t feel like we’re bein’ shadowed?”
Spurr cast a cautious glance up the slope, deep grooves cutting into the leathery skin around his blue eyes. “Now that you mention it…”
“You see somethin’?”
“No. I haven’t seen nothin’. But I got a little cool feelin’ right between my shoulders, in the middle of my back. I been thinkin’ it’s just the sweat on this old shirt, but now when I dwell on it, it feels like a coin laid against my skin. And that feelin’ usually means somethin’.”
“Maybe Stanhope sent someone to double back and set up an ambush.” Mason heard the doubt in his own words. It was a reasonable concern, but he just didn’t think that the shadow he kept glimpsing—or thought he was glimpsing—had anything to do with Stanhope’s gang.
Damn annoying, though.
Spurr ordered the other lawmen riding along behind him and Mason to keep their eyes peeled for a possible ambush, and the party continued around the shoulder of the hill, until they dropped down into a narrow canyon on the northwestern edge of it. They reined their mounts down at the bottom of a sandy wash in which slightly charred stones encircled a low mound of gray ashes and a black chunk of half-burned cedar.
Spurr turned to Mason. “Climb down and see how long them ashes been there.”
Mason gave the older man an indignant look. “You’re the tracker.”
Spurr sighed. “I outrank you, Sheriff. And I’m old. Each time I swing down from ole Cochise’s back might be my last. Now, git down there and poke your finger in them ashes.”
“Ah, Christ, I’ll do it.” Calico Strang swung down from his white-dappled chestnut, cursing under his breath.
He bit off his right glove and, holding his horse’s reins in his other hand, squatted over the fire ring and poked two fingers into the ashes. “Shit!” He pulled both appendages out quickly, snarling and rubbing the tips of both fingers across his checked trousers.
The others laughed. Spurr scowled down at the young Pinkerton. “Now, that was the most cork-headed thing I seen you do yet.”
Ed Gentry, sitting his horse beside that of his fellow territorial marshal, Bill Stockton, said, “I think we oughta start callin’ him Jim Bowie.”
“Mister Jim Bowie,” added Stockton, shaking his head and laughing.
Strang poked both fingers in his mouth and snarled at the others.
“All right, all right—joke’s over,” Mason grouched, soberly looking around. “Judging by them apples over yonder, and them tracks around the fire ring, it wasn’t no gang that stopped here last night. It was just one man. One man, one horse.”
Spurr said, “You act like you might know who’s makin’ you spooky.”
“Hell, I don’t know. I just know we gained a shadow somewhere along the trail. I’m thinkin’ it must be one of the Vultures.”
“What would be the point?” asked the second Pinkerton, Web Mitchell. “I mean, if he ain’t bushwhacked us yet, what’s he waitin’ for?”
“And why would ole Clell only send one man back?” added Stockton, lifting his head to look a little anxiously around at the surrounding forested ridges.
“Who knows?” Spurr, too, was looking around and working his lower lip between his teeth. “One reason I and no other lawdog been able to run that pack to ground is they always seem to do the unexpected. Clell don’t always do what you think he’s gonna do. In fact, he hardly ever does.” He hacked a wad of phlegm from his throat and spat it toward the fire ring. “I’ll be damn glad to either kill that son of a bitch once and for all, or see him in leg irons.”
Gentry removed his hat from his head and ran a red bandanna around the inside of the sweatband. “You know, fellas, if there is indeed someone shadowin’ us, it don’t have to be one of the Vultures. Could just be a line rider from one of the big ranches in these parts keepin’ an eye on us, makin’ sure we ain’t throwin’ long loops over their beeves with the intention of sellin’ ’em to a crooked Injun agent over Dakota way.”
Stockton nodded. “I’m gonna throw in with Ed on that one. He can’t play stud for shit, and the whores in Casper say he hasn’t gotten his pecker up since the end of the Civil War, but he occasionally comes up with a good idea.”
“Why, thank you, Bill.”
Web Mitchell chuckled at the two old-timers.
Spurr looked at Mason. “That’s likely the best explanation.”
“Yeah, pro’bly.” Mason wasn’t convinced.
Spurr canted his head to one side, and narrowed a shrewd eye. “You’re thinkin’ it’s the hombre who kept your oysters out of the fire back in Willow City, ain’t ya?”
“I reckon I am.”
“What’s that?” asked Web.
“Nothin’,” said Spurr.
“Let’s go.” Mason booted his horse on across the wash.
Behind him, Spurr said, “Hold on.”
Mason halted his grulla and gave the older lawman an impatient look.
Spurr canted his head up the wash, which carved a narrow gap through the northern mountains. “If memory serves, Sweetwater is on the backside of this range.”
“So it is,” said Mason.
“If the Vultures rode through where you think they rode through, they would have rode through Sweetwater.”
Mason thought about it. Spurr was right. The sheriff felt a little annoyed that the older lawman knew more about Mason’s own territory than Mason himself did.
“So?”
“If they rode through there,” said Gentry, catching Spurr’s drift, his eyes gaining a serious cast, “they might have wreaked holy havoc. They tend to do that to towns.”
“Or, hell,” said Web Mitchell, smoothing his ostentatious handlebar mustache with two black-gloved fingers. “Maybe they liked it so much they decided to stay.”
Spurr turned to Mason. “Let’s you and me head up the wash and check in on Sweetwater. If nothin’ else, we’ll pick up Stanhope’s trail there.”
Mason felt frustration tugging on him like two opposing ropes around his neck. He looked up the wash, then toward the forested ridge rising on the other side of the canyon.
A game trail angled up the ridge through the conifers and aspens, skirting a small talus slide and curving around a lightning-topped pine. It beckoned him onward, farther west toward Utah where the Vultures were likely headed. Sidetracking to Sweetwater held little appeal for him. The Vultures had probably ridden straight on through, which meant Mason would only be wasting time, letting the outlaws who’d made a fool out of him get farther and farther way.
Farther and farther out of his jurisdiction.
Spurr was right, though. Damn the old lawdog. But that’s one reason why Mason had wanted him around. To talk sense the mossyhorned federal had acquired through long experience, to keep Mason from becoming his own worst enemy in his haste to run the Vultures to ground and assuage his badly battered pride.
He turned to the others. “You fellas keep riding west while Spurr and I head on up to Sweetwater. Stanhope just might hole up somewhere around here to rest his horses for a day or two, so you might run into him. If you do, don’t engage him till Spurr and I get there.”
Mason winced against his frustration and booted the grulla on up the wash.
Spurr glanced at the fire ring. “Keep an eye out for our friend there, boys.” He looked at Strang. “How’re your fingers, Calico? Maybe you oughta put some lard on ’em.”
“Fuck you, old man!”
“You’re purty, but you ain’t that purty,” said Spurr, booting Cochise after Mason.
The others chuckled as they started up the forested ridge.