Chapter 3
Thunder rumbled but no storm was approaching. The Arizona skies were as clear as polished blue glass in a corner of which the sun hung like a vast bell of molten gold.
Colter Farrow slowed his horse and looked around, frowning.
As the rumble grew around him, as though an army were descending on him, a wet snake slithered in his belly. He could feel his coyote dun stallion tense his muscles beneath the saddle. The mount’s name, Northwest, stemmed from the direction the prized mount always used to point his head while grazing back home in the mountain pastures of the Lunatic Range.
The horse lifted its head, sniffing the air, the cinnamon mane buffeting softly in the hot, dry Arizona breeze. It whickered edgily deep in its chest.
Colter leaned forward to pat the right withers reassuringly. “Easy, Northwest. Easy, now—might only be cowpunchers hazing beeves to fresh pastures . . .”
The redheaded gunslinger’s own belly knew it wasn’t true. Colter had been on the dodge too long for his instincts not to have grown as sharp as a freshly edged Green River knife.
The rumbling grew louder and louder until Colter could feel the ground vibrating beneath Northwest’s shod hooves. Colter looked around wildly. When he saw a churning cloud of tan dust rise from the incline to his left, from below the long, sage-and-cactus-spiked bench he’d been traversing for most of the past two hours, that snake in his belly coiled again quickly.
“Go, boy!” he yelled, nudging the stallion’s loins with his spurs. “He-yahhh, boy. He-yahhhh! Split the wind, Northwest!”
He’d just spied a whole army of riders exploding up onto the bench on his left, a good dozen men spread out side by side and silhouetted by the brassy sun, as he swung the coyote dun hard right.
“There!” one of his pursuers shouted. “There! There! There! ”
Leaning low over the coyote dun’s buffeting mane, Colter said, “Well, so much for my original theory. They’re not cowpunchers after all!” He glanced over his shoulder as the swarm of silhouetted riders, the sunlight glinting off their sidearms and rifles, bounded after him, within a hundred yards and closing.
The redheaded pistoleer didn’t have time to count his shadowers, but he was sure there were a dozen or more men in hot pursuit. A couple snapped shots at him but they were still too far away and moving too hard for accuracy though there was always a chance of a lucky shot.
Colter kept his head down and gave his own mount free rein, and together they stormed across the barrel of the bench, heading for the low country. Colter might have been outnumbered, but he had a good horse, one of the best mounts that had ever been raised in the Loonies, as the Lunatics were locally called.
His pursuers had obviously been galloping after Colter for quite a distance, climbing up from the lower desert at a hard run. That meant that not only was Colter likely riding the best horse on the bench at the moment, but his mount had a fully stoked firebox, as all morning Colter had been holding the frisky beast to nothing faster than a trot, saving it for just such a situation as this.
Colter tossed another glance behind him. Sure enough, he and Northwest were pulling ahead.
“Good boy, Northwest,” Colter said, keeping his head low, his voice quavering as the horse’s scissoring hooves sawed away at the ground. “You’re beatin’ them scalawags. What we’ll do is drop into the lowlands yonder then climb that next bench to the north. That’s a steep climb over there, and I’ll bet silver dollars to horse fritters that that will be the end of our shadowers. They’ll likely get a bad case of homesickness after that climb, and we’ll be on our way to Mexico while they’re back wherever they came from, pinchin’ the parlor girls an’ throwing back shots of Taos lightnin’!”
That last word had just made its way out of his mouth before Colter’s lower jaw dropped nearly to the wash-worn red bandanna twisted into a knot around his neck. Either a cloud had just pushed over the bench before him, or yet another group of riders was storming toward him, up the north side of the bench and cutting off his escape route.
Colter blinked.
His heart thudded.
It was the latter, all right. The silhouettes of individual pursuers took shape in Colter’s field of vision. Like the first group, this bunch was also riding stirrup to stirrup, dusters buffeting out around them like the wings of giant birds, their dusty hat brims bending in the wind of their ground-hammering passage.
They were straight out ahead of the redhead and his galloping coyote dun, maybe seventy yards away and closing fast.
“Whoahhhhh!” Colter yelled, drawing back sharply on Northwest’s reins.
Ahead, riders stormed toward him.
Behind, riders stormed toward him.
Quickly, Colter looked around. He had two directions in which to ride—to the east or the west. He couldn’t ride east because of a deep cut in the bench in that direction. There was only west, straight on up the gradually rising bench.
Reining the coyote dun sharply left, Colter poked the horse again with his spurs and whipped his rein ends against the mount’s left hip, though he hadn’t needed to do any coaxing. This wasn’t the dun’s first rodeo.
He and the horse’s rider had had plenty of bounty hunters and lawmen after them, after Colter had killed Bill Rondo, the rogue sheriff of Sapinero in the Colorado Territory. Rondo had killed Colter’s foster father, Trace Cassidy, and then, when Colter had ridden to Sapinero to investigate, Rondo had used his legendary branding iron to burn a large, ugly S into Colter’s left cheek. The “Mark of Sapinero” some called it, indicating the bearer of the brand was no longer wanted back in Rondo’s territory.
In Colter’s case, most deemed it the “Mark of Satan.”
Others, especially those who’d seen the young, left-handed, redheaded, scar-faced firebrand at work with his guns, had dubbed Colter a redheaded devil, one with a good working knowledge of the old Remington .44 in the holster positioned for the cross-draw on the left-hander’s right hip, and the old-model Henry Tyler .44 rifle in the scabbard jutting up from under his left thigh.
Colter’s criminal reputation had grown when Bill Rondo had framed him for the murder of two deputy U.S. marshals. Now, here he was, two years later, on the run once more with a whole horde of bounty hunters or lawmen—possibly both—galloping so close behind him now that one of their bullets curled the air just off his right ear before shrieking off a rock dead ahead of him.
That caused him to flinch and for his heart to race even faster.
He glanced behind.
Again, he’d opened up a gap between himself and his pursuers. He’d been right. He had the best horse of the lot. Still, the horde’s foremost riders were only sixty or so yards behind him, and judging by how low they sat in their saddles, avoiding the wind, and by how they were spurring their mounts and whipping the horses with their reins, they were damned determined.
Still, Colter’s heart was buoyed by the fact that with every long stretch of Northwest’s slender but muscular legs, he and the coyote dun were widening the distance between him and the gun wolves.
But, then . . .
“Oh no,” Colter heard himself say beneath the wind roaring in his ears.
He stared straight ahead over Northwest’s laid-back ears.
There was a problem. A big one. Not in the form of more riders, though that couldn’t have been much worse.
It appeared that Colter and Northwest, storming up the gentle incline of open ground, were fast approaching the end of the bench. A shadowy line shone across the ground ahead, and as Colter and Northwest continued to gallop toward it, that shadowy line grew wider.
They were fast approaching a slender chasm.
It appeared as though, maybe several eons back, something had pried both ends of the bench apart and left it with a long, jagged crack down its back, extending from Colter’s left to his right. Beyond the gap, the bench continued.
Still, there was the gap. The end of the road. Not just the end of the road, but the end of Colter’s life.
Should he stop and fight despite the futility of going up against thirty armed men with federal bounty money dancing in their eyes, or deprive them of their quarry by riding right on over the cliff and into eternity?
Or . . .
He saw now as he closed on it quickly that the gap was no more than thirty, possibly thirty-five, feet across.
Could Northwest clear it?
Suddenly, Colter had no choice but to let the horse try. He was now too near the chasm to stop.
Colter leaned even lower, squeezing his knees taut against the horse’s barrel, and shouted, “Go, boy—gooo!”
His blood raced like frigid snowmelt in his veins. The sweat pasting his hickory shirt to his back suddenly turned to ice.
Northwest shook his head and lunged off the bench and into thin air. Time slowed as horse and rider arced up and over the chasm.
Colter looked down.
His gut leaped into his throat as he saw that the knife slash across the bench had to be at least two hundred feet deep—a devil’s red maw of churned gravel, fluted sandstone, sloping rocky shelves, and tonguelike projections of raw earth with a few tufts of wiry brown grass and desert shrubs growing amongst the debris of the planet’s bowels, down there in the sun-dappled shadows of an earthen sarcophagus.
Northwest had kicked several rocks from the cliff’s lip as the horse had made its leap. Colter saw those rocks tumbling down, down, down into the chasm’s open jaws, one or two bouncing off the sheer wall behind Colter now as he and Northwest gained the far side of the bench.
They made it!
But as Northwest’s front hooves gained the ground on the opposite side, Colter looked down and slightly behind him to see that the dun’s rear hooves just barely cleared the chasm. They landed not two inches on this side of it, grinding into the black gravel and coarse brown grass, kicking the gravel out behind them and into the canyon as the horse’s momentum drove horse and rider forward, away from certain death.
Or maybe not . . .
Colter had just turned his head forward when the horse shifted violently. It lurched to its right. Right away, Colter knew why. He heard the grinding rasp of gravel as the horse’s right hoof slid inward.
Northwest whinnied.
Instinctively, Colter pulled his feet free of his stirrups. He’d gentled horses back in his home range of the Lunatics, back before all his worldly troubles, before Bill Rondo had killed Trace, and Colter had drifted down the vengeance trail, and he knew that the first thing a horseman did when sensing trouble was to pull his boots free of his stirrups lest he wanted to get his bones pounded to chalk.
As Northwest pulled to the left, sagging beneath him, Colter flew to the right, the ground coming up fast in a gray-brown blur. It hammered Colter about the head and shoulders. It pounded a shrill “Ohh!” out of him and then he went rolling, rolling like a rag doll, feeling his hat flying away from him.
He felt the slashing, grinding assault of a million small rocks and some not so small before he came to a stop on his belly, his lips pressed against more dirt and gravel. Instantly, before he even knew if he was all in one piece, he heaved himself to his feet and swung toward his horse, more worried at the moment about Northwest than he was about himself.
One, he was a horseman, born and bred. His horse was as much a part of him as his own arms and legs, his own soul.
Two, without a horse, he was dead out here even if he had shed the posse, which remained to be seen . . .