AS HAWK LED a shaken Amalie at a stumbling half-run through the trees, she started to sob again at sight of Keegan on his back, both hands frozen in death at the knife hilt protruding from his body. Keegan’s eyes were wide, staring, one filmed with dust. Blood had made a large dark circle around the knife, staining his wrists and the cuffs of his shirt.
Hawk hurried Amalie toward the saddled horses still at the rack. There were three left. In the corral were a dozen or more unsaddled horses, milling around, raising dust into the late afternoon.
Hawk swung her into the saddle of a bay, picked a steeldust for himself. “If something happens to me,” he said grimly, “ride back to Meg and the other one. Maybe the three of you can get out the north exit. Pray that the guard there won’t shoot women out of the saddle.”
“If Colonel Spate has gone to collect the ransom, he won’t harm me if Ralph pays—” And the grim set of Hawk’s lips made her add, “Will he?”
“Come on.” He jerked his head at her and swung out into the road, his shoulders tensed as he scanned trees and buildings.
Down the road Birnham lifted his head from the dust. There was an ugly stain across the right side of his chest. With his crushed and bloodied nose he looked only half human. Amalie drew rein, staring in horror at the apparition.
Hawk had Keegan’s gun at his belt. He stepped his horse wide of the wounded man, beckoning Amalie to do likewise.
At that moment Birnham moaned, stretching out a hand as though for help.
“Help that man,” Amalie cried, pointing with a hand that shook.
“Come on!”
“You’re as much a monster as Colonel Spate and Keegan!” she said hoarsely.
And when Hawk started back to her, to seize the reins if necessary, something flashed dully from Birnham’s hand. The bullet, instead of drilling Hawk’s back, struck the steeldust in the jaw. With a great trumpeting cry of pain, the animal’s knees buckled. Hawk struck the ground on a shoulder, felt a stab of pain, rolled, retaining his grip on the revolver.
Springing to his feet, Hawk fired directly at Birnham, who was now sitting up and trying to turn a heavy pistol for another shot. The shot took him between the eyes. Birnham fell back into the road, limp as a bedroll.
Arm-waving at a shocked Amalie to stay put, Hawk ran to get the last saddler at the rack, a bay. When he came back to Amalie she said, “That man intended to murder you!” She sounded incredulous.
“And probably murder you in the bargain.” He looked over his shoulder. Only two humans left alive in the camp, so far as he could tell: Meg and Trudy. They stood stiffly where he had last seen them, in front of the crude little house back in the trees. Hawk’s left hand was beginning to swell from the bullet wound. The cut was becoming inflamed. “Let’s get out of here.” He led the way.
She followed, head down, skirts torn and dusty, hiked high up on her legs. One stocking was badly ripped and the other sagged. Her hair was loose about her pale face. Her forehead and a cheek were smudged with dust. When Hawk came to Forester’s body, he swung down and got the dead blacksmith’s rifle and some shells for it.
“Too bad you went to all that work to fashion those three-inch spikes,” he said tonelessly to the corpse.
“What did you mean by that?” Amalie said, reining in, her horse skittish because of the blood scent. She stared wide-eyed at the big man sprawled on the ground.
“Spikes to sew on the inside of a green cowhide.” He mounted his horse, jamming the rifle into a boot, then changed his mind. He drew the rifle, cocked it. He wasn’t thinking straight to boot a rifle when there was danger ahead.
They rode slowly down the steep canyon road, the hooves of their horses clattering on the rocks.
Amalie pulled her mount up with Hawk’s and said anxiously, “What did you mean? Three-inch spikes sewn to green cowhide?”
“Don’t ask questions.” This innocent had no idea what kind of agonizing torture had been planned for her. And better that she shouldn’t know, he decided.
She stared in the half-light, biting her lip. He rode ahead, scanning both sides of the narrow road. At each bend in the road he waved her back, then proceeded, tense in the saddle, cocked rifle in a steady hand. The sounds of their walking mounts echoed between the sheer walls of the canyon. Above them the sky was narrow and distant. A first star glimmered as it fought against the last of daylight.
Finally, the tension forced Amalie to burst, “The way you killed those men—my God! As if you got some satisfaction out of it. Did you?”
“Some.”
This shocked her into a temporary silence.
Hawk turned in his saddle to look at her. “Amalie, keep a tight grip on the reins. We may run into trouble any minute. And dry those eyes. They’ll dry awful quick if you take a bullet in the head.”
She lowered her hand and wiped the wetness on the torn skirt. He rode close.
“Did Spate ever say where he wanted the ransom paid?”
“At the Lookout.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he’s gone there,” Hawk said grimly. “Or maybe lie’s waiting at the gates. He knows damned well I’ll try to get through.”
At last, with the light nearly gone, they saw the gates ahead. They stood wide open.
Amalie seemed to perk up. She smoothed her tangled hair and gasped, “Freedom.”
He made a sharp gesture with the rifle. “Stay here.” He pointed at some boulders, large as a horse, that were near the left gate. “If there’s trouble, try to hide in those rocks.”
“I won’t stay in this canyon another minute!” she cried. She drubbed heels into the horse’s flanks and swung around Hawk. Not expecting the sudden foolish move, Hawk was caught by surprise. He cursed, leaned far out and tried to seize the reins, but missed by an inch. He started after her.
“Amalie!” he cried. “Don’t go through those gates! Don’t!”
But she was already through—and she had triggered the ambush set up for them. A stocky man in a brown hat ran from shadows to block her, to try to grab the horse by a headstall. He got fingers hooked in the leathers and swung his full weight on it.
“I got her, Colonel!” he shouted, then nearly lost his footing on the slippery rock floor as the horse stumbled. Righting itself, the snorting animal swapped ends so violently that Amalie was nearly unseated.
Movement up on the ledge caught Hawk’s eye as lie reined in. A stocky, bare-headed rifleman knelt on the narrow ledge, aiming at him.
Hawk desperately reined aside as the man squeezed off. He saw the powder flash in the shadows above, felt his horse collapse. He kicked himself free, landed hard, sliding on the slick floor where seepage had darkened a portion of it. Someone fired at him from the protection of the gate.
He heard the bullet scream off the canyon wall. Twisting aside, he saw a rifle flash again on the ledge. He pulled the trigger on his own gun, but because of the distance and the fact that he was moving too fast, the bullet only caught the man in the knee. But the impact caused his upper body to swing forward. Before he could correct his balance, he fell, arms windmilling. He landed with a sodden sound, spread out of shape on the stone floor of the canyon.
Beyond the gate something moved. Hawk threw himself flat, the impact of the granite floor against his chest nearly knocking the wind out of him. An orange-red flame winked at him from behind the right gate. Rock chips stung his cheek as the ricochet filled the canyon with its banshee wail.
On his knees, Hawk fired three times at the gate. He heard a strangled cry, but it was lost under the sound of Amalie’s sudden sharp scream.
Beyond the open gates, she was still in the saddle, trying to beat the man in the brown hat about the shoulders. He held her horse at the headstall and with the other hand had her ankle. She was half out of the saddle.
“Colonel!” the man cried for a second time. “I got her!”
In that moment Hawk had to chance hitting Amalie in the leg. There was no need to worry because, as he squeezed off, the man lost his brown hat and fell against the horse, causing it to buck jump. As it came down it slipped on the stone flooring. Before it could fall, Amalie swung out of the saddle, landing on all fours. And the horse, limping, moved out of her reach and on down the canyon toward the flats beyond.
Already Hawk was aware of other hoofbeats and tightened sweated hands on the rifle. But the horses now suddenly lunged away from the gates, heading for open country. They were riderless. Empty stirrups flapped and reins looped about saddle horns whipping crazily in the wind.
Behind them was a rider, herding them along at a hard run. A rider hunched in the saddle.
“It’s Colonel Spate!” Amalie cried, scrambling to her feet and pointing.
Hawk, at a run, did not have to be told. He knew that slender back too well, the set of a classic skull on strong shoulders. Here, out of the canyon, beyond the gates, the light was better, than by the shadowed canyon walls.
He saw a dark stain on Spate’s right side at the back. Spate and the two men had been waiting at the gates with an ambush. When Amalie had ridden away from Hawk, the man in the brown hat had jumped the gun, shown himself and tried to grab her horse.
Hawk’s wide mouth tightened in a mirthless smile. In those few seconds since first spotting the fleeing colonel, Hawk still had a good target. He knelt on the hard, blood-smeared granite, steadied the rifle on Colonel Thomas Spate’s fast vanishing figure. It would be one of those truly memorable shots from a true marksman.
Movement suddenly blurred his vision. Instead of the Colonel’s back in his sights he saw Amalie, who had flung herself in front of Hawk. “You can’t!” she screamed, waving her hands at him.
“Get out of my way!” Hawk leaped up to brush her aside. But it was no use. Spate was out of sight around a shoulder of distant hill. Far out on the flats the running horses laid a haze of dust against the horizon.
“The son of a bitch left us afoot,” he snarled. He tamed on Amalie. “I had my chance to end it. Why’d you butt in!”
“But you couldn’t kill a man in cold blood, Hawk,” she gasped. “Shoot him in the back when he was already wounded?”
“Him I could shoot in the back!” Hawk stared back up canyon, now completely in shadow, ears strained for any sound. Overhead the stars were brighter. At the other end of the canyon, far beyond the camp, was a lookout, and possibly two or more. The shooting at camp could have drawn them down from the mountain. Finding dead companions strewn about, they might try to play it out by galloping for the gates.
Seizing Amalie by an arm, he walked her quickly away from the dead horse, the two dead outlaws sprawled nearby.
“Would you have killed the colonel?” she persisted, stumbling along in his grip, trying to keep up with his long legged stride.
He was silent as he pulled her after him.
Down on the flats the sand was deep, making the going all the harder. Amalie was struggling for breath, about done in.
“You stay here and rest,” he said gruffly. “And don’t go wandering off.”
“Hawk—”
“Do what I tell you! Last time you damn near got us killed!”
She seemed subdued as he tramped off, climbed to a dome of land to see if, in the dim light, he could spot any of the loose horses, and to gauge the possibilities of catching two of them. Those the colonel had driven off were not in sight, and he could not even hear their wild hoofbeats. A stillness had settled over the high country. As he started back down the rise of ground to where he had left Amalie, he heard a horse snuffle.
Cocking the revolver, he looked around. Some distance away stood a horse, head down. As he began to move toward it, calling softly, it tried to pull free of reins hung up in chapparal. At each step it limped badly. He knew it was the horse that had unseated Amalie and limped off down canyon to the flats.
Upon reaching the winded animal, he examined the forelegs, finding a faint gash across the right, probably made by a ricocheting bullet.
He led the animal back to Amalie. He boosted her into the saddle, then led the horse in the direction she said would be the Lookout.
An hour later they had to stop; Amalie seemed exhausted. In the darkness a cold wind had started to blow, stirring the sand so that it stung the eyes.
As he tethered the horse in the shelter of a rocky mound of earth, Amalie whispered, “My teeth are chattering.”
He pulled her from the saddle and into his arms. Then he stretched her out on the ground and lay beside her, sheltering her body as best he could from the wind.
He stretched out a long arm so that her head could rest upon it. “That better?” he said quietly.
“How can you be so ruthless in one breath, so gentle in another?” she wondered.
“Try to sleep.”
For a long time she lay in silence while night creatures stirred. A full moon broke through clouds that had drifted down from the high peaks to shine down on the flats where they lay, making grotesque shadows of rocks and weird looking tangles of brush.
“I owe you my life,” she whispered. “But I still can’t understand how you can be so cold-hearted when you have a gun in your hand.”
Holding her close, he changed his earlier decision not to tell her about the death Spate had planned for her—the death cage. It shocked her so that for several minutes she could not speak. She clung to him, her body trembling against his.
“Then I owe you much, much more,” she said hoarsely. When she raised her face above his, he felt a warm tear drop to his lips. In the moonlight her eyes were luminous and closer now as her mouth suddenly came down on his, the lips warmly parted.
And moments later when her hand brushed across his abdomen, feeling the ugly scars, she recoiled in horror. He told her who had put them there and why.
It was some minutes before she could calm herself and resume what she termed joyful payment for all he had done for her—the ugly death he had spared her at the hands of Colonel Thomas Spate.
“I’m glad you didn’t go after him, no matter what he’s done,” she whispered at last against his throat. “And you could have, when you found the horse.”
“In the first place, I couldn’t leave you behind,” he told her. “And besides, I could never have caught up with him.”
“There’s enough blood on your hands as it is, Hawk.”
“I’ll find him one day,” he vowed.
She said nothing, because now the intensity of the moment drew all thought of speech from her mind.