Chapter 9
“I don’t know how in the world anyone found this meadow up here in the peaks.
” Owen hadn’t had enough sleep in about a month, and it was wearing on him.
He had three horses in tow, each with a prisoner on its back.
Tex brought up the rear with the horses they’d retrieved from the Duncans while Morgan and Roz led the way.
Jesse stayed near his ma. Delaney had started the morning riding alongside Boone, but he’d fallen into talking with the boy and the trail was narrow, so she’d dropped back. Owen found himself riding with her.
Shaking her head, Delaney said, “Followed a mountain goat, I reckon. No other way I can think of.”
“Morgan said Roz’s pa was an old mountain man. He knew the land better than Morgan’s pa. A lot of what Morgan knows he learned from Roz’s pa, Cap Sutcliff.”
Owen took his eyes off the reckless stretch of rock they were descending. “Where’d you learn to be so handy in the wild?”
Delaney smiled at him. It made him realize no woman had smiled at him for a long time, leastways not much. Years maybe. Never maybe. He was surprised how much he liked it.
“Pa was always going on about a child needing to handle himself in the woods. He’d taught all my big brothers to track and hunt, and when I came along, he never treated me any different from them.
The older three were a lot older. Pa was serving in a fort for a few years, and Ma couldn’t join him.
The older boys took care of Ma. Ma put up with it, mainly because she thought it did the boys good, so they got real handy in the woods.
It helped that my ma was also comfortable in the outdoors. ”
Boone looked back at her, still wearing his bandage. It was dirty by now, but Owen had to believe it had kept the dirt out of the wound, so it was a good thing.
“Then Pa came home, and Boone and I were born not long after.”
“We were a good team, the four of us,” Boone added.
“My big brothers sort of took off one at a time. But they were close in age and were mostly gone by the time I could have a hope of remembering them. It’s said I met Bowie, the eldest, when I was a baby.”
Tex said, “Bowie Bridger is your brother?”
“Yep. Heard he’s in these mountains somewhere.”
“I’ve heard of him. A fearsome man, more ghost than human.”
“That sounds like Bowie.” Delaney faced forward again.
“So the four of us still at home went on adventures all the time. The next forts where Pa was stationed were mostly not in dangerous places: Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Texas, which was still mighty wild, but they had housing for a man’s family.
Boone and I were adults by then, so when Pa was moved again, we stayed in Texas.
That’s where we were living when Ma wrote and said she and Pa were done with their wandering ways for good. ”
Delaney smiled at Owen. “We’ll see. We never settled for long. Wherever we were, we’d spend time in the outdoors, where Pa would test us, teach us every trick he knew, and challenge us to learn more than he could teach.”
“We were living in Ohio when the war broke out—that was before Texas.” Boone sounded somber about that.
Owen couldn’t say if it was because the war was a mean business or because his pa had been in danger.
“All three of my big brothers had headed for the mountains by then.
Two of them came back and fought in the war.
They ended up serving with Pa in the Battle of Gettysburg with the Army of Northern Virginia, which later became the Army of the Potomac.
They stayed with him and watched Pa climb the ranks until he was a colonel.
“He was sent to the Western Frontier after the war, and again he ended up in places no family could join him. This post in Fort Russell is, we hope, his final post. Boone has plans to enlist if the place suits him. He was too young for the Civil War. The knothead longs to serve in the cavalry.”
“At least for a few years,” Boone said.
Jesse broke in to ask what the cavalry was, and Boone turned his attention to the boy.
“You know, I think Morgan was in the Army of the Potomac,” Owen said. “He was mighty young and served as a drummer, until they found out how good he was with a rifle. I wonder if he knew your pa?”
Morgan heard his name and glanced back. “What was that?”
Boone, closer to Morgan and following the conversation, said, “Did you know Colonel Bridger in the war?”
Morgan tilted his head. “I knew him because everyone knew him. Doubt he took much notice of me.” He chuckled.
“Time to stop talking and pay attention,” Roz cut in. “Single file now. This next stretch is a killer.” She gave Morgan a look before taking the lead.
And she was right.
“You go first,” Owen said to Delaney. “I don’t want you anywhere near these low-down Duncans.”
Delaney urged her horse ahead while Owen held back.
He had to admit he liked a strong woman, especially one who’d listen to the occasional request. If it was smart anyhow.
He suspected if he’d asked her to do something stupid, she would have something to say about it.
He found he liked that, too. Of course, he was finding he liked most everything about Delaney Bridger.
Owen didn’t know how anyone could call this a trail.
It looked like they had stepped off the edge of the world.
The gully in front of them was so steep, his horse would have to walk on tiptoes.
But despite that, the horses picked their way down, down, down.
The gully was in shadows even though it was near midday.
He wondered if wild horses roamed up here. Someone or something had to have gone down this trail before. No horse would’ve tried it if he wasn’t following a scent or some other tracks that were invisible to humans.
Owen, who considered himself as steady as a man could be, felt his stomach swoop as they walked along the side of the slope. His foot scraped against the wall of the gully on the right, and his left foot dangled in thin air over a hundred-foot drop.
He let his horse find the way, doing his best to keep the reins loose to not interfere with the animal’s concentration.
He heard a horse snort behind him. The jingle of a bridle. They were leading a parade with the saddle string of stolen Duncan horses bringing up the rear with Tex. He judged the jingle to be coming from the horse Stella was riding. She was third in line of their row of criminal Duncans.
He didn’t look back for the sheer reason that it might throw off his horse’s balance. He sure hoped that snort didn’t have trouble behind it, but there wasn’t much he could do about that right now anyway.
Directly in front of him, Delaney’s horse stumbled. She was a fine rider, though, so she didn’t panic. The strong horse regained its footing and plodded on.
Owen was proud of his ability to keep his head in an emergency, but he found his heart pounding.
He thought of a few emergencies he’d faced in the war and with his family after the war when Quantrell’s raiders came mighty close to his family in Iowa.
The main reason he’d learned not to panic was because panic always made things worse.
In fact, panic limited his ability to help.
And yet here he sat, scared the woman riding ahead of him was going to suffer a deadly fall.
He studied the way down. The trail at this point was more like a scattered series of outcroppings that descended.
He looked to his right toward a vast stretch of nothingness.
He could hear water running and figured there was a river at the bottom of this slit in the earth.
But he wasn’t about to look for it. He’d see it when they got there.
Owen took a moment to wonder how he’d chosen such a rugged, remote life.
U.S. Marshals were supposed to deliver warrants and subpoenas.
They traveled with reward money promised on wanted posters.
They transported prisoners too, but most Marshals lived very routine lives.
Not him, though. He’d sought out jobs that sent him far and wide.
He liked investigating and doing undercover work, which meant traveling to places where no one knew him.
He’d been settled in Colorado for a few years, but when a job cropped up that required travel, he’d volunteered.
He’d just recently gotten back from chasing down stagecoach robbers in Wyoming.
Morg and Tex had been part of that team.
It struck him right then that he was more a nomad than anything else.
That life had suited him until right this second.
Right now, clinging like a vine to the edge of the world, he had to ask himself what had given him such a blamed fool notion as to work at a job like this.
His father had been an Iowa homesteader who’d worked as a carpenter besides the farming.
Owen had learned the skill of building while at his side.
But he’d never wanted to set down roots or build anything, not since he’d arrived home safe from the war.
He’d wandered for a time, hard-pressed to settle down after years of excitement and danger. Finally, he’d signed up for the U.S. Marshals Service and had never stopped moving since.
Brooding over the memories, Owen’s heart almost came to a stop when Delaney’s horse skidded for a few inches. It was then he had a bright idea.
Pray . . .
He’d been slow coming to it, but he was a believer. He needed to pray them all down this gorge, and high time he finally thought of it. Best to pray them all the way to Fort Russell. He set himself to do just that as he and his horse picked their way down into the gullet of the mountain.
A man couldn’t help but think of the valley of the shadow of death.
Finally they reached the bottom, where one by one they waded into a fast-moving stream.
Rather than cross it, Roz turned and rode alongside, and everyone followed.
The water was knee-deep on their horses, and narrow enough that they remained riding single file, pushed along by a current that boiled at times.
The sides of the canyon they rode through rose up around them with no way to scale them.
It might’ve been possible were they to abandon their horses, but then they’d be in the middle of nowhere on foot.
And that was something Owen would never do unless it was down to a choice between life and death.
Delaney looked over her shoulder at him. She made her eyes go wide, comically so. “We made it down.”
Owen turned to see everyone was in the stream now.
“Do you suppose a hard rain would fill this canyon up all the way to the top?” She looked around with some hesitancy.
Owen’s stomach lurched again. “I might not have thought of that without you mentioning.”
She smiled and turned back to ride on. They were all going faster now. No one wanted to linger down here.
A roaring sound brought Owen’s eyes forward. Then he closed them. White water. Were they going to ride through that? It was a descent, too. A waterfall done the hard way through jagged rocks.
Then, just as they were going to have to wend through the rocks, Roz turned her horse aside, and though they’d been riding with walls on both sides of the stream that reached a hundred feet or more, there was a narrow strip of shore.
Roz rode out of the water and along on that sandy shore.
And then whatever she’d been looking for, she found, and they started to climb again.
Another mind-numbing, bone-chilling, narrow trail.
And Owen was being mighty generous to call it a trail.
He wondered where in tarnation they were.
Grizzly drew his horse to a halt and pointed to the ground. “That there’s blood.” He dismounted and knelt on one knee to study the spot. “Four wounded out of a group of eight, if each of these bloody spots is a sign of someone hit.”
Hester wandered to the crest of a hill. “The bullets must’ve come from there,” he said, looking downward. “This happened days ago. Let’s go see what we’re up against.”
Grizzly mounted up, and they rode down to find the tracks of seven horses. “One man firing is all, I’d say. He was out in front and probably the only one able to see them as they skylined themselves on that crest.”
Both of them took a long, hard look at the tracks. There was a good chance they’d be able to identify some of them if they saw them again, and Grizzly intended to see them again real soon.
“They rode down and to the west. Got off the trail.” Hester stared at the tracks for a while longer, then rode downhill to where the group had rounded a boulder.
The others, those who had done the shooting, picked up the trail and their prints mingled.
And it was close enough, Hester had to believe the ones attacking were right on the group’s heels.
“Grizzly, we can’t go after ’em tonight.
The sun is setting, so we won’t be able to track them much longer.
We should go on into town and ask around about these riders, then lay up more supplies if we’re going to go haring off into the wilderness.
We didn’t pack enough for days, maybe weeks in the wild. ”
“You’re right, Hester. It eats at me to turn aside, but we don’t have a choice. The next town is only a few miles ahead. I’ll send a wire to the fort and tell them to expect me to be gone for an unknown length of time.” Because both of them knew they wouldn’t be coming back without their children.
Hester stared at those bloodstains as they turned and headed back toward town.