Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
The trail had been descending for miles, and for quite some time now, Sheila had been following Wendell along a bluff overlooking the river.
Dodger was somewhere behind them. The gushing, roaring torrent was often right beneath them, and Sheila gazed down at the water as it raced along in heaving swells before exploding in bursts of white spray over gleaming boulders and shattered remains of once-great trees.
Over the course of the past few hours, the forest had been changing.
The endless expanses of fir had given way to alternating woodlands of spruce and aspen.
Sheila was no expert when it came to the flora of Colorado, but she knew one tree from another.
The spruces rose straight and rigid to almost delicate silver spear points.
And in groves closer to the water’s edge, the round leaves of the aspen—which in summer would turn and tremble at the first hint of storm—were now mere buds on the naked, gray-green branches.
The sun was nearly overhead, and she guessed it was sometime around noon when they reached a thickly wooded ravine that opened out onto the river and extended far into the mountainous green hills to the west. The trail dropped once again until they were nearly at the level of the river itself, and the green forest closed around them.
A few minutes later, they reached a stream that appeared to flow out of the very heart of the ravine.
Crystal-clear water tumbled over a small waterfall into a shimmering pool.
She gazed at the reflected glints of sunlight coming through the trees as Wendell directed his horse toward some shallows where they could traverse the stream.
Sheila’s back ached, her legs were cramped, and her bottom was numb from the long hours in the saddle.
About an hour ago, as they passed the collapsed entrance to an abandoned mine and the ruin of a tiny shack, Wendell had slowed just enough to hand her some dry biscuits and then his water flask.
She ate and drank as he ordered, but now she wished she hadn’t.
He showed no sign of stopping, so Sheila urged her horse closer. He turned in his saddle to look at her.
“What do you want?”
“I need to stop.”
“Why?”
“I need to…to make water.”
“Hold it.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “Please, Wendell. It’s urgent.”
He looked ahead, clearly annoyed, and his cheeks puffed out as he expelled a deep breath. “We ain’t maybe ten miles away from where we’re heading. You can wait that long.”
She couldn’t. “I can’t, I tell you. Just a quick stop. Please.”
The sound of hooves thundering up behind them caused the older man to roll his eyes and then glower at Sheila.
“What’s going on?” Dodger demanded, reining in beside her. “What’s she want?”
“None of your business,” she retorted.
The words came sharper than wisdom called for, but fear had burned down into something harder now. She was tired of being handled, threatened, and spoken of as if she were baggage tied to a saddle.
“How’d you like a good slap? That’d make it my business. Now, what do you want?”
“Ain’t nothing to do with her.” Wendell leaned forward in his saddle. “We’re stopping here to water the horses.”
He was going to let her relieve herself, but she knew it was more to assert himself over Dodger than it was for her. This was a good turn, but he was still an outlaw. And if she ever had the chance, she’d make sure he faced justice in a court of law for abducting her.
“I’ll ride back a ways.” Dodger told them, wheeling his horse. “Don’t want nobody sneaking up on us.”
As the blackguard started off, Wendell started to call after him but stopped and watched him go, a disgusted frown on his face.
With a glance at Sheila, he dismounted.
“Git now,” he said as he helped her get down. “And don’t go taking your time, neither.”
As soon as her boots touched the ground, her knees buckled slightly. She grabbed hold of the stirrup leather. For a moment she thought her legs wouldn’t hold her weight. She glanced up at Wendell and was surprised by the fleeting look of concern that crossed the hawkish features.
It was gone almost at once, but she had seen it. That unsettled her nearly as much as his threats had. Wendell was not kind. Yet neither was he empty of all feeling, and that made him harder to understand.
She leaned against her horse’s flank and extended her bound wrists toward him. “Would you?”
He frowned at her. “You ain’t gonna run away?”
She scoffed and gestured toward the river and the trees surrounding them. “I was raised in New York City. I’m an unarmed woman in a place I’ve never seen before. How long would I survive out here if I ran away?”
“That shows good sense.”
He pulled a small knife from his boot and cut the rope on her wrists. The blade sliced through the cord like butter. Wendell tossed the rope into the creek, and it disappeared downstream.
“Thank you.”
She flexed her elbows and fingers and rubbed the welts where the rope had dug into her skin. Slipping her hands into the arms of the duster draped around her, she took a couple of tentative steps, feeling the blood flow back into her lower extremities.
He led the horses toward the pool of water above the shallows. “Git. We ain’t about to be lollygagging around here all day.”
“I’m going,” she told him, directing her steps toward the brush closer to the river.
“Only to them aspens,” he called out. “Don’t go no farther.”
“All right. All right.” Sheila walked, hurried a couple of steps and then walked again to where he was pointing.
She crouched behind the brush in a leaf-lined depression that appeared to be a branch of the creek that only filled during times of flooding. It ran straight down to the river, dropping off near the end.
She pulled up the duster and her skirts.
As she relieved herself, she could see the top of a great snarl of fallen timber that the current had piled up at the river’s edge.
Raising herself slightly, she spied Wendell with the horses by the creek, filling his water flask.
The horses were both standing in the pool, drinking.
The earthy smells of evergreen needles and last year’s decaying leaves filled her senses. The sound of the waterfall blended with the rush of the river. Her eye was drawn upward to the expanse of blue skies above the bare, tangled branches of the aspens and the silver tips of the spruces.
The world around her seemed to be so finely drawn, so exquisitely sharp in every detail and scent. She chuckled to herself that she should feel this now, at a time when her life was in jeopardy. Perhaps, she thought, it was precisely because of the danger she was facing.
For the first time, she felt the incredible beauty and the allure of this country. It was all so wild and untouched by man, so different from the crowds and the filth of the city.
And for one impossible moment, she understood why a man like Caleb Marlowe might look at these mountains and choose loneliness over drawing rooms, danger over comfort, open sky over every safe...and suffocating...thing she had left behind.
When she left New York, spring had only begun to touch the neighborhoods of Manhattan.
The daffodils were beginning to bloom, yellow and lovely, in the churchyard of the Presbyterian Church across Fifth Avenue from her grandparents’ brownstone mansion at the corner of Twelfth Street.
But so many of the city’s smoke-filled streets were still knee-deep with the muck of a late snow and the endless rain that had followed.
The city was a place filled with self-inflicted problems and dangers.
From the Broadway rum palaces to the gin mills of the Bowery to the bucket shops of the Five Points, Manhattan was reeling with drunkenness and crime.
Poverty had no place in her family’s neighborhood, but a person could see it everywhere if they opened their eyes.
The immigrants hawking their wares on the streets.
The streetwalkers who would appear at dusk by the wrought iron gates of the parks.
The filthy little boys jammed into the chimneys for the monthly cleaning.
And the footpads roaming the shadows at night, looking for nobs and swells to prey on, didn’t choose that life because they had summer mansions to pay for on Long Island or in Newport.
From what Sheila had seen, Elkhorn and Colorado had its share of lawlessness, to be sure. But at moments like this, with the clean air filling her lungs, with green vistas and shimmering water everywhere, she understood why her father and so many others came here and stayed.
The sound of a horse being reined in near the creek jarred her from her moment of reverie.
She shook her head, wondering how she could be so whimsical about things when she was in the clutches of hard, desperate men.
She didn’t know if she’d survive the day, and here she was ready to paint a picture of it.
“Where is she?” Dodger’s voice was brusque and demanding.
“Water your horse. She’ll be back in a dang minute.”
Sheila raised herself enough to straighten her skirts. She had no desire to spend any more time with Dodger than she needed to.
“Which direction did she go?” There was a hard note in the rogue’s tone that made Sheila’s blood run cold.
If Wendell answered, she didn’t hear it. She peered over the top of the hollow at the two outlaws.
Dodger swung to the ground, and his mount clopped to the creek to drink with the other horses.
Wendell was still crouched by the pool, splashing water on his face. Dodger stood behind him, his eyes scanning the terrain around them. He was obviously searching for her.
“Hear that?” the older man asked, standing up. He was looking back the way they’d come.
“I don’t hear nothing.”
As Wendell moved past his partner, Sheila saw the gleam of the blade in Dodger’s hand. There was no time to shout a warning. There was no time for anything.
The knife flashed, swift and cruel. Wendell staggered, one hand flying to his throat.