Chapter 14
Chato rose and scanned his surroundings. His senses turned to the land like a hound. Marisol’s rifle barked once more, precise and cold.
One of the two bandits on the right bank slumped, a neat hole through his chest. The last wounded man made a run for the scrub, bleeding and frantic.
“Stop him!” Marisol screamed.
Blaze started forward with his Colt raised. The bandit lurched, eyes wide with the shock of pain.
That was when Blaze fired. The bullet hit him, and the man’s shoulders convulsed. He dropped face-first into the sand. Wounded, not dead.
Blaze’s breath came in ragged pulls. He didn’t feel like a killer, yet his hands had done it.
“Are you alright?” Marisol panted, coming up beside him.
Her Hawken Plains rifle hung loosely in one hand, smoke curling from the barrel. Her eyes searched his face, then flicked to the dying horse.
The sight of Nancy’s stillness seemed to hit her like a physical blow. She knelt, fingers moving quickly to check the animal’s throat, then shook her head.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “She was a good horse.”
Blaze sank down on a rock, the sand hot beneath his palms. “She was everything.”
The blood pooled dark near Nancy’s flared nostrils. Blaze reached out and ran his hand along the animal’s neck, feeling the last warmth fade. He closed his eyes for a second and let himself feel the grief.
It was sharp and immediate. Another loss.
“You okay?” Chato asked quietly. He’d already gone through the ridges, counted bodies, and marked spare cartridges. He crouched with his knife set down, polishing the blade on his sleeve as if nothing had happened.
“No,” Blaze said simply. His voice was small. “Not really.”
Marisol looked away for a second. “Fight’s done,” she said. “We need to gather what we can. Check for supplies. Take whatever is worth anything.”
Chato moved like water through the brush. He returned with a few slashed saddlebags and a tossed-over blanket.
“Gold’s not on them,” he said. “I ripped open their sacks and took what they had.”
He pointed at the dead men’s collars. Each bore the hollowed horseshoe and serpent mark of the Hollow Creek Riders.
“It’s them,” Blaze muttered. “We’re closer.”
His hands still shook when he holstered his Colt Navy revolver. The weight of it was something he could hold onto, a small promise of something he could do. He drew breath and exhaled slowly.
“You did good,” Marisol said at last. The words were rough, as if pulled up from some buried place. “You kept your head.”
“I didn’t finish him,” Blaze said. The shame tasted worse than the dust. “I—”
“You wounded him,” Chato said. “Alive can be worse than dead if we catch him.”
Marisol’s jaw clenched. She kicked a spent shell, then looked at Blaze with a raw, searching intensity.
“You sure about this?” she asked. “About what it turns a man into?”
“I don’t get to be sure,” Blaze replied. “I only get to do what I must.”
She turned away, looking out across the creek bed where bodies lay like rag dolls.
“We should move fast,” she said. “We take their horses, their maps, anything that tells us where they go.”
Nobody objected to her plan. They couldn’t stay here for long anyway. They had to act.
So the trio worked with grim thoroughness. Marisol started rifling through bodies for papers or jewelry, Chato was splitting the dead man’s belt for a compass, and Blaze was hauling the saddle off Nancy with stiff hands.
The horse’s eyes were clouded but open. Blaze pressed his forehead to the warm flank once more before he let it go.
“Nancy,” he said aloud to the empty air, a whisper carried on a cold wind. “You kept me alive for a while. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you.”
Suddenly, Marisol’s hand came down on his shoulder.
“Don’t waste her with words,” she said. “Make her mean something.”
Blaze nodded. He felt the hollowness knotted like a stone in his gut and turned it into a sharpened edge. He looked at the spread of the bodies, the saddle marks under the sun, the drop of blood on the sand that was today’s tally.
“All that’s left is to move,” Chato murmured. “We go find shelter. We need a plan.”
Marisol kicked at the sand. “We bury what we can.”
Blaze let his jaw set. He picked up Nancy’s bridle, the leather sticky with blood. He placed the horse’s head gently, turning her to lie with dignity, if there could be dignity there. He stretched the blanket over the mare’s flank, tucking sand around the animal as if tucking a child into bed.
His hands were steady now, not from peace but from hardening.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re not staying here.”
They left the creek bed together, dust rising in their wake. Six men lay dead in the sand. Six fewer mouths to laugh at other people’s ruin. Blaze felt nothing like triumph—only the weight of what had been taken and the small, bitter certainty that this was the cost of the path he’d chosen.
“First fight,” Chato said quietly as they climbed the low slope toward the ridge. “You lived.”
Blaze didn’t answer for a long while. The Colt felt heavier on his hip than before, the metal warm from his hand. He thumbed the cylinder, tracing the groove worn by his father’s use.
“I’m not done,” he said finally. “Not by half.”
Marisol slung her rifle across her shoulder. Her dark hair stuck to her neck with sweat and dust, and she glanced sideways at him.
“Then don’t get reckless,” she warned. “There’ll be more.”
Blaze breathed in the desert air. Nancy’s death still sat under his ribs like a bruise, but something in him had hardened. He didn’t feel like the boy who’d run from the burning ranch anymore. He felt sharper. Colder.
They walked in silence for a while, boots crunching over gravel and dry brush. The sun had slipped low, the light gone amber and thin. The road ahead shimmered, long and lonely. Blaze’s legs ached, but he didn’t slow.
“Hold up,” Chato said suddenly.
He stepped off the road and crouched near one of the fallen Riders lying half in shadow beside a scrub bush. His movements were quiet.
Marisol shifted her rifle forward, scanning the ridge.
“What is it?” she called, her voice low but alert.
Chato didn’t reply right away. He reached into the dead man’s coat, fingers moving until they found something tucked deep inside. When he pulled it free, the last of the sun caught the edge of paper. It was creased, sweat-stained, and bound with rawhide.
“Found something,” he said.
Blaze took a step closer, the soles of his boots crunching against the grit. “What kind of somethin’?”
The Indian held the paper and glanced over it, eyes narrowing. He passed it over, and Blaze took it carefully.
The writing was rough. It looked like a half-map, half-note. Names were scattered through it, along with a few markings he couldn’t make sense of . . . except for one word, underlined twice in dark ink.
“Red Mesa,” Blaze said aloud. The sound of it sent a ripple down his spine.
Marisol leaned over his shoulder. “That a place or a name?”
“Place,” Chato said. “South of here. Old mining town . . . emptied out after the flood. Dry now. No law. If they’re meeting anywhere, it’d be there.”
Blaze frowned, trying to picture it. He’d heard of Red Mesa when he was younger. Miners swallowed by tunnels, a flood that washed away half the town.
Folks said you could still find bones down there if you looked hard enough.
“You think Wilder’s there?” he asked.
“Could be,” Chato replied. “The Hollow Creek Riders use spots like that. High ground, water nearby, tunnels for cover. They’ll feel safe.”
Marisol reached out and tapped the corner of the map. “The note mentions somethin’ about a shipment from the east road. Could be arms. Could be gold.”
Gold. The word stung Blaze’s ears like a spark. He clenched the paper, knuckles whitening.
“Could be Wilder,” he said.
Marisol gave him a look that weighed his words before she spoke.
“Then we go careful,” she said. “If this leads where I think it does, we’ll be walkin’ straight into the lion’s den.”
“Better that than runnin’ blind.” Blaze’s voice came out rough, scraped raw by the dry wind. “If he’s there, I want to know.”
Chato folded the paper and tucked it into his vest. “We’ll stop ahead. We rest, think it through. If Red Mesa’s the next step, we move as soon as we can.”
They started walking again, the silence stretching between them. Blaze stared at the fading horizon, where the mesa rose dark and red against the sky. It looked like a wound, deep and unhealed.
He felt that same wound inside himself. Open, aching, but alive.
Marisol walked a few paces ahead. She looked back once, eyes catching his.
“Don’t go makin’ promises to ghosts, kid.”
“I’m not,” Blaze said softly. “I’m makin’ one to myself.”
The wind picked up, stirring the dust at their feet. They walked on, three shadows against the dying light.
Behind them lay silence: six dead men, a single fallen horse, and the first blood on the road to Red Mesa.