beside the front wheel.
He had never felt such pain in his life. It swelled and burst into a fiery explosion that seemed as big and hot as the sun. As Luke lay there gasping for breath, he heard shots, heard men cry out. Remy cursed and gasped. Edgar roared in defiance, a bellow that was cut short by a flurry of gunfire.
They had been ambushed. The question was whether the bushwhackers were Yankees . . . or those damned deserting curs, Potter, Stratton, Richards, and Casey.
He got his answer a moment later when hoofbeats sounded close beside his head. Instinctively, he tried to jerk away from them, but his body wouldn’t work anymore. All he could do was lie there and twitch.
“I don’t hear you giving any orders now, Jensen,” a man’s harsh voice said.
Wiley Potter. Luke recognized the voice, even though he couldn’t respond to it.
He thought his gun was still tucked in his waistband and tried to edge his hand toward it. A gun roared, and mud from the riverbank splattered in his face as the bullet tore into the ground beside his head.
“You’re beat, Jensen,” Potter said. “You might as well admit it. The other three are dead, and you soon will be. And that gold’s goin’ with us, just like it was supposed to all along. You stupid idiot, did you really think we were just gonna ride away and leave it?”
Luke was hurting too much to force his thoughts into any coherent order. He shifted a little, and an even more terrible wave of agony made him scream.
“Your back’s busted,” Potter went on. “That was a hell of a shot I made, if I do say so myself. You’re gonna be a long time dyin’, Jensen, and I’m going to sit right here on my horse and enjoy every minute of it. So you go ahead and scream. It’s music to my ears.”
“Wiley, we can’t stay here too long.” That was Stratton. “We need to take these wagons and get movin’. Why don’t you just put a bullet in his head and be done with it?”
Casey laughed. “What fun would that be? I’m with you, Wiley. I want to listen to Jensen scream while he’s dyin’.”
Luke’s mind cleared abruptly. He understood what they’d been saying and forced himself to cut short the agonized cries coming from his tortured throat. He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.
But his resolve was short-lived, as the pain made him cry out again. Several of the deserters laughed, obviously enjoying Luke’s torment.
They weren’t going to have much longer to indulge their sadistic glee. A darkness that had nothing to do with night was closing in around Luke, washing over his mind like a black tide.
“He’s dead,” he heard Wiley Potter say.
That was all. After that, the darkness was complete.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 11
When Luke Jensen was ten years old, he fell out of a tree and broke his left arm. It hurt like blazes, and he couldn’t hold back the tears as his pa set the bone and splinted the arm.
“No need to cry,” Emmett Jensen had said. “That don’t make the arm feel any better, does it?”
“Hell yes, it does!” Luke had yelled.
Emmett had laughed too hard to get on to him for cussing. Luke’s ma took care of that later, fussing at him until he wished he’d broken his ears instead of his arm.
Luckily, Emmett had set enough broken bones that he knew what he was doing, so his oldest son’s arm healed cleanly and Luke didn’t suffer any loss of strength or movement in it. He never forgot how bad it hurt when it happened, though.
A couple years later, while getting some wood from the pile next to the back door of the Jensen cabin, he was stung on the right hand by the biggest scorpion he’d ever seen. It felt like somebody had shoved a dull knife through his palm.
The hand swelled up and got almost as red as a beet, and for a while the family worried that he would lose it. Emmett was prepared to cut the hand off if it meant saving Luke’s life, but first, he rode up into the hills and brought back an old granny woman who scoured the countryside for plants, made a foul-smelling poultice out of them, and bound it onto Luke’s hand.
Within a day the swelling started to go down and the redness went away. By the time a week had passed, the hand was back to normal and Luke couldn’t even see the place where the scorpion had stung him.
He remembered what that had felt like, too, and took particular satisfaction in stomping every one of the ugly little varmints he saw after that.
The pain radiating from his back made breaking his arm seem like stubbing his toe. That scorpion sting was nothing more than a mosquito bite. Without a doubt, the current pain was the worst agony Luke had ever experienced in his life.
He wasn’t sure how long he lay there, awash in suffering, before he realized the pain meant he wasn’t dead.
His pulse hammered an insane rhythm inside his skull. He tried to force his eyes open, but couldn’t do it. There wasn’t enough strength in him even for a tiny task like that. All he could do was lie there and drag ragged breaths into his body.
After another unknowable length of time, he became aware of light striking his eyelids. He tried again to lift them, and succeeded.
Sunlight lay in a dappled pattern around him. Lying on his stomach on damp ground, his head was turned to the right, his left cheek pressed against the dirt. After a moment, he figured out the sun was shining down on him through some tree branches. Trying to make his brain work provided a welcome distraction from the pain.
He tried to remember how he’d gotten there. At first, everything up until that moment was a blank slate in his mind, but slowly the details began to fill in. He remembered the gold, the journey from Richmond, the friends who had been with him . . .
Then the ambush and Wiley Potter’s sneering voice telling him the others were dead and he was dying. In fact, he recalled Potter saying, “He’s dead.”
Potter had been wrong about that. Luke was too weak to move, but he sure wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway.
Since Potter had been wrong about him, maybe the bushwhacker had been wrong about the others, too. Luke yelled, “Remy! Dale! Edgar! Can any of you hear me?”
It was only when he heard the faint croaking sounds that he realized he wasn’t yelling at all. He’d only thought that he was.
He heard some birds in the distance, the wind stirring the branches in the trees, the tiny lapping sound of the river flowing nearby, but that was all.
He had to get up and look for them. He might still be able to save them.
The gold was gone. Luke knew that. Potter and the other deserters would have taken the wagons with them when they left him for dead, so Luke didn’t waste time worrying about that. His only concerns were saving his own life and helping his friends if he could.
He needed to get up and see how badly he was hurt, but one thing at a time, he told himself. First he wanted to look around. He moved his hands enough to dig his fingers into the dirt and brace himself. Then, with a grunt of effort, he lifted his head.
A yell burst from him as even that much movement set off a fresh explosion of pain. He wanted to drop his head, close his eyes, and retreat back into the welcoming darkness.
Instead, he forced his head from side to side in small, jerking motions.
He couldn’t hold back a sob as he saw Dale lying on the ground a few yards away. The young man’s face was unmarked and his eyes were open, but flies were crawling around on them. He was dead, no doubt about it. His clothes were black with blood where he’d been shot.
