“You really think he’d do that?”
“Somebody who would steal a bunch of army rifles and try to turn them over to a troublemaker like Juan Pablo ... I wouldn’t put much of anything past him,” Matt said.
The flame of rage burned so brightly inside Zack Jardine that it threatened to consume him. He had been close, so close, to achieving his goal ...
And then like judgment striking literally from the heavens, that boulder had come crashing down and ruined everything.
He hadn’t gotten a good look at the men who’d been shooting at him, but he was certain one of them was Sam Two Wolves. That blasted half-breed had been a thorn in his side ever since Two Wolves had shown up in Flat Rock.
Joe Hutto and Dave Snyder galloped up alongside Jardine. All the others had fallen to the volley of gunshots from the top of the bluff, including Doyle Hilliard. Jardine had seen him go down with blood spouting from a bullet hole in his chest.
“Zack, what are we gonna do now?” Hutto yelled over the pounding hoofbeats.
“It’s all ruined!” Snyder added, echoing Jardine’s thoughts.
But Jardine wouldn’t let himself give up. He had come too far, invested too much in this scheme. As he cudgeled his brain, an idea came to him.
“Head for Flat Rock!” he told the two men. “We’re gonna grab that Englishwoman from the Buckingham Palace!”
“What good will that do?” Hutto wanted to know.
“Plenty, when Noah Reilly tells everybody that Indians carried her off! Everybody in town knows Reilly, and they’ll believe him!”
The more Jardine thought about it, the more he believed the hastily formed plan stood a chance of working. Nothing stirred up frontiersmen quicker than a threat to a woman.
If the men of Flat Rock and the nearby ranches believed that Lady Augusta had been kidnapped by the Navajo, they would mount a rescue effort and go charging recklessly out to the canyon where the Navajo lived.
Juan Pablo would meet that attack with all the ferocity he and his followers could muster, even without those army rifles, and blood would be spilled on both sides.
That was all it would take, Jardine told himself.
The blood was the key to everything.
And that key would unlock the fortune that could still make Zack Jardine a rich man.
When Sam and Stovepipe reached the spot where they had left Elizabeth, they found her gone and the horses scattered, just as Sam expected.
“That was pure bad luck,” he said as he brought his mount to a halt. “Juan Pablo and the others must have ridden right into her while they were trying to get away.”
“You reckon they headed back to the canyon?” Stovepipe asked.
“I don’t know where else they would go.” Sam lifted the reins and urged the horse into a run again. Stovepipe followed suit.
The time it took to reach the canyon where Caballo Rojo’s clan lived was torture to Sam. He hadn’t gotten to know Elizabeth all that well before he left to search for the bushwhackers, but from what he had seen of her, she was a fine young woman.
And she had taken good care of Matt, which meant a lot, too. Sam didn’t want anything bad happening to her. He doubted that Juan Pablo would kill her outright—he had expressed his intention to take her as his second wife, after all—but there was no telling what else he might do.
The eastern sky was starting to turn a faint shade of gray from the approach of dawn when Sam and Stovepipe came in sight of the cliffs where the canyon was located. They reined in to talk about their plan of action.
“If we just ride straight in,” Stovepipe said, “Juan Pablo’s probably left guards with a couple of those Springfields he grabbed at the mouth of the canyon to shoot anybody who shows up.”
“That’s the only way in there,” Sam said. “We don’t have any choice.”
“What we need is a distraction. I’ll go chargin’ in to draw their fire, and you come along behind me and pick ’em off.”
“That’s a good way to get yourself killed,” Sam protested.
“You got a better way to get in there?”
Sam had to admit that he didn’t. But he said, “Why don’t I go first and let you pick them off?”
Stovepipe didn’t answer him. Instead, the range detective kicked his horse into a run and galloped straight at the mouth of the canyon.
Sam drew his revolver and followed. Stovepipe had a good lead on him. Sam might have been able to cut into that gap, but he knew this was their best chance of getting into the canyon.
At least one of them might make it through, he thought grimly.
As if warned by some instinct, Stovepipe abruptly pulled his horse to the right, then back to the left. Muzzle flame spurted from both sides of the canyon mouth.
That gave Sam the location of the guards, assuming that there were only two of them. The Springfields were single-shot rifles, and although someone trained in their use could reload very quickly, the Navajo would be far from expert at that.
Sam was counting on that to give him a slight advantage. While the guards were fumbling to get fresh shells
