Caleb threw Wolfe a narrow look. «Forget it.»
Wolfe’s smile flashed against his dark features. «Don’t blame you a bit. That’s one hell of a girl. She saw the men in front of her and pulled her horse right back onto his hocks. By the time he got four hooves on the ground again, she had seen her best chance and she took it.» Wolfe shook his head, remembering. «She aimed that red stud for the biggest gap in the horsemen, yanked out her shotgun, and headed for the men at a dead run.»
Reno looked shocked. «Willow did that?»
Wolfe nodded, then glanced at Caleb. «You don’t look surprised.»
«I’m not. When theComancheros jumped us, my horse went down. Willow turned around and came back for me and damn the rifle fire.»
«I can see how that would put a man in a marrying frame of mind,» Wolfe said, smiling. «Just watching her take on Slater’s bunch gave me a few ideas in that direction. Those London ladies I met were as lovely as dawn, and would have lasted just about as long out here.»
«Willow did fine as soon as I got her some decent clothes,» Caleb said.
«Thought I recognized those buckskins,» Wolfe said. «It took Slater’s men a minute to figure out it was a girl riding up. Once they did, they sort of settled back, expecting it to end without a fuss. By the time they got their rifles out she was on top of them. They fired a couple of rounds to turn her, she fired back, and one of the men grabbed her right out of the saddle when the stud ran by.»
Caleb’s hand tightened on the rifle stock. «Did he hurt her?»
«Not as much as she hurt him,» Wolfe said, satisfaction in every syllable. «Hemightas well have grabbed a wildcat. By the time I got down off that rock and up to the men, Willow was hog-tied on the ground and the man who had caught her didn’t have enough skin left on his face to be worth shaving.»
Wolfe didn’t mention that Willow looked a little worse for wear, too, her pale cheeks showing the clear imprints of a man’s hand.
«Then Slater came up and started asking questions about you,» Wolfe continued, glancing at Caleb. «Willow said she didn’t know where you were, that she was lost.»
«Did Slater believe her?» Reno asked.
Unhappily, Wolfe took off his hat, ran his fingers through hair as thick and black as night, and snapped his hat back into place. «No. He found a book of some kind she was carrying. Seems there was a map and a lot of notes in it.»
«My journal,» Caleb said. «She took it.»
Wolfe’s eyes narrowed, but he asked no questions despite his curiosity. «Slater told her to point out where she had been. She looked him right in the eye and told him she couldn’t read. He threw the journal in her face and told her she had until the horses were cooled out to learn.»
«How much time do we have left?» Reno asked.
Silently Wolfe scanned the countryside and the angle of the sun. «Maybe another hour. Those horses were lathered from their fetlocks to their ears. That’s why I took a chance and came looking for you. If I hadn’t found you in five more minutes, I was going back.»
Caleb’s mouth flattened. He knew what Wolfe wasn’t saying — Jed Slater was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted in the most efficient manner possible. His reputation for applied cruelty had been earned during a particularly cruel war.
Wolfe looked at Caleb’s harsh expression and knew what the other man was thinking. Hesitating, knowing he shouldn’t, Wolfe nonetheless found himself asking the question that had eaten at him since the first moment he had realized who Slater’s men were pursuing.
«How did you get separated from Willow?» Wolfe asked.
Caleb said nothing.
Reno swore and admitted, «She wrapped her stud’s feet in cloth and sneaked out of the valley.»
There was silence while Wolfe thought about what Reno had said.
«She got past both of you,» Wolfe said finally.
«Yes.»
«Be damned.» He sighed. «Any idea why she took off?»
Reno didn’t wait for Caleb to speak. «Willow thinks Caleb seduced her to get even for me seducing Caleb’s sister.»
«Bloody hell,» Wolfe said, shocked into using a kind of English he had sworn to forget. «Why did —»
«The horses have rested enough,» Caleb interrupted. «Let’s ride.»
Without waiting to see if the other men would follow, Caleb touched spurs to his horse, sending it forward at a fast canter. A minute later, Wolfe passed him, taking the lead. Nothing more was said until Wolfesignalled for a halt.
«We have to leave the horses here,» Wolfe said.
While Reno tied the horses out of sight, Caleb pulled off his boots and switched to moccasins. Wolfe started up the steep shoulder of a ridge that poked out into the grassland. When all three men were belly down just below the crest, they took off their hats and crawled up the last few feet.
Slater’s camp was at the bottom of the slope, a thousand feet away. There was little cover on the slope itself, for it was too steep and too rocky for anything to survive except bits of grass and scattered, very stunted trees. The only other approach to the camp was up a grassy meadow where ten hobbled horses were grazing and five horses were being slowly walked while lather dried after their long, exhausting run.
Ishmael was one of the horses. Though they had been walked for half an hour already, it would be at least another half hour before they were cool enough to be turned out with the other horses. Then Slater would come back and begin questioning Willow.
Before that happened, Willow had to be gone.
Taking care that no sunlight flashed off the spyglass, Caleb searched until he found Willow. She was off to one side of the camp, tied hand and foot among the supplies. Her arms were pulled awkwardly behind her back. A rope went from her wrists, around a waist-high stump, and from there to her ankles.
Ten feet behind her, a man lay propped against a saddle, cutting his fingernails with a pocket knife. His face looked like he had tangled with a wildcat.
Willow straightened. The movement caught Caleb’s eye. For a moment, the hair on her cheeks slid aside, revealing the livid marks of a man’s hand. A stillness came over Caleb for the space of one breath, two, three. He took a long look at the guard. Only then did Caleb resume quartering the area around Slater’s camp, marking out the positions of other men, of available cover, of possible ambush sites.
While Caleb used the spyglass, Wolfe talked in a low voice that carried no farther than the men who were stretched out on either side of him. «If Slater follows his wartime practice, there will be a man guarding Willow and another guard about thirty yards out from camp where you’d least expect it. At the first sign of trouble, both guards will shoot Willow.»
«I saw a man in the rocks off to the right,» Caleb said softly. «I’ll take care of him on the way in.» He collapsed the spyglass and handed it to Reno. «Same for the man close to her, the one with the scratched face. I’ll take particularly good care of him.»
Reno scanned the slope and the approaches to the camp while Caleb took off his heavy coat and made certain his six-gun was secured in the holster.
«You can’t get close to them without being spotted,» Reno said finally, lowering the spyglass. «And if you shoot them, Willow will be the next to die. We’ll have to wait until dark.»
«Slater isn’t a patient man,» Caleb said. «I’m not going to sit here and watch him ask questions and then cut her to ribbons with his steel-tipped quirt when she doesn’t answer. That’s what he did in Mexico when a woman wouldn’t tell him where her husband was.»
Wolfe’s powerful hand damped around Reno’s arm, holding him down when he would have surged upright. «Easy, Reno. Cal likes it even less than you do, but he’s right. If anyone can get Willow out of that camp alive, he can.»
«Here,» Caleb said, handing over his rifle to Wolfe. «Cartridges are in my jacket pocket. At this range, the gun pulls about a half-inch to the left. Willow and I might be in your line of fire for the first fifty feet. After that, I’m taking her up the ravine at the rear of camp. When we’re over the top, we’ll go to ground and wait for you to bring the horses to us.»
