Sugarfoot pounded back up the Avalanche Creek path, taking the fork in the trail at a dead run, leaping rocks and rotting logs without a break in stride. When the forest thickened again, Sugarfoot slowed just enough to be able to avoid or jump over the natural obstacles that were strewn across the trail. Small runoff channels and big boulders, freshly fallen trees and trees that had long ago fallen, all of them flashed beneath the hooves of the hardrunning horse.
Whip rode Sugarfoot like a big cat, never coming loose no matter which way the horse jumped, always ready with a steady pressure on the reins to help Sugarfoot gather himself after a difficult jump.
As Sugarfoot hurtled yet another log, more shots came from up ahead. The sounds were much closer now. There was no doubt that it was a six-gun. Several six-guns, in fact.
No rifle answered.
No shotgun boomed.
«Run, you big gray bastard,» Whip said through his teeth. «Run!»
Spurs reinforced Whip’s command. Sugarfoot flattened out and gave everything he had. Nose stretched into the wind, tail streaming behind, the horse tore through the forest at a flatly dangerous speed. One misstep, one mistake, and both man and horse would go down in a tangle of broken limbs.
Whip knew it but didn’t care. In his mind was the memory of how the Culpeppers had watched Shannon with eyes that were even more lewd than their words.
And now she was at their mercy.
The trees ahead thinned, telling Whip that the meadow was immediately ahead. As much as he wanted to gallop right up to the cabin, he knew it would be stupid. He wouldn’t be much good to Shannon if he got cut down in a Culpepper crossfire.
And he had no doubt it was the Culpeppers who were after Shannon.
Whip pulled hard on the reins. Sugarfoot sat on his hocks and slid to a stop in a turmoil of dirt and forest debris. The meadow was only thirty feet ahead. Rifle in hand, bullwhip over his shoulder, Whip kicked his feet free of the stirrups and jumped off. He landed on his feet, running hard.
Before he reached the edge of the trees, a rope shot out of the shadows and tangled around his feet. He rolled as he fell, yanking free of the rope and regaining his balance with a feline twist of his body.
But it was already too late.
When Whip stood, he was looking right up the barrel of Floyd Culpepper’s six-gun. Whip could tell the man was Floyd because he was holding his gun in his left hand. His right wrist was wrapped tightly in rags that might have been clean once, but no longer were.
Pale blue eyes watched Whip with an expression somewhere between malice and glee.
«Lookee here, Clim. Darcy was right about this ol’ boy hotfooting it back here if n he heard shots.»
Clim turned aside and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice.
«And here you thought Darcy was just trying to cut me out of my rightful turn in that little widow’s saddle,» Clim added.
Rage and something more gripped Whip, a feeling as though his guts had been cut out and were falling away, leaving him cold all the way to his soul.
«Whoever touches Shannon is a dead man walking,» Whip said.
Floyd’s smile revealed sharp, uneven teeth.
«Right fine sentiments,» Floyd said mockingly, «but you ain’t in no position to be making no brags. Drop that long gun, boy. And that bullwhip, too.»
Whip obeyed, but his gray eyes never stopped measuring the distances between himself and Floyd’s drawn gun and Clim’s holstered weapon.
«You see a knife, Clim?»
«Nah. ‘Sides, no thick-chested West Virginia boy can hold a candle to me in a knife fight.»
«Walk,» Floyd said to Whip, gesturing with his bandaged wrist toward the meadow. «You try to get away and I’ll kill you quick as a rabbit.»
Whip didn’t doubt it.
«Give the signal,» Floyd said to Clim.
Clim whistled shrilly, three short blasts of sound followed by silence.
After a few moments, a whistle answered.
«Move it, boy,» Floyd said to Whip. «They’re waiting for us, and Beau ain’t a waiting kind of man.»
When Whip moved forward it was with a peculiar, gliding grace. His weight was always poised on the balls of his feet, ready to jump or lash out in any direction at the first sign of carelessness from his captors. He held his hands oddly, just away from his sides, his fingers slightly curved as though in relaxation.
«Told ya,» Floyd said to Clim after a few steps.
«Told me what?»
«This here ol’ boy ain’t much account without his bullwhip and rifle. He’s as heedful as a welltrained hound.»
Clim grunted. «Damn big hound. Even bigger than the one Beau shot. We’d of had that gal if’n that cur hadn’t jumped Darcy when he grabbed her.»
Hope stabbed through Whip. It sounded like Shannon might have gotten away.
«Don’t git yer water hot,» Floyd said to Clim. «Beau ain’t much on talkin’ lately, but he can still track slick as sin. He’ll get the widow ‘fore she gets too far. Hell, ain’t no place for her to go to anyways.»
Clim eyed the big man walking in front of him. Despite Whip’s surrender, the coiled ease of his stride made Clim nervous.
«Why don’t you just shoot him and get done with it?» Clim asked.
«Beau,» Floyd said succinctly. «He’s got a bone to pick with this ol’ boy. You want to be the one to tell Beau he can’t have no fun ‘cause you done gone and killed him?»
Whatever Clim said was too guttural to understand.
Whip walked from the shadows of the trees into the full sunlight of the meadow.
To the girl hiding and catching her breath after a reckless scramble down through Silent John’s bolthole to the cave and from there into the cabin, Whip’s appearance was dream and nightmare combined.
It can’t be Whip! He rode away.
Seeing Whip captive to the Culpeppers wrenched Shannon’s mind away from her fear for Prettyface, forcing her to concentrate on saving herself, for only then could she save Whip.
Still unable to believe that Whip had come back, Shannon leaned forward and peered through the ill-fitting shutters again.
There was no mistake. Sunlight flashed on hair as pale as corn silk. Sunlight outlined clean, powerful limbs and wide shoulders. And sunlight showed that Whip’s hands were empty of weapons.
Nor did the bullwhip lie in quiet coils on his shoulder.
Shannon bit her lip against a hunger to cry out to Whip, to tell him that he wasn’t alone, that she would help him. But crying out would be as foolish as walking barefoot through a campfire.
Quickly Shannon turned away from the shutters, went to the front door, and lifted the shotgun down from its pegs. As she reached to open the door, she heard a voice call from just beyond her cabin.
«Told ya you’d get him!»
«Yah. Easy as shootin’ a hen on a nest,» called someone from the meadow.
Heart beating wildly, Shannon shifted the shotgun and lowered the heavy bar into place across the door. She tiptoed back to the shutter and peered out again.
Whip was walking across the meadow toward the cabin. Behind him rode two men on mules. Another man stood ten feet from the cabin door, watching the three men approach. The ripped state of the nearest man’s clothes — and the bloody marks on his face and arms — told Shannon that this was the Culpepper who had grabbed her, only to go down beneath Prettyface’s attack.
Shannon’s hands tightened on the shotgun as she thought of her loyal dog. Then she forced herself to think of here and now, and the danger to Whip and herself.
There was no time to claw her way back out the bolthole and down the mountainside to surprise the Culpeppers. Whatever she did would have to be done from here.
And soon.
