fetlock and risen quickly. As they attempted to escape the churning rapids, they plunged into a trough, the roiling gray ice water suddenly splashing the horse's flanks, soaking in through Miguel's boots and pants. He felt the powerful mare lose her footing once or twice as the water threatened to sweep her away. A lesser rider might have dug in the spurs or whipped her with a crop, but Miguel leaned forward through the howling squall and laid his head down by hers, patting her straining neck, squeezing with his knees, reassuring the animal that he was still there and still in charge. He was the master of her destiny. Not the storm.
The roar of the torrent was huge now, a crescendo overwhelming all else. The rumbling thunder of the stampede was gone, washed away by the white-water rapids. Miguel thought he might have heard human screams once or twice, but so cut off was he from his fellow riders, so perfectly isolated within the fury of this instant hurricane, that he could not tell whether he alone survived at that moment.
Flossie struggled and wrestled against the flood, gaining purchase with her hooves, then losing it, then finding a foothold again. Just as it seemed she might tire and succumb, Miguel felt her connect with solid earth again, somewhere down below the rushing water, and with a titanic heave she launched herself up out of the death grip of the flood and onto the slight rise.
'Go, girl, go, go,' the cowboy cried, urging her on.
The great beast, the finest of his mounts, repaid his faith in her, pushing onward and upward, finding a small, gentle ridgeline submerged beneath just a foot of water.
He reined her in then lest they plunge into greater depths again.
A longhorn appeared out of the white squall, bawling with fear, charging for them. Before Miguel could turn Flossie around, she saw the danger and veered, increasing her speed. He could see that a collision was inevitable, though. The steer was going to broadside them in just a few seconds.
Miguel acted without thought, whipping out his saddle gun and blasting the animal in the head. It roared with agony and outrage, half its face torn away by the Lupara, but just as it seemed as though momentum might carry it into them anyway, the beast's front legs buckled and it tumbled end over end, a thousand pounds of muscle, meat, and bone crunching into the ground, throwing up a massive fantail of floodwater.
Miguel felt his bowels tighten and shudder with the shock of near death. The horse whinnied her alarm but had sense enough to thread herself quickly around the airborne steer. She found good purchase on the small rise and galloped on. Miguel thought to rein her in, then decided to trust the animal's instincts. She was probably better suited than he to surviving this.
On they raced for a few minutes more, Flossie following the natural rise of the land and only once or twice plunging into unexpected depths, drenching them both again. Miguel kept his head down and his attention focused on the remains of the herd to his right. He strained with all his might to make out some sign of his daughter through the violence and chaos, but there was nothing. As the wind and rain finally began to abate, it became clear that few of the cattle remained. The hellish squall faded back to a hard downpour, and finally he was able to see more than a few feet in any direction. A river now ran off to his right, a violent, roiling dark brown flow in which floated the carcasses of dozens of dead animals, most of them cattle but also a few horses, some still saddled, and one sheep, bloated with gas, its four legs pointed skyward.
Pulling on his reins, at last he brought Flossie to a halt on a small mound of waterlogged earth that seemed high enough to have avoided inundation. Three longhorns already stood there, but they moved aside silently for the newcomers. Miguel turned in the saddle and peered back up the valley, into the rain. Even with visibility still reduced, it was possible to see that a hugely destructive force had scoured the wide shallow gorge of animals and plants in a short time. He spied an uprooted tree heading toward him from the south, along with what looked like an old car body. The Lord only knew where that had come from. He had seen no sign of human habitation, new or old, for miles.
'Hello!' he cried out. 'Can anyone hear me?'
Of D'Age, who had been so close at one point that he'd been able to reach out and steady his ride, there was no sign. He heard a plaintive barking somewhere behind him and craned around to see Red Dog a few hundred yards away, standing atop a truck-sized boulder, wagging her tail and spinning in circles. She was safe from the flood there, but he saw nothing of the other dog, Blue.
'Hey. Over here!'
A female voice, coming from the north and a little to the east, on the far side of the still-roaring river that had sprang into life.
Miguel found her waving from a tree.
Miss Jessup, and with her Sofia.
His heart felt as though it might burst from his chest.
One of the camp whores appeared from behind them, too, but he could not tell which, so thoroughly bedraggled and mud-covered was she.
'Stay there,' he cried back. 'Do not move until the water falls or someone comes to help.'
Sofia yelled something in reply, but he could not make it out.
Miguel waved in what he could only hope was a reassuring fashion as he spurred on, looking for other survivors. He saw hundreds of dead cattle, some of them jammed up in massive natural dams formed when one or two had caught on a tree trunk, providing a temporary obstacle against which even more had piled up. A few minutes on he found D'Age's body, smashed against a rocky outcrop, the head staved in and resting at a horribly unnatural angle. The young man's eyes were open, staring up into the storm that had killed him. Miguel did not dismount. There was nothing to be done for the dead at this time, whereas the living might be in need of his help.
Another body just a short way farther on turned out to be Jenny, Willem D'Age's fiancee. Miguel recognized her fine red leather riding boots sticking out from the crushing weight of a dead longhorn.
He crossed himself and offered a quick prayer for the souls of the departed. It was a mechanical gesture, something programmed into him by the nuns of his childhood. In his heart he no longer felt as if he was talking to God. There was only a void and a world full of pain and wickedness.
'Miguel… over here…'
He almost didn't hear the faint voice crying out over the raging waters and the still hammering rain, but the crack of a rifle shot drew his attention back across the flood stream to where Adam stood atop another large boulder with a woman. His spirits lifted as he recognized Maive Aronson, but then his mood palled again. He just knew that her husband must be dead. Cooper Aronson, the leader of this small band who had taken him and Sofia in, who had adopted them, really, after Crockett, had been riding on the far side of the herd with his wife. Miguel knew the man well enough to understand that he would not have let himself be separated from her even in the worst of the storm. That he was nowhere to be seen was an ill omen indeed.
Miguel waved and gestured for them to stay put, nodding when Adam signaled that he understood. Shivering in his sodden clothes, the vaquero rode on to survey the extent of the damage.
'All gone,' Aronson's wife whimpered. 'All of them?'
'I am afraid so,' Miguel said, the words like ashes in his throat. It was he who had suggested-insisted-that they head to the northeast to avoid entanglements with the road agents, but in doing so he had doomed the small party to utter destruction.
Four more hours he had ridden that day, up and down the length of the flood, until it receded, leaving a hellish landscape. Dead and broken cattle. Shattered trees. The bodies of the missing, save for Adam's sweetheart, young Miss Gray, who remained unaccounted for. Wrack and ruin.
The herd was scattered to hell and beyond.
His own horses and Blue the cattle dog had perished.
The few surviving souls clustered around a sputtering, rusted iron stove in an old corrugated iron shed on high ground, a good five miles from where they had lost everything. Himself. Sofia. Maive Aronson. Adam and Trudi Jessup. And the camp whore named Marsha, rescued, cleaned up, and dressed in a very damp pair of Adam's jeans and a grossly oversized flannelette shirt and lamb's wool jacket from Miguel's pack.
Just another hour would have seen them clear of the worst effects of the flash flood. Had the storm held off just that brief while longer, they could have laagered up here on this hill, easily high enough to have sheltered all the cattle and the humans who watched over them.
A steady downpour fell outside, and occasional gusts of wind blew miserable drifts of cold rain and even sleet into the shelter, which looked to Miguel to be an outstation for a large ranch. A workbench ran along the back wall,
