her head up, too.
“You smell it, don’t you?” Scratch asked.
“Yeah,” she replied, her voice growing taut with worry. “Smoke.”
They were down in a hollow and couldn’t see very far. Scratch heeled his horse into a faster pace, and Cara did likewise. The smell of smoke grew stronger in the air as they trotted toward a rise about a quarter of a mile away.
By the time they reached the top of that rise, Scratch wasn’t surprised to see clouds of gray smoke billowing into the air in the distance. Both riders reined in sharply, and Cara exclaimed, “Damn it!”
“I reckon that was the way we were goin’?” Scratch asked as he nodded toward the smoke.
“That’s the right direction,” Cara said. “What I can’t tell is how far away the fire is. I think it’s on the other side of the hideout.”
“Maybe so, but the wind’s blowin’ it this way mighty fast. You reckon we can get to the cave and get out before the fire reaches it?”
“I don’t know,” Cara said, “but I sure as hell intend to try.”
She leaned forward in the saddle, jabbed her boot heels into the flanks of Bo’s horse, and sent the animal lunging forward in a gallop.
“Cara!” Scratch shouted after her. “Dadgum it, come back here!”
She ignored him and kept riding. For a second, Scratch pondered pulling out his Winchester and trying to shoot the horse out from under her. He decided against it because he wasn’t going to do that to Bo’s horse, for one thing, and for another it wasn’t easy to hit a target moving that fast. He might kill Cara with the shot instead.
And maybe she was right, he thought. It was difficult to judge distances where smoke was concerned. That blaze could be fifteen miles away, maybe even more. They might be able to reach the hideout, retrieve the loot, and then flee ahead of the flames. It was worth a try, at least until he had a better idea how close the fire really was.
With that decision made, Scratch sent his own mount galloping after Cara’s.
She was a good rider, and she maintained the short lead over him as she raced along draws, over ridges, and around jutting piles of rock. The pillar of smoke in the distance had climbed high enough into the sky that it was visible even when they were riding over lower terrain. The gray column stood out in sharp, menacing contrast to the bright blue sky. Scratch thought it was a little wider, too, which meant the leading edge of the fire was spreading out and growing broader.
The air was so dry it tasted like dust in his mouth. That, combined with the high winds and the dead vegetation, was a recipe for pure, unadultered hell.
Up on the Great Plains, Scratch had witnessed a number of prairie fires, and they could be awesome in their destructiveness. Nothing was a match, though, for a Texas wildfire with its sheer deadly speed. The only natural disaster Scratch could think of that was close to a wildfire’s equal was a tornado, and even those usually weren’t as bad because their paths of devastation weren’t as broad.
As they came out on the lip of a rise overlooking a valley, Cara hauled back on the reins and drew her horse to a stop. She leveled an arm and pointed at the long, rugged ridge on the other side of the valley, a couple of miles away.
“The cave is in that ridge,” she told Scratch. “And the fire is still on the other side of it.”
She was right. The spreading smoke was beyond the ridge, but it was impossible to tell just how far away the fire really was.
“We can get the loot,” Cara said. “Then we’ll head east, away from the fire.”
“Until it overtakes us,” Scratch warned. “That wind is blowin’ faster than these horses can run.”
“We can make it,” she insisted. “Come on!”
She kicked the horse into a gallop again, taking the downward slope at a breakneck pace. Scratch rode after her. He couldn’t help but keep casting glances at the steadily advancing smoke.
Those two miles or so across the valley seemed a lot longer with the threat of the wildfire looming over them. Eventually, though, they reached the ridge and Cara started following a winding trail that twisted and turned its way upward. The face of the ridge was such a jumble of boulders that Scratch could understand how the entrance of a cave could be hidden up here. They probably wouldn’t be able to see it until they were right on top of it.
He had caught up to Cara and was right behind her when she suddenly reined in. She jerked Bo’s Winchester from the saddle boot.
“What is it?” Scratch asked as he brought his mount to a stop alongside hers.
“I saw somebody above us,” she said tensely. “Riders comin’ down this way.”
“Folks tryin’ to get away from the fire, more than likely,” Scratch guessed.
“Maybe, but we’re close to that cache now, and I don’t trust anybody.” She jerked her horse toward a cluster of rock slabs that had slid down the face of the ridge in ages past. Over her shoulder, she told Scratch, “We can hole up over here and bushwhack whoever it is!”
Scratch wasn’t of a mind to bushwhack anybody, but there was no point in arguing with Cara right now. Once she saw that those riders she had spotted weren’t any threat to them, they could go on with their own business.
Scratch coughed as he followed Cara into the rocks. The smoke was getting thicker in the air. You didn’t just smell it; now it irritated the nose and eyes and throat. The horses didn’t like it, either. They were getting harder to control.
Scratch and Cara dismounted where they could watch the trail leading down from the ridge without being too noticeable themselves. Scratch hadn’t seen the riders, but he trusted Cara’s eyesight. His own eyes were starting to water a little from the smoke.
He listened intently for hoofbeats, and for the crackle of flames as well that would warn them the wildfire was almost on top of them. He didn’t hear that telltale crackling, but after a moment he caught the steady thud of hoofbeats. Someone was coming down the trail, all right.
Cara lifted the Winchester. Her hands were tight on the weapon.
“Whoever that is, they better not’ve got into that cache,” she said. “I’ll kill ’em before I let anybody steal my loot.”
That struck Scratch as funny, but he didn’t have any laughter in him at the moment, not even a dry chuckle. Instead he waited in silence, holding the reins of both horses while Cara edged forward beside one of the massive slabs of rock to get a better look at the trail.
One by one, half a dozen riders came into view. As they drew closer, Scratch studied them intently. They were all rugged-looking, well-armed hombres. The man in the lead wore a flat-crowned black hat and a black vest over a white shirt. He had a hawklike face and a dark mustache.
Close behind him rode a burly man in a buckskin jacket. He was bare headed and had a wild shock of long gray hair. The next man was lean, with red hair and a face like a fox. The other three were typical hard cases, roughly dressed and with several days’ worth of stubble on their faces. Each of those three was leading a packhorse.
Scratch had never seen any of the men before.
That wasn’t the case with Cara, though. A shock went through him as he realized that she was staring at the men in stunned recognition, especially the man riding in the lead.
Then she cried out, “Hank! Over here! Hank!”
The words were barely out of her mouth when she swung the rifle in her hands toward Scratch and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 29
Brubaker reined in and pointed to the towering column of smoke rising in the distance.
“Morton said he’d send us a smoke signal,” the deputy commented. “You reckon that’s it?”
“That looks like too much smoke to be a signal,” Bo replied with a worried frown. “That’s from a big
