Ransom (11 page)

It was just a damned shame he had not brought a bottle along. Or several. After all, it was going to be a couple weeks before he went back down to collect his money. He really should have brought a bottle. Not that he had money to pay for one, and barkeeps tended to watch too close to swipe one. Now, if it was just as easy to steal a bottle as it was to take a horse, well, he would have something to warm his gut in the evenings. On the other hand . . .

He looked across the fire to the woman and the girl, huddled over there about as far away from him as they could get and still receive some warmth from the fire.

Damn woman was starting to look better and better and that was the truth of the matter. She was a bitch but she was a fancy one. He had never had a woman that fancy, nor one that uppity. He wouldn't expect her to be as good as, say, a Mexican trollop or an Injun squaw. But it might be interesting to find out.

Thinking about what the blond bitch would be like twisted his smile into a leer.

He hadn't thought she was paying attention to him, but she was. She saw his expression and read it correctly.

Her face flushed bright red and she quickly dropped her eyes.

“I have to . . . I have to go to . . . to the bathroom,” she said.

“Right over there, missy, but you stay in the light, y' hear me? Don't be going past that clump o' brush. Don't go behind it. I got to see.”

He would not have thought it possible, but she flushed even darker.

She did not get up or go anywhere.

Apparently, he thought, she did not have to go all that bad.

Chapter 10

Taylor got off the brown and knelt, examining the ground closely for a moment. Then he stood and scuffed at the gravel, stepped back, and looked at the faint mark his boot had made. Finally he turned and looked up at Hahn, who was waiting, still mounted on the paint horse. “I think we may have something here.”

“It's them?” Hahn said, his expression brightening and his posture straightening as well. Taylor shook his head. “I don't know as it's them, but I can tell you that it's some-damn-body. Somebody's been through this way.”

“Can you tell how long ago?”

“No, I can't. All's I can say for sure is that horses have passed this way not too awful long ago. Could be a day, two days, I really ain't sure.” He removed his hat and ran the back of his wrist across his forehead.

“But it's them,” Hahn persisted.

“Likely,” Taylor conceded. “Nobody would be moving cows up here this time o' year. Everybody running cattle up here already has 'em here and it's too early for them to be brought back down. Shouldn't be anybody up in these hills again for another couple months.”

“Could there be a prospector? Someone like that?”

Taylor considered that for a moment, then said, “Could be. I won't guarantee against it, but most prospectin' fellas I've come across don't have more'n one horse. Most often they only go out with a mule or a burro an' no horse at all. From what I see here, there's more than the one
animal. An' if you look right here”—he pointed—“you can see that piece of a curve pressed into the soil there where there's a little less gravel. That's for sure a horse hoof. So, no, I don't reckon it's a prospector wandering around up here and it for sure ain't no elk nor deer nor anything like that. Wouldn't be no point to a prospector bein' here since everything has pretty much been looked over anyway. That leaves . . . well, we'll see.”

“God, I hope it's them,” Hahn said. He pulled his shotgun out of the saddle scabbard and checked the loads.

“Put that thing back,” Taylor told him. “We aren't close to whoever this is.” His expression was grim, however, when he added, “Yet.”

* * *

“Can't we stop for a few minutes? I'm hungry and my backside hurts from all this riding.”

“I swear, Hahn, you're more bother than a wagonload of three-year-olds,” Taylor snapped.

“I mean it. I need to stop. Besides, I have to, uh, I have to take a leak.”

Taylor turned around in his saddle and glared at the man who was the author of all his unhappiness. Or so John Taylor believed anyway. After a moment he sighed. “All right, damn it. Give me a minute to find a good spot.”

Fifteen minutes later Taylor reined the brown to a halt beside a trickle of water that sprang out of a nearly vertical hillside. “You can get down now,” he told Hahn. “See that spot over there? Build us a fire on those flat rocks an' put a pot of water on to boil. If we're gonna stop here for a bit, we might as well have a swallow or two o' coffee.”

“You want me to do it?” Hahn asked.

“Yes, I want you to do it. I'm gonna be busy,” Taylor said, stepping down from his horse. He quickly hobbled both his saddle and pack animals, stripped their bridles off, and turned them loose to graze on a patch of emerald-green grass that flourished because of the water.

Taylor started off on foot and Hahn called him back. “Where are you going?”

“Just up there a ways. I want t' see can I find good tracks where we got dirt for a change. It might help me to know what we're dealing with. How many of them. Like that. Get that coffee going. I won't be gone long.” He set off on foot, eyes on the ground ahead of him, worry pulling at his features. Jessica. Loozy. Where were they? How were they? What was happening to them now?

He was tempted to hurry. To rush ahead and to find them. But haste was not called for here. Not at all. Thoroughness, that was what was needed.

But oh, it was tempting to hurry.

* * *

“Good Lord, man, where'd you learn to build a fire?”

Hahn looked up at Taylor and scowled. “What business is that of yours, mister?”

“Because I'm the one wantin' to have some noonday coffee, that's what. I been gone a good half hour. By now you shoulda had the fire going an' the coffee all made. Instead you got a pile o' sticks and not even no flame, much less coffee. Lord God, man, you are about useless as tits on a boar hog.”

Hahn, bristling, jumped to his feet and thrust his chin out. But he did not take the swing he so obviously wanted to throw. Once was quite enough for that. There was no
way he could physically overpower the much larger Taylor.

“Get outta the damn way,” Taylor snapped. He stepped forward and brushed Hahn out of the way, then knelt by the haphazard pile of sticks, some of them still green, that Hahn had assembled. Moving with the speed and sureness of long practice, Taylor selected the smallest, driest bits of wood from the pile and reassembled them to his liking. He took a magnifying glass from his pocket, polished it on his sleeve, then focused it on the splintered base of a dry twig to start a small fire. As the tiny blaze took hold and began to strengthen, he added larger and larger pieces until he had a fire the size of a hat.

“Now you can put the water on to start heating. You do have the water ready, don't you?” Taylor waited a moment for an answer but received none. He snorted softly, shook his head, and stood upright. “Never mind, then. I'll get it.”

Hahn glared at Taylor for several seconds, then turned and began rummaging in the packs in search of coffee.

* * *

They stopped at the top of a rock-strewn chute that was nearly—but not quite—vertical. It descended for perhaps one hundred fifty feet before reaching the floor of a narrow cut. Taylor stepped down and flipped his stirrup onto the seat of his saddle. He looked back at Hahn and said, “Best tighten your cinch before we start down that thing.”

Hahn lifted himself up in his stirrups and peered down at the chute. It looked even taller and steeper than it was. Certainly Hahn found it to be intimidating. “We have to go down that?”

Taylor nodded. “We do.”

“Can't we . . . go around? Or something?”

“Nope.” Taylor pulled his cinch tight and secured it in place, then mounted the brown, looked back at Hahn, and shrugged. Without another word he started down the chute, shifting his weight far back and allowing the brown horse to pick its way slowly down, a cascade of dust and dislodged rocks leading the way.

Hahn dismounted and began leading the paint horse down. The paint and Hahn's packhorse made it down the chute a good five minutes before he did. Much to Taylor's amusement.

 

Ervin Ederle

There! The recognition gave him a smug satisfaction. The blond bitch's husband would be too frightened to tell anyone, but even if he did there was no posse on earth that could ferret him out here. He had proven that before. Now Ederle stood on the path . . . goat, sheep, Indian, whatever . . . and peered up at his perfect hidey-hole.

The broad ledge in front of it was perhaps twenty feet above the narrow path. There were no stairs, no ladder or visible handholds, but the climb was not so steep that it could not be easily scrambled, and by a man carrying a pack or bundles of supplies as Erv had also proven the times he had hidden here before.

No one else, no one except the last three members of his gang—or what used to be his gang; with this deal he was retired from all that—knew about this place. No one else ever would.

He looked at the woman and the girl and amended the thought: no one alive, that is.

“Come along. You two can help me carry them bags of stuff up there. Might as well be of some use.”

“Carry? Where?” The woman looked confused, not defiant.

Erv grinned, then laughed out loud. “You'll see. Just get down now. You can leave those horses standing. I'll take care o' them later.” He would have to lead the horses back down below timberline and turn them loose on hobbles lest they provide a hint of what lay above. Not that he
expected anyone to come near, but a man should always be cautious and sensible. That was why Erv had done so well for so long. Cautious and sensible, that was him.

Probably he would need more supplies to keep the females for the two weeks. If he kept them, that is. It might be sensible—certainly it would be easier—to just shoot them and be done with it. He could collect his ransom money and then just fade away with not a soul but him knowing the full truth of it.

The only reason he needed them now was if he had to give a show of good faith. Like if the husband insisted on seeing them before he turned over all that money.

Erv snorted. Good faith! Good faith was for mugs. What Erv cared about was that ransom money. It warmed his heart just speculating about how much it would be. Thousands. How many thousands? Enough to keep him in senoritas for the rest of his days. He was sure it would be that much at the very least.

“Come on now. Take up those pokes from behind your saddles an' carry them. I'll show you the way.”

The bags, he noticed, were light. There was not enough food in them to sustain three people for the whole two weeks.

But there was enough for one.

That was something he would have to think about, but first he needed to get some sleep. Watching over the damn females through those several nights getting here just about had him worn down to a frazzle. And before he could sleep now he had to get the woman and the kid settled inside the hidey-hole and take the horses down and . . . there was just an awful lot that still had to be done.

He was just about worn out, that was the truth of
the matter. He could feel it in his chest now. Clutching. Squeezing. Just about worn out, he was afraid.

“Hurry up. We don't got all day.”

In spite of Erv's prodding the females were slow to crawl down from their mounts. It took more prodding to get them to carry anything. Lazy bitches. He needed them for the time being but after that, well . . .

He smiled, thinking about the ransom. How much would it be? Thousands? How many thousands? What a delightful question it was to be asking himself, he thought, his smile broadening into a grin.

The woman saw the expression and cringed away, probably thinking he had something else in mind.

Which he did even if not at that exact moment. Funny, the farther they got from town, the better looking the woman became.

Erv yawned and shook his head vigorously back and forth in an attempt to clear the cobwebs from it, then angrily snapped, “Get on up there, damn you. Move!”

It pleased him to see how quickly they scurried.

Two weeks, he thought. Then all that money.

He was smiling again as he grabbed his saddlebags and followed the woman and girl up to the ledge above. Oh, it was going to be such a good life!

Chapter 11

“Over here.” Taylor glanced to his right. Hahn was standing behind a screen of scrub oak, pointing at the ground by his feet. He had gotten off his horse in order to take a leak and now seemed to have found something.

“Be right with you,” Taylor responded. He reined the brown to the right and stopped behind and to one side from the paint, close but not within kicking range even though the paint horse was not normally a kicker.

Taylor dismounted, wrapped his rein ends in the ragged, tough scrub oak branches, and walked over to stand beside Dick Hahn. “What am I s'posed to be seeing here?”

Hahn pointed again. “Isn't that a hoofprint?”

Taylor looked more closely at the scrape in the red, compacted gravel and said, “Well, I'll be a son of a bitch. 'Tis at that.”

Hahn swelled up with pleasure and abruptly nodded his head. “So they went this way,” he said, the sentence as much question as statement.

“No doubt about it,” Taylor said. “They went this way.”

Oddly enough, he received the same sort of pleasure from Dick Hahn's newfound ability to spot a track as he used to feel when then four-year-old Loozy read a new word to him. “That's good,” he added. “Real good.”

Since he was off his horse anyway, Taylor took a few
extra moments to unbutton his fly and drain his own snake before he climbed back onto the brown.

“No need for that yet,” he said when Hahn reached for the butt of his shotgun. “We're still a ways behind them.”