Elizabeth Lowell - Only His

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.»

Wolfe nodded and began sighting over the rifle, getting the feel of the new weapon.

Caleb turned to Reno. «How quiet are you on a stalk?»

«He’s better than most and not as good as you,» Wolfe said before Reno could answer. «But then, neither am I, and I was raised among the Cheyenne.»

Caleb grunted. «Reno, you can stay up here with your rifle or you can come part of the way with me and we’ll find out how slick you really are with that six-gun.»

Reno smiled wolfishly. «I’ll be stepping on your heels every bit of the way.»

He was talking to himself. Caleb was already moving. Stalking human game took time, and they had damn little of that left before Slater came back into camp.

WILLOW looked out from behind her screen of hair, saw that the horses were still being walked, and went back to trying to get out of the ropes that bound her. Desperate to be free, yet worried about attracting attention from her guard, she jerked and yanked at the bonds under cover of her long hair. Pain raked up from her wrists. Fear helped her to ignore the hurt. She never wanted to see the cruel promise in Slater’s eyes again. TheComanchero Nine Fingers had made her feel unclean.

Slater horrified her.

Despite Willow’s efforts, the ropes felt no looser now than they had when she first began twisting her wrists until the skin was rubbed raw. Fighting the despair that threatened to overwhelm her, she jerked first one wrist, then the other, hoping if she made herself bleed, her wrists and hands would be slippery enough to evade the tight bonds.

A glance at the guard told Willow that he must have finished hacking at his fingernails. He was lying on his back, his mouth open, dead asleep.

Willow began yanking openly on her bonds, taking advantage of the guard’s midday nap.

«Don’t move, honey. I don’t want to cut you.»

For an instant, Willow thought she had gone mad and was hearing things. Then she felt her bonds giving way and had to bite back a cry of relief and joy.

«Ease your ankles around to the right,» Caleb said in a voice that was barely audible.

There was a soft rustling sound as Willow inched her feet around toward the back of the stump. For a moment she felt a sensation of pressure on her ankles, followed by a slight rocking motion. The rope at her ankles fell away.

«Back up slowly until you’re behind the stump. No! Don’t watch the camp. That’s my job. You watch what you’re doing.»

Willow scooted in slow motion until the stump was between her and the camp. Caleb was lying on his stomach, his body flat to the ground.

«Lie down real slow and crawl like a snake past me toward that little crease in the grass. See it?»

She nodded, lay down, and began wriggling along Caleb’s length. When her head drew even with his chest, he gave her more terse directions, his voice so low she wondered if she was really hearing the words at all.

«The crease leads to a gully that’s about a foot deep. Go left and keep snaking along uphill until you get to the rocks. Your brother is on the left, behind them. Whatever youdo, keepdown. Reno and Wolfe will have to shoot over us if we’re spotted.»

Willow wanted to ask questions, but a look at the bleak yellow clarity of Caleb’s eyes closed her throat. She ducked her head and pushed herself forward on her stomach, feeling as exposed as an egg on a fence rail. Each time she looked up to see how far she was from the gully, it seemed that she had made no progress at all. But if she started to go faster, Caleb’s hand clamped around her ankle, forcing her to go so slowly she wanted to scream with frustration and fear.

When Willow finally reached the gully, she discovered that it provided scant cover. Less than a foot deep, with wide, shallow, gently sloping sides, the gully was little better than grass when it came to hiding Willow and Caleb. The rocks he had mentioned were more than a hundred feet away. Willow put her cheek dose to the ground and pushed herself along with arms that were trembling from the strain of moving so slowly and so awkwardly.

They were fifty feet from the rocks when one of Slater’s men glanced over and discovered Willow was missing.

The shout of discovery was cut off in mid-cry when Wolfe opened up with Caleb’s rifle, raking the camp with bullets. Caleb threw himself over Willow, protecting her in the only way he could. Fifty feet up the ravine, Reno began firing his six-gun. The bullets came so rapidly it was hard to separate the sound of each shot. Other shots came from the camp, pistols and rifles all mixed together in an unholy barrage.

Flattened against the earth, frightened, barely able to breathe, Willow felt Caleb’s big body jerk and heard him curse. More shouts came, more gunfire, bullets whining and thudding into the ground nearby, but she could see nothing, for Caleb covered her completely.

Abruptly, Reno’s six-gun fell silent. The repeating rifle didn’t. It continued to lay down a withering hail of bullets.

«Run for it!» Reno shouted.

The words had barely registered on Willow when Caleb yanked her upright and half-carried, half-dragged her toward the rocks. Reno was crouched to one side of the shallow gully, slamming a second, fully loaded cylinder into his revolver. Willow and Caleb hurtled past Reno as the repeating rifle finally fell silent.

Immediately, Reno opened fire once more, giving Wolfe time to reload. This time the shots came more slowly as Reno coolly picked off men who were foolish enough to stick up their heads to see what was happening. The range was extreme for a handgun, but Reno was extremely good with the weapon.

«Up that ravine,» Caleb said curtly to Willow as he stood behind her and pointed her toward a dry watercourse that angled away from the ridge where Wolfe was. «When you reach the trees, go about a hundred feet, then get behind some cover and stay there until we catch up. Nowrun.»