Arizona Ambush

BLOOD BOND ARIZONA AMBUSH

William W. Johnstone

with J. A. Johnstone

PINNACLE BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

SAVAGE TEXAS

Copyright Page

Chapter 1

“Are we in Arizona or New Mexico?” Matt Bodine asked with a puzzled frown.

Sam Two Wolves shook his head.

“I don’t know. We might’ve even strayed over the line into Colorado or Utah. That’s why they call this area the Four Corners.”

Matt frowned.

“You don’t know exactly where you are? You’re an Indian, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you know these things?”

“I’m half Cheyenne, as you well know.”

“Well, then, shouldn’t you be at least half-sure where we are?”

“The Indians who live around here are not Cheyenne,” Sam pointed out with the tolerant air of someone explaining things to a small child. “I believe most of them in these parts are Navajo.”

Matt shook his head.

“Sounds like an excuse to me.”

“What about you?” Sam asked. “You’re blood brother to the Cheyenne. Shouldn’t you know?”

“I’m blood brother to one Cheyenne—you. And since you’re half Cheyenne, that makes me ...” Matt squinted as he thought. “I never was that good at ciphering. You’re the one with the college education. You figure it out.”

“Maybe we should just admit that we’re lost.”

“I’m not lost.” Matt pointed south over the mostly flat, dry terrain through which the two young men rode. “That way’s Mexico.” He turned in the saddle and waved a hand northward. “And Montana and Canada are up yonder a ways. California’s in front of us, and the Mississippi River’s behind us. See? I’m not the least bit lost.”

Sam just shook his head as Matt grinned.

The companionable relationship between them came naturally. Matt Bodine and Samuel August Webster Two Wolves had ridden together for a number of years, drifting across the frontier, and before that they had been childhood friends in Montana. That was where they had become blood brothers.

The link between them was even stronger than that. They were onihomihan, brothers of the wolf. The adventurous lives they had led made them brothers of the gun, as well. Theirs was the unbreakable bond of men who had fought side by side and saved each other’s lives on numerous occasions.

At first glance they might have been mistaken for actual brothers. Both young men were tall, broad-shouldered, and powerfully built. The differences between them were apparent on a second look, however.

Matt’s close-cropped brown hair was lighter than Sam’s shaggy black hair, which was as dark as a raven’s wing.

Sam also had the slight reddish tint to his skin which was also part of his legacy from his father Medicine Horse, as were the high cheekbones.

Matt wore jeans and a faded blue bib-front shirt. His battered brown Stetson was thumbed back on his head most of the time, as was the case now.

Sam wore jeans and a fringed buckskin shirt, although the fringe was strictly utilitarian, not gaudy like that on the outfits of Wild West Show performers. His black hat had a wide brim and a slightly rounded crown.

Another difference was in the way they were armed. Sam wore only one holstered revolver while Matt sported a pair of Colts. Sam was fast on the draw and accurate in his aim, but Matt was in a whole other league when it came to lead-slinging. His speed rivaled that of famous gunfighters such as Smoke Jensen, John Wesley Hardin, and Frank Morgan. Matt’s name wasn’t quite as well known as those others, perhaps because of his relative youth.

Matt and Sam both owned lucrative ranches in Montana, but except for brief visits, they hadn’t been home in years. The ranches were run by top-notch managers, and that allowed Matt and Sam to do the thing they loved best—drift. Both were fiddle-footed hombres, always eager to see what was on the other side of a river or over the next hill.

The fact that they didn’t know exactly where they were wasn’t going to stop them from riding on. The destination mattered less than the getting there, and as long as they were moving, Matt and Sam were happy.

But that didn’t mean they weren’t alert. Matt suddenly stiffened in the saddle and said, “I just saw the sun reflect off something on that bluff over yonder.”

He nodded toward an upthrust of rocky ground several hundred yards northwest of them.

“So did I,” Sam agreed. He looked around in case they needed to find some cover. The reflection could be nothing ...

But it could also be the sun glinting off a pair of field glasses, or worse, a rifle barrel.

“There’s an arroyo off to our left,” Sam began. “Maybe we’d better—”

A buzzing sound, like a giant bee that had just flown between them, interrupted him. Both young men recognized the sound, having heard similar ones all too many times in the past. That buzz was a heavy-caliber slug cutting through the air, and it was followed an instant later by a distant boom.

“Head for the arroyo!” Sam finished as he and Matt kicked their mounts into a gallop. The horses, big, strong animals with plenty of sand, raced toward the gully that twisted its way across the arid landscape.

Matt saw dust fly in the air as another bullet struck the ground to their right. The arroyo was about fifty yards away, and it wouldn’t take the racing horses long to cover that much ground.

Even so, several more slugs whipped past the heads of Matt and Sam as they leaned forward in their saddles to make themselves smaller targets. There had to be more than one rifleman up there on the bluff shooting at them.

Why they were being bushwhacked like this was a whole other question, one that didn’t really matter at the moment. They could worry about who the would-be killers were and why they wanted Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves dead once they were safely behind some cover.

The arroyo was only about twenty yards away when Matt was hit by what felt like a giant fist punching him in the right side. The terrible impact drove him so far to the left that he couldn’t stay in the saddle.

He was stunned, but a part of his brain continued working. He had been shot before, so he knew one of the rifle bullets had hit him and reacted accordingly.

When he felt himself slipping off the horse, he kicked his feet free of the stirrups so neither of them would catch and hang up when he fell. If that happened, he would wind up being dragged over the rough ground, and probably that would be just as bad or worse than being shot.

Suddenly there was nothing under him but air, and a split second later he crashed into the ground, landing on his left shoulder. Momentum tumbled him over and over as more bullets kicked up dust and gravel around him.

Chapter 2

Zack Jardine was down by the wagon, keeping an eye on the unloading, when rifle shots began to crash from the top of the nearby bluff.

Jardine’s head jerked up and he grated out a curse. He saw powder smoke spurting from the places in the rocks where he had posted guards to keep an eye on the semi-arid landscape around them.

The men seemed to be shooting at something southeast of the spot where the guns were being unloaded. Jardine swung around, looked in that direction, and saw two men riding hellbent-for-leather, several hundred yards away.

Rifle in hand, Jardine broke into a run toward the trail leading to the top of the bluff. He was a big man, heavily muscled and handsome in a rugged, cruel way, and he didn’t like running in the hot sun.

He glanced toward the men on horseback when he was halfway up the trail and saw one of them tumble off his horse, probably hit. The other one was still mounted, though.

Jardine reached the top. Angus Braverman was one of the riflemen, Doyle Hilliard the other. Jardine figured Braverman was the one who’d started shooting. He was impulsive, reckless ... a damned fool, some might say.

“You opened the ball,” he shouted at Braverman and Hilliard. “You’d better kill both of them. I don’t want either of them getting away!”

To help ensure that, Jardine lifted his own rifle to his shoulder. He sighted at the distant figures and started cranking off rounds as fast as he could work the repeater’s lever.

He paused only long enough to wave an arm at the men he’d left below and yell, “Kill them!”

Everybody forgot about the crate of rifles they had just lifted down from the wagon and got busy trying to ventilate those two unlucky hombres who had wound up somewhere they shouldn’t have been.

From the corner of his eye, Sam saw his blood brother go down. He hauled back on the reins as hard as he could, but by the time his horse skidded to a halt, he was already a good ten yards past the spot where Matt had fallen.

Sam threw himself out of the saddle and ran toward Matt, holding the reins and pulling the horse with him. Bullets thudded into the ground and kicked up dust.

As he ran, Sam felt a hot streak on the side of his neck and gritted his teeth. He knew a slug had just come within an inch or so of ending his life.

But the thought of abandoning Matt to his fate never entered Sam’s mind. Not even when Matt lifted his head and bellowed, “Blast it, Sam, get out of here!”

Sam ignored that and stooped to get an arm around Matt. He had been blessed with great strength, so he was able to lift Matt without much trouble.

“Can you run?” he asked.

By way of answer, Matt lurched toward the arroyo.

Sam ran alongside him, still leading the horse. Matt’s mount had bolted off somewhere. They could find the horse later—if they were still alive.

Sam’s horse let out a shrill cry and leaped ahead, pulling loose from Sam’s grip on the reins. As the horse galloped down the arroyo’s bank, Sam spotted the bloody streak on its rump where a bullet had creased it.

He’d been using the horse as makeshift cover. Now he and Matt were left out completely in the open. Sam slipped his arm around Matt’s waist and half-carried, half-dragged him toward the shelter of the arroyo.

Sam felt a bullet tug at his buckskin shirt as he and Matt reached the bank and tumbled over it. The slope wasn’t too steep, about a forty-five-degree angle.

When they reached the bottom, Sam lifted his head and looked to make sure the bank cut them off from the view of the riflemen on the bluff. He couldn’t see the bluff at all anymore, so that meant they were out of the line of fire.

Sam turned to Matt and asked, “How bad are you hit?”

Matt’s face was pale under the permanent tan. He had his hand pressed to his right side. A dark stain had spread beyond it on his shirt.

“Think the slug caught me at an angle ... and went on through without penetrating too deep,” he answered in a voice taut with pain. “I’m bleedin’ like a stuck pig, though.”

The booming of the rifles on the bluff had stopped. The men hidden up there must have realized they’d just be wasting bullets if they kept shooting. They couldn’t hit Matt or Sam from where they were.

Sam pulled up Matt’s shirt and saw the two puckered, bloody holes in his friend’s torso. The smaller hole was in Matt’s side, the slightly larger one that marked an exit wound on Matt’s back only a few inches away and a little lower.

Matt was right about the bullet going all the way through. The angle of its flight had been shallow enough that Sam hoped the slug had missed any vital organs.

Even if that were true, the bullet had still done plenty of damage. And Matt could easily bleed to death if Sam didn’t get those crimson streams stopped—soon.

Up on the bluff, Zack Jardine cursed bitterly again as over the barrel of his rifle he saw the two strangers disappear. From this height, Jardine could see the dark line of the arroyo zigzagging its way across the ground, and knew they had taken cover in it.

Jardine lowered his rifle.

“Get down there,” he told Braverman and Hilliard. “We’re gonna have to go after those two.”

“One of ’em’s hit bad, Zack,” Braverman said as he straightened from behind the rocks where he had been crouched. “Did you see the way he fell? He’s bound to be dyin’.”

Braverman was a short, quick man with red hair who never tanned in the desert sun, just blistered. He looked harmless, but Jardine had seen him kill more than one man in cold blood without batting an eye.

Hilliard was bulkier, with a drooping mustache and what seemed like a permanent week’s worth of beard stubble. “Those fellas ain’t worth gettin’ killed over, Zack,” he rumbled.

“Well, then, you shouldn’t have opened fire on them in the first place!” Jardine’s words lashed at the two men. “Why the hell didn’t you just let them ride on past? They probably didn’t even notice us over here.”

A number of boulders littered the ground along the base of the bluff, huge chunks of sandstone that had broken off and rolled down the slope in ages past.

The wagon and the horses were down there among those big rocks, easy to miss if somebody wasn’t looking for them. That was the main reason Jardine had picked this isolated place to deliver the rifles.

“They was actin’ funny, Zack,” Braverman said. “Lookin’ this way and all. I think one of ’em pointed. I was watchin’ ’em through my spyglass.”

Jardine’s jaw clenched in frustration. It was all he could do not to walk over there and stove in Braverman’s stupid skull with the butt of his rifle.

It wouldn’t do any good, he told himself. Braverman was too dumb to realize that a reflection off the lens of the telescope was probably what had alerted the two strangers that somebody was over here.

“Come on,” he ordered as he started down the trail.

Braverman and Hilliard fell in behind him, thumbing fresh cartridges into their rifles as they followed their boss.

When Jardine reached the parked vehicle, he snapped at the other men, “Put that crate back in the wagon with the others.”

“But we haven’t got the money yet, Zack,” Dave Snyder protested.

“And we’re not going to today. We’re calling off the swap.” The men didn’t look happy about that, so Jardine went on, “Don’t worry, we’ll get our payoff, and it’ll be just the first of many. But I don’t like the way this is playing out, so we’ll set up another meeting.”

The other men exchanged glances. They knew that Zack Jardine was something of a superstitious man by nature. If a deal didn’t feel right to him, he wouldn’t go through with it until it did.

So there was no point arguing with him. Anyway, arguing with Jardine was dangerous, and they knew it. They were a hard-bitten bunch, but Jardine was the worst of the lot.

He knew that, too.

As several of the men gathered around the long, heavy crate to lift it back into the wagon bed with its brothers, Jardine leveled an arm and pointed toward the arroyo he had spotted from the top of the bluff.

“Those two hombres are over there in a gully, on foot, and at least one of them is wounded. I want them both dead. That shouldn’t be too hard. I’m going back to Flat Rock with the wagon. The rest of you go take care of those two ... and don’t come back until they’re buzzard bait.”

Chapter 3

“Give me your bandanna,” Sam said.

Matt reached up to the blue-checked bandanna tied around his neck.

“This is my favorite bandanna!” he protested. “You remember that girl who gave it to me—”

“Yes, and she seemed quite taken with you, at least at the time, so I doubt that she’d want you to lie there and bleed to death. Hand it over.”

With a sigh, Matt took off the bandanna and gave it to Sam, who used the Bowie knife he carried in a sheath on his left hip to cut it into two pieces. He wadded up each piece and shoved them into the bullet holes.

Matt grunted in pain.

“Take it easy,” he said. “I just got shot, you know.”

Sam lifted his head as he heard the swift rataplan of hoofbeats somewhere on the prairie not far away.

“And you’re liable to be again,” he said, “because unless I’m mistaken, those bushwhackers are about to pay us a visit and try to finish us off.”

Sam looked both ways along the arroyo, at least as far as he could see. That wasn’t very far, because of the way the gully twisted and turned, less than a hundred yards in either direction. But he spotted his horse a short distance away and whistled for the animal. He wanted the Winchester in the saddleboot.

As the horse trotted toward him, Sam stood up and got both hands under Matt’s arms from behind.

“I can stand up!” Matt said.

“Faster this way.”

Sam dragged Matt along the floor of the arroyo toward a pile of brush that had washed up against a rocky outcropping during some past flash flood.

In this part of the country, these arroyos were bone-dry nearly all the time, except for the one or two occasions every year when a rare desert thunderstorm would send walls of water gushing through them.

The brush and the rock would provide a little cover for Matt. Sam propped him up against the outcropping.

“Think you’re strong enough to handle your guns?”

Both of Matt’s Colts were still in the holsters attached to the crossed gunbelts. He drew the revolvers and said, “You bet I am. Just give me something to shoot at.”

“You ought to have some targets soon enough.” Sam’s horse had come in respose to the whistle. Sam hurried over to the animal and drew the Winchester from its sheath.

Then he took off his hat and slapped it against the horse’s bullet-creased rump. That sent the horse galloping off along the arroyo where Sam hoped it would be safer.

Sam went to the far side of the arroyo and waited there with the rifle in his hands. The banks were steeper here. The bushwhackers would have to descend into the arroyo and come along the bottom of it to get at their intended victims.

“Keep your eyes on the rim above me,” Sam called to Matt. He pointed up with a thumb. “They might cross over somewhere else and try to get above us. I’ll watch the rim on your side.”

Matt nodded and lifted his gaze to the top of the bank about six feet above Sam’s head. The bushwhackers might try to sneak up and fire down directly on them from up there.

The hoofbeats had stopped. That meant whichever way the bushwhackers planned to proceed, they were approaching on foot now.

Matt and Sam both listened intently for the scrape of boot leather on the ground or anything else that might give away the location of the would-be killers.

They didn’t hear anything except the faint sighing of the wind across the plains. Then a shadow moved on the rim above Sam’s head. Matt knew that a man on his side of the arroyo cast it, and he jerked a gun barrel up to alert Sam to the lurker.

Sam had already realized the man was up there. He lifted the Winchester to his shoulder as the crown of a sweat-stained, pearl-gray Stetson came into view.

Sam held his fire, well aware that this could be a trick. One of the bushwhackers could have put his hat on a stick and lifted it up there, trying to draw a shot that would tell him and his companions where Matt and Sam were.

A few seconds later, the man stepped into sight. He held a rifle, and as he spotted Sam, he tried to lift the weapon.

He was too late. Sam’s Winchester was already lined up. The rifle cracked and sent a .44-40 slug drilling through the bushwhacker’s shoulder. With a yell of pain, the man twisted and flopped backward out of sight.

But as if that had been a signal, more shots erupted from farther along the arroyo as several more gunmen charged toward Matt and Sam.

Matt twisted and pressed himself against the outcropping, grimacing as the movement made pain from his bullet wound jolt through him. Flames stabbed from the muzzles of his Colts as he opened fire on the darting, shooting figures.

On the other side of the gully, Sam dropped to one knee and triggered several rounds from the Winchester. Fire spat from the rifle’s muzzle as a storm of lead howled back and forth along the arroyo.

Bullets sizzled through the air and whined off rocks. One of the slugs hit the bank just above Matt’s head and sent dirt and gravel spraying over his face. He jerked back and blinked as the grit stung his eyes and blurred his vision for a moment. The barrels of his Colts drooped.

Sam kept up his deadly fire. Through the haze of gunsmoke that floated in the arroyo, he had seen several of the attackers stagger and a couple of them had fallen. He wasn’t surprised when he heard a man bellow out a curse and then order, “Come on! Let’s get out of here!”

Sam knew that might be a trick, a tactic to make him and Matt think their enemies were giving up.

But when he stopped firing, he could tell that the other guns had fallen silent, too. Echoes of the thunderous blasts still bounced back and forth between the walls, but as they faded, Sam heard swift hoofbeats again. It certainly sounded like the bushwhackers were pulling out.

“You all right?” he called over to Matt.

“No new bullet holes, if that’s what you mean,” Matt replied. He had blinked most of the dirt out of his eyes and could see fairly clearly again. “Reckon they’re really gone?”

“I don’t know. We’d better wait and see.”

“I don’t want to cause a problem for you, Sam, but these holes in my side are still leaking.”

“Just hang on,” Sam said. “I’ll get you out of here and find some help for you.”

“Where do you figure on doing that? We’re out in the big middle of nowhere. There’s probably not a settlement within thirty miles. Maybe not even that close. Might find a ranch house somewhere, but that’d just be a matter of dumb luck.”

Sam flashed a grin at his blood brother.

“Well, then, you’ve got that going for you.”

“I’m gonna keep track of all these mean things you’re sayin’ to me while I’m hurt, so when I get to feeling better ...”

Sam motioned for Matt to be quiet.

“I’m going to go take a look.”

“Be careful,” Matt said, and the joking tone was gone from his voice now.

Sam came up from his kneeling position and stalked along the floor of the arroyo, turning his head constantly from side to side as he looked for any sign of the attackers.

He reached the area where the bank’s slope was gentler, and his keen eyes spotted several indications that the gunmen had fled this way. Carefully, he ventured up.

The plains on both sides of the arroyo were empty as far as the eye could see, which was pretty far in this flat terrain. The bushwhackers were gone, all right.

Sam hurried back to the place where he had left Matt. As he approached, he saw that his friend’s head hung forward limply, as if in death.

Chapter 4

Sam’s breath seemed to freeze in his throat. His heart slugged heavily in his chest. Fearing that Matt had died from the loss of blood, Sam ran forward and dropped to his knees beside his friend.

Sam put his hand to Matt’s throat and searched for a pulse. Relief flooded through him when he found one. Matt’s heart was beating fast but steadily. He had just passed out.

There was no time to lose, Sam sensed.

He checked the pieces of bandanna he had wadded into the bullet holes. Both of them were soaked, and more blood was leaking out around them.

Sam threw the sodden bits of cloth aside and cut replacements from Matt’s shirttail. When he had them in place, he fastened Matt’s belt around them to hold them there.

A whistle brought Sam’s horse back. The animal shied a little at the smell of fresh blood, but Sam calmed it with a quiet word.

He lifted Matt into the saddle. It wasn’t easy, since Matt was so much dead weight in his unconscious state, but Sam managed, then climbed on behind him.

Sam rode out of the arroyo, holding Matt in front of him with one arm and using the other hand to hold the reins.

They had been headed west when the bushwhackers opened fire on them, so he started off in that direction again. He didn’t know of anyplace he could get help that was within reach back the other way.

They had ridden about two miles when Sam spotted something up ahead. A moment later, he recognized it as Matt’s horse. The animal had bolted this far after Matt was shot out of the saddle, then stopped to graze on the sparse clumps of hardy grass that dotted the desert.

Finding the horse didn’t really help matters right now. With Matt out cold, they had to ride double so Sam could keep him in the saddle. But Sam whistled for the horse to follow them, anyway. They would need the animal later, he told himself, when Matt recovered from his injury.

Sam wasn’t going to allow himself to consider any other possibility.

They had covered another mile or so when Sam saw something else in front of them. A haze of dust rose into the hot air. Sam figured it was being kicked up by the hooves of several horses moving quickly over the plains.

He thought at first the dust came from the bushwhackers’ mounts as they put this area behind them, but after a moment he realized the cloud was moving toward him and Matt.

Of course, it could still be the bushwhackers doubling back to look for them, Sam reminded himself.

But it could also be a group of cowboys from one of the isolated ranches that could be found in this region, or even a cavalry patrol. In that case, it would be good to meet up with them. They could help him patch up Matt’s wounds.

Until he knew for sure, it might be wise to err on the side of caution. He turned the horse to the south, thinking he would move out of the path of the oncoming riders.

There was a cloud of dust rising into the blue sky from that direction, too.

Sam’s mouth tightened into a grim line as he turned back to the north. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to see more dust that way.

Whoever the riders were, they were closing in around him and Matt. The only possible way to escape would be to turn completely around and gallop eastward.

Even that would be futile, Sam realized. His horse was big and strong, but carrying double this way, it would only be a matter of time until the pursuit caught up. They couldn’t possibly outrun it.

Instead, Sam slid down from the saddle, caught hold of Matt, and lowered him gently to the ground. Then he drew the Winchester again and thumbed cartridges into it until the magazine was full and a round was in the chamber.

He forced his horse to lie down. Sam stretched out behind the animal and laid the rifle over the horse’s flank.

He had sixteen bullets in the rifle and six more in his Colt. He would sell their lives at the cost of every one of those slugs if he had to.

The dust clouds came nearer. Sam saw the dark shapes of the riders at the base of those clouds as they closed in. When they came in range of the Winchester, he held his fire because he couldn’t be sure who they were.

A moment later he was able to make out buckskin leggings, red and blue shirts, bandannas bound around black hair, and ponies being ridden without saddles. The three groups of riders converged around him and Matt and then came to a halt about fifty yards away.

One man urged his pony forward. His dark face was set in a grim expression, and he carried an old single-shot rifle.

Sam had a hunch that he was looking at a Navajo chief.

The rider called out a challenge in his native tongue, demanding to know who Sam was. Sam wasn’t fluent in the language, but he understood enough to know what was being asked of him.

He kept his rifle trained on the chief as he replied in Spanish, “Two Wolves, son of Medicine Horse!” A lot of the tribes in this part of the country spoke that language in addition to their own.

The chief scowled—although it was hard to discern much change in what was evidently his natural expression—and turned to say something to one of the other warriors.

This man, who also carried an old rifle, rode forward past the leader and came closer to Sam.

“Caballo Rojo says you look like a white man, not a Mexican,” the warrior said in English. “Are you?”

“My father was Medicine Horse of the Cheyenne,” Sam insisted, also speaking English this time.

“And your mother was white,” the Navajo said. He spoke the white man’s language well, which led Sam to believe that he had spent some time on the reservation, around missionaries and the Bureau of Indian Affairs functionaries.

“My mother was white,” Sam admitted. Most Indians were fairly tolerant of people with mixed blood, although like any other group, some looked down on the so-called half-breeds.

The warrior who was talking to him sneered.

“You travel with a white man, you dress like a white man, you use a saddle like a white man. You might as well be white.”

Sam felt a surge of anger and didn’t try to suppress it.

“The Cheyenne blood is strong in me!” he called. “My people have fought and defeated the whites many times!”

Unlike the Navajo, he thought, who had a history of losing more battles than they had won against the invaders of their land.

More than likely, however, pointing out that fact to a proud Navajo warrior wouldn’t be the smartest thing in the world to do. But Sam was proud, too, and the impulse was strong in him.

Proud, but not a blasted fool. He was surrounded, outnumbered, and Matt needed better medical attention. Sam went on, “My friend is hurt. I ask hospitality for him.”

“And for you?”

“I go where he goes,” Sam declared, even though he couldn’t really enforce that position.

The chief—Caballo Rojo, or Red Horse, Sam recalled—spoke again, and the Navajo who had been talking to Sam turned and answered him.

The discussion went back and forth quickly for a couple of minutes. Sam understood enough of it to know the two Indians were talking about what to do with him and Matt, but he couldn’t tell what conclusion they came to.

When the spokesman turned back to him, every fiber of Sam’s being was tense with the knowledge that he might be fighting for his life, and Matt’s life, in a few seconds.

“Caballo Rojo says that you and your friend are welcome among the people of our clan,” the warrior said. Judging by the sullen expression on his face, he didn’t agree completely with that decision. “You will not be harmed, and we will help your friend if we can. This is the word of Caballo Rojo.”

Relief went through Sam. Being given the word of the chief like that meant that he and Matt were safe, at least for the time being.

Of course, a man could ride into almost any Indian village on the frontier and be safe at first.

They wouldn’t kill him until he tried to leave.

Chapter 5

Sam slid the Winchester back in the saddleboot. He stood up and tugged on the horse’s reins. The animal struggled upright and shook itself.

Sam went over to Matt and once again lifted his unconscious friend. The Navajo didn’t make a move to help, but Sam didn’t expect them to.

As soon as he was mounted behind Matt, the riders closed in around them. There would be no getting away now, even if Sam wanted to, which he didn’t.

As the group started off, heading west, the man he’d been talking to fell in alongside him.

“What is your white man name?” the Navajo asked, and he seemed genuinely curious now.

“Sam. Samuel August Webster Two Wolves.”

The Navajo made a face.

“A mouthful of words,” he said disdainfully. “A waste of time and breath.” He thumped his bare chest lightly with a clenched fist. “Juan Pablo, but sometimes I am called Corazón de Piedra.”

Heart of stone, Sam translated.

“Because your heart is hard like a stone?”

“Toward my enemies it is.”

“I’m not your enemy, so I think I’ll call you Juan Pablo.”

The Navajo looked like he wasn’t sure about that.

The group rode in silence for several minutes before Sam said, “Your people are Diné?”

That was the Navajo name for themselves.

Juan Pablo nodded.

“Yes. The true rulers of this land, and someday those who try to take it will be sorry that they did.”

Nobody was trying to take this rugged, arid land in the Four Corners region, at least not that Sam had heard of. Much of it had been set aside by the government for the Navajo.

But it was true that there were white settlements in the area, as well as wagon trails, stagecoach routes, and the like, not to mention the ranchers who moved in and tried to graze cattle or sheep on the hardscrabble land. Most of them laid claim to waterholes the Navajo might consider theirs.

Sam didn’t recall hearing anything recently about Indian raids in this part of the country, so he asked, “Do you and your people make war against the whites?”

“We want only to be left alone,” Juan Pablo snapped. “But if that does not happen ... then there may be war.”

It would be a short one, Sam thought. The only guns these warriors had were practically antiques, old single-shot rifles that probably jammed as often as they fired.

The Navajo might be able to raid an isolated ranch house or something like that, but against a company of cavalry they wouldn’t last fifteen minutes.

To change the subject, Sam said, “How did you happen to find my friend and me? From the looks of the dust clouds, it seemed like you were searching for us.”

“We were,” Juan Pablo said. “I was hunting when I heard much shooting. I went back to my people and told Caballo Rojo, and he gathered the men and came to see what it was about.”

Sam nodded.

“Well, I’m glad you found us,” he said. “My friend Matt needs help.”

“What happened to the two of you?” Juan Pablo asked with grudging interest.

“Some bushwhackers opened fire on us from the top of a bluff,” Sam explained. “We were taking cover in an arroyo when Matt was wounded. The men came after us, but we were able to fight them off.”

“Who were these ... bushwhackers?”

Sam shook his head.

“I don’t have any idea, and I don’t know why they started shooting at us.”

“Did you see them?”

“They were white,” Sam said. “Or maybe a few were Mexican, I don’t know. I was too busy shooting at them to get a good look at them, if you know what I mean.”

Juan Pablo grunted to indicate that he did.

“Will you try to find these men and seek vengeance for what they did to your friend?”

“Matt’s more than my friend,” Sam said. “We’re blood brothers. And the only thing I’m interested in right now is making sure that he’s all right. But if he doesn’t make it—or even if he does ...” Sam’s voice hardened as he went on, “Yes, I’d like to know who they were and why they tried to kill us.”

“I would feel the same way,” Juan Pablo admitted.

The flat terrain had become more rugged as they rode, until now they were in a region of bluffs, ridges, and mesas, cut with deeper arroyos. A line of low cliffs appeared in front of the riders.

Sam saw a canyon cutting into the cliffs and had a hunch that was where they were headed. The members of Caballo Rojo’s clan probably lived in there. The place could be defended by putting men at the narrow mouth of the canyon.

His guess turned out to be correct. They rode past a couple of sentries armed with bows and into the canyon itself, which had steep walls that would be difficult, if not impossible, to scale.

After a few hundred yards the canyon widened out and ran for more than a mile into the plateau formed by the cliffs. Sam spotted a number of squat, mound-like hogans built of earth and wood scattered along the banks of a little stream, none of them too close together, because the Navajo liked their privacy.

A few scrubby trees grew on those banks, as well as some grass. A flock of sheep cropped at the grass.

Dogs ran out to bark greetings at the newcomers, followed by quite a few children and some women.

Caballo Rojo looked over his shoulder and called something back to Juan Pablo, who nodded and answered in the Navajo tongue.

“We will take your friend—your blood brother—to my hogan,” Juan Pablo told Sam. “My wife will care for him.”

“Thank you,” Sam said. “I appreciate your hospitality.”

“It is the way Caballo Rojo wishes it,” Juan Pablo said, making sure that Sam knew it wasn’t his idea.

The warriors dispersed. Juan Pablo led Sam to one of the hogans, where a short, stocky Navajo woman waited. He spoke to her, obviously seeking her approval.

Sam recalled that women wielded quite a bit of power in the Navajo society. Juan Pablo’s wife might refuse to go along with Caballo Rojo’s decision.

After a moment the woman replied at length to Juan Pablo, who then turned and nodded to Sam.

“I can carry him inside,” Sam said as he slid down to the ground next to the horse.

“I will help,” Juan Pablo said, still grudgingly. He and Sam lifted Matt down from the horse, then put their arms around him to help him into the hogan.

Another woman stepped through the dwelling’s door as Sam and Juan Pablo approached with Matt between them.

This woman glanced at Sam, and he felt a shock go through him as he saw her long, curly red hair and brilliant green eyes. Despite the green shirt and long calico skirt she wore, like the Navajo women, she was white, and from the looks of her, as Irish as she could be.

Chapter 6

Sam tore his eyes away from the young woman. He didn’t want to offend Juan Pablo by staring at her. He wasn’t afraid of the Navajo warrior, but since Juan Pablo and his wife were going to take care of Matt, it wouldn’t be polite to stare.

Juan Pablo motioned for Sam to enter the hogan. He did so, stepping past the redheaded woman, who held the entrance flap open.

A small fire smoldered in the rock-lined pit in the center of the hogan. The smoke curled up and out the opening at the top of the shelter. That opening let in a shaft of afternoon sunlight that revealed a thick pile of blankets.

Sam and Juan Pablo lowered Matt onto the blankets and rolled him onto his left side. The woman knelt beside him and pulled up his shirt so she could examine his wounds. She plucked the blood-soaked wads of cloth from the bullet holes and tossed them into the fire.

“My wife will tend to his wounds,” Juan Pablo told Sam. “Come with me.”

Sam hesitated.

“I’d rather stay here with my blood brother.”

“You do not trust us?” Juan Pablo snapped.

“Of course I trust you,” Sam replied, although if he had been honest, his answer would have been No, I don’t trust you. Not completely.

But that would be an insult, and Sam knew it would be a mistake to push this proddy Navajo warrior too far. He went on, “Where are we going?”

“To see Caballo Rojo.”

Sam nodded.

“Good. I want to thank him again for his hospitality. And you, too, of course.”

Juan Pablo just gave one of his skeptical grunts.

The redheaded woman had followed them into the hogan. As the two men turned to leave, she stepped aside from the entrance. Juan Pablo went past her without even a glance.

Sam tried to do the same, but it was difficult. He hadn’t expected to find someone like her in this Navajo camp.

The canyon was still in a mild state of excitement as Juan Pablo led Sam through it. The people who lived here probably didn’t see visitors very often.

Juan Pablo took Sam to the largest hogan along the stream, which evidently belonged to Caballo Rojo, or rather to his wife, given the matriarchal nature of these people. He went to the entrance and spoke, and Caballo Rojo answered from inside. Juan Pablo jerked his head at Sam, who went first.

Caballo Rojo sat cross-legged on a buffalo robe near the fire. Several women, ranging in age from their teens to their late thirties, bustled around the hogan, engaged in various chores. The younger ones would be Caballo Rojo’s daughters, the older ones his wife and possibly her sisters.

Several men who appeared to be about Caballo Rojo’s age sat around the fire with him. They would be the chief ’s inner circle, his most trusted advisers. One of them was probably a shaman.

Caballo Rojo spoke respectfully to the women, who stopped what they were doing and left the hogan. Whatever would be said in here was for the men.

With a brusque gesture, Juan Pablo motioned for Sam to sit down. They took their seats on blankets.

Having grown up in a Cheyenne village, Sam found all this familiar despite the significant differences in the Navajo culture. He knew that if he stayed in surroundings like this for very long, he would start thinking and acting like an Indian again. That part of his heritage was never far from the surface.

Now that Sam had a better look at Caballo Rojo, he saw why the man had been given that name. Sam had assumed at first that Caballo Rojo had ridden a red horse at some time or another, but instead the man’s long, narrow face had a definite horse-like shape to it.

Caballo Rojo spoke, and Juan Pablo translated for him.

“Did you and your friend come to this land in search of the Navajo?”

Sam shook his head.

“We were simply riding through the area. We bear your people no ill will.”

Juan Pablo translated again, then said, “Caballo Rojo has promised you the hospitality of our people. You and your friend will be safe as long as you remain here. We will do our best to nurse your friend back to health, and then you will be free to leave.”

“Tell Caballo Rojo I am very grateful to him. I promise on behalf of myself and my friend to repay his kindness.”

Sam finally began to relax. It looked like he and Matt might live through the day after all, he thought.

Matt had no idea where he was when he opened his eyes, but he was glad to be there for a couple of reasons.

One was that he was still alive.

The other was that he was looking into the prettiest pair of green eyes he had seen in a long time.

Sam must have found a town, Matt thought. He remembered the fight in the arroyo but nothing after that. Now he was lying on a featherbed and had a good-looking redheaded nurse leaning over him.

Then he realized that the bed wasn’t soft at all, but hard instead, as if he were lying on the ground. As his vision cleared even more, he realized that wasn’t a roof over his head but rather the curving roof of an Indian hogan. And as for the “nurse” ...

Well, she was a green-eyed redhead, no doubt about that, but she was dressed like an Indian woman and when she spoke the words made no sense to him.

Matt figured whatever she had said to him was in an Indian language. Navajo, probably, given the area through which he and Sam had been traveling when they were ambushed.

Matt was fluent in Cheyenne and could get by in several other tongues spoken by the tribes on the northern plains, but Navajo was mostly a mystery to him.

His side hurt where he’d been shot, but not as much as he expected it to. He heard someone else moving around in the hogan and turned his head slightly to see another woman. She was older than the redhead and obviously an Indian. Matt figured the two of them had patched up his wounds.

He wasn’t sure how he’d ended up in a Navajo hogan or what in blazes that good-looking redhead was doing here. The Navajo didn’t take white captives like some tribes did.

But those questions could wait. Right now he wanted to make sure his blood brother was still all right.

“Do you know where Sam is?” he asked the redhead. “Sam Two Wolves?” Matt made a guess. “The man who brought me here?”

The redhead replied in whatever language she’d been speaking before. Matt tried to pick up some of it, but he couldn’t figure out what she was saying. After a moment, though, she repeated, “Sam?”

Matt nodded.

“Yeah. Sam. Big fella.” He tried to gesture to indicate what he meant. “Half Cheyenne.”

The young woman just stared at him for a second and then abruptly burst out laughing.

“Your friend Sam is fine,” she told Matt in perfect English. “And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have teased you like that. You just looked so puzzled and confused I couldn’t resist.”

Suddenly angry, he tried to sit up, but she put a hand on his shoulder and held him down. That made him aware that he was no longer wearing his shirt. No great loss, since it had a couple of bullet holes in it and had been soaked with his blood. The lightheadedness he felt now was probably a result of all the blood that had leaked out of him.

He was able to prop himself up on an elbow and look down at his side. He couldn’t see the wound on his back, but the one in his side was covered with a poultice of some sort. He figured the hole in his back was being treated the same way.

Matt let himself relax on the thick pile of blankets. They weren’t a featherbed after all, he thought, but they were fairly comfortable.

“Who are you?” he asked the redhead. He wanted to express his gratitude for their help, but he was a mite peeved at the moment.

Also, his uncertainty about Sam’s fate, regardless of what the redhead had said, plagued him, but he was too weak to get up, and chances were the young woman wouldn’t let him, anyway. She wore a determined look on her face.

“My name is Elizabeth Fleming,” she said. “You should lie back down. You lost a lot of blood.”

Matt nodded and said, “All right. Don’t reckon I’ve got much choice in the matter. I’m about as weak right now as a newborn kitten.”

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” Matt admitted as he stretched out again on the blankets.

“I’m a teacher. I’ve come to help educate these people.”

The Navajo had been living in this part of the country for hundreds of years, Matt thought. He wasn’t sure how much educating they needed.

Folks back East didn’t think of it that way, however. They had the idea that everybody ought to live like them ... whether the people to be “educated” wanted it or not. “Lo, the poor Indian!” they said, leading the cavalry to adopt Mister Lo as a scornful nickname for all Indians.

Some good things came from that Eastern attitude, misguided though it was most of the time. Sam’s mother had been a white teacher who had come west to educate the so-called savages.

In the process she had won the heart of Sam’s father Medicine Horse.

“I reckon I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Fleming,” Matt said. “I’m Matt Bodine.”

“I’m pleased to meet you as well, Mr. Bodine ... although the circumstances are somewhat lacking in, ah, propriety.”

Such as the fact that he wasn’t wearing a shirt, Matt realized. He wondered if he ought to try to cover up with one of the blankets he was lying on.

The older woman knelt by the fire, where a pot was sitting at the edge of the flames. Matt didn’t know what was in it, but the hogan began to fill with a good smell that made him realize he was hungry in spite of his weakened condition. Or maybe because of it.

Before he had a chance to think any more about that, somebody stepped into the hogan. Matt looked up and saw a fierce-looking Navajo warrior standing there. The man looked at Elizabeth Fleming, then at Matt.

And as he glowered down at Matt, his hand dropped to the hilt of a knife tucked behind the scarlet sash around his waist. The look in his eyes was unmistakable.

He wanted to pull that knife and plunge it into the white man’s chest.

Chapter 7

Matt tensed himself to roll out of the way if the warrior lunged at him, but a second later Sam stepped into the hogan, too. Sam didn’t appear concerned, so Matt figured he was safe after all.

“You’re awake,” Sam said, sounding happy about it. He came over and hunkered on his heels next to the pile of blankets where Matt lay. “How do you feel?”

“Those bullet holes hurt like blazes, and I’m a mite lightheaded,” Matt replied, “but on the whole I reckon it’s a heap better than being dead.”

Sam nodded.

“You had me pretty worried for a while, Matt. You lost so much blood, you looked like you were about to run dry.”

“Yeah, I can feel it, too,” Matt said with a feeble nod. He glanced toward the unfriendly-looking warrior. “Who’s your pard there?”

“That’s Juan Pablo. He’s the one who heard the shots when those bushwhackers opened up on us. He came back here to the canyon, got Chief Caballo Rojo and the rest of the men, and rode out to see what had happened.”

“They’re Navajo?” Matt guessed.

Sam nodded.

“That’s right.”

Even though he was weak, Matt lifted a hand and rested it on Sam’s arm. Quietly, he asked, “Are they going to—”

“Kill both of you?” Juan Pablo broke in. Obviously, Matt’s question hadn’t been quiet enough to keep the warrior from overhearing what he said. Juan Pablo went on, “Caballo Rojo has promised that the two of you will be safe.”

Sam inclined his head toward the warrior and told Matt, “Juan Pablo speaks English.”

“Of course he does,” Elizabeth said. “Quite a few of his people have been to mission schools.” She stood up and held out a hand to Sam. “I’m Elizabeth Fleming.”

“Sam Two Wolves,” he told her. “I was wondering what a, uh ...”

“—Redhead who looks like she’s straight from Killarney was doing in a Navajo clan?” Her green eyes twinkled as she smiled. “I’m a teacher, Mr. Two Wolves.”

“So was my mother,” Sam said, unknowingly echoing Matt’s thoughts earlier.

From the blankets, Matt said, “Help me sit up.”

Sam frowned.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I’ve got something to say, and I’d rather be upright while I’m doing it.”

“You’re going to be stubborn about this, aren’t you?”

“You ever know me not to be stubborn when I thought something was right?”

“All right,” Sam said. “Just take it easy. I’ll give you a hand.”

He got his arm around Matt’s shoulders and lifted him into a sitting position. Matt’s head spun crazily for a few seconds before settling down.

The wounds in his side and back throbbed, too, but he ignored the pain. The bleeding had stopped, thanks to the poultices, and as long as it didn’t start again, he was confident that he would be all right.

“Juan Pablo, thank you for helping me,” Matt said. “I owe you a debt.”

Juan Pablo looked skeptical, but he gave Matt a curt nod. Without saying anything, he went over to the fire and hunkered next to the pot where the stew was simmering. He took a wooden bowl from his wife, dipped it into the pot, and began eating with his fingers, picking out chunks of meat and wild onions from the savory broth.

Elizabeth brought bowls of stew to Matt and Sam. Earlier, when Matt smelled the stuff cooking, he had thought he was hungry. But now his stomach suddenly rebelled against the idea of eating. He grimaced and pushed the bowl away, saying, “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

Sam said, “Drink the juice, anyway, even if you can’t eat the rest of it right now. After losing all that blood, your body needs the nourishment.”

Matt could see the logic in that argument. Sam held the bowl to his mouth and tipped it up, and Matt forced himself to swallow the thick liquid, sip by sip. When he was finished, Sam helped him lie down on the blankets again.

“For some reason ... I just got ... mighty tired,” Matt managed to say as his heavy eyelids drooped and exhaustion washed over him.

“Go ahead and get some sleep,” Sam urged. “It’ll be good for you.”

Matt nodded, or at least thought he did. He couldn’t be sure. He closed his eyes to let sleep overtake him.

Just before he dozed off, a thought occurred to him and he tried to open his eyes again. He wanted to tell Sam he had seen that green-eyed, redheaded young woman in the Navajo getup first.

But that probably wasn’t true, he realized, since he’d been unconscious when they got here, so it was just as well that oblivion claimed him before he could say anything.

Sam didn’t sleep much that night, because Matt developed a fever and would have tossed and turned restlessly all night if Sam hadn’t sat beside him and tried to keep him calm.

As it was, Matt muttered incoherently most of the time and jerked his head back and forth. Elizabeth Fleming, who seemed to have appointed herself a nurse as well as a teacher, and Juan Pablo’s wife took turns wiping Matt’s forehead with a wet cloth in an attempt to cool his fever.

Juan Pablo himself left the hogan, muttering disgustedly to himself as he went to look for somewhere more peaceful to sleep.

Sometime during the long ordeal, a rustle of movement close by made Sam’s head come up sharply. He had dozed off sitting up, without realizing it. He saw Elizabeth on her knees on Matt’s other side. She had taken over the job of bathing his feverish forehead.

Sam started to smile and nod at her. He was in mid-nod, though, when the urge to yawn gripped him. He couldn’t hold it back. His mouth opened wide before he could stop it. All he could do was cover the yawn sheepishly with his hand.

Elizabeth laughed.

The soft sound didn’t waken the older woman, who now snored on the other side of the hogan. Sam chuckled, too, and grinned at the redhead.

“I can tell by your accent you’re not really fresh from Killarney,” he said. “Where are you from?”

“Bennington, Vermont, actually,” she told him. “What about you?”

“Montana. Like I said, my mother was a teacher. My father was Medicine Horse of the Cheyenne.”

“I don’t think I’ll be marrying one of my students here in Arizona.”

“Then we are in Arizona?” Sam asked. “Matt and I were talking about that earlier today ... before the shooting started.”

Elizabeth nodded.

“Yes, in Sweetwater Valley, about twenty miles west of Flat Rock.”

“I didn’t think there was any sweet water in these parts.”

“You should know that Indians are capable of irony,” Elizabeth said with a smile.

“What’s this Flat Rock you mentioned? I don’t reckon I’ve heard of it. Some natural landmark?”

“No, it’s a town,” she said. “The closest town to this spot. I took the stagecoach there from Chinle.”

Sam shook his head.

“Must not have been there for very long. It’s been a few years since Matt and I rode through this area.”

“All I know is that it has a rather rough reputation. The stage line ends there, and the driver said he would be glad to turn around and start back to civilization.”

Calling anywhere in this region “civilization” was stretching things a mite, Sam thought. A lot of it had been unchanged for hundreds of years.

Matt stirred and let out a low moan. Elizabeth leaned over him with a frown for a moment, then got the cloth wet again in the basin of water on the ground beside her and wiped it over his forehead.

“He needs proper medical care,” she said, “but I’m afraid this is about all we can do for him.”

Sam nodded.

“Matt’s strong. He’ll pull through this all right.”

His voice was confident. He just wished his heart was.

But Elizabeth was right. All they could do was try to keep Matt comfortable and wait for his fever to break.

Chapter 8

Two days later, it did. Big drops of greasy sweat formed on Matt’s face as his temperature went down. As the sun came up that morning, he was groggy but awake again.

“Sam ... ?” he whispered as he saw his blood brother sitting beside him and looking down at him anxiously.

“Just take it easy,” Sam told him. “You were real sick for a while, but I think you’re better now.”

Juan Pablo’s wife knelt beside Matt and removed the poultices from the wounds. Those poultices had been changed several times while Matt was in the grip of the fever.

Each time Sam had seen the bullet holes, his worry had deepened. The wounds were angry-looking, and streaks of red radiated out away from them. He knew that the festering threatened to spread all through Matt’s body.

But now the redness had faded so much it was almost invisible. The poultices had drawn the corruption out of Matt’s flesh. The wounds were beginning to pucker a little, too. Soon they would close up and start to heal.

The woman covered the holes with pieces of clean cloth and bound the bandages in place with long strips of rawhide. Sam hadn’t seen her smile even once since he and Matt had been here, but now she as she looked at him and nodded, her expression wasn’t as severe as it had been. He took that as a good sign.

“We’re still in the Navajo canyon?” Matt asked.

“That’s right. You’ve been too sick to move you. Juan Pablo’s wife has been taking care of you, along with Miss Fleming.”

“That’s mighty nice of ’em. Hasn’t been ... any trouble?”

“Nope.”

“No sign of those ... bushwhackers?”

“No, but I’ve been thinking about what happened. Either we almost stumbled into something they didn’t want us to see ... or somebody sent them after us because they wanted us dead.”

“Who would ... send hired killers after us?”

“I don’t know, but I’d like to find out for sure one way or the other.”

“Yeah,” Matt agreed, “if somebody’s after us ... it’d come in handy to know who and why.” He sighed. “Soon as I ... get some of my strength back ... we’ll see if we can pick up their trail.”

Sam shook his head.

“You’re not going to be in any shape to travel for a while. Right now, though, since it looks like you’re going to be all right, I need to find Juan Pablo and go talk to Caballo Rojo. I want to make sure it’s all right with him before I try to leave the canyon.”

“Leave the canyon? I told you, I’m gonna have to rest up some first ...”

“It’ll be at least a week before you’re on your feet again, Matt. The trail’s already several days old. If we wait until you’re strong enough to travel, it’ll be so cold there’s a good chance we’ll never be able to find those varmints. Unless they ambush us again, and we won’t have any warning of that coming if we don’t know who they are.”

“Yeah, but you can’t track them down by yourself,” Matt protested.

“Why not? I know we make a good team, but I can take care of myself, you know. And I’m a better tracker than you are, too.”

“Durned well ought to be, since you’re half-Indian,” Matt muttered. “But that still won’t stop you from going off and gettin’ yourself killed.”

“Have a little faith,” Sam said as he got to his feet.

“You’re just gonna leave me here?”

“You’ll be well taken care of, and Caballo Rojo has given his word that you’ll be safe. Anyway, I don’t think the ladies would let anything happen to you. They’ve worked too hard pulling you through to lose you now.”

“Where is that ... pretty little redhead?”

“Miss Fleming, you mean?”

“I don’t reckon there are too many other redheads around here,” Matt said.

“She’s around. She’s got to get some rest sometime, you know. Taking care of you will wear a person out.” Sam grinned. “I ought to know.”

“Do I remember her sayin’ ... she’s a schoolteacher? My memory’s a mite fuzzy right now.”

“That’s right. From Vermont.”

“And we run into her in the middle of nowhere,” Matt muttered. “If that don’t beat all.”

Sam found Juan Pablo sitting on a rock beside the creek, restringing a bow. The warrior glanced up and grunted, but didn’t say anything.

“Matt’s fever finally broke,” Sam reported. “He’s feeling a lot better.”

“Good. We will not have to trouble ourselves dragging his body away from the canyon for the coyotes and the buzzards to feast upon.”

Sam swallowed the angry retort that almost sprang to his lips. He and Matt were guests of the Navajo, after all. Anyway, he should be used to Juan Pablo’s surly nature by now, he told himself.

“I’d like to speak with Caballo Rojo.”

That drew some interest from Juan Pablo. He looked up with a frown and asked, “Why?”

“Because I want to find those men who bushwhacked us and make them tell me what it was all about.”

Juan Pablo grunted again.

“Probably they were thieves who wanted to rob you. All white men are thieves.”

“I suppose they could have been, but Matt and I didn’t look like very tempting targets for a robbery.”

That was true. Despite the fact that neither of the young men had to worry about money because of the ranches they owned in Montana, nobody could tell that by looking at them. They had good horses, and their guns were relatively new and well-cared-for, but other than that they appeared to be typical, down-on-their-luck drifters and grub-line riders.

“Those men could be far away by now,” Juan Pablo pointed out.

“That’s true. And that’s all the more reason to try to pick up their trail now, before they get even farther away.”

“You are set on doing this thing?”

“I am.”

“Caballo Rojo said that you may leave the canyon whenever you wish.”

Sam nodded.

“I know. But I want to tell him where I’m going and why, and make sure it’s all right with him if Matt stays here while he recovers from his wounds.”

“You are going to leave your friend?” Juan Pablo didn’t sound happy about that.

“He’s not going to be fit to travel for a week or more,” Sam explained. “I don’t want to wait that long to go after the bushwhackers.”

A put-upon sigh came from Juan Pablo. He set the bow aside.

“Come,” he said as he stood up. “We will talk to Caballo Rojo.”

They walked through the canyon to the large hogan that belonged to the chief. Sam had been here long enough now that the novelty of having him around had worn off for the most part. Some of the children still followed him wherever he went, and some of the young, unmarried women eyed him with open interest and speculation that he was careful not to return. Making some warrior jealous was one of the last things he needed.

Caballo Rojo was sitting outside his hogan enjoying the morning sun. He greeted Juan Pablo in Navajo, then gave Sam a solemn nod and said, “Two Wolves.”

Sam was pleased that the chief used his Cheyenne name. He considered that a good omen.

“Good morning, Caballo Rojo,” he said. “My friend Matt Bodine is better this morning. The fever no longer consumes him.”

Juan Pablo repeated that in Navajo. Caballo Rojo nodded again and spoke. Juan Pablo translated, “Caballo Rojo says this is a good thing and that your heart must be lightened.”

“It is,” Sam replied. “Tell him that it’s due to his great mercy and generosity that Matt survived at all, and that we are indebted to him.”

Juan Pablo complied.

Sam went on, “But now I must ask him for even more of that mercy and generosity, because I want to leave Matt here to recover while I search for the men responsible for hurting him.”

Juan Pablo spoke the words, and Caballo Rojo considered them gravely. For a long moment he didn’t reply, and when he did, it was at great length. Sam knew not to read too much into that. The Navajo could be as wordy and obsessed with formality as any other tribe.

Finally Juan Pablo turned back to him, and the warrior’s translation was predictably brief.

“Caballo Rojo says that this is agreeable to him, and he promises that your friend will continue to be cared for and kept safe.”

“Please express my deepest gratitude to the chief.”

Juan Pablo did so. Caballo Rojo acknowledged that with another grave nod and a slight wave of his hand.

Juan Pablo asked, “When will you go?”

“As soon as I can,” Sam said. “Now that Matt appears to be out of danger, I don’t see any reason to wait. I want to pick up the trail before much more time goes by.”

“Can you find the place where you were attacked?”

“I think so,” Sam said with a smile. “I kept my eyes open while we were on our way here, and I’m pretty good at remembering landmarks.”

“I can take you back to the place where we found you.”

Sam was a little surprised by the offer. He hadn’t expected Juan Pablo to be so cooperative.

“I appreciate that, but it’s not really necessary.”

Juan Pablo shrugged.

“If you change your mind ...”

“I don’t reckon I will.”

The familiar sneer appeared on the warrior’s face.

“Now you sound like a white man,” he said. “Always convinced you are right.”

Sam shrugged and turned to head back to the hogan where he’d left Matt. That was where he’d been staying, too.

Sam gathered his gear, checked the place where the bullet crease was healing on the animal, and then saddled his horse, which was picketed on a grassy stretch beside the creek with the Navajo ponies. When he was ready to go, he returned to the hogan and found Matt sitting up, eating a bowl of stew.

Matt’s face was a little thinner from his ordeal and pale under his permanent tan. But he seemed to have a healthy appetite, and that was a good sign. He finished the stew, set the empty bowl aside, and said, “You look like you’re ready to ride.”

“I am,” Sam said with a nod.

“You’re really gonna leave me here?”

“Caballo Rojo has given me his word personally that you’ll be taken care of.”

Matt made a face.

“I don’t much cotton to being taken care of.” He glanced across the hogan, where Elizabeth Fleming sat with Juan Pablo’s wife, each of them weaving a blanket. Elizabeth wasn’t the only one doing the teaching during her stay with the Navajo. “Even when the surroundings are pleasant most of the time.”

A worried frown creased Sam’s forehead.

“I trust Caballo Rojo,” he said as he folded his arms across his chest and gave Matt a stern look. “Can I trust you?”

“Trust me to what?” Matt asked in apparent innocence.

“Behave yourself.”

“Me? Why, I always behave myself, Sam, you know that.”

Sam grunted.

“I’m not joking here, Matt,” he said. “You’d better take care of yourself and let those wounds heal up.”

“I have a strong constitution,” Matt said with a smile.

“You’ve got a strong something.” Sam held out his hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“You’d better be back in a week or less,” Matt said as he clasped Sam’s hand.

“Why’s that?”

“Because by then I’ll be strong enough to come after you, and that’s exactly what I plan to do if you haven’t shown up by then.”

So that was a new worry, Sam thought. But Matt had a point. In a week’s time, he probably would be strong enough to leave. Matt had always healed quickly and had a vast core of inner strength. He might joke on the outside, but on the inside he was steel and whang leather.

“Fine. If I’m not back in a week, you can come pick up my trail.”

Matt nodded.

“Darn right I will.”

“So long.”

Matt started to get up.

“I can come outside—”

Sam waved him back down onto the blankets.

“Just sit there and rest, blast it. The more you do that, the sooner you’ll get well.”

Sam started to duck out through the hogan’s door. Matt stopped him by saying, “I suppose it’d be too much to ask for you to save a couple varmints for me.”

“I reckon that’ll be up to them,” Sam said.

Chapter 9

Juan Pablo was waiting next to Sam’s horse.

“You are certain you do not want me to come with you?” he asked.

Sam thought quickly. He remembered the looks of dislike that Juan Pablo had given both of them. He didn’t think Matt would do anything to cause trouble while he was gone, but it might be better to have Juan Pablo where he could keep an eye on him.

Sam considered the situation, then said, “Juan Pablo, I’ve changed my mind. I appreciate your offer, and I accept.”

Juan Pablo’s expression was as flinty as ever, but Sam thought he saw a flash of satisfaction in the man’s eyes. Juan Pablo nodded and said, “I will tell my woman and get my pony.”

“I’ll be waiting right here,” Sam told him.

Navajo warriors traveled light. Less than ten minutes later, Sam and Juan Pablo rode away from the hogans. Several barking dogs followed them for a while before turning back.

It would take them until the middle of the day to reach the place where Caballo Rojo and his men had found the blood brothers. Sam didn’t want to pass all that time in silence, so after they had ridden for a while, he said, “You speak pretty good English. Did Miss Fleming teach you?”

Juan Pablo didn’t look over at his companion. He kept his eyes turned straight ahead in a haughty glare, and for a moment Sam thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“I learned at one of the missions, years ago, when the white man thought he could keep the Diné penned up like wild animals. Life at the agency was no way for my people to live.”

Sam knew that in many ways, Juan Pablo was right. Reservations and Indian agencies were often badly run, either through greed and corruption or just sheer incompetence. Too many of the people in charge came from back East and had no real idea of how the tribes lived. Their intentions might be good, but their zeal was misguided.

“Lo, the poor Indian!” Sam thought again, not without a trace of bitterness at the way his own people had been treated. The reformers tried to turn their charges into white men, when all that was really needed was a place where the Indians could be left alone without constant encroachment by the whites. It seemed simple to Sam.

But of course, the simple, effective answers were never good enough for government. Not when there could be hordes of rules and regulations and bureaucrats to enforce them.

Once the Indians moved to the reservations, the government tried to run everything about their lives. Someday, it might come to the point where the government tried to do the same to all the country’s citizens. And that day would be the true end of liberty and freedom.

Sam was just thankful that he would be long dead before that ever happened.

“But there were teachers at the agency,” Juan Pablo went on. “Like Miss Fleming, though none of them had hair like flame. They taught us. Or tried to. Most of my people could not or would not learn. Somehow ... the words stuck in my head. I could not get them out, even though I did not really want them.”

Sam thought there was something odd in Juan Pablo’s voice when the man talked about Elizabeth Fleming. The Navajo seemed to despise almost everything about the white men ...

But maybe not Elizabeth.

Sam didn’t let his companion see the frown that creased his forehead. If Juan Pablo had feelings for Elizabeth Fleming, that could lead to trouble sooner or later.

Especially since Matt was back there alone with her now. Sam was confident that Elizabeth wouldn’t return any affection Juan Pablo felt for her, but that might not stop the Navajo from being angry if she got mixed up with Matt.

Before leaving the canyon, Sam had told his blood brother to behave himself.

Now he hoped Matt was doing that in more ways than one.

The knowledge that Sam had gone off on an adventure without him gnawed at Matt’s guts. Sure, he knew he was too weak to stay in the saddle right now, and ten minutes on horseback would probably start blood running from those bullet holes again, but still, it was annoying.

Matt didn’t know what to hope for: that Sam would find those bushwhackers without any trouble and settle their hash for them, or that he’d have to come back here and get Matt to help out like he should have in the first place.

While he was pondering that, he supposed he might as well distract himself in other ways.

Luckily, he had a mighty nice distraction in the person of Miss Elizabeth Fleming.

She spent hours in the hogan, talking to him about growing up as the pampered daughter of a wealthy family that controlled a highly successful shipping line.

“I suppose it was having everything handed to me like that that made me want to do something for people who weren’t so fortunate,” she told him.

“Don’t feel too sorry for the Navajo,” Matt said. “They had it pretty bad when the army rounded them up and forced them all to live down at Bosque Redondo and other agencies like that, but once they were allowed to come back up here to their traditional homeland, they were a lot better off.”

“But they live in ... well, in dirt huts,” Elizabeth said, lowering her voice so Juan Pablo’s wife wouldn’t hear her. “And they raise sheep.”

“Well, I might agree with you about the sheep,” Matt said with the cattleman’s natural disdain for those woolly, bleating creatures. “But as for the rest of it, this is the way the Navajo have always lived. It’s all they know.”

“I suppose you’re right. I can’t help but think they would want to better themselves, though.”

Matt didn’t waste his time arguing with her. Like every professional do-gooder, Elizabeth was convinced she knew what was best for everybody and nothing would shake her from that almost religious conviction.

Anyway, he had a long-standing policy of not arguing too much with pretty, green-eyed redheads, and he didn’t see any reason to change it now.

Elizabeth couldn’t spend all of her time with him, though, and when she wasn’t there he had nothing to do except recuperate from that bullet wound.

Sitting and resting was as boring as all get-out, but Matt forced himself to do it. Any time he heard something going on outside the hogan, he wanted to get up and go see what it was, but he made himself sit quietly.

He slept for a while during the afternoon, then woke up and ate supper with Elizabeth and Juan Pablo’s wife. Juan Pablo hadn’t gotten back yet, or if he had, he hadn’t put in an appearance at the hogan.

Matt dozed off again, gradually settling down into a deep sleep as night closed in around the encampment. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep when something woke him.

His eyes opened. Even wounded, he was fully awake and alert instantly. He couldn’t see anything, but he sensed movement somewhere close by.

“Matt.”

The voice was a whisper. He propped himself up on an elbow and looked around.

Elizabeth was on her knees beside his pile of buffalo robes. The fire had burned down, but it still gave off a faint glow that he could make out behind her, silhouetting her hair and her slender form, which was now clothed in a long nightgown. Juan Pablo’s wife was asleep on the other side of the fire.

“Matt,” she said again, “I ... I know I shouldn’t be here. It’s very improper.”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “It is.”

“And I know that you’re ... well ... injured and need your rest, but I ... I’ve been lonely here. I know I’m doing good work with these people and all, but still ... one gets lonely for the company of one’s own kind after a while. I thought perhaps ... if I could simply lie here with you for a while ...”

Matt took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe he was about to do this, but he said, “I don’t reckon that would be a good idea, Miss Fleming.”

“I think you can call me Elizabeth. And I wasn’t proposing anything, well, indecent, Mr. Bodine, just some companionship.”

She might believe what she was saying, and it might actually start out that way, Matt thought, but it wouldn’t stay that way and he didn’t figure that was a good idea.

For one thing, he really was injured, and he wasn’t sure he was up to any romping. For another, that stolid-faced Navajo woman was snoring on the other side of the hogan, and he didn’t know how sound a sleeper she was.

And for another, he just flat didn’t need the complication of a romance with this Vermont schoolteacher, no matter how pretty she was. He had to concentrate on getting better, so he could catch up with Sam and help him settle the hash of those bushwhackers.

“I’m sorry—” he began.

“No, that’s perfectly all right,” Elizabeth said, and now her voice was stiff and formal again. “There’s absolutely no need to apologize. Of course it would be a bad idea. I’ll go back to my own hogan now and leave you alone.”

Now you’ve gone and done it, Matt thought. He had insulted her.

As she stood up, he lifted a hand toward her and said, “Elizabeth ...”

“You should go back to sleep now,” she said firmly. “I’m sorry I disturbed your rest, Mr. Bodine.”

Before he could say anything else, she turned and left the hogan. As Matt looked through the open doorway, he saw the white shape of her nightgown for a moment, floating through the dark night like a ghost.

Then she was gone.

Matt sighed and stretched out on the blankets again. Under different circumstances, he would have been pleased to have Elizabeth pay him a nighttime visit like that, but not here and not now.

He didn’t know what things would be like between them when the sun came up in the morning. If she was so mad at him that she didn’t come to visit him anymore, he didn’t know how he was going to get through the long, empty hours while he regained his strength.

What it amounted to was that Sam didn’t need to waste any time getting back here, so they could go after those blasted bushwhackers together.

Chapter 10

By the middle of the day, Sam and Juan Pablo had reached the place where the Navajo warriors had found the blood brothers. They stopped there to eat some of the dried, jerked venison they had brought with them.

“I suppose you’ll be going back to your home now,” Sam said when they finished with the meal, such as it was.

Juan Pablo said, “No, I will come with you to the place where you and your friend fought those men. I can help you find their trail.”

“I appreciate the offer, but that’s not necessary.”

“The sooner you find them and deal with them, the sooner you can return to the canyon, get the one called Matt, and leave my people alone.”

“Well, if that’s the way you want to look at it ...” Sam shrugged. “I reckon you’re welcome to come along.”

Juan Pablo just grunted and turned away to tend to his pony.

They rode on, backtracking the trail Matt and Sam had left after their encounter with the bushwhackers several days earlier. The terrain had flattened out to the point that there weren’t many landmarks, so it didn’t really look all that familiar to Sam.

After they had gone several miles, though, he spotted a bluff that he recognized in the distance.

“That’s where they were when they started shooting at us,” he told Juan Pablo as he pointed to the bluff that jutted up from the flats. Sam swept his hand back to the south. “The arroyo where they caught up to us is over that way.”

“These men outnumbered you,” Juan Pablo said. “If they wanted you dead, why did they not keep fighting until they had killed you?”

“We’d already ventilated several of them, maybe fatally. I don’t think they had the stomach to keep fighting. They decided to cut their losses and leave us alone instead. Anyway, they knew Matt was wounded, and they may have thought I was, too. Maybe they hoped we’d just crawl off somewhere and die.”

“No man worthy of the name hopes that his enemy dies. He makes certain of it.”

“Well, it’s lucky for Matt and me that they didn’t.”

Sam rode over to the arroyo. He dismounted to study the welter of hoofprints nearby where the bushwhackers had left their horses. He was looking for prints with distinctive horseshoe markings and found a few he might be able to recognize if he ever saw them again.

He saw bootprints as well, but there was nothing remarkable about them. He studied them anyway and tried to commit them to memory.

Sam also found a number of spent cartridges that had been left behind by the would-be killers. Standard .44-40 rounds used in most Winchesters and some handguns, he decided. Nothing there that would lead him to the bushwhackers.

But some scouting around turned up more hoofprints that led southeastward.

“Is there a settlement in that direction?” Sam asked.

Juan Pablo made a face and spat.

“A place the white men call Flat Rock.”

Sam had never heard of the place. When he said as much, Juan Pablo went on, “The first white man to settle there had a trading post. He sold whiskey and women. The town grew around it. Miners and men who raise cattle go there to indulge their lusts.”

“Then I’m not surprised a bunch of bushwhackers would head for there,” Sam said. “How far away is it?”

“A day’s ride. Maybe less.”

Sam glanced at the sun.

“I probably can’t get there today ... but I can sometime tomorrow. Maybe I’ll find some answers there.” He pointed toward the bluff. “I think I’ll ride over there and have a look around.”

“But the trail is here,” Juan Pablo said as he nodded at the tracks on the ground.

“Yeah, but I want to see if I can figure out what those fellas were up to.”

Sam swung up into the saddle. Juan Pablo mounted the pony and rode with him toward the bluff.

As they came closer, Sam saw that it was a fairly common upthrust of rocky ground, probably formed sometime in the dim ages past by an earthquake.

He didn’t know exactly where the bushwhackers were when they opened fire on him and Matt, so the first thing he did was ride along the base of the bluff, keeping a close eye on the ground as he weaved around the big sandstone boulders that littered the area.

After a few minutes he reined in and pointed as he spoke to Juan Pablo.

“Look there. Wagon tracks.”

Sure enough, the iron-rimmed wheels of a wagon had cut parallel ruts into the ground, until the vehicle had stopped right here where Sam had spotted the tracks among the rocks.

It appeared the wagon had been pulled by a four-horse team and accompanied by a number of riders. Sam could tell where the driver had swung the vehicle around and started back in the direction it came from.

Sam rubbed his chin as he frowned in thought.

“Who’d drive a wagon out here into the big middle of nowhere, then turn around and go back?”

“There is no understanding the madness of the white man,” Juan Pablo said. “Even a mixed-blood like you should know that.”

Sam ignored the veiled insult and continued studying the ground.

“Looks like there were about a dozen riders with the wagon. It had an escort. An army wagon, maybe?”

“Did you and your friend see a wagon when you rode by here the other day?”

“No. At least I didn’t. I’d have to ask Matt to be sure, but I think he would have said something about it if he had. You have to remember, though, we weren’t really paying any attention to this bluff until the shooting started, and once the lead was flying, we lit a shuck for that arroyo as fast as we could. The wagon could have been here, and we just didn’t notice it among these rocks. We were several hundred yards away.”

“Or maybe it was here some other time and had nothing to do with the men who tried to kill you. There has been no rain and not much wind to disturb the sign.”

Sam nodded.

“That’s true. My hunch is that this bluff ’s not that popular a place, though. I think it’s all connected. Let’s take a look and see if there’s a trail to the top of the bluff anywhere around here.”

As it turned out, there was a narrow trail that angled up the bluff about fifty yards away. It was only wide enough for one man at a time, but Sam found several marks on the rock where boot heels had scraped it recently.

He put everything he had seen together in his mind to form a theory and tried it out on Juan Pablo.

“That wagon and about a dozen outriders came here for some reason. The man or men in the wagon stayed below, along with some of the riders, and the rest of the bunch went up to the top of the bluff to keep an eye on all the country hereabouts. As flat as it is, they could probably see a long way. Then Matt and I came riding along, and for some reason the men on the bluff didn’t want to take a chance on us noticing what’s going on. So they tried to kill us.”

“That makes no sense,” Juan Pablo insisted. “What could they have been doing to make them feel that way?”

“I don’t know, but it had to be something pretty bad, probably illegal.”

“Madness,” Juan Pablo muttered.

Sam turned his horse.

“I want to take a closer look at the place where those wagon tracks stop.”

He rode back to the spot and dismounted, being careful not to disturb any marks he might find on the ground. As he walked slowly back and forth, his keen eyes searched for anything out of the ordinary.

After a few moments, he hunkered on his heels to get an even closer look at an area a short distance off to the side of the wagon tracks.

“Did you find something?” Juan Pablo asked.

“Maybe.” Sam pointed a finger. “Right here, the corner of something has gouged a little place in the dirt. There’s a line leading away from it.” His finger traced the faint mark on the ground. “There’s another corner mark, about eight feet away.” Sam moved around. “And another line in the dirt where the sharp edge of something was sitting. It goes to a third corner ... and back along there to a fourth one ...”

Sam looked up at Juan Pablo, who hadn’t dismounted.

“Somebody brought a crate of some sort out here on that wagon, unloaded it, and set it on the ground here. The crate, or what was inside it, was heavy enough to leave those marks.”

“A crate,” Juan Pablo repeated. He sounded skeptical. “What sort of crate?”

“Well, there’s no way of knowing how deep it was, but we can tell that it was about two feet wide and eight feet long.”

Juan Pablo shook his head.

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“Not to you, maybe,” Sam said. “But to me that sounds an awful lot like a coffin.”

Chapter 11

“The box you white men bury your dead in?” Juan Pablo asked. He sounded slightly disgusted. The Navajo did not enclose the bodies of their dead in boxes.

“That’s right.”

“There is no grave here.” Juan Pablo pointed at the ground. “No one has dug in this dirt. We would be able to tell.”

“You’re right. Maybe it wasn’t a coffin. But it was sure shaped like one.”

“None of this makes sense,” the warrior said.

“It will, sooner or later. Once I find the men who tried to kill me and Matt.”

“You thought that some enemy might have sent them after you. Now, according to what we have found, that is not what happened. You and your friend were shot at simply because you rode along here at the wrong time.”

“That’s the way it looks,” Sam admitted.

“Then why seek them out?” Juan Pablo wanted to know. “It had nothing to do with you. You and the one called Matt still live. Why not return to the canyon, wait until he is fit to travel, and ride on? Why search for the men who shot at you?”

“Because I don’t like it when somebody tries to kill me,” Sam said. “Besides, if they were that worried about somebody seeing them, they were up to no good. They need to be stopped.”

“Why?” Juan Pablo sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Because they might hurt somebody else.”

From the warrior’s expression, it was obvious he thought Sam was completely loco.

“Look, you can go back,” Sam went on. “I never expected you to come this far with me. I’ll handle things from here on out.”

“You are being foolish.”

“Maybe, but it’s my choice to make, isn’t it?”

Juan Pablo scowled.

“If you die, what will happen to the man in my hogan?”

“If I don’t come back, as soon as Matt has recovered he’ll come looking for me. And if they’ve put me under, he’ll avenge my death. You don’t have to worry about being stuck with Matt.”

“Do what you want,” Juan Pablo snapped. “I am going back.”

He stalked over to his pony, leaped on the animal’s back, and galloped off, soon vanishing except for a thin pillar of dust that rose in the west.

Sam was glad to see him go. He was glad for Juan

Pablo’s help, but the warrior wasn’t the best company in the world.

Several hours of daylight were left. That was enough time for Sam to cover some of the ground between here and Flat Rock.

He rode back to the arroyo and picked up the trail there. He could have followed the wagon tracks, but there was still a slim possibility that the wagon and its escort weren’t the same bunch that had jumped him and Matt.

He hadn’t gone more than half a mile, though, when the two trails merged. The men who had fled from the battle at the arroyo had rejoined the wagon, and all of them had headed southeast toward the settlement called Flat Rock.

Sam’s eyes constantly searched the barren landscape around him as he followed the tracks. He didn’t expect to run into an ambush ... but he and Matt hadn’t been expecting the one several days earlier, either. Out here on the frontier, it was always a good idea to be alert.

From time to time, Sam even checked behind him to make sure Juan Pablo hadn’t changed his mind and started following him. He didn’t know of any reason the Navajo warrior would do that, other than sheer contrariness, which Juan Pablo seemed to have in abundance.

The trail didn’t deviate much from its southeastward course, just enough now and then to avoid natural obstacles, like the scattered red rock mesas and stone chimneys that thrust up from the plains around them.

From time to time Sam came to narrow creeks that were little more than trickles, but in this dry, dusty land, that was enough water to cause lines of green where mesquites and stunted cottonwoods grew on the banks. The countryside wasn’t what anybody would call pretty, but Sam had been in worse places.

When the sun was touching the western horizon behind him, he began looking for a place to make camp. He settled for a place beside one of those narrow streams, so he and his horse would have water and he could refill his canteens.

Quickly, he picketed and unsaddled his horse, then gathered buffalo chips and used them to fuel a small fire just big enough to boil some coffee.

As soon as he’d done that, he scooped sand on the flames to extinguish them and sat back to make a meager supper on the venison and dried corn he’d brought from the Navajo canyon.

When Sam had finished eating, he stood up and plucked a large handful of bean pods from the mesquites. He scattered them around the area where he intended to spread his blankets.

If anyone approached those blankets in the darkness, they would either step on the pods, causing them to crunch under the skulker’s boots, or kick them and set the beans to rattling. Either way, the noise would serve as a warning.

He spread the blankets and set his saddle where he could use it as a pillow, then placed his hat on the saddle. Then he took his Winchester and stepped across the creek. It was narrow enough that he didn’t even get his boots wet.

He walked along the stream for about fifty yards to a place where the bank had caved in some and formed a little hollow. After poking in that space with the rifle barrel to make sure no rattlers were lurking in it, Sam settled down with his back in the hollow. He could sleep sitting up when he had to, and tonight his gut told him that might be a good idea.

The heat of the day lingered as night fell, although it would cool off some before morning. Sam’s eyelids grew heavy as he sat there with the Winchester across his lap. He let himself doze off. He knew there was probably no need for so much caution, but better to be careful than dead.

When he woke up, sometime far in the night, at first he didn’t hear anything and wondered what had roused him from slumber. A couple of seconds later, mesquite pods rattled. There was no wind, so he knew they weren’t swaying on the trees.

That was confirmed an instant later when a man’s voice ripped out a curse and ordered, “Ventilate him!”

Six-guns began to roar. Sam leaned forward as he saw orange flashes stab from the muzzles of two revolvers. He knew they were pouring lead into his blankets, saddle, and hat, and he wasn’t happy about the damage they’d be doing to those items.

Better than putting holes in his hide, though.

He brought the Winchester to his shoulder, levering a round into the chamber as he did so. The rifle cracked as he aimed just above one set of muzzle flashes.

Sam triggered half a dozen swift rounds, shifting his aim to the other bushwhacker in the middle of the volley.

He heard yells of pain that told him some of his bullets had scored, but the gunmen didn’t stop firing. They just shifted their aim to his sanctuary along the creek.

Sam pulled back as far into the hollow as he could as slugs smacked into the dirt wall next to him. He waited for a lull, then cranked off another four rounds, spraying the shots along the opposite side of the creek bank where the men had believed him to be camped.

That was enough for them. They held their fire and retreated. Sam heard them running, followed a moment later by the clatter of hoofbeats as the bushwhackers galloped away.

Wary of a trick, he stayed where he was and took advantage of the opportunity to reload the Winchester, thumbing cartridges through the loading gate until the magazine was full again. Once he had done that, he waited some more, until finally he stood up and made his way cautiously toward the campsite.

He had picketed his horse a short distance away, hoping the animal would be out of the line of fire if any trouble broke out. That was the first thing he checked, and he was relieved to see that the horse appeared to be fine, other than being a little spooked by the racket and the stench of powder smoke in the air.

When Sam approached the spot where he had spread his blankets, he saw several dark splashes on the ground. Kneeling, he touched a finger to one of those splashes, then rubbed it against his thumb.

Blood, he was pretty sure. So he had winged at least one of the men, no doubt about that. Not fatally, though, and possibly not even seriously, because both of the bushwhackers had been able to flee like they had wings on their feet.

He straightened and went over to his bedroll. His hat lay off to one side where it had been thrown by the bullets that hit it.

Sam picked it up and held it over his head. Stars shone through the holes ripped in the hat. He grunted. He could always buy another hat, but not another head.

The leather on his saddle had been torn, too, and slugs had gouged grooves in the wood underneath it. That damage could be repaired, and his blankets could be patched and mended.

He gathered his gear, stuffed the ruined hat in one of his saddlebags, and saddled his horse. He was moving his camp in case the bushwhackers came back with reinforcements.

Sam followed the creek for a couple of miles before he found another place to settle down for the rest of the night. In the morning it would be easy enough to come back to the site of the ambush and pick up the trail again.

In other ways, though, the situation had become much more complicated. As he lay looking up at the stars, he asked himself how the bushwhackers had known where to look for him. He supposed it was possible the leaders of the bunch, whoever they were, could have posted men to watch the trail and ambush anyone who seemed to be searching for them.

It was also possible that the two men who’d snuck up on his camp tonight had nothing to do with what had happened several days earlier. They could have been a pair of drifting outlaws bent on murder and robbery.

But if they weren’t ... if they were connected to the men who had tried before to kill Sam and Matt ... now they knew one of their intended victims was on their trail.

That meant if they were in Flat Rock, they would be on the lookout for him when he rode into town. This was going to make his job even more difficult and dangerous.

But that was nothing new, Sam told himself. He and Matt didn’t go looking for trouble, but it seemed to find them anyway. This was just one more instance of that happening.

He would deal with whatever was waiting for him in Flat Rock when he got there, Sam told himself. He rolled over and went to sleep.

Chapter 12

Zack Jardine was in a bad mood when the pounding on the door woke him. He sat up in the tangle of grimy sheets and muttered a curse.

The woman who lay beside him shifted a little and muttered in her sleep. Jardine couldn’t remember her name. Dolly, Dotty, something like that.

It didn’t matter. She was a whore, and that was more important than what her name was.

Somebody was still hammering on the door with a fist. Dolly had taken a nip of laudanum when she and Jardine were through with their business, so it wasn’t likely she was going to wake up anytime soon.

That racket was liable to rouse anybody else who was sleeping, though, so Jardine swung his legs off the bed and stood up.

If that was one of his men at the door, drunk as a skunk, Jardine intended to whip him within an inch of his life.

Wearing only the bottom half of a pair of longjohns, Jardine fumbled around on the little table beside the bed until he found a match. He snapped the lucifer to life and held it to the wick of the candle that sat on the table as well.

Then he turned to the ladderback chair where he had hung his gunbelt. He pulled the Colt from its holster and looped his thumb over the hammer.

With the candlelight shining on the heavy slabs of muscle on his chest and shoulders, he went to the door.

“What the hell is it?”

As soon as the question was out of his mouth, Jardine took a quick step to the side, just in case whoever was in the hall fired a slug through the door.

Of course, if somebody wanted to kill him, the varmint might figure he would do that. In that case it would be a matter of the man guessing whether Jardine moved left or right.

Fifty-fifty odds. Jardine could live with that. He’d faced worse odds before and was still alive.

No shot sounded in the hallway. Instead a man called through the thin panel, “Zack, Joe Hutto just rode in with Three-Finger Smith. Three-Finger caught a bullet.”

Jardine jerked the door open. He had recognized Dave Snyder’s voice.

“How bad is he hurt?”

Snyder shook his head.

“I don’t know. That Englisher woman’s takin’ a look at him now. She claims to know somethin’ about doctorin’. I think he’ll live, though.”

“Joe’s still downstairs?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be down in a minute to talk to him. I want to know what happened.”

“I got a pretty good idea what happened, Zack,” Snyder said. “Somebody’s on our trail.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Jardine said. “Tell Joe not to go anywhere.”

“You bet,” Snyder said as Jardine swung the door closed.

Jardine went to pull his clothes and boots on. The night was warm, and Dolly—if that was her name—had thrown the covers aside. Jardine glanced at her naked body.

She was young and still relatively pretty, with a lot of curly blond hair, and under other circumstances he might have tried to wake her up enough to have another go with her ... or maybe not even bothered waking her.

But he had more important things to worry about now, such as the potential threat to the deal for those stolen rifles.

Jardine buckled on his gunbelt and left Dolly sleeping there. He clattered downstairs to the main room of the Buckingham Palace, the saloon and whorehouse that was the biggest building in the relatively new town of Flat Rock.

According to the banjo clock on the wall behind the bar, it was nearly two o’ clock in the morning. The place was still open but not very busy at that hour. Only about a dozen men were in the barroom, and more than half of them were Jardine’s men.

Including the one stretched out on the bar, bleeding onto the hardwood from the bullet hole in his side.

The auburn-haired woman who called herself Lady Augusta Winslow looked up from examining the wound and said coolly, “I charge extra for medical services, Mr. Jardine. I assume you’ll cover the expenses incurred for the care of your man here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jardine replied, not bothering to try to keep the irritation out of his voice. “How’s Three-Finger doing?”

“With the proper treatment, he should survive. The bullet’s still inside him, so it will have to be removed. If he lives through the surgery, he’ll be fine.”

Jardine gave the woman a curt nod.

“Go ahead. But be careful. He’s a good man.”

That was one of the rare occasions when someone had used the term “good man” to refer to Three-Finger Smith, so called because he had only three fingers on his left hand.

A lot of hombres on the frontier were missing fingers, but usually the loss was the result of an accident, like getting a finger caught in a rope while taking a dally around the saddlehorn.

Three-Finger had lost his index and middle fingers when the husband of a married woman caught him with those fingers where they shouldn’t have been. Faced with the choice of getting a bullet in the head or laying his hand out flat on a table, the man previously known as plain Hal Smith had chosen the table, whereupon the offended husband had promptly chopped off the offending digits with a Bowie knife.

The man would have been smarter to chop fingers off Smith’s gun hand, because as soon as Three-Finger, as he was newly dubbed, had the injury wrapped up, he returned and shot the luckless cuckold in the back.

The man was on top of his wife at the time, trying to mend the fences of her straying, and the bullet went all the way through him and killed her, too.

Jardine had heard Three-Finger tell that story numerous times, and it always provoked Three-Finger to such laughter that he had to slap his thigh with his mutilated hand.

Snyder, Joe Hutto, Angus Braverman, and Doyle Hilliard were among the man clustered around the wounded Three-Finger now. Lady Augusta reached behind her to the backbar, picked up a bottle of whiskey, and handed it to Snyder.

“Pour as much of that as you can down his throat,” she instructed. “It’ll be a lot easier to operate on him if he’s soused to the gills.”

Snyder nodded.

“Angus, you and Joe grab on to him. Doyle, pry open his mouth.”

Jardine countermanded that order.

“Just give him the bottle. Nobody ever had a problem getting Three-Finger to drink. Joe, come with me.”

Hutto nodded. He followed Jardine to a table in the corner while Smith grabbed the bottle away from Snyder, tilted it to his mouth while Braverman and Hilliard helped him sit up, and let the who-hit-John start gurgling down his throat.

“What happened?” Jardine asked when he and Hutto were seated at the table. “I left you out there to make sure nobody picked up our trail after that foul-up the other day. I’m guessing somebody did.”

Hutto nodded. On the gang’s way back to Flat Rock, Jardine had dropped off him and Smith at one of the little buttes that overlooked the trail about fifteen miles from the settlement, ordering them to stay there until he told them otherwise.

The next day, he had sent a rider out there with enough supplies to last the two sentinels a week. A few days had passed since then, long enough so that Jardine had become convinced the two men they had bushwhacked had crawled off and died or moved on somewhere else.

Either way, he didn’t think they were a threat anymore.

Judging by the way Three-Finger was bleeding on the bar, he’d been wrong about that.

“We spotted one of those hombres ridin’ toward town,” Hutto explained.

“You’re sure it was one of the men we had that run-in with the other day?”

Hutto nodded.

“Yeah. I got a good look at him through the spyglass. It was that big fella in the buckskin shirt, looks sort of like a redskin.”

“What did you do?”

Hutto rubbed a hand over his angular, beard-stubbled jaw.

“We saw where the son of a buck made camp, so we figured if we snuck up and killed him, there wouldn’t be anything to worry about. But he pulled a fast one on us and was holed up waiting for somebody to jump him. Three-Finger caught a slug while we were tradin’ shots with the varmint.”

Jardine said wearily, “You were supposed to light a shuck back here to town and warn me if you saw anybody like that following our tracks.”

“Yeah, I know, but we thought—”

“And that was your mistake right there,” Jardine cut in as he leaned forward. His face was dark with anger. “You’re not supposed to think, damn it! I handle that!”

He flung a hand toward the bar, where Three-Finger had polished off the whiskey and now lay there with a cherubic smile on his face, cradling the empty bottle against his chest.

“Now I’ve got another man with a bullet hole in him, and that fella you ambushed may be smart enough to figure out why somebody tried to kill him ... again.”

Lady Augusta poured more whiskey over a knife with a keen blade that glittered in the lamplight.

“Now you’ll have to hold him down, gentlemen,” she told Jardine’s men who were still gathered on the other side of the bar. “Hold him tightly. I won’t be responsible for what happens if you don’t.”

At the table, Joe Hutto shook his head.

“I’m sorry, boss. We thought we were doin’ the right thing. What happens now?”

Three-Finger screamed as the knife cut into him, but the strong hands on him kept him from moving.

“Now we wait to see if that son of a bitch shows up in Flat Rock,” Jardine said. “If he does, I guess we’ll just have to kill him here.”

Chapter 13

Sam wasn’t familiar with Flat Rock’s history, but he knew the settlement couldn’t have been in existence for too many years.

As he approached the next day, he saw that it had sprung up at a spot where one of the little creeks in the area flowed across a large, flat rock, spreading out to form a shallow pool.

That much water was rare in these parts. There were a few mines in the Carrizos to the north and some ranches in the basin that spread south toward Black Mesa and Canyon del Muerto.

Officially, this was all Navajo land, but when there was money to be made, “civilized” men never worried too much about things like reservations and treaties. There were ways around any obstacle, routes usually paved with discreet payoffs.

Those mines and ranches needed supplies, and the men who worked on them needed a place to blow their wages on loose women, watered-down whiskey, and marked cards.

Flat Rock filled those needs, and as a result the settlement had more saloons than any other sort of business establishment, by a large margin.

When Sam rode into town, the main street was mostly empty in the blistering Arizona sun. A few wagons were parked in front of buildings, and a handful of saddle horses were tied at hitch rails. Less than half a dozen pedestrians were making their way along the boardwalks or trying to avoid the piles of horse droppings that littered the broad, dusty avenue.

No one seemed to pay much attention to Sam, despite his buckskin shirt and copper-hued features. Many frontiersmen had such deep, permanent tans that they appeared almost to have Indian blood.

Anyway, Indians were nothing out of the ordinary around here.

Sam had followed the wagon and horse tracks to within a couple of miles of Flat Rock. When the trail got that close, it was lost in the welter of tracks left by other riders and vehicles coming and going from the settlement.

Since he didn’t know anyone here in Flat Rock, he couldn’t trust anyone, either. He couldn’t even go to the law, if there was any, because it was possible the authorities were connected to the bushwhackers. He and Matt had run into plenty of crooked lawmen in the past.

While he was trying to figure out how to proceed, he might as well get something to eat besides the dried venison and corn he’d been subsisting on for the past day, he decided. He angled his horse toward the hitch rail in front of a squat adobe building with a sign on it that read simply CAFÉ.

Sam dismounted and wrapped his horse’s reins around the rail. As he stepped toward the open door, two men in dusty, well-worn range garb came out of the building. Heavy revolvers rode in holsters on their hips.

One of the men was tall and thin, with a hawk-like face and a drooping black mustache. He had an open-clasp knife in his hand and was using the point of the blade to worry at a piece of food stuck in his teeth. That seemed to Sam like a fairly dangerous method for a man to pick his teeth.

The other hombre was shorter and considerably stockier than his companion, though not actually fat. His battered old brown Stetson was thumbed back on a thatch of rusty red hair. He had an open, honest face with a slight scattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks.

The tall man folded his knife and slipped it into a pocket as he gave Sam a smile and a friendly nod.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Good morning,” Sam replied. “Or good afternoon. I’m not sure exactly which it is.”

The short man pulled a big railroad watch attached to a thick chain from his pocket and flipped it open.

“Seventeen minutes after twelve,” he announced. “So it’s afternoon.”

“Well, then, good afternoon,” Sam said.

“Are you new in town?” the tall man asked. “Don’t recollect seein’ you around Flat Rock before.”

“This is the first time I’ve been here,” Sam replied.

“Just passin’ through?” the shorter man asked.

Sam was puzzled by the questions, but then he remembered how much interest strangers sometimes drew in frontier towns. Anything to break the monotony of a sometimes drab existence was welcome.

And surrounded by such a rugged, arid landscape, life in Flat Rock would certainly be drab.

Sam had no real idea what the men he was searching for looked like, but the bushwhackers might have studied him and Matt through field glasses before they opened fire.

So for all he knew, these two apparent grub-line riders could be part of the gang.

Which meant they could know who he was, too.

But without any way of being sure about that, all he could do for the moment was play along.

“That’s right, just passing through,” he said.

“If you’re lookin’ for a ridin’ job, there ain’t many to be had hereabouts,” the tall cowboy told him. “We ain’t lookin’, in particular, ’cause our dinero ain’t run out yet. But Flat Rock’s a good place to be if you’re aimin’ to make some money. It just looks like a sleepy little burg. Lots of excitin’ things goin’ on in this town, yes, sir.”

“Well, that’s good to know,” Sam said. He was about to decide that these two men were just the pair of harmless cowpokes they appeared to be, although he couldn’t rule out anything else. He nodded toward the door of the café. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m a mite hungry ...”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” the shorter man said. “Best chow in town.”

“I’m obliged,” Sam said. He took a step toward the door.

“Say,” the tall man spoke up, “I don’t mean no offense, but you look like you got some Injun blood in you.”

Sam stopped.

“I’m half Cheyenne,” he said. He had never denied or been ashamed of his heritage.

The tall man grinned.

“I’m an eighth Cherokee, myself. Like I said, no offense meant, just curious. Only way a fella really finds out anything is by askin’ questions.”

“I suppose that’s true.” Sam grasped the doorknob and nodded to the two men. “So long.”

He opened the door and went inside before the talkative cowboys could say anything else.

Sleepy little burg or not, the café was doing good business in this noon hour. Half a dozen tables covered with blue-checked tablecloths were occupied, and the stools along the counter were almost all full.

Sam took one that wasn’t and sat down between a burly man who looked like a freighter and a smaller gent in a suit and rimless spectacles.

The freighter, if that’s what he was, ignored Sam, but the other man nodded and said, “Hello.” His formerly stiff collar had wilted in the heat.

Sam returned the nod.

“Afternoon.”

The man held out his hand.

“Noah Reilly.”

Sam shook the townsman’s hand and introduced himself.

“I’m Sam Two Wolves.”

“That’s certainly a colorful and unusual name.”

Sam shrugged.

“Not where I come from.”

“Where’s that?”

“Montana,” Sam said without going into any more details. Folks in Flat Rock seemed to be a friendly, inquisitive bunch.

“I’ve never been to Montana. From everything I’ve heard, I’m sure it’s beautiful up there. More beautiful than this part of Arizona, anyway.”

A middle-aged counterman with gray hair and a white apron came over and said, “Noah, quit yam-merin’ at this fella. He probably came in for something to eat, not a lot of talk.”

“No, that’s all right, really,” Sam said as he saw the contrite expression that appeared on the bespectacled man’s face. “I don’t mind talking. But I would like something to eat.”

“Lunch special’s chicken and dumplin’s,” the counterman told him.

Sam nodded and said, “That’ll be fine, thanks.”

“Comin’ up.”

As the counterman turned to the pass-through window that led to the kitchen, Noah Reilly pointed to the empty bowl in front of him and told Sam, “I had the chicken and dumplings. Delicious. You’ll enjoy it.”

“I’m sure I will. What do you do for a living, Mr. Reilly?”

“You can call me Noah. I work at the general store.”

Sam had taken the man for a clerk of some sort, so he wasn’t surprised by Reilly’s answer.

“I’ll bet you know everybody in town, then.”

Reilly grinned.

“All the ones who have any money to spend, anyway.” He laughed at his own mild wit.

“You probably don’t get a lot of strangers riding through Flat Rock.”

“No, not as out of the way as we are here. Most people have to have a good reason to come to Flat Rock, or they’d never even hear of it. But people always need supplies, and this is the only place in fifty or sixty miles to get them.”

“That’s true,” Sam admitted. He didn’t see how talking to Noah Reilly was going to help him find the men who tried to kill him and Matt, but he didn’t have anything better to do at the moment, he supposed.

“Are you a full-blooded Indian, Sam?” Reilly went on.

The blunt question made Sam raise his eyebrows a little.

“Half Cheyenne,” he explained, just as he had told the tall cowboy outside.

“Most of the Indians in these parts were Navajo. This is part of their reservation, you know.”

Sam nodded and said, “So I’ve heard. They’re peaceful, though, aren’t they?”

“For the most part. Some of the people around here still get nervous about the Navajo, even though all the trouble with them seems to have been over for fifteen years. But for all we know, some of them may have long memories.”

“Could be,” Sam said. Caballo Rojo was old enough to have taken part in the Navajo wars back in the Sixties.

“Well, no standing in the way of progress, eh?” Reilly scraped his stool back. “Here comes Harvey with your food, and I have to get back to work. It was a pleasure to meet you, Sam.”

“Likewise,” Sam said with a nod.

Reilly reached down to the floor, picked up a black hat, and put it on. He placed some coins on the counter to pay for his meal and left the café as the counterman put a big bowl of chicken and dumplings in front of Sam.

“Want some coffee or a cup of buttermilk?”

“Coffee will be fine,” Sam said.

“Comin’ up,” the man replied. That seemed to be a habitual response with him.

Sam took a bite of the food while the counterman poured coffee in a cup for him.

“That is good,” he said. “Mr. Reilly told me it would be. He was right.”

The counterman chuckled.

“Ol’ Noah likes to talk, that’s for sure. Hope he didn’t bend your ear too much.”

“Not at all,” Sam said. “Everybody in town seems pretty friendly. I ran into a couple of cowboys just outside who talked to me, too.”

“Tall, skinny fella and a little redheaded gink?” When Sam nodded, the counterman went on, “Yeah, they’ve been hangin’ around town for a week or so. Don’t know where they get their money, but they seem pretty flush. Maybe they’ve been lucky at the tables over in Lady Augusta’s place.”

Sam’s interest had perked up at the counterman’s mention of how the two cowboys had been in Flat Rock only for a week or so. Of course, that timing didn’t have to mean a thing ...

But it was an indication that the two men had shown up in this area about the same time as he and Matt had been ambushed. The fact that they had money but didn’t seem to be working for it was intriguing, too.

But before Sam pursued that angle, he satisfied his curiosity on another matter.

“Lady Augusta?” he repeated.

“You haven’t heard of the Buckingham Palace Saloon?”

Sam shook his head.

“Woman came into town about a year ago,” the counterman explained. “Said her name was Lady Augusta Winslow. She let it be known that she was some sort of English nobility. I couldn’t say one way or the other about that. Whole thing could be just a crock of buffalo chips. But she talks like an Englisher, I’ll give her that. And she had enough money to start the Buckingham, which is what most folks around here call the place. Biggest and best saloon and poker parlor in Flat Rock, which means it’s the biggest and best in the whole Four Corners. You should check it out.”

“They let half-breeds in there?” Sam asked.

“Mister, they’d let a dang Rooshian cossack in if he had money to buy booze or gamble.”

“I just thought since Mr. Reilly said folks around here are still a little nervous about the Navajo ...”

“Well, that’s true,” Harvey said with a nod. “But you look as much like a white man as an Indian, so I don’t reckon you’d have any problems.” He rubbed his jaw and frowned in thought. “Except maybe with John Henry Boyd.”

“Who’s that?”

Before Harvey could answer, the teamster sitting next to Sam suddenly turned toward him and said, “By God, mister, are you gonna sit there flappin’ your gums all day? Your food’s gettin’ cold!”

“Take it easy, Jase,” the counterman said. “Nothin’ wrong with a little conversation.”

“There is when it’s gettin’ on my nerves!”

Sam said, “Take it easy, friend. No one meant to cause a problem here.”

The teamster muttered something under his breath, shoved his stool back, and stood up. He tossed a coin on the counter and stalked out of the café.

“Don’t mind him,” Harvey said as he scooped up the coin. “He’s like a surly old bull buffalo pawin’ the ground. He don’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sam said. “Now, you were sayin’ about this John Henry Boyd fella ...”

“He owns the Devil’s Pitchfork ranch, south of here,” the counterman explained. “Has a powerful hate for Indians of all kinds. I don’t know for sure why he feels that way, but I’ve heard it said that his whole family, except for him, was wiped out when Indians attacked the wagon train they were traveling with, twenty years or more ago.”

Sam nodded. It was an old, familiar story. There had been plenty of senseless bloodshed on both sides during the long clash between red men and white on the frontier, and it had left a lot of hatred behind it. He wished things could have been otherwise, but no one could change history.

“If you’re just passin’ through, though, you shouldn’t have to worry about John Henry,” the counterman went on. “He don’t come into town much. He’s almost always out at the ranch.” He lowered his voice. “Which, to hear some folks tell it, is as much of a way station for hombres on the dodge as it is a real ranch.”

That was interesting, too, Sam thought. If outlaws frequented Boyd’s ranch, that could have some connection to the attack on him and Matt.

“I’m obliged to you for telling me.”

Harvey grinned.

“Just lookin’ out for my customers. It ain’t like I’ve got all that many of ’em. Tell you what, Jase was right about one thing ... that food’s gettin’ cold.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Sam said. He dug into the chicken and dumplings.

As he ate, he mulled over everything he had learned so far, which on the surface didn’t amount to a blasted thing. He had some minor suspicions about the two garrulous cowboys he had met outside but nothing really to tie them to the bushwhackers, and what he had heard about the Devil’s Pitchfork Ranch was intriguing.

Other than that, nothing.

Or maybe not quite nothing, he corrected himself. He had learned that the Buckingham Palace was the biggest and most popular saloon in Flat Rock, so that meant most of the people around here would pass through its batwings at one time or another.

If the bushwhackers were still around and on the lookout for him, that would be a good place for them to spot him.

And he wanted them to spot him, no doubt about that. The odds of him being able to find the men he was looking for were slim, so it made more sense to let them find him. Maybe then he could figure out what it was all about.

That amounted to just about the same thing as painting a target on his back, Sam realized ... but this wouldn’t be the first time he had done that.

Usually, though, he had Matt with him. This time he was alone in a strange town that might be full of enemies, for all he knew.

Didn’t matter. When he got through here, he told himself as he ate the chicken and dumplings, it would be time to pay a visit to Buckingham Palace.

The one in Flat Rock, Arizona Territory, not London.

Chapter 14

When he had finished the food and downed the last of the coffee, Sam paid Harvey for the meal, said so long, and left the café.

He looked along the street and spotted the saloon a couple of blocks up. It was a two-story adobe building that actually had two floors, not one and a false front. A narrow balcony ran along the front of the second floor.

The entrance was at the near corner. The sign that read BUCKINGHAM PALACE SALOON—BEER—LIQUOR—GAMES OF CHANCE—ENTERTAINMENT was so long it took up the front of the building and ran down the side, too.

Before heading for the saloon, Sam looked around for a livery stable. He found one on a side street and turned his horse over to a friendly, middle-aged Mexican who introduced himself as Pablo Garralaga.

“This is a fine horse, señor,” the stableman said. “I will take good care of him.”

“I’m sure you will,” Sam said. “How much?”

“Fifty cents per night, señor. This includes feed and the finest care. And I will repair that damage to your saddle for free. I am skilled at such things.”

Sam handed him two silver dollars, grateful that Garralaga hadn’t asked how his saddle had gotten shot up.

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be in town, but that’ll get us started.”

“Gracias, señor.”

On the off chance that he might find out something else, Sam said, “Do you happen to know a couple of cowboys who’ve been in town about a week? One of them is tall and has a mustache, the other is shorter and has red hair.”

Garralaga rolled his eyes.

“Those two! The little one, he is not so bad, but the tall one, he never stops talking! Always with the questions, questions, questions! He makes me tired just to listen to him.”

“Then they’re keeping their horses here?”

“Sí, señor. Over there.” Garralaga pointed to a pair of stalls near the front of the barn.

Sam strolled over and looked at the horses in apparently idle curiosity. One was a buckskin, the other a wiry paint.

Actually, he was looking at the hoofprints they had left in the dust of their stalls, checking to see if either track was similar to the ones he had found out at the ambush site.

Neither hoofprint looked familiar, so to excuse his actions he just nodded and commented, “Nice-looking horses,” as he came back over to Garralaga.

“These hombres are friends of yours, señor?” the stableman asked.

“Not really. New acquaintances, I guess you’d say.”

Garralaga shrugged and nodded, looking as if he didn’t really understand but didn’t care, either. As long as his customers paid their bills, whatever else they did was none of his business, his expression seemed to say.

“Can you recommend a good place in town to stay?” Sam went on.

“The Territorial Hotel is the only one in Flat Rock, but ...” Garralaga hesitated.

“They might not want anybody with Indian blood staying there, is that it?” Sam guessed.

“I am sad to say that is true, señor. Myself, I don’t care. All men’s money spends the same.”

“I understand.”

“But there is a boardinghouse where you would be welcome, if there is room. A woman named Señora McCormick runs it. If you go there, tell her that Pablo at the livery stable sent you. Her late husband and I were amigos, before he passed away last year.”

Sam nodded.

“I’ll do that. I’m obliged, Señor Garralaga.”

The stableman smiled and waved a hand.

“De nada.”

He told Sam how to find the boardinghouse, and once again Sam postponed his trip to the saloon. He slung his saddlebags over his shoulder and walked toward the boardinghouse, carrying his Winchester.

Along the way he came to a general store, so he went inside to buy a new hat to replace the one that had been shot up the night before.

Bespectacled Noah Reilly smiled at him from behind the counter.

“Mr. Two Wolves!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you again this soon. What can I do for you?”

“I’m in the market for a new hat,” Sam explained.

“Right over here,” Reilly said, gesturing toward a set of shelves where a number of hats sat, gathering dust.

Sam found one that he liked. The new hat didn’t have silver conchos on the band like his old one, but other than that it was very similar. Sam figured he could switch the bands if he wanted to.

He paid Reilly for the hat and settled it on his head. It would be good to have something to shade his head from the sun again.

The boardinghouse was a frame building, one of the few in town. In this part of the country, nearly everything was built of adobe.

The gray-haired woman who answered Sam’s knock on the boardinghouse door asked, “Yes? Can I help you?” Her face wore a rather severe expression, but Sam thought her brown eyes looked kind.

Politely, he removed his new hat and said, “Señor Garralaga down at the livery stable recommended your place to me and said you might have a room for rent. That is, if you’re Mrs. McCormick.”

“I am,” the woman said. “Eloise McCormick.”

“My name is Sam Two Wolves.” He waited to see if that was going to make any difference.

Apparently it didn’t. Mrs. McCormick said, “I have a couple of vacant rooms. Would you like to take a look at them?”

“Ma’am, Señor Garralaga spoke so highly of you and your house, I’m sure that’s not necessary. I’ll take one of them.”

She smiled, and that made her look younger.

“Well, then, come on. I’ll show you the rooms anyway, and you can take your pick.”

Sam choose a front room that looked out at the street. He liked to be able to see what was going on. The room was simply furnished but looked clean and comfortable.

“What brings you to Flat Rock, if you don’t mind my asking?” Mrs. McCormick said. “Are you a scout for the army?”

“No, ma’am. You get many army scouts passing through here?”

“The cavalry sends out patrols from Fort Defiance every now and then. The Navajo behave themselves for the most part, but it doesn’t hurt to remind them of what happened back in ’63. My late husband was already out here then and served under Kit Carson.” Mrs. McCormick gave Sam a keen look. “You’re not a Navajo, are you, Mr. Two Wolves?”

“No. Half Cheyenne.” Sam wondered how many times he was going to have to answer that question.

“I see. Clean linens once a week,” she went on briskly, “breakfast is at six in the morning, supper at six in the evening. I serve Sunday dinner at one, but not the rest of the week.”

“Sounds fine to me,” Sam said with a nod.

“Your next-door neighbor is Mr. Reilly from the general store, and he likes peace and quiet, so I hope you’ll cooperate in that respect.”

Sam smiled.

“Noah Reilly?”

“Oh, you know him?”

“We’ve met,” Sam said.

“Well, good. You won’t feel as much like you’re in a strange place, then. How long do you think you’ll be staying?”

Until someone tries to kill me again and I can find out why, Sam thought.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “I’ll pay you for a week. Is that all right?”

“That’ll be fine.”

They concluded the arrangement, and Mrs. McCormick left the room. Sam put his saddlebags on the bed and leaned his rifle in the corner. He went to the window and pushed back the gauzy yellow curtain that hung over it.

The boardinghouse was on Flat Rock’s only street, and from here Sam could see part of the front of the Buckingham Palace Saloon.

A couple of benches were on the boardwalk in front of the saloon, and on one of them sat the two cowboys he had met earlier, evidently just watching the world go by.

The tall, skinny one had his knife out again and was using it to whittle something. The shorter one’s head drooped forward every now and then, as if he were having a hard time staying awake.

There was something about those two, Sam thought, something that bothered him.

Mrs. McCormick must have been elsewhere in the house, because he didn’t see her in the parlor or foyer as he left the house. The saloon was only a short distance away, and it was finally time he paid that visit to the place.

Sam had to walk right past the two cowboys to reach the batwinged door, and just as he expected, they grinned at him in recognition.

The tall one continued whittling without missing a beat as he asked, “How was the food at the café? Best you ever et, right?”

“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Sam said, “but it was good.”

“Wait’ll you taste ol’ Harve’s Irish stew. It’s even better.”

“Pie ain’t bad, either,” the shorter cowboy put in.

“Goin’ to have a drink?” the tall one asked.

“More like a look around,” Sam said. “I’m not much for drinking.”

“Oh, yeah, because of the Injun blood, I reckon. The firewater don’t agree with you.” The man folded his knife and put it away. He held up what he’d been working on. It was a little whistle. “What do you think?”

“Looks good,” Sam said. “Can you play it?”

“Not worth a lick,” the tall cowboy said with a grin. He tossed it to a boy passing by in the street and added, “Here you go, son. Enjoy yourself.”

The boy caught the whistle and said, “Gee, thanks, mister!”

He went on his way, tooting tunelessly on it.

The cowboy put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet in a loose-jointed fashion.

“Come on, Wilbur,” he said to his shorter companion. “We’ll join this here fella.”

Sam didn’t recall inviting them along, but that didn’t seem to matter. As the three of them walked toward the saloon’s entrance, the tall cowboy went on, “They call me Stovepipe Stewart.”

“On account of he’s so tall and skinny,” his redheaded friend put in.

“And this is my pard Wilbur Coleman,” Stovepipe completed the introductions.

There didn’t seem to be anything Sam could do but give them his name. “I’m Sam Two Wolves.”

“Pleased to meet you, Sam. I figure it’s sorta our duty to take you under our wing and show you around, you bein’ new in town and all and us bein’ old-timers.”

Sam almost said something about how he thought they had only been in Flat Rock for a week, but he caught himself in time. He didn’t want them knowing that he’d been asking questions about them.

Anyway, it didn’t matter, because redheaded Wilbur Coleman laughed and said, “Yeah, real old-timers, that’s us. We been in this burg all of a week.”

“That’s seven times as long as Sam here,” Stovepipe pointed out.

“I suppose if you want to look at it that way ...”

Sam pushed the batwings aside and stepped into the Buckingham Palace. He saw right away that it was an impressive place, with a long, mahogany bar on the right side of the room, cut-glass chandeliers that must have been freighted all the way up here from Phoenix, plenty of tables for drinking, and a large area of poker tables, roulette wheels, and faro layouts in the back of the room. There was a piano, too, but no one was playing it at the moment.

Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, the saloon was busy. Men stood at the bar, where a couple of drink jugglers waited on them. Several of the tables were occupied, too. Young women in short, low-cut, spangled dresses circulated among them, delivering drinks and smiles to the customers and ignoring hands that got a little too familiar.

A couple of poker games were going on, and men were trying their luck at faro and roulette, too. The only thing that was missing was a parade of saloon girls up and down the stairs to the second floor with men who wanted to buy their favors.

The tall cowboy was watching Sam keenly. He said, “The gals don’t do that sorta business durin’ the day, only at night. Lady Augusta says it ain’t proper to be beddin’ down for pay when the sun’s out.”

Sam gave Stovepipe a sharp glance.

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

“Well, you seemed to be takin’ it all in,” Stovepipe drawled. “I sorta figured you’d get to that point in your thinkin’ and wonder about it.”

“Stovepipe’s a demon for figurin’ things out,” Wilbur put in.

Sam looked around again.

“I’ve heard about this so-called Lady Augusta. Is she here?”

Wilbur bristled.

“So-called?” he repeated. “Are you doubtin’ the word of the finest lady ever to set foot in Arizona?”

“Not really,” Sam said. “But you have to admit, it is a little odd to think that a member of British nobility would wind up running a saloon in a backwater town in Arizona Territory.”

“There ain’t a thing in the world odd about it,” Wilbur insisted. “She just got tired of all that foofaraw over yonder in England, and who could blame her? Sittin’ around in musty ol’ castles on spindly-legged chairs and sippin’ tea with your dadburn pinky finger stickin’ out! Who in the Sam Hill would want to spend your days doin’ that?”

“Not me,” Stovepipe said with a wide grin.

“Not me, neither,” Wilbur said. “So don’t go sayin’ nothin’ bad about Lady Augusta, Sam. I won’t take kindly to it.”

Stovepipe leaned closer to Sam and said in a loud whisper, “He’s a mite smitten.”

Sam felt a little like he had wandered into a lunatic asylum. The thing to do in a situation like that, he told himself, was to play along. He said, “Sorry, Wilbur. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“That’s all right,” Wilbur said, still sounding a little huffy. “Just so’s you know.”

Stovepipe gestured toward the bar on the right-hand side of the room.

“Come on, Sam,” he said. “I’ll buy you a phosphate. We’ll steer clear of the hard stuff.”

“All right,” Sam said. He was accomplishing his purpose just by being here. If any of those bushwhackers were in the room, they were getting a good look at him.

And of course, there was still a chance the two men with him were part of the very bunch he was looking for.

When they got to the bar, Stovepipe ordered cherry phosphates for the three of them, even though Wilbur made a face at that. The tall, lanky cowboy leaned his left elbow on the hardwood and asked, “What brings you to this wide place in the trail, Sam?”

“Flat Rock seems like more than just a wide place in the trail. It seems like a real town.”

“Right now it is. I’ve seen ’em come and go, though. One of these days it’s liable to dry up and blow away like so many others have. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“A man’s business is usually his own,” Sam said.

“That’s Stovepipe for you,” Wilbur said. “Always pokin’ his big nose in where it ain’t wanted.”

“That ain’t it at all,” Stovepipe insisted. “I’m just naturally curious.” He looked at Sam again and raised his somewhat bushy eyebrows.

“I’m looking for some fellows,” Sam said. Maybe it was time to put a few of his cards on the table and see what he could shake out. “About a dozen men on horseback. They rode this way a few days ago.”

He didn’t say anything about finding the wagon tracks.

Stovepipe sipped his phosphate and got some of the bubbles from the fizzy drink on his mustache. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and said, “These hombres you’re lookin’ for are friends of yours?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then they’re enemies?”

“Didn’t say that, either.”

“Aw, leave the fella alone, Stovepipe,” Wilbur said.

“I’m just tryin’ to help,” the tall cowboy said. “Maybe I know those fellas Sam’s lookin’ for. What’re their names?”

Sam just smiled and didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know the names of his quarry or even what they looked like. If Stovepipe and Wilbur were members of the gang, he wanted them to worry about him enough to be prodded into taking action.

Stovepipe looked like he wanted to press the issue, but just then a commotion erupted outside in the street. Hoofbeats thundered and men yelled. Everybody in the saloon swung around to look out the big plate-glass windows.

“What in blazes is all that?” Sam asked.

Stovepipe’s craggy face had taken on a grim cast.

“Sounds like that bunch from the Devil’s Pitchfork has come to town,” he said. “And I reckon they’re just about ready to raise hell and shove a chunk under the corner.”

Chapter 15

The uproar made nearly everybody in the saloon turn toward the windows. The only ones who ignored it were the men at the poker tables who were intent on their cards.

A moment later, a man slapped the batwings aside and stalked into the Buckingham, followed by half a dozen more men. They were all rugged-looking, hard-bitten hombres in range clothes, Sam noted. A holstered revolver hung at the hip of each man.

Stovepipe Stewart leaned closer to Sam and said, “Yep, that’s the Devil’s Pitchfork bunch, some of ’em, anyway. John Henry Boyd’s gun crew. Fella in the lead is Pete Lowry. Tough hombre. All of ’em are.”

Sam had gotten that impression. Pete Lowry was a broad-shouldered man with a jutting shelf of a jaw that gave him a pugnacious appearance.

Lowry strode to the bar and thumped a fist on the hardwood to get the attention of one of the bartenders. It was really a wasted gesture, because nearly every eye in the place was on the newcomers already, and both bartenders were there to fill their orders.

“Whiskey for me and the boys!” Lowry snapped. “The good stuff, too, not that homemade swill.”

“All we have is good stuff, Mr. Lowry,” the nearest bartender said. “Lady Augusta don’t go in for that panther piss.”

Lowry’s hand shot across the bar and grabbed the bartender’s shirtfront. He jerked the man forward and roared, “Are you arguin’ with me?”

Sam stiffened. He didn’t like to see anyone being manhandled like that.

Stovepipe must have noticed the reaction, because he put a hand lightly on Sam’s arm and said, “Hold your horses, son. You don’t want to get on Lowry’s bad side. He’s not somebody you need for an enemy.”

Sam forced himself to relax. Stovepipe was right. Anyway, it was none of his business what Lowry did, Sam told himself.

The bartender said, “No, sir, I’m not arguin’ at all. I’ll get you that whiskey, the finest we got, right away.”

Lowry let go of him and nodded curtly.

“That’s more like it. Pour it up, apron. After what happened last night, we need those drinks.”

Sam wondered what had happened the night before. He didn’t have to think about it for long, because as soon as Pete Lowry had knocked back the slug of whiskey the bartender put in front of him, he turned around and addressed the room in a loud voice.

“A bunch of damned savages raided the ranch last night,” he said. “Killed two punchers and took off with fifty head of cattle. By God, there’s gonna be a whole new Navajo war here in the Four Corners!”

Lowry’s words shook Sam, although he managed not to show it. He had a hard time believing that Caballo Rojo or any of his people would have attacked the Devil’s Pitchfork ranch. Even the proddy Juan Pablo just wanted to be left alone. None of them would go out of their way to draw attention to themselves by raiding a ranch and killing white cowboys. Sam would have staked his life on it.

Lowry seemed convinced of what he was saying, though. Several of the other ranch hands joined in, loudly and profanely insisting that the Navajo had gone on the warpath.

As Sam listened to Lowry and the other cowboys rant, he thought about what Noah Reilly had said earlier about people in this area still being nervous about the Navajo. This was going to make them even more so.

“A new Injun war,” Stovepipe Stewart mused. “What do you think about that, Sam?”

“I think it’s loco,” Sam answered honestly and without hesitation. “If there are any Navajo still out there looking for trouble, there aren’t enough of them to fight a war. I don’t think they’d be foolish enough to risk that by raiding a ranch and killing some punchers.”

He spoke a little too loudly. A man who stood not too far away at the bar overheard him and called, “Hey, Pete! This fella says you’re lyin’. And from the looks of him, he might be a redskin, too!”

“Uh-oh,” Wilbur said. “This ain’t good.”

Lowry swung around with a belligerent glare on his face.

“Who called me a liar?” he demanded. His angry gaze landed on Sam. “I’ll bet it was you!”

Sam didn’t see any point in lying, and it went against his nature anyway. He said, “I never claimed you were lying. I just said I thought it was unlikely any Navajo would be foolish enough to attack your ranch.”

Lowry stomped toward him.

“Then how do you explain those missin’ cows and two of my friends bein’ dead?”

“I’m sorry about your friends,” Sam said. “But maybe the cattle were stolen by rustlers.”

“On unshod ponies? And those two fellas had arrows stuck in ’em! Navajo arrows!”

“Anyone can ride unshod ponies,” Sam said. “And white men can use bows and arrows, too. It wouldn’t be the first time whites have tried to blame the trouble they caused on Indians.”

Lowry stopped in front of Sam, looked him up and down, and sneered.

“You don’t talk like a redskin, but you sure look like one,” he said. “Half-breed, ain’t you?”

“I’m half Cheyenne,” Sam said for what seemed like the dozenth time since he’d ridden into Flat Rock.

“No wonder you’re defendin’ those filthy savages. You’re just like ’em.”

“The Cheyenne and the Navajo have never been allies,” Sam pointed out. “They’re from totally different parts of the country. Anyway, the Navajo fought more wars against other tribes, like the Pueblo, than they ever did against the whites.”

“A redskin’s a redskin, and I got no use for any of ’em,” Lowry snapped. “And I sure as hell got no use for a smart-mouthed one like you, mister!”

He launched a fist at Sam’s head.

Chapter 16

Sam was expecting that. He’d had a hunch that Lowry was working himself up to a fight.

As the man lurched forward and swung, Sam ducked his head and bent at the waist. The punch sailed wide past his ear.

Thrown off balance by the missed blow, Lowry stumbled against Sam, who hooked a hard right into his belly. The breath went out of Lowry’s body with a whoof!

Lowry’s companions from the Devil’s Pitchfork yelled and surged toward Sam. As Lowry doubled over from the pain of the blow, Sam grabbed his shoulders and shoved him into the path of the charging cowboys. A couple of them ran into him and knocked him off his feet. Tripping over Lowry, the men went sprawling. More of the cowboys got tangled up and fell.

That gave Sam time to slip his Colt from its holster and say, “Just hold on, blast it! There’s no need for—”

“Watch it, Sam!” Stovepipe warned.

Men were crowded around Sam. Someone in the bunch lashed out and drove the side of his hand against Sam’s wrist.

Paralyzing pain shot up his arm. His fingers opened involuntarily, and the revolver slipped out of his hand and thudded to the sawdust-littered floor.

Another man caught hold of Sam’s shoulder and jerked him around. He heard a shout of “Let’s teach the redskin a lesson!” and then a fist seemed to explode in his face before he could get out of its way. The impact sent Sam stumbling backward.

He knew if he went down, there was a good chance these men would stomp and kick him to death. Because of that he fought desperately to keep his balance, but he felt it deserting him and knew he was about to fall.

At that moment, strong hands caught him from behind and kept him on his feet. Sam glanced around and saw it was Stovepipe Stewart who had caught him.

“Much obliged!” Sam gasped.

“Don’t be thankin’ me yet,” Stovepipe warned. “Here they come!”

It was true. Not only were the Devil’s Pitchfork hands closing in around Sam, several of the men who’d been in the saloon to start with had joined the fight, too, and all of them wanted his blood.

Sam put his back against the bar, hoping that the bartenders would remain neutral as they usually did when a brawl broke out. Stovepipe was on his right, Wilbur on his left, and both of the cowboys had their fists clenched and ready.

Sam wiped the back of his left hand across his mouth. That left a streak of blood on it from a bleeding lip.

“Are you two sure you want to take cards in this game?” he asked.

“You bet,” Wilbur said. “We don’t cotton to such bad odds.”

“So we’ll make ’em a little better,” Stovepipe added.

“All right,” Sam said.

That was all he had time to get out of his mouth before angry shouts filled the saloon and fists started flying.

Sam stood there with his back against the hardwood, slamming punches back and forth and trying to block the blows aimed at him. Quite a few of them got through despite his best efforts and rocked him. He stayed upright, though, and continued battling.

On either side of him, Stovepipe and Wilbur were doing the same. Stovepipe’s big, knobby fists on the ends of gangling arms snapped out with surprising speed and force and sent more than one man flying off his feet.

Wilbur’s style was different. With his stocky frame, he was more of a grappler. He got hold of two men, knocked their heads together, and then used their limp forms to trip up several more men.

With a bellow like a wounded buffalo bull, Pete Lowry plowed through the melee, knocking men aside in his attempt to reach Sam. Sam saw him coming and was able to get his feet set. He met Lowry’s charge with a straight, hard left and followed it instantly with a right cross.

Unfortunately, neither blow seemed to have much effect on Lowry. That prominent jaw of his might as well have been made of iron.

Sam had a hunch the big man’s weak spot was his gut and tried to land a punch there, but Lowry was already too close. He rammed into Sam and bent him backward over the bar.

Sam gasped as pain shot through him. Lowry began to hammer punches into his ribs.

Sam brought his cupped hands up and slapped them over Lowry’s ears. That made Lowry jerk back and gave Sam room to lift a knee into the man’s groin. Lowry didn’t shrug that off. With a keening cry of pain, he doubled over again.

At least nobody else had pulled a gun yet, Sam thought. That was the only good thing about this ruckus. As long as the men were just whaling away at each other, someone might get killed, but it was less likely than if guns were involved.

Even with Lowry incapacitated for the moment, there were plenty of other angry men to take his place. They crowded around Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur, and their numbers actually worked against them because they kept getting in each other’s way as they tried to throw punches.

Eventually, though, they would overwhelm the three men who stood together at the bar. Sam knew that, and he didn’t know if he could count on any more help. It was unexpected enough that Stovepipe and Wilbur had pitched in to aid him.

Either they weren’t members of the gang that had bushwhacked him and Matt, Sam thought as he blocked a punch and landed a haymaker on a man’s jaw ... or else they were playing a very deep game.

There was no time right now to ponder that, no time to do anything except keep on fighting and postpone their ultimate defeat as long as possible ...

The roar of a shotgun blast seemed to shake the entire room.

It was loud enough to assault the ears and make every man in the place stop what he was doing. A shocked silence fell as the echoes of the blast faded.

Into that silence came the sharp, angry voice of a woman.

“What in blazes is going on here?”

Sam lifted his eyes to the stairs and saw her standing there, her auburn hair pulled back away from her lovely face, the dark blue gown she wore hugging the splendid curves of her body. Smoke curled from one barrel of the double-barreled Greener in her hands, telling Sam that she still had a load of buckshot in the weapon, ready to cut loose again.

Even without the faint British accent to her words, Sam would have known from her regal bearing that he was looking at Lady Augusta Winslow, the owner of the Buckingham Palace Saloon.

Chapter 17

Lady Augusta eased back the shotgun’s other hammer. The sound was loud in the now eerily quiet saloon.

“I asked what’s going on here,” she said.

One of the bartenders spoke up.

“It was this Indian, ma’am,” he said as he pointed to Sam. “He started it!”

“That ain’t true,” Stovepipe said. “Pete Lowry threw the first punch.”

That accusation brought howls of protest from a dozen throats as the Devil’s Pitchfork hands who were still conscious and on their feet loudly denied that Lowry had started the fight. Some of the other men in the saloon backed up their claim.

A jerk of the shotgun’s barrels made the men shut up. Lady Augusta looked at Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur and said, “You there. You three seem to be at the center of this maelstrom. Come up here, now.”

“Hear that, Wilbur?” Stovepipe asked with a quick grin. “You get to go upstairs and meet Lady Augusta.”

“Pipe down,” Wilbur snapped. A deep red flush spread over his freckled face. When Sam saw it, he realized that Wilbur had been worshipping Lady Augusta from afar. Evidently he had never actually met her.

“Make a path for them,” Lady Augusta ordered. No one in his right mind wanted to argue with a shotgun. There was plenty of angry muttering going on, but the men moved back to make way for Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur.

Sam spotted his Colt lying on the floor underneath the brass rail at the bottom of the bar, where someone had kicked it during the fracas. He reached down, picked it up, and slid it back into his holster, then joined Stovepipe and Wilbur as they crossed the room toward the stairs.

When they reached the bottom of the staircase, Sam was uncomfortably aware that the shotgun was pointing more at him and his companions than it was at the rest of the men in the saloon. He didn’t like climbing toward the menacing double maw of the barrels, but that seemed to be the most likely way he and his companions could get out of here with their hides relatively intact.

Lady Augusta drew back a couple of steps as they reached the second-floor landing. She still covered them with the Greener.

As she glanced toward the men down below in the saloon’s main room, she said in a clear, commanding voice, “I want everything cleaned up and put back in its place down there. Every man who pitches in to help gets a free drink.”

That sent men scrambling to pick up knocked-over chairs and right overturned tables. Even some of the men who had been in the middle of the fight were more interested now in earning that free drink.

Not Pete Lowry, though. He jabbed a finger at Sam and said, “Don’t you believe a word that filthy redskin tells you, ma’am. He says he’s half Cheyenne, but he could be lyin’. He could be one of those mur-derin’ Navajo himself, come into town to spy on us!”

“That’s insane,” Sam said.

“Just hush,” Lady Augusta said coldly. “Move down there to that open door. That’s my suite.”

Stovepipe looked at Wilbur again, who gave his lanky friend a warning glare. Stovepipe didn’t say anything.

With the shotgun trained on the backs of the three men, Lady Augusta followed them along the corridor to her suite.

Downstairs, Zack Jardine slumped in a chair at one of the tables that had been set back on its legs and glared at Angus Braverman and Doyle Hilliard.

“Was that him?” Jardine asked.

Braverman nodded.

“Yeah. I got a good look at him that day, Zack. There ain’t no doubt.”

“He didn’t look like he was hurt a bit, the way he was brawling. What about those two men who sided him? Was one of them with him that day?”

Braverman shook his head in answer to this question.

“No, both of those hombres are older than the fella who was with the half-breed. I don’t know what happened to him. He was hit, so likely he died, and now the ’breed’s lookin’ to settle the score for him.”

“One of us should have shot him,” Jardine said, keeping his voice low. “That idiot Lowry and his friends would’ve gotten the blame if that happened.”

“I never got a clear shot at him, Zack, or I might’ve,” Hilliard said. “Those boys from the Devil’s Pitchfork were crowdin’ around him too much.”

Jardine grunted. Boyd, Lowry, and the other two-bit desperadoes from the Devil’s Pitchfork thought they were tough hombres. The people of Flat Rock believed that, too.

They had no idea who the really dangerous men among them were.

“At least we know the rest of the boys did their job and ran off those cattle,” Jardine commented quietly. He had split his forces the previous day, keeping half of his men here in Flat Rock and sending the other half to rustle some cows off the spread south of the settlement.

Jardine had told those men before they left that if they got a chance to ventilate some of the Devil’s Pitchfork hands, not to hesitate. Dead cowboys and rustled cattle would go a long way toward stirring up the whites in the area against the Navajo.

Once those rifles he had hidden here in town were in the hands of the Indians, a shooting war would be inevitable. The hotheads among the Navajo would see to that, and they would find the settlers more than willing to fight.

Then the army would come in to clean out the hostiles, the government would take back the reservation land it had granted to the savages, and Jardine and his partner would be ready to take full advantage of that.

Deeds had already been drawn up, just waiting for the proper developments in Washington. Once they were signed, millions of acres would belong to Zack Jardine ... the King of the Four Corners.

It had a nice ring to it.

Of course, most of those acres were flat, empty, and useless ... but they surrounded areas where cattle could be run, and precious waterholes, and mines producing small but still lucrative quantities of gold, silver, and copper.

Besides, there was talk of running a rail line through here, and if that happened, the so-called worthless land would be worth even more. No land where the railroad wanted to go was truly worthless.

“At least we know the half-breed’s here now,” Braverman said, breaking into Jardine’s grandiose thoughts. “We don’t have to watch the trail for him anymore.”

“It would be better if Joe and Three-Finger had done like they were supposed to,” Jardine snapped. “We could have set a trap that would’ve made sure the meddling bastard was dead by now.”

“We can still kill him,” Hilliard suggested. “He’s upstairs right now.”

“With that Englishwoman,” Jardine pointed out. “Lady Augusta’s the belle of this whole region. We don’t want anything to happen to her.”

That brought another idea to Jardine’s brain, one that had crossed his mind on previous occasions. In an area where most of the women were either washed-out whores or Navajo squaws, Lady Augusta Winslow was a shining light of femininity.

If he was going to be the King of the Four Corners, Jardine mused, maybe he could interest Lady Augusta in being his queen ...

With a little shake of his head, he put aside that appealing thought and told Braverman and Hilliard, “Keep an eye on the ’breed, but don’t let him know you’re watching him. If you get a chance ... get rid of him.”

“What about those two cowboys?” Braverman asked.

Jardine shrugged.

“I don’t have anything against them. But if they’re in the way ... well, the buzzards would be even happier with three bodies than they would with one, wouldn’t they?”

Chapter 18

When Sam stepped through the door of the suite, he wasn’t surprised to see that the sitting room was elegantly and sumptuously furnished, from the rug on the floor to the paintings on the walls to the ornate lamp on a gleaming table.

He had seen enough downstairs to know that the lady liked fine things.

“Sit down,” she ordered as she came into the room behind them. “That divan will do.”

Stovepipe took off his hat and said, “Ma’am, not to be argumentative, but that’s a mighty nice piece of furniture to have three galoots like us sittin’ on it. We’re liable to get it a mite dirty.”

“Never mind that,” Lady Augusta snapped. “Sit.”

The three men sat.

She lowered the shotgun as she faced them, but the weapon was still pointed in their general direction. She wouldn’t have to raise it much in order to spray them with buckshot if she pulled the trigger on the loaded barrel. Shotguns were heavy enough that some women had trouble handling them, Sam thought, but not this supposedly genteel Englishwoman.

“Now tell me what happened down there,” Lady Augusta ordered. She nodded at Sam. “You.”

“Pete Lowry and some riders from the Devil’s Pitchfork came in and started talking about how the Navajo raided their ranch last night, ran off some cattle, and killed a couple of hands.” Sam inclined his head toward Stovepipe and continued, “I commented to my friend here how that seemed unlikely to me. Someone overheard me and told Lowry that I called him a liar.”

Lady Augusta nodded.

“I can see how that would spark a confrontation. I’ve seen these other two around, sir, but not you. Who are you?”

“My name is Sam Two Wolves, ma’am. And before you ask, I really am half Cheyenne. No Navajo blood, despite what Lowry said down there.”

“Yes, I didn’t think you looked much like any of the Navajo I’ve ever seen, and there are plenty of them around here. This is supposedly their land, after all.” She turned her attention to Stovepipe and Wilbur. “What about you two? Who are you, and what’s your connection with all this?”

Stovepipe still had his black Stetson in his hand, and when he nudged Wilbur in the ribs with an elbow, Wilbur snatched his battered old hat off his head, too.

“They call me Stovepipe Stewart, ma’am,” the tall, skinny cowboy said. “This here’s my pard, Wilbur Coleman.”

Wilbur opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a nervous squeak.

“You got to pardon ol’ Wilbur,” Stovepipe went on. “He ain’t much for talkin’, especially around beauti-some ladies.”

Lady Augusta didn’t smile, but Sam thought he saw a twinkle of amusement in her eyes for a second.

“Go on,” she said solemnly. “Why were you involved in that fight?”

“Because we were sidin’ Sam here,” Stovepipe explained. “Didn’t seem fair to us that so many fellas would jump one lone hombre and give him a thrashin’ ... especially when he was just tellin’ the truth.”

“Then you were sticking up for the underdog.”

Stovepipe nodded.

“Yes’m, you could say that.”

For a moment, Lady Augusta regarded them gravely, then nodded and turned to place the shotgun on a side table.

The sight of the Greener lying there on what was obviously an expensive piece of furniture was a little odd, Sam thought, a good example of the stark contrasts to be found in many frontier towns on the edge of civilization.

“I can respect such behavior,” Lady Augusta said, “although my tolerance is strained when it results in damage to my saloon. You gentlemen are forgiven for your part in the hostilities.” She crossed her arms over her bosom. “Now ... what about the Indians? You don’t believe there’s any truth to what Pete Lowry said, Mr. Two Wolves?”

“I don’t know for sure because I wasn’t there,” Sam admitted, “but it seems pretty unlikely to me that people who have been mostly at peace with the white men for more than fifteen years would risk starting a war again.”

“But what if they’re starving? What if they had to have those cattle in order to feed their families?”

She had a point there, Sam thought. Fifty cattle would feed Caballo Rojo’s people for quite a while.

But that isolated canyon where the Navajo lived was two days’ ride from here, and Sam hadn’t heard Caballo Rojo, Juan Pablo, or any of the other warriors talking about raiding a ranch in the near future, or any other time, for that matter.

It hadn’t appeared to Sam that the band was running short on food, either. Everyone seemed reasonably well-fed. Between the sheep they raised, the crops they grew, and the deer that roamed the area, none of the Navajo should have gone hungry.

They wouldn’t have risked everything by attacking the Devil’s Pitchfork. Sam was sure of it.

“I just don’t see it happening that way,” he told Lady Augusta. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

“What other explanation is there?” she asked. “Or do you believe the incident never occurred?”

Stovepipe said, “You mean maybe Lowry and his boss made the whole thing up? Why would they do that?”

She smiled at him.

“You tell me, Mr. Stewart.”

Stovepipe shook his head and said, “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t. This whole business don’t make heads nor tails to me.”

“Well, it’s really none of my affair. I was just curious what nearly got my saloon busted all to pieces, as you ruffians might say.” She went to the door and opened it. “There’s a door at the end of the hall that leads to the rear stairs. I suggest the three of you depart that way, rather than going through the main room downstairs. In fact, I insist upon it. Mr. Lowry and his friends may still be down there, and I don’t want a repeat of what happened earlier.”

“Neither do we, ma’am,” Sam assured her as he got to his feet. Stovepipe and Wilbur followed suit.

“It was an honor and a privilege to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” Stovepipe said. Beside him, Wilbur gulped, opened his mouth to say something, gulped again, and made a few incoherent noises. Stovepipe nodded toward his friend and added, “Wilbur says likewise, Your Ladyship.”

“You’re all welcome in the Buckingham Palace Saloon,” she told them, “but not until the boys from the Devil’s Pitchfork are gone. Agreed?”

Sam nodded and said, “That’s fine with me. One run-in with Pete Lowry is plenty.”

They stepped out into the corridor. As they did, Wilbur seemed to gather his courage. He turned around and said, “It sure was a pleasure to—”

Unfortunately, Lady Augusta had already closed the door behind them, so she couldn’t hear him. Wilbur stopped and looked crestfallen.

Stovepipe clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, “Come along, old hoss. Maybe you’ll have another chance to talk to the lady some other time.”

“Yeah, well, I could’ve talked to her now if you two blabbermouths would ever let a man get a word in edgewise,” Wilbur muttered.

Sam chuckled. He hadn’t ruled out the possibility that these two had some sinister motive in befriending him, but it was becoming more and more difficult to remain suspicious of them.

They took the rear stairs and went out a door that led into the alley behind the saloon.

“Where are you headed now, Sam?” Stovepipe asked.

Sam looked at the sky. The afternoon was getting to be well advanced.

“I thought I’d go check on my horse at the livery stable, then head for the boardinghouse where I’m staying. The lady who runs the place told me that supper was at six o’clock, and I’ve got a hunch she wouldn’t look kindly on any of her boarders who were late.”

“You gonna be in town for a while?”

“I don’t know yet,” Sam answered honestly. “Probably.”

“Then I reckon we’ll be runnin’ into you again. And if you get into any more trouble, let out a holler. Wilbur and me are liable to be around somewhere close by. Flat Rock ain’t all that big of a place, after all.”

“I’ll remember that,” Sam promised. He lifted a hand in farewell as the two cowboys ambled off along the alley.

He wondered if Stovepipe’s comments meant that the two of them planned to keep an eye on him ... and if they did, why?

Pablo Garralaga at the livery stable wanted to know if Sam had found Mrs. McCormick’s boardinghouse. Sam said that he had and thanked the liveryman for directing him there.

“Looks like a comfortable place,” he said. “And as it turns out, the fella who has the room next to me is a man I met at the café earlier.”

“And who would that be?” Garralaga asked.

“Noah Reilly.”

Garralaga smiled.

“The little hombre from the general store?”

“You know him?”

“I buy goods there. And he comes by here every so often to rent a saddle horse from me.”

Sam said, “He didn’t strike me as the sort of fella to go riding around the countryside.”

Garralaga shook his head.

“No, no, he tries to ride, but the poor little mucha-cho always comes back in such pain. He told me once that he used to live somewhere back East, and he came out here to Arizona for his health. He thinks that he should learn to ride so he will fit in better. I try to show him how to sit so he won’t be so sore from the saddle, but it’s no use. Some people should never get on a horse.”

Sam supposed that was true, even though he had spent so much of his life on horseback it was hard to imagine that there were people who just couldn’t ride.

He looked in on his own horse, said so long to Garralaga, and then strolled toward the boardinghouse. Along the way he mulled over everything that had happened since he rode into Flat Rock. He had met some people, gotten into a brawl, and had a beautiful Englishwoman who just might be nobility point a shotgun at him. It had been an eventful afternoon, but not a particularly productive one. He didn’t feel like he was any closer to finding the bushwhackers than he had been before he arrived in town.

But they were still here somewhere, his instincts told him. It was just a matter of drawing them into the open and figuring out why they had tried to kill him and Matt. Once he had done that, he could decide on his next move.

At least he didn’t have to worry too much about Matt right now, he told himself. That was one thing to be thankful for, anyway.

Chapter 19

Juan Pablo hadn’t returned to the canyon by the next morning, and Matt wasn’t sure what that meant. He hoped Sam and the Navajo hadn’t run into trouble, such as another ambush attempt.

Elizabeth Fleming wasn’t in the hogan when Matt woke up. He didn’t see any point in asking the older woman about her, so he just kept quiet, ate the bowl of stew she gave him for breakfast, and sat motionless while she changed the poultices on his wounds.

He felt stronger now, and as a result he was even more restless than before. That afternoon it grew so warm and stuffy inside the hogan that Matt felt like he couldn’t get a breath of air.

Finally he got to his feet, went to the door of the hogan, and stepped out into the sunlight.

This was the first time he had felt the sun in a long time. A week, maybe? Matt wasn’t sure. Because of his injury, he had lost track of time. All he knew was that although the light was blinding to his eyes, the warmth of the sun on his skin felt wonderful and was very welcome.

He drew in a deep breath. As in any Indian encampment, the air was filled with the smells of smoke, grease, and human waste. Even that didn’t bother Matt right now. He had been in plenty of so-called “civilized” places that smelled worse.

“Matt,” a voice said behind him.

He turned and saw Elizabeth standing there. From the looks of it, she had been on her way around the hogan when she saw him and stopped short in surprise.

After a moment she took a step toward him and lifted a hand as if she intended to reach out and touch his bare chest. Other than the bandages wrapped around his midsection to hold the poultices in place, he was naked from the waist up.

Plenty of people were around, including Juan Pablo’s wife, who had followed Matt out of the hogan. Feeling their eyes on him, he backed away from Elizabeth, then turned and pushed past the older women to go back inside.

His jaw was clenched in anger, most of it directed at himself. He had never in his life been one to run from trouble, and here he was retreating.

Not only that, as he turned away he had caught a glimpse of the hurt that flared in Elizabeth’s eyes. That ate at him as well, and he seethed inside with resentment for the unaccustomed awkwardness that had put the both of them in this position.

That was a long day and an even longer night. Matt was restless and had trouble sleeping. The bullet holes still ached at times and itched at others, and he couldn’t help but wonder how Elizabeth was doing tonight.

Juan Pablo was bound to be back tomorrow with news of Sam, Matt told himself.

But Juan Pablo didn’t return the next day, which increased Matt’s worries about his blood brother. More and more he wondered if Sam and Juan Pablo had been ambushed. The thought that Sam might be lying out there somewhere on the plains, wounded or even dead, gnawed at Matt’s guts.

His boredom at doing nothing but sitting around increased, too. His wounds had closed up and were healing. Some of his strength had come back, and while he knew he wasn’t in shape yet to do a lot of hard riding or fighting, he felt too good to waste his days in inactivity.

Through sign language, he managed to tell Juan Pablo’s wife that he wanted a shirt to replace his blood-soaked, bullet-torn one. She gave him a shirt made of soft, red-dyed wool that he slipped over his head.

“I’m going to take a walk,” he told her. When she stared at him uncomprehendingly, he pointed to himself and then made walking motions with his fingers. The woman shook her head, but Matt ignored her and stepped out of the hogan.

He hoped he wouldn’t run into Elizabeth this time. He needed to get a little exercise. That would just make him stronger, he thought.

As he strolled along the creek and passed some of the other hogans, he was aware that he was being given a lot of curious looks. Several children ignored the sheep they were supposed to be watching and started following him. They tagged along with him until their mothers angrily called them back. Some of the men watched him warily.

Even though Caballo Rojo had guaranteed his safety, having a white man around had to go against the grain for these people who had been rounded up, forced to walk hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo, and kept there in captivity for years before they were allowed to return to their homeland.

Matt made sure he didn’t do anything that could be mistaken for belligerence. He gave everyone friendly nods and smiles.

As he approached Caballo Rojo’s hogan, he spotted the clan leader striding toward him. Caballo Rojo seemed to be bound on a specific errand, and Matt wondered if someone had gone to him and told him that the white man was wandering around the canyon.

Caballo Rojo stopped in front of him and rumbled, “Rest. Get stronger.”

“I’m already getting stronger, Chief,” Matt said. “I need to move around now. I need to do something.”

Caballo Rojo shook his head.

“Rest.”

“I will. I give you my word. I’m just taking a stroll.”

Caballo Rojo looked like he didn’t approve of the idea, but he didn’t try to force Matt back to Juan Pablo’s hogan. He stood there scowling as Matt walked over to the creek and continued following it.

He would walk a little farther and then come back, he figured. After being shut up in that hogan for so long, the warmth of the sun and the interplay of light and shadow through the branches of the cottonwoods along the stream were very welcome.

Matt hadn’t gone very far when a bend of the creek and the thickening of the trees partially obscured the hogans. He was about to turn around and go back when he heard voices up ahead.

The voices belonged to women, and instantly the possibility that they might be bathing occurred to him. Matt was too much of a gentleman to spy on any female in a situation like that, so he swung around to head away from the spot.

Then he heard a laugh that he recognized as Elizabeth Fleming’s, and that stopped him in his tracks.

“Don’t be a damn fool, Matt Bodine,” he told himself out loud. “You better just get away from here right now.”

He would have, too, but just then the voices got louder. With a crackling of brush, the women pushed into view behind him. His head was turned just enough for him to catch the motion from the corner of his eye. He heard a surprised gasp, and Elizabeth said, “Matt?”

He couldn’t stop himself from looking around. When he did, he saw the redheaded woman standing there with three young Navajo women.

Their hair was wet, and their colorful blouses and skirts clung to their damp bodies. They had been bathing, all right, and Matt was glad he hadn’t stumbled onto that scene. At least they were clothed now.

“Sorry,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be movin’ on now.”

He turned to leave, but Elizabeth hurried to catch up with him.

“You’re feeling better?” she asked.

Matt nodded.

“Yeah, I’m stronger now. Those bullet holes are healing. I felt like I needed to get out and move around some. But I’m going back to Juan Pablo’s hogan now.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

Matt didn’t think that was a very good idea, but he wasn’t really strong enough to run away from her, so there was nothing he could do.

Besides, that would have been rude. He didn’t want to cause trouble, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings any more than he already had, either.

The other young women followed behind them, talking in quiet but animated voices. Matt figured they were gossiping about him and the white teacher from back East.

That was all he needed, he thought. In some ways these Navajo were like anybody else. They liked a good juicy scandal.

Matt tried to walk a little faster as they approached the hogans. When he did, the pounding heartbeat and slight shortness of breath he felt told him he had pushed his recuperating body just about as far as it wanted to be pushed right now. He slowed.

“When Juan Pablo comes back, I may have to go.”

Elizabeth looked saddened by that prospect.

“You’re going to leave?”

“I need to find Sam.” Matt had thought it might take a week for him to be strong enough to ride out on Sam’s trail, but now he believed he might be able to do that sooner. Another two or three days ought to see him in good enough shape to leave.

And that would sure simplify matters with Elizabeth, too. Best he put some distance between him and her, Matt told himself, so she could go back to her teaching and not be distracted by him.

If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he didn’t want to be distracted by her, either. Not as long as Sam was gone and the mystery of who had bushwhacked them and why still went unanswered.

Those thoughts wheeled through Matt’s mind, and he wished they would go away. Getting caught in a gunfight was easier, in a way, than trying to navigate human emotions and figure out what was the best thing to do.

Elizabeth didn’t make it any easier by saying, “I wish you’d stay longer.” She sounded determined to make that happen, one way or the other.

Matt didn’t waste his breath arguing with her. They had gotten back to Juan Pablo’s hogan, so he told Elizabeth, “I’ll see you later.” She looked like she was going to argue, so he went on, “I’m tired. I need to rest.”

She nodded, although he could tell she was reluctant to do so. He ducked through the entrance before she could say anything else.

The older woman gave him a stern look when he came in, as if she were scolding him. He ignored her and sat down on the blankets, and as he did, he realized just how weary he really was. He stretched out on the soft, thick pile of blankets. It felt good, and before he knew it he had closed his eyes and dozed off.

Matt didn’t know how long he had slept before he woke up to the sound of angry voices outside the hogan. Some sort of squabble was going on.

He probably would have ignored it, but then he recognized one of the voices as Elizabeth’s. He rolled over and pushed himself to his feet. Ignoring the exclamations from Juan Pablo’s wife, he stepped out into the late afternoon.

Elizabeth was there, all right. She looked angry and more than a little frightened as she tried to pull away from a man who had his hand clamped around her arm. He was holding her so tightly it had to hurt, Matt thought. Without pausing to ponder what he should do, he said, “Hey! Let go of her, mister!”

The Navajo released Elizabeth’s arm, but as he did, he turned toward Matt. His hand dipped instead to the knife tucked behind the red sash at his waist. With a whisper of steel, the blade came out. The warrior lunged at Matt and lifted the knife to strike.

Chapter 20

Instinct took over. Matt’s left arm came up to block the thrust of the blade.

At the same time his right fist shot out and smashed into the warrior’s face. He twisted at the waist as he launched the punch so he could put as much power into it as possible, and pain jabbed through him as the move pulled at the healing bullet holes.

That was a lot better than standing there and letting the man sink the knife in his chest, though. As the man reeled back a step, Matt grabbed the wrist of his knife hand with both hands and wrenched on it. The Navajo grunted in pain as bones ground together in his wrist and the knife slipped from his fingers.

The warrior swung a left at Matt’s head. Matt moved aside just enough to cause the blow to glance off his ear. It hurt anyway.

Matt hooked a left of his own to the Navajo’s jaw. He knew that the longer this fight lasted, the less chance he had. The wound he had suffered and the long days of lying around had depleted his reserves of strength. He was already breathing hard, and his pulse hammered inside his skull in a wild, discordant drumbeat.

A loud, angry voice bellowed words Matt didn’t understand, but the tone of command was unmistakable. The man he’d been battling abruptly stepped back. The man’s chest heaved, and his face was flushed and twisted with fury. But with a visible effort, he restained himself from attacking Matt again.

Caballo Rojo stalked up and planted himself between Matt and his opponent. For a moment the chief shouted at the warrior who’d been manhandling Elizabeth.

Then he turned to Matt and said, “White man go back in hogan!”

“I didn’t do anything,” Matt protested. He pointed at Elizabeth. “I was just protecting Miss Fleming!” He looked at her. “What in blazes is this all about, anyway?”

Elizabeth was pale and obviously upset.

“The young women have been gossiping about us, Matt. Pino here thinks that I’m corrupting them by being here. Many of the Navajo harbor such resentment toward white people that they don’t like me being here in the first place.”

“So he was trying to get you to leave?”

“Yes, and some of them think we should both go.” Elizabeth shook her head. “But I won’t leave, not as long as I can help these people.”

Whatever she was teaching them, Matt had his doubts about how much it really helped the Navajo. He wasn’t sure a young woman from Vermont could know anything that would help these people survive in this rugged wilderness.

Even so, he wasn’t going to stand by and let her be mistreated. That went too much against the grain.

On a practical level, however, there wasn’t much he could do. A number of men had gathered, and from the way they were glaring at Matt it was obvious whose side they were on. Outnumbered, weak, and wounded as he was, he couldn’t stop Pino from doing whatever he wanted.

Caballo Rojo leveled an arm.

“Go back in hogan,” he ordered Matt again.

“You’re gonna just let him get away with it?” Matt demanded. He didn’t expect Caballo Rojo to do otherwise, but it wouldn’t hurt anything to try ... he hoped.

Caballo Rojo didn’t budge. His face was hard as a rock as he pointed at the hogan. Matt reined in the anger he felt boiling up inside him.

He wouldn’t be doing Elizabeth any good by getting himself killed, and Caballo Rojo looked just about riled up enough to go back on his word.

Matt jerked his head in a curt nod.

“All right,” he said. “But this is wrong.”

“Wrong for white man not wrong for Navajo,” Caballo Rojo insisted.

Matt looked at Elizabeth and said, “Sorry.”

“I appreciate you trying to stand up for me, Mr. Bodine.”

He took a deep breath.

“Maybe when I leave here, you ought to go with me.”

“No, I don’t think so. Like I told you, I intend to stay. But when you’re gone ...”

She didn’t have to finish what she was saying. When he was gone, then the young women of the clan wouldn’t have anything to gossip about where he and Elizabeth were concerned. The trouble would probably blow over.

Fine, he thought. If that was the way she wanted it, he could oblige her.

“As soon as I’m strong enough to ride, I’ll head out. I need to catch up to Sam, anyway.”

Elizabeth nodded and said, “Of course.”

With a last glare directed at Pino, Matt turned toward the hogan. Juan Pablo’s wife had come out to watch the confrontation. He brushed past her and went inside. He heard a lot of low-voiced talking outside, but he didn’t understand it and didn’t care.

He told himself he didn’t care, anyway. It was easier like that.

But not by much.

The canyon settled down as night fell. The brief ruckus between Matt and Pino seemed forgotten. Juan Pablo’s wife gave Matt his supper, as usual, and this time when she removed the poultices from his wounds, she didn’t pack more in there.

Instead, she simply covered the bullet holes with a thin layer of moss and bound it into place as a makeshift bandage. Matt took that to mean they thought he no longer needed the medicinal powers of the roots and herbs the woman had been using on him.

His sleep was restless again that night. He couldn’t stop thinking about Elizabeth and wondering how she was doing. He admired her determination but questioned her good judgment.

The next morning he slipped on the wool shirt again and left the hogan. The woman didn’t even try to discourage him this time. He supposed she had given up on getting him to do what she wanted him to do.

He didn’t know where Pino’s hogan was, or he would have avoided it. He definitely didn’t want to encounter Caballo Rojo this morning, either, so he steered clear of the chief ’s hogan and walked along the creek toward the mouth of the canyon instead.

He wouldn’t get too close to it, he decided, because he didn’t want to alarm the guards posted there, but walking part of the way and then coming back would be good exercise for him.

None of the Navajo tried to stop him as he left the hogan, although he saw several of them watching him. He supposed they knew he wasn’t a prisoner here, so he couldn’t be trying to escape. When he came closer to the mouth of the canyon, he was able to see out over the vast sweep of the plains, and it looked mighty appealing to him. He had always been fiddle-footed by nature and never liked to stay in one place for too long.

Luckily, Sam was the same way, so they had always been good trail partners as well as blood brothers.

Matt stopped suddenly and frowned as he spotted something unusual out on the prairie. Several miles east of the canyon, a large cloud of dust rose into the morning sky.

His first thought was that it might be coming from a cavalry patrol, but after watching the cloud for a few minutes, Matt decided it was unlikely so much dust would be kicked up by horseback riders.

That looked more like the sort of dust cloud that would come from a herd of buffalo on the move, or a bunch of cattle being driven to market.

Out here in this big, mostly empty country, only one of those things was a possibility. The closest buffalo herds were hundreds of miles away, in western Texas.

There were some ranches in these parts, though, and the punchers who worked on them might be moving some cattle.

Matt wished he was out there on a good horse, getting a close look at whatever was going on. He didn’t have any particular reason for feeling that way, just curiosity and restlessness. He watched the dust cloud until it finally moved out of sight to the northwest. The wall of the canyon itself cut the cloud off from his vision.

He turned to walk back toward the hogans. As he did, his instincts told him he was being watched. He looked along the creek and thought he saw a flash of movement from the brush that lined the stream. Matt headed in that direction, but when he got there he didn’t see anyone.

Maybe it was his imagination, he told himself, although he didn’t really believe that. He had never been the sort to see things that weren’t there.

No, it was more likely that someone had been spying on him, he decided. Elizabeth, maybe? She could have noticed him leaving the hogans and followed him out here, even though she had to know by now that wouldn’t be a wise thing to do.

Or maybe somebody who wasn’t his friend, like Pino, was lurking around and keeping an eye on him.

Matt didn’t like the feeling that crawled along his spine when he thought about somebody watching him. Most of the time, when somebody spied on an hombre like that, they were up to no good, he thought.

He would just have to keep his own eyes open for trouble.

No one bothered him during the rest of his walk. When he got back to the hogan, he told Juan Pablo’s wife, “See, I’m doing better. Getting stronger. I walked halfway out of the canyon and back, and I’m fine.”

Some of that was bravado on his part. He was pretty tired. But he was convinced that he was getting stronger with each passing day. Another couple of days, he told himself. Then maybe he could start thinking about riding out on Sam’s trail ... assuming that his blood brother hadn’t returned by then.