“Apache,” he said. “Carrying long gun. Sharps .50. Looks to be in twenties. Dressed like Mescalero. Seen us watching him. Riding off.”
Sure enough, the horseman had kicked his heels into the flanks of the pinto, moving it off toward the north, away from the friends, and disappeared from sight in a handful of seconds.
“You feel any others, Krysty?” J.B. asked. “Anywhere around?”
“No. Just the one man, going away. Can’t hardly feel him at all now.”
Ryan turned back to the buckled, weed-strewed highway, following it with his eye as it twisted and turned before vanishing among the pines. “Let’s go find a place to camp,” he said.
IT LOOKED LIKE it might have been another picnic area back before the long winters. But there was no building, or notices; no barbecue pits and just the stumps remaining from what might have been scattered tables and seats, and no messages from the mysterious Children of the Rock.
A narrow river ran along its back, which Ryan and Jak checked for spoor, concluding that no animals, or humans, had been there for several days.
“Looks good to me,” Ryan said. “After the run-in with that panther, and our friend on the pony, we’d best keep a careful double watch. Doc, Dean and Jak, do ten through one. Mildred and J.B., watch from one to four. Krysty and me—and I— will keep guard from four until dawn.”
“We hunting?” Jak asked. Ryan shook his head. “Think not. Light’s going fast. Remember the size of the panther Mildred chilled. Wouldn’t like meeting that on a dark trail. We had plenty to eat back in the redoubt. There’s what seems like good, clean water over yonder. We can think about food tomorrow.”
RYAN AND KRYSTY LAY under a tall live oak, pulling the lightweight blankets over both of them.
“You feel like some lovemaking, lover?” she whispered.
Ryan hesitated a long, meaningful moment before starting to reply. “Well…”
Krysty laughed and kissed him very gently on the cheek. “Me neither, lover.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Mebbe.”
Ryan grinned. “And mebbe not. Been a long day. Bit of excitement with Mildred’s panther.”
Krysty held his hand, running her thumb in a soft circle around the center of his palm. “Not many women could’ve done that,” she said.
Ryan nodded. “True enough. Tomorrow we could think about doing some hunting.”
“Don’t feel very hungry. Not at the moment, anyway. Thing I feel most like is getting some shut-eye.”
Ryan squeezed her hand and rolled over onto his back. Unlike in the redoubt, they were both fully dressed, having just kicked off their boots. Their weapons lay on the ground at their side.
“Sleep well, dearest,” he said.
“And you.”
THEY WALKED along the steep-sided gorge, gradually moving higher.
The cloudless sky was a deep, rich blue, and a refreshing breeze shifted the tall branches. The night had passed without incident, though Ryan had thought at one point that someone was moving stealthily in the dark woods. But he had looked carefully in among the shadows cast by the hunter’s moon and seen absolutely nothing.
He’d checked with Krysty, who hadn’t been able to feel any nearby presence.
They were following a narrow game trail that cut up the gradient, away from the rumbling of the water at the bottom of the valley. The higher they climbed, the taller the pines seemed to become.
A little before noon, Krysty laid her hand on Ryan’s arm. “Something quite close,” she said quietly. “Feels like a number of men.”
“Which direction?”
“Ahead of us. Somewhere about where the trail levels out onto a kind of plateau.”
The others waited while Ryan crept ahead on hands and knees, the SIG-Sauer drawn, moving as silent as a whisper in a midnight graveyard.
There was some thick brush just where the trail flattened out, and he was able to reach it unobserved. Parting the leaves with his fingers, he peered through.
Krysty’s mutie sense had been right.
Chapter Seven
There were five of them, instantly recognizable as Mescalero Apaches, sitting around a small, totally smokeless fire with a pair of skinned rabbits roasting over a pit. They were all short, muscular men, between twenty and twenty-five years old. Their restless ponies were tethered at the far side of the clearing.