But the gods favored them.
Gradually more and more of the limitless desert opened before them. The canyon walls gave way, and the trail grew wider.
Being an albino, Jak found bright light difficult to cope with, though he saw excellently in dusk or darkness. But he was still the first to spot the band of horsemen, eight or ten miles away from them, moving toward the south, surrounded by a veil of roiling gray dust.
“Look.” He reined in, standing up and shading his ruby eyes with his ivory hand.
They all stopped their mounts and looked down. There seemed to be about twenty or so in the group, riding at a good speed. Ryan and the other three were still about a thousand feet higher than the strangers four miles from the ranch.
It was only guesswork, but it certainly looked as if the horsemen were going directly away from the Lauren spread.
“You make them out?” Jak asked. “Way they ride I figure them Navaho.”
“Could be,” Ryan agreed cautiously.
“No sign of a fire or nothing bad at the house.” Dean’s horse was almost beyond the boy’s control, whirling around and around, stamping its hooves, kicking up a spray of sparks from the bedrock beneath it.
“No sign of Christina or Michael, either,” J.B. added. “Nobody.”
Behind them they could hear their friends’ horses, coming closer.
“No point in going off like a bat out of hell, now, Jak,” Ryan warned.
The teenager swallowed hard, taking in several long, slow breaths. Nodding. “True, Ryan.”
They allowed the other three to catch up with them. Krysty had been swaying in the saddle, her face almost as pale as Jak’s. Ryan rode alongside her at an easy canter, ready to reach out a supportive arm if needed.
“I’m feeling better, lover,” she said.
“Sure?”
“Yeah. Who are those riders we saw from higher up in the foothills?”
“Mebbe Navaho. Were they the trouble you saw?”
“Can’t tell.”
They were now roughly a mile away from the farm.
Ryan scanned the area, hoping against hope that he might catch a glimpse of Christina, or Michael, standing shy and silent in the shadows, possibly holding little Jenny in his arms.
But there was nothing.
And nobody.
“Dead animals,” Dean said, riding close to his father.
“Where?”
“By the small barn.” He pointed with his right hand, nearly dropping the reins as he did so.
The rest of the horses were gathered in a tight nervous group at the back of the corral.
“Three cows missing and some pigs,” Jak commented. “Dead ones are goat and two sheep. Lotta blood there.”
Without a word being said, they all reined in at almost exactly the same moment, about two hundred yards from the house.
There was a stillness in the afternoon. The horsemen had vanished away south, though the pillar of dust that marked their passing could still just be seen. Off behind them, in the foothills, Ryan glimpsed again the snowy egret that he’d noticed around the area since they’d arrived there a few days earlier. The sun was sinking slowly in the west, and the sky was still totally clear of any clouds.
Krysty caught Ryan’s eye and made a slight, imperceptible movement of the head. He nodded, knowing what she was telling him, knowing it himself.
The stillness told its own story.
“Christina!”
Jak’s voice made all the saddle horses start, Dean nearly losing his seat and falling to the dirt. The cry echoed off to the mountains, coming back to them, the last syllable, “Tina,” rolling back and forth until it had faded once more into the stillness.
“We going in, Ryan?”
“Guess so, Jak.”
“Hold a perimeter?” J.B. asked, but the flatness in his voice answered himself, even before Ryan said anything.
“Don’t figure there’s any point, do you? Whatever’s happened here has happened. Done.” Ryan slid down and looped the reins of his horse over the picket fence that bordered the neat orchard.
One by one, they all dismounted. Jak stayed last in the saddle, as though he were single-handedly holding off the bad news that lay around them. The air seemed to taste of the bitterness of hot iron.
“Want us to go in first, Jak?” Ryan suggested as gently as he could.
“My house. My wife. My baby.”
“Sure.”
“They could have got away when they saw trouble coming,” Mildred suggested.
Jak shook his head, his face cold and calm. “Nice idea. But doubt it.”
In the corral, one of the horses snickered. A door in the hayloft of the largest barn blew a few inches open, then closed again.
“Best get it right.” J.B. looked around at the others. “Go to double red. Blasters out and cocked.”
Ryan went to the right, around the house, followed by Krysty and Dean. J.B. led Mildred to the left. Jak chose to go straight on in, onto the porch and through the open front door.
Christina Lauren was in the kitchen.
Chapter Eight
Christina had died hard. Her dress was torn across the shoulder, revealing her breasts, and her skirt was around her waist, her thighs showing the bruises and the other sickly evidence of how she’d been used. Krysty stooped and pulled down the thin gingham material, covering the woman’s nakedness. She then took a cloth off the table and laid it over the woman’s chest and head.
Her face was severely bruised, blood clotted around the mouth and nose. More blood seeped from both ears, indicative of an injury to the head. Both her wrists were badly broken. Her left eye was swollen shut, the other staring blankly up at the low ceiling of the kitchen. A crimsoned knife lay in the corner of the room, its tip snapped off.
“She did some damage,” J.B. said quietly. “There’s far more blood around than came from her. She wasn’t stabbed.” He bent and reached under the towel. “Looks like someone in heavy combat boots kicked in the back of her head, after they’d” The sentence trailed uneasily away into the silence.
“You reckon she killed some of those Navaho?” Dean asked.
“Likely,” J.B. replied. “There’s a trail of blood into the other room, soaked into the floor. Then it’s smeared, like someone was dragged away.”
Jak had said nothing since they entered the charnel house. He stood by the stove, idly brushing crumbs from its black iron top. His face was totally without emotion, drained of all life.
“Jenny?” Mildred queried.
The thought of the baby had been on everyone’s mind since finding Christina’s corpse.
Ryan coughed, clearing his throat. “Doubt she’ll be too far away.”
“Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that young Michael might have escaped with her?” Doc asked.
Nobody answered.
It was all too obvious that the killers had been in the home for some time, with the leisure to take theIR pleasure with the helpless woman.
So, where was Michael Brother? The only realistic answer was that he was dead, his stiffening body lying somewhere around the spread.
“How come they left the way they did?” Krysty asked. “They didn’t break anything or start a fire or steal food. Just butchered some stock.”
“They saw us coming,” Dean said.
Krysty shook her head. “No, they didn’t. When we first spotted the riders, they were well off the spread. It’s like something interrupted them.”
“Michael?” J.B. suggested. “Then where is he? He must be somewhere close by. He’d have seen us ride in.”
Once again they heard the loose door on the barn banging in the light breeze.
“Find Jenny’s body,” Jak said. The first time he’d spoken.
THE SEARCH didn’t take long. Jak himself found the pathetic bundle of crimsoned rags, lying at the base of the wall of the feed barn. At about the height of a man’s shoulders, there was a dark patch on the wooden planks, dried blood and a sickening trickle of brains, with a few hairs stuck in it. Splinters of bone gleamed like metal in the late-afternoon sun.
He stooped over it, head bowed, saying nothing. The rest of the friends stood in a half circle. It wasn’t a time for words. Dean was the only one to speak, hissing between his teeth, “Bastards! Little girl like that!”
Finally Jak put his hands beneath his daughter and lifted her up, tenderly arranging the sodden blanket around her.
“Didn’t have to do that, did they?” he whispered.
They didn’t look for Michael. Not then.
The important thing was to be there for Jak. They followed him slowly back into the house, into the cool, airy living room, where he sat down on the long sofa, still cradling the little corpse on his lap.
“Jak?” Krysty said.
“What is it?” The voice was like ice water over obsidian.
“There are things to be done for Christina and for Jenny. Will you let Mildred and me help you?”
“Why not? Won’t make difference. Not now. Should’ve been here.”