Cowboy PI (28 page)

“Ramona, listen to me. This could be important. Where’s my horse?”

“Down there, tied to a sapling where Alex put him when he went to get Samantha’s horse and the heifer.”

“I want you to go down there and bring something back to me. You’ll find it in my saddlebag. A thick brown envelope with photographs inside. Hurry.”

He could see Ramona was mystified by his urgent request, but thankfully she didn’t question him. Getting to her feet, she trotted off down the hill.

Samantha, he thought when she was gone. He had to get Samantha back here at his side. There was perhaps no solid reason for the anxiety gnawing at him. It was, after all, only a suspicion, not a certainty. Maybe even an improbable one. But if the threat was real, the danger to her this close…

She was still up there alone on the narrow spine of the ridge. Lifting his head from the ground, Roark called to her.

She didn’t hear him, didn’t turn in the saddle to look his way. Either she was too far away, or, more likely, the bellowing of the cattle drowned out his shouts. He couldn’t go to her. He was pinned here under the truck. Seething now with frustration.

Ramona. What was keeping Ramona?

T
HE LONGHORNS WERE
still noisy but less restless now that Alex and Cappy had circled the herd from opposite directions, making efforts to settle them down.

They don’t like being bunched up like this, Samantha thought. Not after the open trail.

She had headed off one straggler, turning the cow back down into the hollow, but otherwise she had been idle. Nothing to do but sit up here in the saddle, one hand resting lightly on the pommel while she worried about Roark. And tried, without success, to keep her gaze from wandering again and again to that fold between the mountains.

“Alamo Junction, huh?”

The voice was understanding, sympathetic. Alex’s
voice. Samantha lowered her gaze to find him just below her on the flank of the ridge. Cappy was with him, both men astride their horses. She realized there must have been a yearning expression on her face, easy to read, as she looked off toward the pass.

“Poor Sam,” Alex said. “It’s got to be tough on you, having to give up like this when everything you’ve worked so hard for is just over there on the other side.”

“I call it a damn shame,” Cappy concurred in his gravelly voice. “Here we come all this way and get this close, then end up just throwing it away.”

Samantha shook her head. “It can’t be helped.”

“Well,” Alex said slowly, “maybe it can.”

She looked down on him sharply. “What are you saying?”

He shrugged. “Only that we could still do it. There’s enough time if we left right now.”

“You mean just the three of us driving the whole herd? Alex, that’s impossible.”

“Maybe out in open country, yeah. But not over a mountain pass with a trail too narrow for the herd to bulge. See, we don’t need anyone riding flank, and with, say, Cappy riding point, and you and me riding drag…sure, the three of us could manage it.”

“Boy’s right,” Cappy spoke up. “Hell, it’s only a few miles.”

“I can’t,” Samantha said.

Alex nodded. “Because of Roark, you mean. No, I guess you couldn’t leave him.”

“Don’t know why not,” Cappy barked. “He’s gonna be all right, ain’t he? Nothing you can do for him anyway until Dick gets back with that tractor. Huh, by then we’ll probably have delivered the cows. Maybe be back here before we’re even missed.”

It was a temptation. Alex and Cappy couldn’t know just how much of a temptation. The chance to prove herself, to defeat those last, lingering fears of everything connected
to her grandfather’s world. The uncertainties about herself that had troubled her all her life. Oh, yes, she knew what Roark had tried to tell her. That she had already demonstrated her worth on the trail, overcome all the obstacles. But she hadn’t. She needed to complete the drive, to achieve this last victory. And, yes, she also needed that inheritance.

Danger. Roark was worried about the danger. But Alex and Cappy would be with her. She trusted Alex. Alex wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

No, she couldn’t do it. Desert Roark when he was trapped down there? What was she thinking?

Twisting around in the saddle, she looked below her at the fallen truck. Ramona was there with Roark, watching over him, caring for him. A movement caught her attention. She lifted her gaze and saw in the distance the figure of Dick approaching on horseback. A tractor crawled just behind him. Help was on its way.

“So,” Cappy called up to her from his side of the ridge, “are we doing this or aren’t we?”

Alex glanced from Samantha to Cappy, looking indecisive now. “Maybe we shouldn’t, Cappy. If Roark knew—”

“Well, he don’t know, does he?”

“But he’d forbid it.”

Alex couldn’t know it, but he had just issued a challenge Samantha couldn’t resist. From the day she had left her grandfather and his ranch, she had refused to let any man control her. Even one as stalwart as Roark Hawke.

“We’re wasting time,” she said, making up her mind. “Let’s go.”

Heels in Dolly’s flanks, she and the horse surged forward, cantering down the hill to the waiting herd. Determined now but unable to silence her pangs of guilt.

Forgive me, Roark, but I have to do this. It’s the only way.

Chapter Thirteen

Roark was on fire with impatience by the time Ramona arrived back at his side.

“Sorry,” she apologized. “It took me a few minutes to find it. You have an awful lot stuffed in that bag.”

Murmuring his thanks as he snatched the envelope from her hand, he checked again on Samantha. She was still up there alone on the top of the ridge, back to him. Maybe he was wrong about his suspicion. Maybe he was overreacting, and the photographs would tell him nothing.

Tearing into the envelope as a puzzled Ramona hovered over him, he removed the packet of the latest photos Wendell had shot of the ravine’s walls. He went through them rapidly, dismissing most of them as being of little interest to anyone but a geologist. Nothing. He could find nothing. Unless…

He went through them again, selecting two photographs that Wendell had labeled as the face of the wall about fifteen feet above the floor of the ravine. Separately, they meant nothing, but when he lined them up, placing one close above the other—

This was it! The images that had nagged at him when he had examined them earlier, but which had escaped his understanding until the two halves were put together to form a whole! He had the full picture now!

To a casual observer in the ravine, it would mean noth
ing. But to someone professional, it would be a startling find. Even Roark’s untrained eye, now that he knew what to look for, could make it out—ridges of rock suggesting rib bones, the shape of a large head with an eye socket. Faint, but there. A Tyrannosaurus rex? Looked like it.

This was the secret of the ravine. Not ancient artifacts in caves but something far older than that embedded high in the walls of the ravine and overlooked by all but one man. Dinosaur fossils, possibly even a rare complete skeleton among them. Fossils that somehow had been discovered in that remote ravine by a failed paleontologist who had recognized their immense worth and been willing to go to any lengths to safeguard his trove.

All the while the explanation had been right here, but until Ramona had triggered Roark’s attention in this direction—

He stopped, staggered by the realization that Samantha was vulnerable. Alex McKenzie, who must have managed to release that brake when no one was looking, hoping the truck would strike Samantha down. She was up there with the little bastard close by, not knowing, trusting him. Because Alex was a friend who’d once had a crush on her.

Thrusting the photographs to one side, Roark elevated himself on his elbows, his gaze shifting frantically to the top of the ridge. His heart dropped like a stone. Samantha was nowhere in sight. It couldn’t have taken him more than two minutes to make sense of those photos, but in that brief time she had disappeared.

“Samantha,” he rasped. “Where did she go?”

But Ramona had been watching him, not the ridge. “I don’t know. Probably down to the herd. Roark, what is it? What’s wrong?”

There was no time to explain. He had to get Samantha away from McKenzie. “Go up there, Ramona. Find her. Tell her I need her back here.
Now.
”

Sensing his new urgency without understanding it, Ramona headed for the crest of the ridge. When she was
gone, Roark cursed his helplessness again and made another effort to free himself. But all his tugging and straining earned him nothing but a fresh spasm of pain in his trapped leg. He lay back, his fists pounding the ground with the anger of his defeat.

If he lost Samantha…

The anguish of that possibility was more than he could bear.

What was taking Ramona so long? He tried not to panic, tried to realize it was a hard climb on foot to the head of the ridge. But it seemed to take forever before she scrambled back down the hill and came to him out of wind. One look at her face told him the worst.

“Gone,” she reported when she could breathe again. “All three of them are gone, and the herd with them. They left only the remuda behind.”

The pass, Roark realized. They had to be on their way to the pass and Alamo Junction beyond. Samantha was out there with Alex McKenzie. A desperate McKenzie who would do anything to keep her from qualifying for that inheritance. Even though there were still missing pieces to this puzzle, he just
knew
that much had to be true. And unless he could get to her in time—

“Dick is on his way,” Ramona added, offering that hope. “I could see him coming from up there. And he has a tractor with him.”

Tractors were slow. Agonizingly slow. This one was an eternity in reaching him. Then there was a maddening delay while Dick and the lanky young rancher who owned the machine decided on the best method for freeing him.

That established, the powerful tractor moved into place. It was equipped with a front-end loader, and when its nose had finally been positioned facing the underside of the fallen truck, Roark could hear the two men attaching chains from the loader to the stout frame of the pickup.

Dick came around to the downed side of the vehicle where Roark lay. “All right, he’s ready to raise her.”

Roark, too, was ready. All he needed were a few inches of clearance to withdraw his leg. Dick went back to conduct the operation while Ramona stood by to offer assistance if Roark should need it.

The tractor went to work at Dick’s signal. Over its roar, Roark could hear the rattle of the chains pulling taut as the front-end loader heaved upward. Bracing himself, he listened to the grinding of metal straining at its seams and a sudden banging that sounded like the jammed camper door popping open under the pressure.

Slowly, slowly, with Dick calling out directions to the tractor’s driver and Ramona admonishing all of them to be careful, the Doorless Wonder rose from the bed of rock where it had been wedged. Roark waited tensely, and when the load was finally hanging a foot or so in the air above him, he went into action, scooting himself backward on the ground until he was clear of the truck.

“He’s out!” Ramona shouted.

Dick relayed the message to the driver, and the tractor roared again, lowering the load. When the pickup had been eased back to the ground, the young rancher cut the engine and joined Dick and Ramona, who were crouched beside Roark.

“It’s all right,” he assured them, waving them off as he lifted himself into a sitting position. “The leg is going to be fine.”

He didn’t know that. There was a tear in his jeans which disclosed a gash in his flesh above the knee. The blood had already caked and dried around the wound. But, injury or not, he had no intention of letting that stop him. He was going after Samantha.

“Man, you need a doctor,” Dick said.

“What I need is my horse. No questions. Get him for me, will you, Dick?”

The horse wrangler and Ramona exchanged glances. “The cattle are gone,” she said quietly. “Alex and Cappy and Samantha have taken them over the pass.”

“Dick, I’ll explain everything later. Just get my horse.” The horse wrangler offered no further resistance. He rose and went off down the hill to fetch the roan from the sapling. The puzzled rancher offered his support, helping Roark to his feet.

“Should you be doing this?”

“I have to,” Roark said grimly. The leg hurt when he tested it, putting weight on it. But then he wouldn’t need to put his weight on it. Not once he was in the saddle.

Come on, Dick, where are you?

While Roark hobbled around a few steps, waiting impatiently for Dick, he learned that the lanky rancher’s name was Buzz Scultz and that he would accept Roark’s thanks, but he would not accept any payment for his rescue.

Alex McKenzie, Roark kept thinking. He had to get Samantha away from him. And if that bastard touched her…

Dick finally reappeared with the roan. “I’m coming with you,” he said, mounting his own horse after seeing Roark settled in the saddle.

Roark nodded and leaned down, handing Ramona his cell phone. “Try to contact the nearest sheriff’s office. Buzz can probably help you with that. Tell them what’s happening and where we’ve gone.” Gathering up the reins, he turned to Dick with steel in his voice. “Let’s ride.”

T
HE FIRST FLAKES
that drifted down from the overcast sky were entirely unexpected. But then Samantha decided there was no reason why she should be surprised. After all, this was Colorado, where early snowfalls weren’t unusual, especially at the higher elevations like this.

The stuff was thickening now, a heavy, wet snow that began to cling to the ranks of the conifers that lined both sides of the trail. Despite the warmth of her leather jacket with its sheepskin collar and her Stetson, which shed trickles of melting snow, Samantha shivered in the cold air.

Alex, riding close beside her at the rear of the plodding
herd, offered his encouragement. “Don’t worry. We should reach the summit of the pass in a few minutes. It’s bound to improve when we descend on the other side.”