Winter Fire (10 page)

“I usually climb up to the south rim and walk back in about a mile. That way my chickens aren't the first thing to catch the hawk's interest.”

“I'll saddle up.”

“You don't have to go. I'm sure it's safe enough. We haven't seen any sign of Moody's men or the Culpeppers in—”

Sarah sighed and shut up. She was talking to herself.

Case was headed toward the brush lean-to where bridles, saddles, and what small equipment they had for the ranch was stored.

Conner is just like that when he doesn't want to listen to reason
, she thought.
Irritating, irritating creatures!

“Men,” she said under her breath as she closed the cabin door behind her. “What was God thinking of?”

Then she began crooning gently to the hawk as she approached it.

The bird's wings flared and flapped strongly. Because it was leashed to the perch by rawhide thongs, the hawk made no real attempt to fly. It simply exercised its wings and its temper on whatever came close enough.

“Hello, my fierce feathered beast,” she murmured. “You've been working those wings so often, I bet you'll jump toward the sky and just keep on going.”

The hawk moved sharply, as though it sensed freedom.

“Yes, yes,” she said soothingly. “The next mouse or snake you eat will be one you catch. No more having chunks stuffed down your throat willy-nilly.”

While she talked, she slipped a leather hood over the hawk's head. Immediately the fierce bird stilled, for it could no longer see.

Before Sarah managed to get on her jacket, hat, and the leather gauntlet Ute had sewn for her, Cricket had trotted up to the front of the cabin.

“Sarah?” Case called. “Better hurry, or it will be sunset before we get to the top.”

“I'm hurrying.”

But there was no impatience in her voice or hands when she reached for the hawk. She had learned that birds of prey were uncanny in their sensitivity to her mood.

Gently she coaxed the hawk off the perch and onto her arm.

“There, there, no need to get all ruffled,” she murmured. “You've been on my arm before.”

Alertly the hawk rode her arm to the cabin door. Even hooded, the bird sensed the difference between the interior of the cabin and the open sky beyond. The yellow beak gaped wide as the hawk gave a high, wild cry.

Cricket snorted and shied.

“Easy, you puddinghead,” his rider said soothingly. “You're too big to be a hawk's supper.”

Sarah looked up at the tall stallion. Doubt was clear on her face.

Case dismounted. Other than a brief hesitation when he took weight on his injured leg, he showed little sign that he had been fighting for his life three weeks before.

“You ride up front,” he said. “Ready?”

“For what?”

“A hand up. Two hands, actually. Put your left hand on the saddle horn and your left foot in my hands.”

“But what about your wound?” she objected, even as she followed his directions.

“Up you go.”

He boosted Sarah into the saddle so smoothly that the hawk didn't even flare its wings.

“Keep your foot out of the stirrup for now,” he said, his voice low and mellow as candlelight. “I'm going to reach around you and get up behind the saddle. Ready?”

By the time she realized that the crooning, velvet voice belonged to Case, he was settling onto Cricket behind her.

“Can you ride without stirrups?” he asked, still using the soothing voice.

“I usually ride without the whole saddle.”

“Good,” he murmured. “Stirrups make it easier on my leg.”

“Where did you learn to talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Butter and honey and lamplight.”

“Training horses,” he said. “Seemed to soothe them.”

“Soothes birds, too.”

“How about people?”

“I'm still awake,” she retorted in a deliberately velvety voice, “but only barely.”

The corners of his eyes shifted slightly upward.

When he breathed in, the scent of roses and sunshine and fresh air lifted from her in a perfume more subtle and fascinating than anything that he had ever smelled from a fancy crystal bottle.

She wants a big brother, not a lover
, he reminded himself.
That's what I want to be to her, too
.

Then, irritably,
Wish to hell I could convince my dumb handle of that. I haven't been this randy since I first discovered I could do more than piss with it
.

He rearranged his weight behind the saddle to accommodate his increasing arousal. As he shifted, he tried to
forget just how yielding and yet resilient Sarah's flesh had felt beneath his hands when he lifted her past him in the cabin doorway.

She's just the right size
, he thought again.
Not so little that a man would lose her in the bedding, and not the size of a barn door, like Lola
.

Lola would make two of Ute
.

Must make for some interesting nights in the old wickiup
.

“See that notch in the rim off to the right?” Sarah asked.

“Yes.”

“Head for it. There's a trail up and over the rim.”

He reined Cricket toward the notch.

The land began to slant upward slowly. The farther the horse got from the river, the drier the underlying ground became. Instead of the musical murmurings of the creek and songbirds hidden in the willows, there was only the occasional rasp of the stirrups against underbrush.

Massive cottonwoods quickly gave way to ragged, narrow-leafed bushes. Prickly pear and other cactus appeared from time to time where the land was too dry or poor for grass. In the deeply slanting rays of the sun, cactus spines outlined their plants in shimmering gold.

Colder air from the mesa top sighed past the riders on the way down to the valley. The breeze brought with it the scent of the coming night, cool and crisp and mysterious.

The creak of leather and the steady breathing of the stallion became the only sounds in the stillness of the late afternoon.

As always, Case's eyes roved the landscape, probing for danger. This time he saw nothing but the stark, impossible beauty of a landscape where stones took on the color of earthbound rainbows and the shape of man's wildest fancies.

Beyond the rim the path became more level, but only
for a mile or so. Then the land pitched up again into a wall of rusty cliffs and dizzying red spires. Dry watercourses showed as lighter bands against the ground and darker bands on the cliffs.

“How much farther?” Case asked.

“See that rocky knoll off to the left? The wind gives a nice lift at the top.”

Cricket wound among boulders and scrambled across sheets of rubble-strewn bedrock. Though the stallion was carrying double, he didn't raise a sweat or breathe hard.

“This is far enough,” Sarah said.

Case swung down off Cricket. As he reached up to help her, slanting sunlight turned her eyes to a luminous golden-gray, like twin candles burning in mist. The same light transformed the cinnamon of her hair into fire, sleek and radiant and inviting.

It was all he could do to keep from pulling off her battered slouch hat, untying her braids, and plunging his fingers into the silky flames.

Hunger pulsed, angering Case with its urgency. He lifted Sarah out of the saddle, set her on the ground, and quickly stepped away from her.

The fact that he limped when he moved didn't improve his temper at all.

“You know that hawk is going to get some of your chickens,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.

She gave him a sideways glance. Although he appeared controlled to the point of coldness, she sensed that there was more to his feelings at the moment than he was showing.

“The hit-or-miss way Conner collects eggs,” she said, “there should be plenty of chicks to go around.”

Case shrugged.

“Stay here until I free the hawk,” she said. “I'll need room to swing my arm.”

Crooning gently to the bird of prey, she walked to a point where a level slab of bedrock jutted out from the
steeply sloping knoll that Cricket had just climbed.

Despite cool air flowing down from distant heights, the land far below kept enough heat to send currents of warm air rising along the knoll. Like an invisible wave, the breeze lifting up from the canyon floor broke across the ledge where she stood. Once past the ledge, the warm air rose up into the sky.

The hawk flapped its wings and leaned eagerly into the warm wind.

Crooning softly, Sarah stroked the bird, calming it.

“Hush now,” she murmured. “Your craw is full of food. Your wing is healed. There are a lot of safe roosts nearby. All you need is a good boost to be on your way.”

After a time the bird stopped trying to fly. But eager shudders still ran though the hawk's body, as though it knew freedom was finally at hand.

What followed happened so fast that Case could barely separate the motions Sarah made. She pulled off the hood with a quick movement of her left hand and at the same time launched the hawk into the air with an upward sweep of her right arm.

Wings flared blackly against the golden-orange light of the setting sun. The hawk dropped below the lip of the rock and vanished.

For a heartbeat Case was afraid that the hawk had been unable to fly. Then a shape burst above the ledge of rock like a black comet. The hawk shot higher and higher with each powerful wing beat until it was invisible against the colorful radiance of the sky.

A sweet, wild cry fell down to the earthbound man and woman watching from below.

Limping slightly, he went to the ledge. He ignored the ache in his wounds. He had endured much worse before. He had no doubt that worse was probably in store for him in the future.

But at the moment, all that mattered to him was the silvery flash of sorrow he had seen in Sarah's eyes.

Silently he came and stood next to her.

“The hawk will be all right,” he said. “It's flying beautifully.”

“I know,” she said huskily. “It's just…”

“What?”

“I would give my soul to fly with it.”

The yearning in her stitched through him like a golden needle. He felt a kinship with her so intense it was painful.

More dangerous than any physical desire, the sense of being joined to Sarah pierced the armor Case had built against all feeling. She touched him in an elemental, frightening way.

Abruptly he turned away from her and stared out over the deserted, mysterious land.

To the northwest the snowy heights of a distant cluster of mountains peeked above the high plateaus that lay between sky and desert. The mountaintops reflected a rich, creamy yellow light. All but the highest part of the peaks was hidden by the series of ragged, eroded plateaus that swept out and down in all directions.

The sun descended swiftly until it was only a handspan from the horizon. Darkness gathered.

In the vast landscape, the knoll where Case and Sarah stood was no more significant than a grain of sand.

Time to be going
, he thought reluctantly.

As he turned back toward the lip of the ledge, shimmering orange light spilled over mesas and buttes, making them glow with crimson fire. Tongues of midnight licked out from the deep canyons and creases. Darkness pooled and rose in a silent, unstoppable tide. Pinnacles of stone became columns of fire burning against the coming night.

No sign of man showed in all the land. No roads. No fixed trails. No lantern glow. Not even smoke rising into the flawless sky.

A man could live here
, Case thought.
Really live
.

No crowding from neighbors. No townspeople reaching
into your pockets with both hands and a false smile on their lips
.

No memories
.

No other place like this, anywhere
.

Let other men take the rolling green hills and wide green valleys. This is for me. Clean and wild and free of the past
.

An unfamiliar feeling of belonging stole over him. He took a deep, slow breath, then another, then another, filling himself with the stark, unflinching beauty of the land.

Down below, along the bottom of the biggest canyon, there were two curving, haphazard lines where cottonwood and willows stood out against the darker land.

Lost River
, he thought.
Lost River Canyon
.

Water
.

He reached into the pocket of what had started as a Confederate overcoat but had long since been stripped of all bright buttons and braid. The spyglass was a familiar, cool weight in his hand. He put the viewing end to his left eye and began quartering the land below.

No matter how carefully he looked, he found few signs of water. There were solitary cottonwoods in some rocky creases, but there was only one winding ribbon of trees and brush to mark the presence of a reliable river.

Lost River ranch is the only good water for a long, long way in all directions
, he realized.

Without water, a ranch just isn't possible
.

And the reliable water was already taken.

Yet Case knew he belonged to this land. He was more certain of it than he had been of anything in his life.

There is something waiting for me after I'm finished with the Culpeppers
, he thought.
This land
.

Land that can't be maimed or murdered by men
.

Land where there's room to breathe, to stretch, to build a ranch. New land, clean of memories
.

Land, but not water.

Only Lost River ranch has any water worth mentioning
.

And Sarah Kennedy owned Lost River ranch.

Absently he collapsed the spyglass and stored it once more in the pocket of his overcoat.