Longarm stopped short, shaking his head and looking around. He had been running in circles, because he was back on the trail. Not only that, but when he heard a surprised whinny, he looked up and saw the roan about fifty feet away. The horse had been calmly grazing on the grass at the side of the trail when Longarm came floundering out of the woods.
Longarm held out a hand and called softly to the roan. He started toward the animal, and it nervously backed away from him a few steps. Longarm couldn't blame the horse. Covered with blood and smeared with filth from the inside of the log, he probably looked bad and smelled worse. But the roan was his one chance to get out of this mess and maybe salvage something from it, so he wasn't going to let the horse get away.
One foot in front of the other, Longarm told himself. Steady, slow and steady. He kept talking, nonsense intended only to soothe the horse's jitters. It must have worked, because the roan stopped backing away. In fact, it even came forward a few steps and nuzzled curiously against his outstretched hand.
Longarm caught hold of the dangling reins and moved to the horse's left side. As he reached up to grasp the saddle horn, he wondered how the roan had gotten so tall. Pulling himself all the way up into the saddle seemed like an almost insurmountable task. With a groan of effort, Longarm got a foot in the stirrup and then hauled himself up. He settled down in the saddle with a thump that made fresh waves of pain ripple through his wounded back.
He slumped forward and jammed his heels into the roan's flanks. The horse broke into a trot. Longarm gritted his teeth and hissed, "Son of a bitch!" through tightly clenched jaws. Every step the roan took hurt him like blazes.
He was moving, though, and that was the important thing. Longarm lifted his head and peered around, trying to orient himself. He had been on the trail to the Diamond K when he was ambushed, and that was still where he was, he realized as he noted several landmarks. More importantly, he was headed back toward the main trail, the one that would ultimately take him to the Mcentire Timber Company camp.
Shouts ripped through the stillness of the forest behind him, followed an instant later by the crash of gunshots. Longarm twisted in the saddle, hanging on tightly with one hand while he used the other to empty his pistol toward the surviving bushwhackers, who had also reached the trail. He didn't know if he hit either of them or not, but he didn't feel the impact of any fresh lead. That was all he cared about at the moment. "Run, damn it, run!" he called to the roan as he drove his heels once more into its flanks.
The bushwhackers were on foot, and they would have to find their horses again before they could come after him. That would give him enough of a lead, Longarm realized, that they would never catch up to him.
Of course, he had been convinced of things before and then had them backfire on him, so it wouldn't do to get overconfident. He kept the roan moving at a steady run until he reached the main trail.
Longarm reined in and paused to study the landscape, trying to remember which way he was supposed to turn. Instinct told him to turn right, toward the south, but for some reason his brain insisted that he go north. He scowled as he tried to puzzle it out.
His gut feelings had saved his life in the past--but so had his mental processes. At the moment, however, he put more stock in his instincts, since his head was more than a little addled. He swung the roan's head to the right and urged it into a run again. He realized he must have been slipping in and out of consciousness. But he was in one of his lucid moments when he reached the cutoff to the logging camp, and he swung the horse onto the smaller trail with scarcely a reduction in speed.
He expected to be stopped by one of the sentries, as usual, but no one stepped out of the trees to challenge him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Longarm knew that wasn't a good sign. He pushed on, the fear that he might be too late clearing his head somewhat.
As he drew closer to the camp, that worry intensified. The guard shack was deserted. He slowed the horse's mad dash for a moment, expecting to hear gunfire up ahead. But silence was the only thing that greeted him. When he rounded a turn in the trail and passed through an open spot in the canopy of trees, he saw smoke curling into the sky, rising from a spot higher on the mountain.
A spot just about where the Mcentire camp was located.
Longarm yelled at the roan and banged his heels into its sides, urging more speed from the horse. The roan responded, lunging forward into a gallop. Longarm had moved beyond pain now; his injured back was numb, and he didn't feel the pounding of the roan's increased speed.
Sweeping wide around bends in the trail, the horse ran flat out for several minutes before the timber camp came into view. As Longarm had feared, that was the source of the smoke. Dark billows rose from the long barracks-like building where the loggers slept. The structure was being consumed by flames.
The fire wasn't the worst of it. Several men were sprawled around the clearing where the camp was located. Longarm had seen enough corpses in his life to know immediately that they were dead. Their bright-colored shirts were stained a dark red with blood.
The sawmill and Aurora's new cabin appeared to be undamaged, as was the cookshack. A line of men stretched from the creek beside the sawmill to the burning barracks, passing buckets back and forth as they battled the blaze. The efforts of the bucket brigade weren't going to be enough, Longarm saw as he reined the horse to a halt. The fire was too far advanced already. Wetting down the area around the building might keep the flames from spreading, however, and that appeared to be what the loggers turned their attention to as Longarm watched.
He was close enough to feel heat from the flames pushing against his face. Despite that, a cold chill went through him. Nothing was more deadly, or more feared, in the woods than fire. Luckily, the season had been a fairly wet one, and the trees were green and healthy. Still, once a forest fire got going, it was almost impossible to put out.
Longarm pushed that thought from his mind. The loggers were doing everything they could to contain the fire. Right now, finding out what had happened to Aurora Mcentire was of more compelling urgency to Longarm.
He looked around the camp as he dismounted awkwardly, his normally smooth motions hampered by the injury he had suffered. He held on to the reins for support and led the horse toward Aurora's cabin.
She emerged from the door before he got there, trailed by Jared Flint. Aurora had her head turned and was giving orders to her harried-looking foreman, so she didn't see Longarm right away. That gave him a chance to look at her and assure himself that she was really all right. Her hair and clothing were disheveled, and there was a smudge of something, either ashes or blood, on her cheek, but other than that, she appeared to be unharmed. Longarm lifted a hand and called, "Mrs. Mcentire!"
She turned quickly toward him and gasped when she saw the blood and dirt covering him. "Marshal Long!" she exclaimed as she rushed over to him. "What happened to you?"
"Ran into some fellas who... tried to kill me," Longarm said wearily. "I disabused 'em of that notion."
Aurora took hold of his arm, her touch soft yet firm at the same time. "Come inside," she urged him. "We have some other wounded men in the cabin, and I'm doing what I can for them." Her attitude was brisk and businesslike, but Longarm could see shining in her eyes a concern for him that had no doubt grown out of their passionate encounter earlier in the day.
"I'll keep that bucket brigade going," said Flint as he started toward the burning building. He echoed Longarm's concern by adding, "We've got to stop that fire before it reaches the trees."
"Amen to that," muttered Aurora as she gently tugged Longarm toward the cabin.
"Tried to... get here and warn you," Longarm told her. "Sorry I wasn't... in time."
She paused and looked at him in surprise. "You knew this was going to happen?"