"Custis, he could be the one behind all the trouble!" she exclaimed.
Longarm nodded. "Yep. That's why I'm going to follow him. If those hired guns are hiding up here, Flint must be on his way to meet with them, maybe give them a new job."
"What are you going to do?"
"Follow him, try to find out just what he's up to."
Molly reached for her horse's reins. "I'm ready. Let's go."
Longarm caught hold of her arm and stopped her. "Not hardly," he said. "You're going back down the mountain--now."
"No, I'm not," Molly said defiantly. "I'm going to help you."
"That's what I meant. Go back to the ranch and tell your pa and Joe Traywick what's going on up here. Tell 'em to send some of the Diamond K hands up that coulee, and have 'em be ready for trouble. I'm liable to need reinforcements, Molly."
She looked doubtful. "I don't know..."
"It's the best thing you can do for me," he told her honestly.
"Well... all right." Her agreement was reluctant, but Longarm hoped she would go through with it.
"I just wouldn't mention anything else that happened up here," he added, pulling the sheepskin jacket closed over her torn shirt and buttoning it. He was aware of the soft pressure of her breasts against the cloth, but tried not to think about what had gone on earlier. He didn't need that sort of distraction right now.
"Don't worry," she said. "That was just between the two of us." She came up on her toes and kissed him again, hard. "And I'll never forget it. Custis. Never."
"Neither will I," he told her, knowing that was what she wanted to hear. Knowing too that there was a grain of truth in what he said. The memory might fade, but it would always be there, deep inside him. He turned her around and patted her on the rump. "Now scoot."
She mounted up and walked her horse out of the boulders. Longarm followed. Both of them moved carefully and quietly. The grass in the tiny valley helped muffle the steps of the horses. When they reached the upper end of the coulee, Molly paused and turned to give Longarm a brave smile. He smiled and nodded, then waved her into motion once more. She started down the coulee.
He turned and rode across the valley to the spot where the upper trail began, the trail that Jared Flint had taken. It was little more than a goat path. Longarm knew he was going to have to be very careful. The vegetation up here was sparse, so there was little cover. If Flint looked back at the wrong time, he was liable to spot Longarm following him.
That was a chance he was going to have to take, Longarm told himself. Fortunately, the trail had a lot of twists and bends in it as it weaved up toward the peak, and there were more of those good-sized boulders scattered about, providing a few hiding places if necessary. His nerves taut with anticipation, Longarm began climbing once more.
Once again, he was thankful for the good fortune that had led him to rent such a trustworthy mount from the livery stable in Timber City. The roan never faltered as it made its way up the steep slope. It placed each hoof carefully, so that no stones rolled underneath its feet. Such a slip could have led to a bad fall; at best, the clatter of rocks bouncing down the mountain might alert Flint that someone was following him. But with the help of the roan, Longarm was able to proceed steadily up the slope. Every so often, he caught a glimpse of Flint several hundred yards above him. When that happened, he slowed down a little, dropping back so that Flint couldn't see him should the timber company foreman happen to glance behind him.
The two men continued up the mountain, and Longarm had to wonder just how high Flint intended to go. Those stolen cattle couldn't have been driven this far up the peak, he decided. They had been disposed of in some other fashion, maybe taken through a pass to the other side of the Cascades. Either that, or they had been driven in the opposite direction, into the ranchlands of the broad Willamette Valley. Getting rid of them there might have attracted more notice and raised more questions, but it wasn't inconceivable.
Maybe his whole theory was wrong, thought Longarm. Maybe there wasn't a hideout up here after all.
That was when he caught sight of a tendril of almost colorless smoke curling into the sky from somewhere several hundred yards above him. From the lower slopes of the mountain, the smoke would have been practically invisible.
Longarm grinned. Somebody had a campfire burning up here, and he figured that camp was Jared Flint's destination.
Longarm dismounted. Despite the roan's surefootedness, he would have to go the rest of the way on foot. Couldn't risk letting whoever was up there know that Flint had been followed. The wind had gotten stronger and chillier the higher Longarm climbed, so before he left the horse he took his jacket from the saddlebags and put it on.
"Sorry there's no graze for you here, old son," he said quietly as he patted the horse on the neck. "We'll be back down in grass country after a while."
He left the roan tied to a scrubby pine and started up the trail once more. His hand hovered near the butt of his Colt as he climbed. His heart was slugging heavily in his chest from the elevation, the exertion, and maybe a little bit from anticipation. He didn't know for sure what he was going to find, but he sensed he was drawing near the end of this case--one way or the other.
This high up the mountain, he thought it unlikely there would be any guards posted, but he kept his eyes and ears wide open just in case. He hadn't seen any sign of Flint for several minutes now.
Suddenly, a bench opened up in front of him. This shelf of fairly level land was several hundred yards long and half that deep. Longarm dropped into a crouch behind a boulder that was perched next to the rim. From there, he could see that the bench was much like the valley down below where he and Molly had made love, only somewhat larger. The ground had a thin cover of grass on it, and a few trees were clustered around what was evidently a spring of some sort. A little creek meandered off to the right end of the bench, where it spilled over the side in a waterfall. Longarm was willing to bet that water was mighty clear and mighty cold. It made him thirsty just thinking about it.
But his attention was focused much more on the trio of ramshackle cabins built around the spring. Old prospectors' shacks, more than likely, he thought, left over from the days when folks had hoped to find gold up here. Somebody had repaired the cabins and built a pole corral, in which a couple of dozen horses grazed.
The horse Jared Flint had been riding was tied up in front of one of the cabins. There was no other sign of the timber company foreman.
Flint had to be inside the cabin, thought Longarm, no doubt conferring with the men who were hiding out here. The men he had hired to raid the lumber camp, to rustle cattle from the Diamond K... and who knows what other deadly errands he had planned for them to carry out?
He had to get closer, Longarm knew. Had to find out just what the next step in Flint's scheme was going to be. He hoped that Molly had reached the ranch without any trouble, because he was going to need help rousting these outlaws from their den.
A foot scraped on rock behind him.
Longarm twisted, his hand flashing to the Colt on his hip. He palmed the gun from the cross-draw rig and started to bring it up, his finger tightening on the trigger. He expected the crash of a shot or the impact of a blow at any instant, and he cursed himself for getting so caught up in his thoughts that he had let someone sneak up on him. Such carelessness was probably about to be the death of him, but at least he would go down fighting.
He froze, finger taut on the trigger, as Molly stepped back sharply and gasped in fear and surprise.
"Son of a bitch!" Longarm hissed. "Girl, I almost blew your head off!" Tremors of reaction went through him.
"I... I didn't mean to startle you," Molly stammered. "I saw you up here, and I knew you must have... must have found something."