Now Rayna was frowning. “No, I hadn’t noticed that.” She rose to begin her own survey and discovered that he was right. Near the mouth of the 174
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gorge, the horse with the cleft shoe had made three sets of prints. “They’re not in too big a hurry, are they?”
“Or maybe they’re waiting for someone,” Meade suggested thoughtfully.
“Us, you mean,” she replied.
Meade studied her expression and found concern but no fear. “Could be.
Or it could be that some of my brother-in-law’s instincts are wearing off on me. Somehow this just doesn’t feel right.” He started back to the horses with Rayna at his side.
“What kind of terrain do we have coming up?” she asked.
“The kind I’d rather not be traveling through right now,” he answered, wishing the skin on the back of his neck would stop prickling. “This gorge snakes around for another mile or so, then narrows into Denning Pass, a swath of canyon that’s barely wide enough for a wagon.”
Rayna took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “Great ambush country, huh?”
“Exactly. During the early years of the Apache wars, that pass was the site of more ambushes than I care to count. In fact, it got its name from a party of settlers who were massacred there. Road agents have made use of it, too,” he added grimly.
“Is there another way through?”
Meade looked at her. “Nope.”
Nodding thoughtfully, Rayna looked up at the steep walls of the gorge. “If they’re going to attack us, they’ll have to go into the cliffs eventually. I don’t see that we have much choice but to keep going until we lose their trail.”
Regrettably, Meade didn’t see any choice, either. “Let’s lead the horses awhile,” he suggested.
“Agreed.” She removed her Winchester from its scabbard on Triton’s saddle, and Meade followed suit. Moving cautiously, with one of them always keeping an eye on the cliffs above, they followed the trail left by the cleft-shod horse. In sections where the ground became too rocky to show sign, they stopped and Meade scouted ahead until the tracks resumed.
They rounded a bend that led southward, and the gorge began to narrow before it snaked off to the east again.
“They stopped here,” Rayna commented, and Meade crouched beside the prints.
“Yes, but neither of them dismounted.”
Rayna felt her pulse pounding steadily harder with every foot they traveled, and when the tracks disappeared on a rocky shelf of ground, her heart nearly thudded out of her chest. She waited while Meade searched ahead for fresh sign, and when he returned to her, his expression was grim.
“Come on,” he said, taking Chicory’s reins from her and turning the horse in the direction they had just come.
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Rayna had no choice but to follow. “What’s wrong? I didn’t see anyplace where they could have hidden the horses or led them into the cliffs. Didn’t the prints resume?” she asked.
“Yes, but good old Cleft Shoe’s prints don’t look quite as deep as they did before.”
“You think his rider went up into the cliffs and the other one went ahead?”
Meade shook his head in frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being an alarmist, but I don’t want to take any chances. You stay here while I check this out more thoroughly.”
It was a gallant sentiment, but Rayna didn’t care much for heroics. “Meade, how long have you known me?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. Just over three months, I suppose. Why?”
She smiled at him. “What do you think the chances are that I’m going let you leave me here with the horses?”
He sighed with disgust. “Damn poor, I presume.”
“That’s right.”
“Rayna . . .”
His stern look didn’t intimidate her. “Meade, we can argue, or we can get this over with.”
Her stubborn jaw was firmly set, and he knew it was pointless to try to reason with her. “If I go alone, you’ll just follow me, won’t you?”
She nodded.
“All right. I guess I’d rather have you where I can keep an eye on you.”
“Where we can keep an eye on each other,” she corrected.
Meade shook his head as he tethered Chicory to a stout scrub near the base of a cliff. “God, but you’re stubborn.” He replaced his rifle in its scabbard and advised Rayna to do the same. “If we have to climb, the rifles will only make it more difficult,” he explained, and she couldn’t argue with his logic. Once the canyon narrowed, they wouldn’t need long-range weapons, anyway.
Rayna just hoped they wouldn’t need them at all.
With the horses secured a good distance away, they returned to the rock shelf where Cleft Shoe’s tracks became shallower. They studied the ground and finally found a clear boot print near the east wall of the gorge. Loosened rocks showed them where someone had started climbing, and Meade abandoned all hope that his imagination had just been working overtime. They went up and found a ledge that ran parallel to the trail, then moved along it with as much stealth as they could manage.
A few feet after the canyon curved sharply to the left, the ledge ended and they began climbing again, following the trail of dislodged rocks and an occasional boot print in the soft red clay. Ahead, Rayna could finally see the 176
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mouth of Denning Pass, and she was grateful to be on the cliffs rather than trapped in the bowels of the narrow arroyo.
“Okay, this is as far as you go,” Meade whispered when they stopped to rest beneath a sheltered overhang that hid the mouth of the pass from view.
“Meade, we agreed—”
“We agreed that you wouldn’t stay with the horses. I’m going to follow our clumsy friend and see if I can get the drop on him from behind.”
“And what about his friend? You know . . . the one who went ahead through the pass. Remember him?”
“Of course I do. Unless I miss my guess, he’s already left the horses somewhere on the other side and has climbed into the cliffs, too.”
“Then we should both go.”
“No,” he said as adamantly as he could and still keep his voice low. “You stay here and keep an eye out. That’s an order.”
“But—”
“Rayna, for God’s sake, just shut up and for once do as you’re told,” he said, then ducked out of their little hidey-hole.
Concerned that she might stupidly follow him, Meade spent nearly as much time looking over his shoulder as he did concentrating on the shelf he was climbing. After a few minutes, though, it became obvious that she had done the sensible thing, and he devoted all his attention to following the difficult trail left by the brigand who was waiting somewhere ahead in Denning Pass.
Back in her hiding place, Rayna wasted very little time fuming over Meade’s dictatorial command. She could never have followed without him seeing her, but that wasn’t the logical thing to do, anyway. What they needed was a bird’s-eye view of the pass, and the only way to get it was to go straight up.
After backtracking to a likely spot, she began free-climbing with the same steady skill that she and Skylar had learned when they were thirteen years old and had been trapped in Diablo Canyon by a flash flood. It was a difficult but not impossible climb, and within thirty minutes she had reached the top, where a surprisingly flat mesa awaited her.
Keeping away from the edge, where she might have been spotted from the opposite side of the canyon, she hurried toward Denning Pass. When the opposing rock walls finally narrowed to a point where she could easily have tossed a stone across to the other side, she dropped to her stomach and crawled to the edge.