"I'm a friend. Do you hear me? I'm a friend."
The man didn't move.
"Mister?" Janna whispered, touching his naked shoulder, shaking him lightly, calling to him in her low, husky voice.
There was no sign that he heard.
Carefully Janna sat on her heels next to the man, letting fragrant pinon boughs brush over her. She slid her hand around his neck until she could press against the jugular… and breathed out. Her first impression was of fiery heat, then of the strength in his muscular neck, and then finally she felt the slow, somewhat ragged beating of his heart. From the size of the lump on the side of his head, she was surprised that he had remained conscious long enough to get this far.
"You're not going another inch, are you?" she asked very softly.
The man didn't disagree.
With gentle fingers Janna probed his head wound. Though it was puffy, there was no softness of crushed bone beneath. Nor was blood pooling in the dirt anywhere around his big body, which meant that none of his wounds were bleeding him to death.
Once Janna assured herself of that, she didn't waste any more time checking injuries. The stranger's extraordinary efforts had ended up defeated by a dead end against a stone cliff, but his original plan was still good-take such a difficult route up the side of the plateau that Cascabel wouldn't think to look there for an injured man. All Janna had to do was backtrack, thoroughly wiping out the man's trail as she went. Then she would lay a false trail in another direction and sneak back up to the stranger to make sure that he kept quiet until Cascabel tired of the game and went back to camp.
Slowly Janna worked back down the man's trail, doing a thorough job this time of removing all signs that anyone had come this way. Where blood had fallen onto loose stone, she picked up the stained rock and substituted another of like size. Where the man's feet had disturbed earth, she brushed it flat once more and sifted dust and plant debris over the surface.
She worked in this manner past several places where he could have chosen other routes to the left or right, up the slope or down. When she came to another place where he had a choice of directions, she pulled a knife from the sheath at her waist, gritted her teeth and cut her arm until blood flowed.
Using her own blood, Janna laid a false trail, concealed it so hastily that it could be detected readily by a warrior with sharp eyes, and began a long, slanting descent to the base of the plateau, heading away from the renegades' camp. As she went, she made more obvious attempts to conceal her direction each time there was a logical choice in routes to make. The closer to Mustang Canyon she came, the less blood she left behind, for she wanted to suggest to the renegades that their quarry wasn't badly wounded; that, in fact, he was bleeding less and less with each moment. Hopefully, when the blood spoor disappeared, the Indians wouldn't be suspicious.
Just as Janna reached the broad mouth of Mustang Canyon, she heard Cascabel's men. They were behind her- and they had just discovered the trail of their prey.
Chapter Two
Trapped by Mustang Canyon's high rock walls, the cries of the renegades echoed eerily, making Janna feel surrounded. She redoubled her speed, running hard toward the head of the wide, deep canyon. As she ran, she pulled the bandanna from her neck and wrapped her arm so that no more drops of blood would fall to the ground.
By the time Janna found the tiny side canyon she had been headed for, she was breathing raggedly. Even so, she took great care to mask her trail when she turned into the twisting slot that opened onto the floor of Mustang Canyon. The feeder canyon she had chosen was extremely deep and narrow. The creek that lay in the tiny canyon's bottom was dry, for it carried water only in the wet season or after summer cloudbursts.
No more than six feet wide as it opened onto Mustang Canyon's broad floor, the slot was a hundred feet deep. Only if the sun were directly overhead did any light reach the bottom of the finger canyon. Thirty feet up the sides were marks of previous floods-brush and small trees wedged into crevices, water stains, small boulders perched precariously in water-smoothed hollows. The floor of the feeder canyon was a dry wash paved with boulders and fine deposits of silt and dried mud, all of which angled steeply back into the body of the plateau.
Leaving no trace of her passage, Janna leaped from boulder to boulder up the slot canyon's floor until it became so narrow that she couldn't extend both arms out from her sides at the same time. At this point the top of the canyon-which was the surface of the plateau itself-was only fifty feet away. Farther on, when the red stone walls pressed in even more tightly, she turned sideways, put her back against one wall and her feet against the opposite wall and inched up the chimney like opening. The top was only thirty feet away, but her progress was dangerously slow. If one of Cascabel's men should happen into the tiny side canyon, she would be discovered within minutes.
In the distance came shouts from the renegades. Janna ignored them, concentrating only on climbing out of the slot canyon and onto the relative safety of the plateau beyond. By the time she reached the top, she was trembling with the effort of levering her body up the narrow opening. She heaved herself over the edge and lay flat, breathing in great gasps, trembling all over and stinging from the scrapes and cuts she had gotten from the stone walls.
What am I complaining about? she asked herself tartly. He suffered a lot worse and kept going. And if I don't do the same, he's going to come to and thrash around and groan and Cascabel will find him and spend the next four days torturing him to death.
The thought galvanized Janna. The stranger was too strong and too courageous for her to permit him to die at Cascabel's cruel hands. She pushed herself to her feet and began trotting across the top of Black Plateau, whose rumpled forests, meadows, and crumbling edges she knew as well as any human being ever had. The plateau was part of the summer grazing territory of Lucifer's band.
Janna had spent five years following Lucifer's band, caring for the sick or the lame, taming those animals that hungered for human companionship or easy food, leaving free those horses that could not accept anything from man's hand, even safety. One of those horses had become Janna's only companion in the plateau's wildness, coming to her freely, staying with her willingly, carrying her on wild rides across the rugged land. It was that horse Janna hoped to find now. The band often grazed this part of the plateau in the afternoon.
She found Lucifer and his harem grazing along one of the plateau's many green meadows, some of which ran like a winding river of grass between thick pine forests. A tiny creek trickled down the center of the sinuous meadow.
Janna lifted her hands to her mouth. Moments later a hawk's wild cry keened over the meadow. She called three times, then went to one of the small caches she had scattered across the plateau and surrounding countryside for the times when Cascabel amused himself by pursuing her. From the cache she took a canteen, a handful of rawhide thongs, a leather pouch that was full of various herbs, a blanket and a small leather drawstring bag that contained some of the gold that Mad Jack insisted was her father's share of his gold mine. As her father had been dead for five years, Mad Jack simply paid her instead.
After a moment of hesitation, Janna removed a knife as well, the last item in the small cache. It took just seconds and a few lengths of rawhide thongs to transform the blanket into a makeshift pack. She slung the pack diagonally across her back and looked over to where the wild horses grazed. Lucifer was staring in her direction with pricked ears, but he was not alarmed. Though he had never permitted her to come within fifty feet of him, he no longer ran from or threatened to attack her. He had come to accept Janna as a particularly slow and awkward horse that showed up from time to time carrying delicacies such as rock salt and grain-certainly no threat to his band despite the man odor that accompanied her.