"That's good enough," he said brusquely.
"But I'm not fin-"
Janna's words ended as though cut off by a knife. Into the taut silence came the sound of a rock bouncing and rolling down the slope.
Ty's hands shifted with shocking speed. In an instant Janna found herself jerked over his body and then jammed between his broad back and the face of the cliff.
Naked and weaponless but for the knife, Ty waited to see what scrambled up over the rockfall and into the pinon-filled hollow.
Chapter Four
A soft nicker floated through the air as a horse scrambled over the last of the rockfall and into the hollow.
"What the hell?" whispered Ty.
Janna peeked over his back. "Zebra!"
"Boy, can't you tell a horse from a zebra!"
"Better than you can tell a girl from a boy," Janna muttered.
"What?"
"Let me out," she said, pushing against Ty's back.
"Ouch!"
Instantly Janna lifted her hand and apologized. Ty grunted and moved aside so that she could crawl out over his legs. Zebra walked up to the edge of the pifion grove, pushed her head in and nickered again.
"Hello, girl," Janna said softly, rubbing the velvet muzzle. "Did you get lonesome without me?"
Zebra whuffled over Janna's fingers, nudged her hands, and kept a wary eye on Ty all the while. When he moved, her head came up and her nostrils flared.
"Be still," Janna said. "She's not used to people."
"What does she think you are?"
"A bad-smelling horse."
Ty laughed softly. The sound made Zebra's ears twitch. He began talking in a gentle, low voice.
"You've got a better nose than my daddy's best hound ever did," he said. Without looking aside he asked Janna, "How long have you owned her?"
"I don't."
"What?"
"I don't own her. She likes me, that's all. Some horses enjoy people, if you approach them the right way."
"And some horses damn near get people killed," Ty said. "I was about ten seconds away from dropping my loop on Lucifer's neck when Cascabel jumped me."
Janna's heart hesitated, then beat faster. Despite Lucifer's refusal to approach her, she thought of him somehow as her own horse. "How did you get so close to him?"
"I'm a fair tracker when I'm not half-dead," Ty said dryly.
"The shamans say that no mortal man will ever capture Lucifer. He's a spirit horse."
Ty shook his head. "That old boy is pure flesh and blood, and he sires the best colts I've seen west of the Mississippi. Lucifer's my ticket to the future that the Civil War took away from the MacKenzie family. With him I'm going to found the kind of herd that my daddy always wanted. He would have had it, too, except for the war. The four MacKenzie brothers rode off to battle on his best horses. They saved our lives more than once."
Janna saw Ty's mouth harden. He shrugged as though to throw off unhappy memories. Into the silence came the rumble of distant thunder and the scrape of branches stirring beneath a wind that smelled of moisture.
"Hope it rains soon," Ty said, looking up at the massed thunderheads. "Otherwise that big dog's tracks are going to lead Cascabel right to us."
"It will rain."
The confidence in Janna's voice made Ty turn and look at her intently.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"I just…know," she said slowly. "I've lived with the land so long that I know a lot of its secrets."
"Such as?"
"Such as-when the air over the Fire range gets an odd sort of crystal shine to it and then clouds form, it always rains about two hours before sundown. It rains hard and cold and sudden, like an ocean turned upside down and pouring back to earth. After an hour or two some of the finger canyons run twenty feet deep with water." Janna pushed away the mare's muzzle and looked at Ty. "Are you still dizzy?"
Ty wasn't surprised that his occasional dizziness had been noticed. He was discovering that not much escaped those clear gray eyes.
"Some," he admitted. "It comes and goes."
"Do you think you can get over that rockfall if I help?"
"Count on it, with or without your help."
Janna looked at the determined lines of Ty's face and the latent power in his big body and hoped he was right. The rocky hollow had been useful, but it would become a lethal trap the instant Cascabel scrambled up and found his prey. The sooner they left, the better it would be.
There was only one haven Janna could think of. It lay on the southeast side of Black Plateau, at the edge of Cascabel's ill-defined territory. It was a spirit place avoided by Indians, whose legends told of a time when the mountain had roared in anguish and split open and thick red blood had gushed forth, spirit blood that made everything burn, even stone itself. When the blood finally cooled it had become the dark, rough rock that gave Black Plateau its name. There, at the foot of ancient lava flows and sandstone cliffs, Janna had found a keyhole canyon snaking back into the solid body of the plateau. Once past the narrow entrance, the canyon widened out into a parklike area that was thick with grass and sparkling with sweet water. It was there she wintered, secure in the knowledge that no warriors or outlaws would see her tracks in the snow.
It had been her secret place, as close to a home as she had ever known. She had shared it with no one. The thought of sharing it with Ty made her feel odd. Yet there really was no other choice.
"Soon as I get you patched up," Janna said, turning to her bag of herbs, "we'll go to a keyhole canyon I know about. Nobody else has any idea that it exists, except maybe Mad Jack, and he hardly counts."
"Mad Jack? I thought he was a legend."
"He's old enough to be one."
"You've actually seen him?"
Janna dug out the herbal paste she had made during the long hours of daylight while Ty had slept. "Yes, I've seen him," she said, and began dabbing the paste on the worst of Ty's cuts.
"I've heard he has a gold mine hidden somewhere on Black Plateau."
Her hands paused, then resumed slathering on medication. "Whatever Mad Jack has or doesn't have is his business."
Ty's black eyebrows lifted at Janna's curt words, "Ouch! Watch it, boy, that's not stone you're poking."
"Sorry," she said in a tight voice.
For several moments Ty watched the gray eyes that refused to meet his.
"Hey," he said finally, catching Janna's chin in his big hand, forcing her to meet his eyes. "I'm not going to hurt that old man no matter how much gold he might have found. I'm not a thief or a raider. I'm not going to build my future on bloodstained gold."
Janna searched the green eyes that were so close to hers and saw no evasion. She remembered Ty telling her to leave him and save herself, and she remembered how he had put his own body between her and whatever danger might have been coming into the hollow. Abruptly she felt ashamed of her suspicions.
"I'm sorry," Janna said. "It's just that I've had men follow me out of town when I buy supplies with a bit of gold I've found here and there. It's usually easy enough to lose the men, but it hasn't given me a very kind opinion of human nature."
The surge of anger Ty felt at the thought of a child having to lose white men in the rocks as though they were Indian renegades surprised him. So did the protectiveness he felt toward this particular child. Uneasily it occurred to Ty that beneath the shapeless old hat and the random smears of dirt, the youth's face was… extraordinary.
My God, I've seen women a hell of a lot less beautiful than this boy. Maybe the men weren't following gold, after all.
Ty snatched his hand back as though he had been burned. The sudden movement made Zebra shy away violently.