Page 43 of Hell and Gone
The land where Carson had been murdered.
Further down the mountain from Carson’s murder site, in the same strip of public land, lay Whiskey Gulch.
“You know, Howell has always made noise about closin’ those public lands. Lockin’ up the Crazies, keeping the ranch land private. Denyin’ public easements through private property. I didn’t much agree with him, but…” Lawrence shook his head. “Seems like our murderers been usin’ that land.” His finger traced the cottonwood grove north of the Lazy Twenty-Two.
Carson’s final moments had been in that grove. Had he looked down at the pastures where they used to ride together?
He pushed that away. “Good riders could cut stock out of herds from these pastures,” he said, clearing his clenched throat. He circled pastures high on the slopes of the Crazies on Endless Sky and Lazy Twenty-Two range. “And then drive that cattle through the Gap. Called Cowboy Gap by us locals, but it doesn’t have a name on the map.” He traced his finger down the knife edge of a mountain pass until it petered out near Heart’s Rafter next to the public lands. An outflow off one of the hundred unnamed mountain rivers wandered through the area, bending around and through the area. “They take this route, then the rustlers can drive the cattle out to clear country. It’s empty out there. You can go miles without seein’ a soul.”
“That river passes by Whiskey Gulch.” Everett stepped back. That look had fallen across his features, the hard look, the face of a hunter. “That’s where we’re going,” Everett said. “And I know what we’ll find.”
Chapter 14
Treacherouswasthe word he’d given to Everett, describing the trail down to Whiskey Gulch.
He’d been too generous.
The Crazies were an eldritch place, filled with more than two centuries of ghosts and choked with even older mysteries. The trail to Whiskey Gulch seemed to gather all those haunted stories, every whispered fear ever spoken, and collected them in the shadows of the pines and the tangled brush. The mountains were normally alive with movement, animals of all size weaving to and fro: deer nibbling through their trails, picking on grasses and roots. Elk grazing the high pastures. Bear sign on big pines scattered across the north slope. Squirrels and rabbits always scampered in the brush, and birds flittered from branch to branch overhead.
Now, not a whisper of breath stirred on the trail. It seemed like all life in the mountains had fallen silent, had fled. Even the sun seemed to still, the golden light turned to a gloom. Not even an insect buzzed.
The silence was louder than a scream, and scraped down Lawrence’s bones. For a man attuned to every sound the mountains made, it was a warning as loud as an alarm.
Even the lonely places, the empty places, had sounds. Had movement.
Shadows clawed for them both, riding together on Trigger. Everett sat in front of Lawrence again, sheltered in his hold. Trigger moved slower but carried them both steadily.
They were walking into silence, and it made him want to fight, lash out before whatever was out there came for them first. He cradled an old shotgun he’d taken from the line camp trailer in the hollow of his arms and scanned the trees. Everett kept one hand on the reins and one hand on the holster of his pistol.
Their bodies moved together, swaying with Trigger’s movements. Everett’s back pressed against Lawrence’s chest, his hips, his thighs, every part of the man touching part of Lawrence. He was alive with Everett, smelling him, the sweat and dust and leather mixture that was all male, all cowboy, and all Everett.
Everett calmed the inferno of his temper. He was the whistling wind cooling his soul. Kept him alert. Kept him focused.I won’t let you die. I swear it.
Their path brought them down perpendicular to the trail the rustlers might have used to drive the cattle through, all the way to Whiskey Gulch.
Everett wanted to sneak up on the place. See who or what was down there. Take the lay of the land.
It was afternoon when they reached the rim of Whiskey Gulch, the edge of a gorge carved into the mountains. Sometime long ago, water had carved the mountain in two and left behind the gorge. Almost a thousand feet deep, the gulch was a dark stab in the earth, so narrow the sunlight skirted the edges, avoided the depths. A rushing tributary of the river flowing off Crazy Peak roared at them from the bottom of the gulch, the sound crawling up the sheer walls.
Lawrence dismounted Trigger and peered over the rim. “No rustler is drivin’ a herd down there,” he said. “The herd would panic. Cattle don’t like spaces like that.”
“I don’t think the herd’s been down there. They’ve been resting nearby. But the camp, and who we’re after—” Everett jerked his chin to the gorge. “If you needed to disappear in these mountains, where would you go?”
“There are better places than this. Just gettin’ down there is liable to kill a man. This place has been dead man’s land for a century. Not even the bootleggers used it.”
“What if you were faking your death? And you couldn’t be seen, couldn’t chance it at all?”
Lawrence frowned. “Who do you mean?”
“I think I know who is rustling the herds and why Carson was murdered. And why you’re being framed. If I’m right, we’ll find them down there.”
“Then let’s go.” He held out his hand for Everett and helped him off Trigger’s back. “We’ll leave him up here.” He tied Trigger’s lead to a tree, giving him enough room to stretch and feed on the grass.
There was one rocky trail, juts of boulders and broken chunks of rock, that slashed across one wall of the gorge all the way to the bottom. Here and there, wooden planks had been stretched from rocky outcropping to outcropping, forming nearly-rotten bridges over a gut-clenching drop. They picked their way down the gorge carefully, hugging the rock wall, sometimes leaping across to the next jutting boulder. By the time they reached the bottom, they were both dripping with sweat and breathing hard.
The gulch was choked with brush, dead tree trunks and limbs from a hundred winters that rolled down the mountain and fell into the earth with each melting snow. The river in the base was calmer than it sounded, and the debris created gentle pools and soft waterfalls, crystal clear water tumbling over ageless wood worn smooth and jutting river rock. In the shade of the ravine’s walls, elder and ash grew, and one willow listed almost sideways at the head of a deep and wide pool. Its feather branches skirted the water’s surface. This far down, there was no wind.
Lawrence stepped wrong on a boulder and slid, his boot slapping the burbling water. Rocks scattered when his boot splashed. The sound was loud as a gunshot and carried, echoing off the ravine’s soaring rock walls.
