Page 13 of Hell and Gone
He stared Lawrence down. The hotter Lawrence got, the more explosively he blew, the colder Everett felt himself go. He could be ice staring down Lawrence’s fire. It was easy not to feel, especially now. Hands on his hips, he stared. “As long as it takes to do it right.”
Lawrence snorted and paced away. His chaps fluttered around his legs, bowed from decades on horseback. Despite himself, Everett’s gaze drifted down each leather-clad, muscled thigh.
He tore his gaze up as Lawrence whirled. Cleared his throat. “Sheriff Braddock asked me to check out a few known rustling hiding spots and check for stolen stock or tracks at each. If rustlers are rounding up stock, they’re bunching them somewhere out of sight. They’ll get a herd ready and then move them out of these mountains in one drive. If we find where they’re holding the stolen stock, we can find them, or we can find their trail. Moving cattle overland leaves a big mark.” He pulled out the sheet of paper Braddock had given him. “Do you have a map?”
* * *
Lawrence spreadhis worn map over his stallion’s thick thigh. His horse whickered and nibbled on Lawrence’s ear. “Easy, Trigger. Just borrowin’ your big ass for a min’.”
He grumbled as Everett read him the coordinates and plotted each. “Damn technology no good in these mountains. Everyone comes up here with their fool ideas. ‘Bout the only thin’ that works up here is fire and guns.” Muttering under his breath, he calculated the first coordinate. “Aw hell, you don’t need GPS. That’s old Robin’s Roost up on the north face of Crazy Peak. And this one…” He moved down the list. “Is Wind Pass.” He scratched out Braddock’s neat scrawl, longitude and latitude markers, and rewrote the local name in blocky capitals. “And that last one is Cow Gap. While we’re at it, there’s another one not too far off down in the canyons. That’s Whiskey Gulch. I can take you to all of ‘em.”
Not a great idea. Lawrence was out for blood, and if they ran into any rustlers or his missing stock, Everett didn’t have a clear idea what Lawrence would do. How he would react. “I think I should go alone.”
Lawrence blinked. “By all means,” he drawled, folding up his map. “You go right on ahead. When you get to the falls on your way to Robin’s Roost, watch for the crossin’ as there’s some tricky parts where one wrong step’ll kill yourself and your horse and no one will be able to find your body. Oh, and it’s bear country on the north slope, so be sure you’re carrying your rifle in hand.” He patted his own saddle’s rifle scabbard, his rifle secured in easy reach. Everett did not have a rifle. “Not to mention there’s wolf, moose, and wolverine,” he said, counting off on his gloved fingers. “And be extra careful with the canyon down there by Whiskey Gulch. It’s treacherous.” He looked Everett dead in the eye and swung into Trigger’s saddle. “Let’s go, boy.”
Everett’s stomach sank. “Wait!”
“What?” Lawrence circled Trigger slowly, pulling him up before Everett. “Didja say somethin’?”
Everett glared. He held Lawrence’s stare as Lawrence circled him on Trigger’s back, smirking. “Fine. You’ll have to show me the way. But when we get to each camp,Igo in.Icheck it out. Understood?”
“I don’t take orders from you, Army. But since you asked for my help so nice-like—” Lawrence clicked, and Trigger trotted off into the trees. “We’ll hit Cow Gap first. It’s closest.”
Chapter 7
They cameup empty at Cow Gap, nothing but the long-abandoned remains of a rustler camp, windblown cattle carcasses stripped to bleached bone, and dust. “Ain’t no one camped here in a long while,” Lawrence said. “And no one’s moved any cattle through here in that long, neither.”
“How many ways through the Crazies are there?”
Lawrence shrugged. “Depends. Few public trails. One long road. Or a million backcountry ways if you know how to find ‘em. A man managed to get onto my land, didn’t he?”
“About that.” Everett swung back into his saddle and followed Lawrence, heading for Robin’s Roost. The sun was fading from the sky, the light getting long and lean, shadows growing around them. “What abuts your north pasture?”
“Public land. Bureau of Land Management owns it,” he drawled. He slowed his horse, letting Everett come beside him, ride side by side. “Forest Service likes to tromp around up there, keep their claim by public easement open to the public. But most everything aside from the peaks are privately owned, so’s it’s a conundrum how the public can get to the public land without goin’ through private land.”
“The government requires a public easement in that case.”
“Sure, they require it. How often is it honored?” Lawrence shrugged. “I got no problem with good people wanting to hike and enjoy the mountains. It’s beautiful country.” He nodded around them, to the wild trees and untamed country, the towering pines mixed with poplar and ash, and the pastel sky unfurled over the mountains like a blanket shaken out on the wind. “This is raw land. Untouched since time began.”
“You can’t find places like this in the world. Not anymore.”
Lawrence tossed him a half smile. “We work hard to keep it like this.” Warmth underlay his words, a careful, creeping pride.
“You do well.”
“Trouble is,” Lawrence said, after a moment of silence lengthened too long between them, until the early evening seemed to shiver. “It’s not just nice hikers and families that want up into the mountains. Howell over at Endless Sky has been closin’ up the access trails for years, denyin’ public easement. If no hiker comes along a trail for one year, he locks it down. Says the public hasn’t expressed its interest in keepin’ the easement open, so he’s takin’ it back. Forest Service tries to fight him in court, but that’s long and expensive.” He patted Trigger’s neck, ran his gloved fingers through his mane. “Makes you wonder, though. If drug runners and rustlers are gettin’ in, should we just close everythin’ up? Keep all this land locked up tight?”
“That seems like stealing.” The Crazies were like lost jewels from a crown, emerald forests and sapphire lakes and rivers, gold-gilded pastures specked with riots of wildflowers, fire-red ruby poppies and amethyst lilacs and diamond-white daisies. It was hard to imagine this much beauty in the world still existed, if Everett wasn’t riding through it. “Can’t believe one man owns all this.”
“Well, two,” Lawrence said. “It belongs to Mister Delaney, least until the ridge back there.” He pointed behind them, to the aspen and fir-laced slopes they had spent the afternoon climbing, the skies above the loping peaks ablaze with the fire of the setting sun. Tips of the pines cut black slices through the orange and spilled-blood sky. “And the land we’re on now is Endless Sky range.” He waved ahead of him toward the south face of Crazy Peak, wreathed in darkness as the sun sank below its tip. The peak was a claw grasping toward the sky, darkness stabbing overhead. “‘Side from the peak itself, all this land belongs to Dan Howell.” His face twisted.
“You want to tell me about that?”
“’Bout what?”
“The animosity you’ve got for Mister Howell.” There was something there, some kind of history he’d waded into, undercurrents as swift as riptides, a suffocating sense that he was the odd man out in this world. Everyone knew something but him, it seemed. He was left to pick up the pieces in a mystery where no one was sharing clues.
“Nope,” Lawrence said. “I got nothing to say about Howell.” He guided Trigger off the trail, stepping him down into a meadow between two creeks that flowed off Crazy Peak. Above them, high on the rock face of the peak, a waterfall tumbled toward the forest, the pool concealed in the thick woods. Fallen trunks of long dead trees lay scattered in the meadow, and Lawrence dismounted off Trigger beside one rotted trunk. “We’ll camp here tonight. Should be at Robin’s Roost by ten in the morning if we’re up with the sun. We can get back to the ranch tomorrow afternoon.”
