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  And the mission that had taken John Henry there in the first place could continue.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Late in the afternoon, John Henry spotted another rider coming toward him along the ravine from the northeast. It was Purcell, and Byrne soon joined them from the southwest.

  “Any problems during the day?” Purcell asked John Henry as the three men gathered at the rim.

  “Not a one,” John Henry lied with a straight face. “I didn’t see a soul.”

  Byrne pointed. “That looks like a fresh bruise on your jaw.”

  “Must be the light,” John Henry said. “Or one still fading from that scrap the other day.”

  Both outlaws looked suspicious, but they didn’t say anything else.

  That told John Henry they must not have known about Gunderson coming out to jump him. “What do we do now?”

  Purcell pulled a turnip watch from his vest pocket and opened it to check the time. “Our relief ought to be along in a few minutes. We wait for them, and then we go back to the ranch and take it easy until the next job the boss has for us.”

  “You mean Garrett.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Purcell said. “Who else?”

  “I just sort of had the feeling that Miss Dalmas is really calling the shots around here.”

  Purcell shrugged. “It’s true nobody messes with the Flame.”

  “How did she come to be running a ranch for outlaws, anyway?” John Henry knew owlhoots liked to gossip as much as anybody.

  Purcell hesitated about replying, but Byrne said, “She came by it natural-like. Her daddy was Harley Dalmas.”

  John Henry shook his head. “Don’t reckon I know the name.”

  “He raised hell all over western Kansas and Nebraska back before the war. The Injuns were causing plenty of trouble then, but they never bothered Harley because he ran guns and whiskey to ’em. Somewhere along the way he met Lottie’s ma and married her. When the war came along, he rode with Quantrill and Bloody Bill and got a leg blowed off. But that didn’t stop him. After the Rebs surrendered, Harley went back to doin’ the only thing he knew, bein’ an outlaw. He had to stump around on a peg to do it, though, and came a time he had to quit. He took over this ranch, and the Flame was with him. She wasn’t much more’n a kid at the time, but she helped him run it and learned everything he could teach her about bein’ a ruthless cutthroat. When he crossed the divide, she just kept on runnin’ the place.”

  Purcell said disgustedly, “Do you have any words left in that scrawny carcass of yours, or did you spew ’em all out?”

  “Well, hell, the man asked a question, and Lottie never said not to tell anybody about her past, did she?”

  “Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to spill your guts, and hers, too.”

  John Henry said, “I won’t mention hearing the story. I appreciate you satisfying my curiosity, though, Byrne.”

  The outlaw was starting to look a little worried that maybe he had said too much after all. He told John Henry, “Just don’t go blabbin’ about it, and we’ll be fine.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  A few minutes later, the three outlaws taking their place on guard duty came into view. As they rode up and reined in, one of the newcomers said, “Have any of you fellas seen Gunderson out here today?”

  “The Swede?” Purcell asked with a puzzled frown. “Why would we have seen him?”

  “He disappeared sometime during the day, and then later his horse came in looking pretty beat up. The horse came from this direction.”

  Purcell, Byrne, and John Henry looked at each other. John Henry pretended to be as baffled as the other two.

  “I didn’t see him,” Purcell said. “And it would be hard to miss somebody as big as him.”

  Byrne added, “I didn’t see him, either, but I thought I heard a shot come from somewhere around here, about the middle of the day.”

  “So did I,” John Henry said without hesitation, “but I never saw anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Let’s ride along the rim a ways and have a look,” one of the other men suggested.

  They were going to see Gunderson’s body in the ravine, and it was in the section he’d been patrolling, John Henry thought. His brain worked quickly, trying to come up with an explanation for why he hadn’t noticed the corpse.

  It didn’t take them long to reach the spot where Gunderson had gone over the edge. Byrne reined in, exclaimed, “Hey!” and pointed down into the ravine.

  “That’s him, all right,” one of the other men said as he leaned over to peer at the sprawled body. “Looks like he fell. Maybe he shot a snake and his horse spooked or something, threw him off too close to the edge.”

  Purcell asked, “How come you didn’t notice him down there, Saxon?”

  “Well, look how close we are to the edge,” John Henry replied. “I was riding a few yards back from the rim so the very thing this other fella just described wouldn’t happen to me, Purcell. From that angle, I couldn’t see him.”

  The explanation made sense, although it also made him look less than diligent in his duties as a guard. Better that than having Gunderson’s friends know he’d been responsible for the big Swede’s death, though.

  Of course, he really wasn’t responsible, he told himself. It had been Gunderson’s idea to come out and try to kill him. The big man would still be alive if he hadn’t done that.

  “All right, somebody’s gonna have to go down there and get a rope on him so we can haul his carcass out,” Purcell said. “Byrne, you’re the lightest. You get the job.”

  “Me? I’m not very good at climbing,” Byrne protested.

  “We’ll tie a lasso around you and lower you down there. You can tie it around Gunderson and we’ll haul him back up.”

  “Just don’t forget to throw the rope back down to me when you get through,” Byrne said. “I don’t want to have to climb out of that hellhole.”

  The recovery operation went fairly smoothly. The rope was tied to the saddle horn on one of the horses, and it took the mount backing away from the rim plus the other five men hauling on the rope to lift Gunderson’s dead weight.

  When they had the body on level ground, Purcell looked at the damage to Gunderson’s face. “Must’ve landed right on that nose of his when he fell, and that broke his neck.”

  One of the other outlaws added, “The Swede was a pretty touchy son of a gun, but he was a good man to have on your side in a fight.”

  That was about the highest accolade men such as these could pay to a fallen comrade.

  “Hey!” Byrne yelled from down in the ravine. “I said don’t forget about me!”

  Purcell untied the rope from Gunderson’s body and tossed it back down to Byrne. A few minutes later, they had pulled him up on the rim again, without as much effort as had been required for Gunderson.

  “Now that we’ve got Gunderson up here, what do we do with him?” John Henry asked. “He’s so damned big, I’m not sure any of our horses can carry him. Even if one of them did, that man would have to walk back to the ranch.”

  “We can leave him here for now,” Purcell said. “We’ll ride on back and send some of the boys with a wagon for him. The coyotes won’t drag him off before they can get back. That makes the most sense.”

  It did to John Henry, too. He hoped Garrett wouldn’t give him the job of fetching Gunderson’s body or even worse, burying it.

  He wasn’t going to mourn for Sven Gunderson.

  He was going to think some, though, about the discovery he had made today.

  * * *

  Nobody really mourned Gunderson. He was laid to rest with a minimum of fuss and ceremony, in a small fenced-in cemetery a few hundred yards from the ranch house. A couple dozen weather-faded wooden crosses marked the location of earlier graves.

  There were only two headstones in the cemetery, rounded pieces of granite that were also starting to show the effects of time and the elements. Lottie Dalmas paused in fr
ont of them as several of the outlaws shoveled dirt back into the grave containing Gunderson’s body.

  Her parents were buried here. She remembered very little about her mother. She had gotten her red hair from the woman, and that was her only real legacy to her daughter.

  Everything else that made Lottie who she was had come from her father.

  Garrett came up behind her. “Do you think Saxon killed him?”

  Lottie glanced back over her shoulder at him. “You mean Gunderson? From what Purcell said, Saxon seemed as surprised by the whole thing as any of them.”

  “That could have been an act,” Garrett insisted.

  “Of course it could, but you saw Gunderson’s body. There’s no doubt his neck was broken, and he must have done it falling into the ravine.” Lottie smiled coldly. “Do you really think Saxon could have snapped Gunderson’s neck like that?”

  “No,” Garrett said grudgingly. “But he could’ve pushed him over the edge, I suppose.”

  “I have my doubts about even that. No, I think Purcell’s idea is right. Gunderson was riding too close to the rim and his horse threw him for some reason.”

  “Why was he out there in the first place? He wasn’t on guard duty.”

  “He might have been looking for Saxon,” Lottie said. “I wouldn’t rule that out. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t find him, or else it would have been Saxon’s body they pulled up out of the ravine.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Garrett said with a shrug. “And I guess it doesn’t really matter why Gunderson’s dead. What’s important is that we’ve lost a good man.”

  “Not that good,” Lottie snapped. “Gunderson was hard to control. We both know that. He was always liable to fly off the handle and do something stupid. Recruiting Saxon and Mallette makes up for what we lost in Gunderson.”

  “I still don’t trust those two.”

  “I know you don’t . . . but you don’t have to, Simon. I do, and that’s all that matters.”

  Garrett flushed at being put in his place like that, but he didn’t say anything else. He might be the leader of the gang, but she was the mistress of the outlaw sanctuary.

  Of course, he could take it away from her, but he wouldn’t do that. There was too much history between them. Even though Henry had come along and taken his place, his feelings for Lottie were still too strong for him to ever betray her.

  She looked at the tombstones for a moment longer, then turned away, toward the buggy that had brought her to the cemetery. “We need to get back to the house and start planning. Dell Bartlett brought a note from Carson this afternoon.”

  “Why didn’t I know about that?” Garrett said with a frown.

  “You were sleeping, and I didn’t see any need to wake you.”

  “What does Carson want now?”

  “He’s getting antsy. He wants us to go ahead and make our move against Montayne.”

  “I thought the idea was to kill him right in the middle of the bunch, so nobody would suspect it was for any reason other than him being on that jury.”

  “That is the reason Montayne has to die, as far as I’m concerned,” Lottie snapped. “But it gets him out of the way so Carson can move in on his range, so it’s worth it for him to pay us for our help. Carson gets what he wants without having to go through an outright range war to get it.”

  “I know the plan,” Garrett said sullenly. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”

  “I just don’t want you to lose sight of what’s really at stake here, Simon.” Lottie climbed into the buggy and took hold of the reins leading to the black horse hitched to it. “It’s the debt those men owe for what they did to Henry . . . a debt they’re all going to pay in blood.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next day, Simon Garrett assembled the members of the gang in the bunkhouse and told them, “We’re ready for the next move. We’re going after Jed Montayne.”

  “That won’t be easy,” one of the men said. “He’s got a mighty hard-nosed crew working for him on the J Slash M. We may have a hard time getting to him.”

  “That’s why we’ve got to draw him out,” Garrett said. “It’ll be a lot easier to lay our hands on him if we get him away from his headquarters.”

  John Henry recognized Montayne’s name from an earlier conversation with Nick Mallette. Montayne was one of the biggest ranchers in the area, the main rival to J.C. Carson’s Anvil spread.

  However, he hadn’t known until now that Montayne was also a member of the jury that had convicted Henry Garrett.

  Simon Garrett went on. “If we run off some of Montayne’s herd, he’ll come after the rustled stock. We’ll use it to lead him right into a trap. If some of his men get killed”—Garrett shrugged—“well, that’ll just be too bad for them.”

  He went on to explain that they would raid the J/M herd that night as it grazed along Sweetwater Creek, north of Kiowa City.

  “The tracks will be easy enough to follow. We’ll run the stock through Packsaddle Gap, and when Montayne and his hands come through there, we’ll be waiting for them.” Garrett paused. “But here’s the most important thing to remember. Don’t kill Montayne. The Flame has her own plans for him, and she won’t be happy if he dies quick and easy from a bullet.”

  That brought grim chuckles from several of the men. Obviously, they had seen Lottie Dalmas in action before, taking her vengeance for Henry Garrett. John Henry remembered what he had been told about how Lucas Winslow’s body had been found, tortured almost beyond recognition.

  Purcell asked, “Is everybody going along on tonight’s job, Simon?” He glanced at John Henry and Mallette, so it was clear who he was talking about.

  “Almost the whole bunch,” Garrett replied. “Old Cribbins will stay here, and a couple men to guard the trail. The rest of us will be riding an hour after dark, so be ready.”

  He named the two men who would remain behind on sentry duty, and John Henry was glad Garrett didn’t single him out for that chore. With that done, Garrett stalked out of the bunkhouse, leaving the men to talk about the raid they would carry out that night.

  “Looks like I’m going to be a rustler,” Mallette said to John Henry as he sat down on his bunk. “That’s certainly not the profession I started out to follow.”

  “Fate always has its own plans for us,” John Henry said.

  “And a sense of humor as well,” Mallette added wryly. “I, uh, sort of hope it’s all right if I stick fairly close to you tonight, John. I never did this sort of work before.”

  “Sure. Just don’t get in the way.”

  “I’ll certainly try not to.”

  John Henry acted like he wasn’t worried about the gang’s plans, but actually his mind was racing, trying to figure out a way to save Jed Montayne and his men from being bushwhacked.

  The obvious method would be to prevent the raid from taking place, but he doubted that would be possible. He might be able to spoil the ambush, though, and give the rancher and his crew a chance to escape being massacred.

  If it was a fair fight between the cowboys and the outlaws, men would die, for sure, but that would give John Henry time to get back to the ranch and capture Lottie. Her as his prisoner would break up the vengeance scheme to wipe out the jury and Judge Doolittle . . .

  It was something to ponder, anyway, an opportunity to seize if the chance came up.

  An air of excitement and anticipation hung over the ranch that afternoon. While the outlaws all knew that their lives would be at risk during the raid and the subsequent ambush, at least there would be some action again.

  Men such as these lived for the ringing blare of six-guns, the tang of powder smoke, the heart-pounding surge of sensation that went hand in hand with the knowledge that their lives could end at any instant.

  In that respect, they weren’t so much different from many of the lawmen who pursued them, John Henry knew. It wasn’t actually a game, but if it had been, the higher the stakes the better.

  Tonight the
re would be no higher.

  * * *

  Nick Mallette licked his lips nervously as he got ready to mount up. He wore range clothes instead of his gambler’s outfit; an assortment of clothes had been left at the ranch over the years by fugitives who passed through there, and Lottie had told Mallette to take his pick from them.

  “You look like a real cowboy, now,” John Henry told him with a smile as they stood outside the barn, holding the reins of their horses. “Or an owlhoot.”

  Mallette took off his black hat and looked down at the faded blue shirt, the black leather vest, and the denim trousers. Lottie had given him a gunbelt, too, and it was strapped around his waist. “I just hope I won’t let anybody down. I’ve never rustled cattle before. Hell, that jailbreak is really the most illegal thing I’ve done.” “Other than murder,” John Henry pointed out.

  “I told you, that killing was self-defense. Just because I was charged with murder doesn’t make it so.”

  “You’re right, Nick. Sorry I said that.”

  Mallette shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I guess to a certain extent, we are what the world thinks we are.”

  “Now that’s profound, amigo. Here comes Garrett. You ready to ride?”

  “As ready as I’m going to be,” Mallette said.

  “All right, everybody get mounted,” Garrett called as he strode up to the group. “We want to get to Sweetwater Creek before the moon rises.”

  The men, more than a dozen of them, swung into their saddles and rode toward the skull-shaped rock and the zigzagging trail that led down the escarpment.

  John Henry and Mallette were in the middle of the group. John Henry didn’t know if that was coincidence or if Garrett had given orders to keep the two of them surrounded because they were the newcomers and not fully trusted yet.

  It didn’t matter. John Henry wasn’t ready to make his move and wouldn’t be until later in the night. For now, he was going to act like a full-fledged member of the gang.

  Garrett led the night riders through the darkness toward the J/M ranch. It took more than an hour to get there. When they were close to their destination, Garrett held up a hand and called a soft-voiced command for them to halt.