pursue, Ellen Naile restrained herself from jumping down from the saddle and running to the blanketed form. Instead, hands trembling, she walked her horse slowly, inscribing a rough circle around the campfire. She eased the revolver at her right side in its holster, the hammer thong tucked away, her fingers contacting the Colt’s smooth wooden grips.
There was no evidence of an ambush.
Slowly, keeping her right hand touching the revolver, Ellen dismounted. Cautiously, Ellen approached the body as she drew one revolver, then the other. As she raised her eyes, she spotted something shining up at her from near her right boot. Holstering the revolver from her left hand, she crouched, picking up the shiny object. It was a cartridge case, big enough to be a .45. Her glasses were in her saddlebags, but when she held the yellow-brass case at just the right angle and distance, she could make out what Jack always called the “head stamp,” and it read “FC.”
Jack used commercially available ammunition from the period for some of his target practice, but refused to use anything but the Federal Cartridge ammunition in his special Colt, or any revolver he might carry for defense.
Jack had been shooting here, and had been well enough afterward to empty the spent cases from the revolver after he was through. Her heart leapt, but she’d always felt that she should have been born in Missouri rather than Illinois—she’d believe that Jack wasn’t the body under the blanket when she confirmed the fact with her own eyes.
Dropping the empty case back into the mud, she walked toward the body. Just to be safe, she kicked the body in the side, where the hip would be. There was no movement. Again, she kicked it, in the ribs. Nothing.
Looking over her shoulder, glancing all about her, Ellen turned her eyes to the blanket-covered form and tugged the rough gray fabric from the face and downward.
“Oh, shit,” Ellen gasped. It was the face of Titus Blake, blue veins tracing a map across gray skin, eyelids rolled back, eyes staring. She drew the blanket downward. Blake’s torso was heavily blood spattered, the blood caked and brown. He’d been shot, at least twice, a careful inspection for additional wounds not something in which she had any interest.
The man leading the riderless horse was her husband; and, although she couldn’t be certain, Ellen would have laid odds, whatever the reason, that the bullets inside Titus Blake had traveled down the barrel of one of Jack’s Colts.
Pulling the blanket up, tucking it around the dead man as securely as she could, Ellen Naile took a deep breath.
Jack and Lizzie were the religious ones of the family, but she shot a glance heavenward before grabbing the reins of her horse and holstering her revolver.
Helen Bledsoe, a heavy rag tied over her face, obscuring her eyes and mouth, visibly shivered. She was bound around her upper body and legs with—Jack Naile focused the binoculars more precisely—barbed wire. Her filthy, tattered dress was everywhere splotched with blood, some of it clearly dried, some of it obviously fresh.
The eight men who had set their midday camp in the cratered out depression of gravel and dirt, a poorly made fire at its center, were drifting up into the higher surrounding rocks, leading their horses, the cinches loose. Some of the men held their saddle carbines cradled in their elbows or swinging at the end of an outstretched arm.
The Bledsoe girl, Jack thought, was clearly the pathetic cheese in the mousetrap.
The plan, apparently, had been for Blake to lead Jack into the killing ground, Helen Bledsoe’s plight so intentionally and obviously tragic as to force anyone with the slightest modicum of human compassion to fling caution to the winds in an attempt to aid her. Blake would likely have declared, “Jack—get her and I’ll cover you,” or something to that effect.
Jack was not short on compassion, but neither would getting himself killed help Helen.
From his observation point well over two hundred yards out at the height of a rocky defile, he meticulously noted the position of each of the eight would-be ambushers. He waited and waited some more.
An hour passed by the face of his leather-cased Rolex, then another and half of a third. The eight men were already shifting uncomfortably. At least two of them had dug cat holes to urinate. One man was nursing a pint bottle of whiskey. Still another had set down his rifle, turned his back on the scene below and