Without a word Janna turned and began running in a different direction, following the trail Lucifer had left during his panicked flight away from the meadow.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Head down, his attention focused on the wild horse trail, Ty trotted rapidly through the forest toward the meadow. Tracks and signs abounded, but he could see without slowing that nothing was less than a few days old. He was looking for much fresher marks.
He found them less than two hundred feet from the meadow itself.
The empty rye bottle glittered on top of the pine needles. The bottle hadn't been there long, for when Ty picked it up and sniffed, the smell of alcohol was strong in his nostrils. Nearby was a tree stained with urine from chest high to the ground. There were hoof tracks left by a shod horse next to the tree.
From that point the trail was easy to reconstruct. Troon- for Ty was certain that the empty bottle had belonged to Joe Troon rather than to a solitary Indian-had been relieving himself from the saddle when something had surprised him.
"I'll bet he was hot on Lucifer's trail and had to piss so bad that his back teeth were floating," Ty said very softly, believing that Janna was right behind. "So there he was, still in the saddle and pissing up a storm when he saw Lucifer through the trees, dropped everything and grabbed for his rifle. Lord, what a mess that must have been."
When Janna made no comment, Ty turned and looked at his own trail. Janna was nowhere in sight.
The uneasiness that had been riding Ty crystallized in an instant of stabbing fear. He ignored his first impulse, which was to backtrack along his own trail until he found Janna. That would take too long, for he had come nearly half a mile. Obviously Troon's trail and Lucifer's crossed somewhere ahead. If Ty followed one and Janna followed the other, they would meet much quicker than if he retraced his own tracks and then hers, as well.
If both of them were really lucky, none of Cascabel's renegades would ride over to find the cause of the single rifle shot. But Ty really didn't expect that kind of luck.
Swearing savagely to himself, he began trotting along the trail left by the shod horse. Within ten yards he spotted the brass from a spent cartridge gleaming among pine needles. The shine of the metal told Ty that the cartridge hadn't been long out of a rifle barrel. He had no doubt that it was the debris of the shot that had awakened Janna and himself less than half an hour ago. He also had no doubt what the intended target had been.
You drunken, greedy swine. If you've murdered that stallion I'll roast you over a slow fire and serve you to Cascabel with an apple in your mouth.
Rifle shots split the silence, followed by the wild cries of Indian renegades hot on a human trail. Fear splintered through Ty like black lightning, for the sounds were coming from ahead and off to his right, where Troon's trail was going, where Lucifer would have gone if he had followed a straight course through the forest-and where Janna would be if she had been able to follow Lucifer's trail.
Ty had no doubt that Janna could track Lucifer anywhere the stallion could go.
Running swiftly and silently, Ty traced the twisting progress of Troon's horse through the forest. The animal had been moving at a hard gallop, a pace that was foolhardy under the conditions. Stirrups left gashes across tree trunks where the horse had zigzagged between pines. Farther down the trail low-growing limbs showed signs of recent damage. Bruised clusters of needles were scattered everywhere. A man's battered hat was tangled among the branches.
Ty had no doubt that he would find blood if he wanted to stop and check the bark on the limb that was wearing Troon's hat, but at the moment it wasn't Troon's blood that interested Ty. It was the palm-sized splotches that had suddenly appeared along with the hoofprints of a huge, unshod horse.
Lucifer.
Like the rifle cartridge, the blood hadn't been exposed to air for more than a half hour. The spots glistened darkly in the shade and were near-crimson markers in the occasional patches of sun. From their position, they could only have come from the stallion.
Breathing easily, running quietly, Ty followed the bloody trail. He knew that he should be sneaking from tree to tree in the thinning forest. He knew that at the very least he should be hunting cover in case he literally ran up on the heels of the renegades. He also knew that Janna was somewhere up ahead alone, armed with a pistol good for six shots and no spare cylinders or ammunition within reach. He didn't know how many renegades there were, but he doubted that six shots would get the job done.
Janna's too clever to be spotted by renegades. She'll go to ground and pull the hole in after her. They'll never find her.
The reassuring thought was interrupted by a flurry of rifle fire. The sounds came from ahead, but much farther to the right than Ty would have expected from the trail he was following. Either Lucifer or Troon-or both-must be hoping to escape by making a break for the steep northern edge of the plateau.
There were a few more sporadic shots and eager cries, then silence. Ty ran harder and told himself it was good that he hadn't heard any pistol shots, for that meant Janna hadn't been spotted. He refused to consider that it could also mean she had fallen in the first outbreak of shooting before she even had a chance to defend herself. He simply ran harder, carrying his carbine as though it were a pistol, finger on the trigger, ready to shoot and fire on the instant.
The hoof prints, which had been a mixture of shod and unshod, abruptly diverged. The unshod prints continued without interruption. The shod hoofprints veered starkly to the right. Ty had no doubt that he was seeing traces of the instant when the renegades had spotted Troon; the prints of Troon's horse were inches deep in the ground at the point where the horse had dug in and spun away from the renegades. Troon had chosen to flee along the rumpled, downward sloping land that led to the plateau's northern edge. There the land was rocky, broken, full of clefts and hollows and sheer-sided ravines where a man could hope to hide.
If Troon were lucky, he might even survive. Ty hoped he didn't. Any man who would shoot at a horse like Lucifer out of greed deserved to die. Without a further thought, Ty veered off after the stallion, leaving Troon to whatever fate luck and the renegades would visit upon him.
The stallion's tracks showed no sudden gouges or changes in direction as Troon's had. When the renegades had spotted Troon, apparently Lucifer hadn't been within sight. The wild horse had cannily chosen a route that looped back toward the eastern end of Raven Creek's long, winding meadow. From there Lucifer could head for the northeast edge of the plateau and slide on his black hocks down into Mustang Canyon or he could run southeast and then straight south, using the entire surface of the plateau, losing himself among the pines, meadows, ridges and ravines that covered the land's rugged surface.
Assuming, of course, that Lucifer was in any shape for a long, hard run. It was an assumption Ty wasn't prepared to make. The stallion's tracks were becoming closer together.
His strides were shortening as though he were winded, and the blood splotches were bigger and more frequent. Part of the horse's slowed progress might have been simply that the land was broken and rolling here, with more uphill than down as Lucifer headed straight toward the eastern lip of the plateau. And the shortening strides might also have been the result of injury.
Ty remembered Janna saying that she had once seen signs that Lucifer had skidded down the steep trail on the plateau's east edge in order to evade mustangers. He wondered if the stallion had remembered his past success and was laboring toward the east trail in hope of another such escape.