Bleakly Hunter shoved aside the savage truth that he had married the wrong girl. It was in the past, untouchable.
Like the war that had taken everything from Hunter but his life and that of his brother.
Dead and buried, all of them, Belinda and Ted and Em. Nothing I can do about it except what I’m doing—tracking Culpeppers and sending them to judgment just as quick as I find them.
Wonder how Case is getting along. Hope to God he hasn’t found more Culpeppers than he can handle.
But Hunter wasn’t truly worried about his younger brother. Case had gone into the War Between the States a boy and come out a man who was as closed and hard as flint, and even less forgiving.
“Hunter?”
The gentle, husky voice whispered through the darkness like a caress. Hunter’s blood surged despite himself.
“Don’t get your water hot,” he said.
Great advice, he told himself sardonically. You be sure to take it yourself.
With a muttered curse Hunter set off after the girl who had gotten under his skin with the speed and heat of nettles.
Holding Bugle Boy’s rein in his left hand, Hunter followed Elyssa through moonlight and shadow. A steady, cool wind blew around them. Elyssa didn’t stop walking until they were across the dusty ranch house yard.
A weathered paddock fence seemed to grow out of the night in front of them. Thirty feet beyond, a hip-roof barn loomed. The mingled scents of horses and hay and dust flowed out of it. Nearby a pipe dripped water into a trough whose surface dimpled and shimmered with moonlight at each added drop.
It was obvious to Hunter that the Sutton ranch was no rawhide operation slapped together with equal parts laziness and hope of better days to come.
The Ladder S had been built to last by a man who cared about the future. In addition to the solid two-story house made of sawed wood and logs, there was a sturdy log bunkhouse, a barn with several paddocks close by, a large corral, a small orchard, a smokehouse, and a big kitchen garden.
From the corral and paddocks came the steady rippling sound of water being piped into troughs for the animals to drink. From the garden came the scent of earth and water and herbs. To Hunter it was a perfume more seductive by far than the cloying magnolias Belinda had preferred.
Hunter’s measuring eyes probed shadow and moonlight with equal intensity. He was searching for both danger and confirmation of what he had heard about the Ladder S ranch.
So far, everything matched Case’s reports and the information Hunter had gathered himself. The ranch hadn’t changed from the description one of the soldiers assigned to Camp Halleck had given Hunter last week:
The Ladder S is as unexpected and beautiful in this howling wilderness as a girl born of aristocrats on her mother’s side and restless plainsmen on her father’s side.
But the army won’t be riding by the Sutton place for a while. The major is dead set on mapping passes and getting himself some redskins, and the Indians leave the marsh pretty much alone at this time of year.
Hunter also knew what the soldier had been too discreet to say. The major in question was an out-and-out drunk, a man embittered by being assigned to the primitive West instead of the civilized East or the prostrate South.
There was no doubt that the Ruby Mountains of the newly created state of Nevada were a wilderness barely touched by man. Nor had Elyssa’s parents chosen to settle near the northern end of the peaks, where wagon trains headed for Oregon passed nearby as they followed the uncertain course of the Humboldt River.
Instead, the Suttons had settled amid the wild, desolate beauty of the east side of the Ruby Mountains. Behind the ranch house rose steep, rugged, jagged peaks. The pass through the Rubies that could be negotiated by wagons was far to the south.
There were two other passes, but they were useful only to a man on horseback. Driving cattle through them, especially while under fire from the likes of the Culpeppers, would have been impossible.
Passes, wagons, cattle, outlaws…
Hunter had studied all of them when he realized that the Culpeppers were planning to go to ground in the Rubies. The war, and a bad marriage, had taught Hunter to control his potent, deep-running passions. He had become a careful man. A disciplined man.
A deadly man.
Now Hunter studied the outline of the Ruby Mountains against the glittering stars. He fixed it in his mind so that he could orient himself along the mountain range no matter what the light. It was a night-fighter’s trick, or an explorer’s.
Hunter had been both.
At least water won’t be a problem, he thought. This place is a remote oasis in the middle of one hell of a desert.
No wonder the Suttons chose it.
And no wonder the Culpeppers want to take it, now that someone else has done all the backbreaking work of hammering a ranch out of the wilderness.
Though surrounded by desert, the Ruby Mountains were themselves not dry. Their high peaks raked moisture from the winter clouds and gave it back as runoff in the spring and summer. All the rills and creeks and streams on the east side ran down to the Ruby Marsh, flooding it with water and life.
Then the melt stopped and the desert closed in until little was left of the marsh but miles of tawny reeds and small, hidden clearings around clean pools.
Most of the clearings were protected by stretches of mud too deep to cross. The remainder provided water and good grazing for cattle. But the paths through the tawny reeds changed with each rain. Today’s clear trail was tomorrow’s deadly bog.
Even the Culpeppers hadn’t been brash enough to take on the rustling, seething mystery of Ruby Marsh.
The marsh acted like a moat protecting the east side of the Ladder S lands. The mountains provided protection on the west side. The south was open to anyone willing to make a long, dry ride around the mountains. So was the north.
The Culpeppers were not only willing to make the ride, they kept a man posted somewhere back up on the shoulder of the nearest peak, watching the Ladder S.
No cattle had been permitted to leave the Ladder S. No new men had been permitted to get to the ranch, where they were desperately needed as cowhands.
A sound stitched through the long exhalation of the wind. In the instant before Hunter identified the source of the noise, he turned, drew and cocked his six-gun.
Just a horse rubbing his neck on the paddock fence, Hunter told himself.
Smoothly he slipped the gun back into its holster before Elyssa could even turn toward him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Just getting used to the sights around here.”
“And the sounds?” she asked dryly.
Hunter made a sound that could have meant anything.
“If you have any questions, ask,” Elyssa said. “That rattling you heard was just Leopard bumping against a loose railing. He scented you and your horse.”
As they walked closer, Leopard whinnied and pranced, eyeing the strange stallion just beyond the fence.
Hunter’s right hand drifted closer to his six-gun once more. Nothing he had heard about Elyssa Sutton’s stal-lion was reassuring. Hunter had no intention of letting his well-trained, well-bred stallion be chewed up in a fight with an ill-trained rogue stud.
“Leopard, huh?” Hunter said, disapproval naked in his voice. “Is he the spotted devil everybody over at Camp Halleck is talking about?”
“That collection of ill-sawn timber and crooked logs can barely be called a camp,” Elyssa said crisply. “But I guess that my stallion might be a topic of idle conversation.”
“Spotted horses aren’t that rare.”
“Leopard is. The enlisted men were quite impressed when their commanding officer mounted Leopard.”
“Rough ride?” Hunter asked, though he knew full well what had happened.
“The man lived. It was more than the pompous fool deserved. I told the captain that Leopard wasn’t one of the horses we planned to sell to the military.”
Hunter looked at the stallion without comment.
“The gentleman,” Elyssa said with scornful emphasis, “told me he would simply commandeer Leopard and pay in army scrip, and I should get out of the way so that men could do men’s work.”
The contempt and anger in Elyssa’s voice made Hunter suspect that the captain had gotten a rough ride from more than the spotted horse.
Elyssa is just like Belinda, Hunter thought. Dead spoiled. No thought for what other people might need, even the army that protects her.
“Paiutes and Shoshones both are looking for scalps,” Hunter said. “The army needs all the men and horses it can get just to protect the settlers heading west along the Humboldt River.”
“So the captain said. I think people would be better protected if someone cut off his supply of liquor, and that of his superior officer as well.”
Hunter looked again at the stallion silhouetted against the night. If the soldiers at Camp Halleck were to be believed, Leopard had not only thrown the captain, the stud had tried to stomp him flatter than a shadow.
Bugle Boy blew through his nostrils and tugged at the reins, smelling grain in the big barn beyond.
Hunter tensed. He expected Leopard to take Bugle Boy as a challenge and start throwing himself at the paddock rails.
Leopard simply stood and breathed audibly, drinking the strange scents. Then he blew out and fixed his attention on Elyssa once more.
“Heard he’s a killer,” Hunter said.
“The captain? I doubt it. The fool probably doesn’t know the loud end of a gun from the quiet.”
“I meant the stud.”
“Leopard is a lamb with me.”
Elyssa’s voice was soft and vibrant with affection for the huge stallion.
The horse whickered and pushed his nose through the poles in the paddock toward Elyssa. She bent and breathed into Leopard’s nostrils. His ears pricked and he whuffled over her cheek and chin, taking in her scent and her breath.
She laughed softly.
The sound went through Hunter like lightning through darkness. He couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be stroked and murmured over so sweetly, to mingle breaths and then bodies until sweetness turned to fire.
With a silent curse, Hunter forced his attention back to the big spotted stallion.
Leopard’s mane and tail were black, full, and very long, proclaiming his ancient Spanish bloodlines. His head was elegantly shaped, black, and held proudly.
High on the stallion’s muscular neck, small ovals of white appeared among the black hair. The white ovals increased along the deep chest and shoulders and barrel until they consumed the black background color. By the time the stallion’s flanks were reached, white was the dominant color. Large black ovals stood boldly against white on the horse’s rump and hind legs.
The equine eyes watching Hunter over the paddock railing were wide, black, as unblinking as the night itself. Hunter had the feeling that Leopard was sizing him up as surely as he was sizing up the stud.
“Sixteen hands?” Hunter asked.
“You have a good eye.”
“Do you use him for stud?”
“Of course.”
Hunter grunted. “Chancy.”
“What?”
“Using a killer for stud. Likely he’ll throw colts as vicious as he is.”
“Leopard isn’t vicious!”
“Tell that to the soldiers.”
“They had no right to rope Leopard and throw him and blindfold him so that—”
“He couldn’t kill the rider he unloaded into the dirt,” Hunter finished coldly. “Probably the only smart thing that fool captain did.”
With that, Hunter turned from the stallion to Elyssa. She stood in the moonlight and wind, her skirts swirling like an earthbound cloud. Even in the dim light, the flat, impatient line of Elyssa’s mouth was visible.
“In any case,” Hunter said in a clipped voice, “the army has every right to conscript suitable mounts, no matter whose pet the horse might be. The Paiutes have been raiding along the Oregon Trail.”
“Or Culpepper trash dressed as Indians have been raiding.”
“Either way, the army has its work cut out.”
“We’ve had no trouble with Indians here.”
“Yet.”
Hunter’s certainty rankled Elyssa. Impulsively she pushed away from the paddock and confronted the dangerous stranger.
“I’m surprised to hear you take the army’s part,” Elyssa said.
“Why?”
“Not so long ago, they were your enemy. Or,” she added rashly, “did you get that greatcoat behind your saddle from a Confederate officer whose luck ran out?”
“I don’t steal from the dead.”
Hunter’s voice was calm, soft, and all the more dangerous for it.
“That’s not what I meant,” Elyssa said.
“Then what did you mean.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a demand.
“That you purchased the greatcoat,” Elyssa said, “the same way Mother and Father purchased furniture and farm animals from settlers on their way west.”
Hunter just looked at her.
“It happens a lot,” Elyssa pointed out. “Most of the people who go west can’t believe what Nevada will be like. My English cousins thought I was lying when I talked about rivers that dried up long before they reached the sea, and lakes that evaporated into salt crystals every summer.”
Finally, curtly, Hunter nodded, accepting that Elyssa hadn’t meant to insinuate that he was a grave robber.
Yet it was an effort for Hunter not to show the fury that had swept over him when Elyssa had seemed to describe him as no better than the crows and carrion eaters who descended after a battle to pick over the dead.
Like the Culpeppers, Hunter thought, meaner than snakes and twice as low.
Barely human.
No. Not even barely. The devil’s own, corrupt to the center of their black souls.
What other kind of creature could do what they did to helpless women, and then sell their terrified children to Comancheros for the price of a fancy ruffled shirt?
There was no answer to Hunter’s silent question.
There had been no answer since the moment he came back from war and discovered that everything he fought for had been raped and murdered, utterly destroyed by rebel raiders.
Culpeppers.
Southerners, like Hunter. That was the worst of it. Betrayal upon betrayal.
Slowly, soundlessly, Hunter let out his breath. He hadn’t felt this depth of rage since he had learned his children’s fate. But thinking about it wouldn’t help. It just got in the way of doing what had to be done.
Take the Culpeppers back to justice.
Dead or alive.
Nothing could be allowed to interfere with that. Nothing at all. Not memories. Not rage. Not regret.
And certainly not a spoiled, sassy girl like the one standing in front of Hunter right now. Another Belinda, knowing only her own wants and to hell with anyone else.
“All right, Miss Elyssa Sutton,” Hunter said neutrally, “you’re not having trouble with the Paiutes or the Shoshones. Yet. What are you having trouble with?”
“Culpeppers.”
“Culpeppers,” Hunter drawled. “Heard of them. They seem to have more kith and kin than Russian royalty.”
Elyssa grimaced.
“Royalty?” she repeated sarcastically. “Hardly. They have less breeding than lice.”
“Even hell has a hierarchy. Which devil is in charge here?”
“Mac said it was the oldest one. Abner.”
Tension snaked through Hunter.
He had followed the trail of Ab Culpepper and his murderous kin for more than two years and a thousand miles. Yet each time Hunter closed in, Ab slipped like smoke through Hunter’s fingers.
And then Ab went on to raid and rape and murder more unsuspecting settlers.
It will end here, in
the Ruby Valley, Hunter vowed.
Soon.
Deliberately Hunter ran Bugle Boy’s reins through his fingers, trying to still the savage eagerness that came when he realized how close he might be to getting his hands on the man who had sold Ted and little Em to an early grave with the Comancheros.
“Miss Sutton,” Hunter said softly, “you’ve just hired yourself a ramrod.”
2
For an instant Elyssa had the distinct feeling that Hunter was giving an order rather than accepting her offer of employment.
Nonsense, she told herself stoutly. It’s just his way. Comes from too many years of giving orders.
It will do him good to take a few.
“That fast?” Elyssa asked archly, echoing Hunter’s earlier words.
He shrugged.
“What about pay?” she pressed.
“Is it a problem?”
Elyssa made an exasperated sound.
“You don’t even know what I want you to do,” she said.
“Kill Culpeppers.”
Elyssa swallowed. “I’m not a—a—”
“Scalp hunter?” he offered, his voice bland.
Bugle Boy tugged again at the reins, wanting to be fed and watered and rubbed down.
“Easy, boy,” Hunter said, stroking the horse soothingly. “It won’t be long now. The little miss will make up her mind before the moon goes down.”
“Mr. Hunter—”
“Just Hunter,” he interrupted. “The war burned out all the formality in me. Hunter is the name I go by now—first, last, and middle.”
Impulsively Elyssa couldn’t help wondering what else had been burned out of Hunter by the war. Softness, certainly.
But not all kindness.
He handles his horse gently, she reminded herself. Surely that speaks of an inner tenderness.
And surely I’m soft in the head to even think it! That’s one hard man standing in front of me.
Yet that was just what Elyssa needed at the moment.
A hard man.
“Mr. Hunter—Hunter, that is—”
Elyssa made an impatient sound and started all over again.
“I’m hiring you to round up livestock with a Ladder S brand and take them over the mountains to the army at Camp Halleck. Along with the cattle you’ll be driving eighty head of green-broke mustangs, also to be delivered to the army.”