Elizabeth Lowell
RECKLESS LOVE
RECKLESS LOVE
Copyright © 1990 by Two Of A Kind Inc.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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Chapter One
Heart pounding, body flattened to the hot earth, Janna Wayland peered down the brush-covered slopes and watched the tall stranger run naked between a double line of Cascabel’s renegade Ute warriors.
He’ll never make it, Janna thought.
Her heart turned over in pity for the man as blow after blow rained onto his powerful body, staggering him, sending him to his knees.
No matter how big or how strong he looks from here, they’ll kill him. They always kill the white men they catch.
Crimson streaks appeared on the man’s broad back as he struggled to his feet and began to run once more, doubled over in pain, lurching from side to side between the two lines of half-drunk warriors. When he reached the end of the gauntlet he straightened unexpectedly and surged forward, his legs driving hard, his head up, running with the power and grace of a wild animal.
The laughing, jeering Utes remained unconcerned about their prey’s apparent escape. Other men had run the gauntlet before. Most of them never reached the end before being knocked unconscious and clubbed to death. The few prisoners who managed to survive the gauntlet had provided great sport for the renegades as they tracked their bleeding quarry through the rugged canyons, plateaus and mountains of the lower Utah Territory. Whether they found their prisoner a hundred yards away or a mile, the end was always the same—torture and a death that was no more merciful than the red-rock desert itself.
Go to the left, Janna prayed, her slender body vibrating with intensity. Don’t take the first side canyon that offers itself. It’s a death trap. Go left. Left!
As though he heard her silent pleas, the man passed up the brush-choked entrance of a small ravine and ran on.
For a few more moments Janna watched him through her spyglass, assuring herself that he was running in the correct direction. Despite the crimson blood staining his skin, the man ran smoothly, powerfully. her breath caught and then wedged in her throat as she watched the stranger run. Every line of his body proclaimed his determination to survive.
She had seen nothing so beautiful in her life, not even Lucifer, the black stallion every man pursued and every shaman said no man would catch.
The stranger disappeared around a bend in the dry wash, still running hard.
She collapsed the spyglass, stuffed it into her hip pocket and began wiggling backward out of the brush that had concealed her from the warriors below. As she moved, she automatically smoothed out signs of her passage and replaced stones or twigs that her body overturned. She had survived for years alone in Indian country by being very, very careful to leave few traces of her presence.
Once she was out of sight of the warriors below—and of the guard on the rimrock at the head of Raven Canyon, where Cascabel’s renegades had their camp—she began running on a roundabout course that skirted one of the many prows of rock that jutted out from the sloping base of Black Plateau. She crossed a dry wash by leaping from boulder to boulder, leaving no trace of her passage. Then she set off on a course that she hoped would cut across the stranger’s trail within a few hundred yards.
If he got that far.
Despite her urgency, she used every bit of cover along the way, for she could do the man no good if she was caught by renegades herself. After five minutes she stopped, held her breath and listened. She heard nothing to suggest that the renegades had begun pursuing the stranger. Hope rose a little higher in her heart. She resumed running, moving with the grace and silence of fire skimming over the land. It was the silence of her movement as well as the rich auburn blaze of her hair that had caused the natives to call her Shadow of Fire.
Just before she reached another dry wash, she saw the stranger’s trail. She veered left, following him, wondering which hiding place the man had chosen of all those offered by the tiny finger canyons and rugged rock formations that riddled the base of the plateau. Not that hiding would do him much good. He tried to conceal his trail, but he was bleeding so much that every few feet bright crimson drops proclaimed his passage.
Janna slowed and began rubbing out the telltale drops, using sand or dirt or brush, whatever was near at hand. When his blood trail began to climb up the slope, she noted with approval that the man had passed up obvious hiding places where the renegades would be sure to look. In spite of injuries and the certain knowledge of pursuit, he hadn’t panicked. Like the elusive Lucifer, the stranger relied on intelligence as well as raw strength for his survival.
Yet it was the man’s determination that impressed her while she followed his twisting trail up the steep, rocky flank of the plateau. She realized that he was hiding in the most unexpected manner. He was taking a route up the plateau’s north face that was so difficult the warriors wouldn’t believe their prey could possibly have gone that way. The renegades would search the easier escape routes first, perhaps wasting enough time that darkness would fall before the stranger was discovered.
It was a long chance, but it was the only one he had, and he had been smart and tough enough to take it.
Janna redoubled her efforts, moving quickly, wiping out signs of the man, doing everything she could to help him elude the warriors who were sure to follow. The farther up the flank of the plateau she climbed, the more her admiration for the stranger’s determination and stamina increased. She began to hope that he knew of an ancient footpath to the top of the plateau, a path that had been abandoned by the Indians, who now rode horses.
The farther up she climbed, the more she allowed herself to believe that the stranger would make it to the top. Up there was water, cover, game, all that a man would need to survive. Up there she could hide him easily, care for his wounds, nurse him if he required it.
Hopes high, she levered herself over a rockfall, only to find a stone cliff cutting off all possibility of advance or escape. At the base of the cliff, piñon and rocks grew in equal profusion.
There was no one in sight.
But there was no way out of the rugged little canyon except the way he had come, and she certainly hadn’t seen anything bigger than a rabbit. He had to be somewhere in the piñon-and rock-filled hollow behind the landslide—unless he had spread spectral wings and flown from this trap like a shaman.
A frisson went over Janna’s skin at the thought. If any man could have flown like a pagan god, this one could have. He had taken a beating that would have killed most men, then he had run three miles and threaded his way to the head of a nameless rocky canyon over land that had tried even Janna’s skill.
Don’t be foolish, she told herself firmly. He’s as human as you are. You’ve looked at enough of his blood in the last mile to swear to that on a stack of Bibles as tall as God.
Intently she stared at every foot of the sloping hollow. Despite her sharp eyes, it took two circuits of the ground before she spotted the stranger lying facedown amid the low, ragged piñon branches
. She approached him cautiously, unwilling to make any unnecessary sound by calling out to him. Besides, he could be playing possum, waiting for her to get within reach of those powerful hands. He wouldn’t expect to be followed by anyone but a renegade Indian out to kill him.
A few minutes of silent observation convinced Janna that the stranger wasn’t lying in ambush. He was too still for too long. She began to fear that the man was dead. He lay utterly motionless, his limbs at very awkward angles, his skin covered by blood and dirt. In fact it was the slow welling of blood from his wounds that told her he was still alive. She crawled beneath piñon boughs until she was close enough to put her mouth next to his ear.
“I’m a friend. Do you hear me? I’m a friend.”
The man didn’t move.
“Mister?” she whispered, touching his naked shoulder, shaking him lightly, calling to him in her low, husky voice.
There was no sign that he heard.
Carefully she sat on her heels next to the man, letting fragrant piñon boughs brush over her. She slid her hand around his neck until she could press against the jugular...and breathed out. Her first impression was of fiery heat, then of the strength in his muscular neck, and then finally she felt the slow, somewhat ragged beating of his heart. From the size of the lump on the side of his head, she was surprised that he had remained conscious long enough to get this far.
“You’re not going another inch, are you?” she asked very softly.
The man didn’t disagree.
With gentle fingers she probed his head wound. Though it was puffy, there was no softness of crushed bone beneath. Nor was blood pooling in the dirt anywhere around his big body, which meant that none of his wounds were bleeding him to death.
Once Janna assured herself of that, she didn’t waste any more time checking injuries. The stranger’s extraordinary efforts had ended up defeated by a dead end against a stone cliff, but his original plan was still good—take such a difficult route up the side of the plateau that Cascabel wouldn’t think to look there for an injured man.
All she had to do was backtrack, thoroughly wiping out the man’s trail as she went. Then she would lay a false trail in another direction and sneak back up to the stranger to make sure that he kept quiet until Cascabel tired of the game and went back to camp.
Slowly she worked back down the man’s trail, doing a thorough job this time of removing all signs that anyone had come this way. Where blood had fallen onto loose stone, she picked up the stained rock and substituted another of like size. Where the man’s feet had disturbed earth, she brushed it flat once more and sifted dust and plant debris over the surface.
She worked in this manner past several places where he could have chosen other routes to the left or right, up the slope or down. When she came to another place where he had a choice of directions, she pulled a knife from the sheath at her waist, gritted her teeth, and cut her arm until blood flowed.
Using her own blood, she laid a false trail, concealed it so hastily that it could be detected readily by a warrior with sharp eyes, and began a long, slanting descent to the base of the plateau, heading away from the renegades’ camp. As she went, she made more obvious attempts to conceal her direction each time there was a logical choice in routes to make. The closer to Mustang Canyon she came, the less blood she left behind, for she wanted to suggest to the renegades that their quarry wasn’t badly wounded; that, in fact, he was bleeding less and less with each moment. Hopefully, when the blood spoor disappeared, the Indians wouldn’t be suspicious.
Just as Janna reached the broad mouth of Mustang Canyon, she heard Cascabel’s men. They were behind her—and they had just discovered the trail of their prey.
Chapter Two
Trapped by Mustang Canyon’s high rock walls, the cries of the renegades echoed eerily, making Janna feel surrounded. She redoubled her speed, running hard toward the head of the wide, deep canyon. As she ran, she pulled the bandanna from her neck and wrapped her arm so that no more drops of blood would fall to the ground.
By the time she found the tiny side canyon she had been headed for, she was breathing raggedly. Even so, she took great care to mask her trail when she turned into the twisting slot that opened onto the floor of Mustang Canyon. The feeder canyon she had chosen was extremely deep and narrow. The creek that lay in the tiny canyon’s bottom was dry, for it carried water only in the wet season or after summer cloudbursts.
No more than six feet wide as it opened onto Mustang Canyon’s broad floor, the slot was a hundred feet deep. Light only reached the bottom of the finger canyon when the sun was directly overhead. Thirty feet up the sides were marks of previous floods—brush and small trees wedged into crevices, water stains, small boulders perched in water-smoothed hollows. The floor of the feeder canyon was a dry wash paved with boulders and fine deposits of silt and dried mud, all of which angled steeply back into the body of the plateau.
Leaving no trace of her passage, Janna leaped from boulder to boulder up the slot canyon’s floor until it became so narrow that she couldn’t extend both arms out from her sides at the same time. At this point the top of the canyon—which was the surface of the plateau itself—was only fifty feet away. Farther on, where the red stone walls pressed in even more tightly, she turned sideways, put her back against one wall and her feet against the opposite wall and inched up the chimneylike opening. The top was only thirty feet away now, but her progress was dangerously slow. If one of Cascabel’s men should happen into the tiny side canyon, she would be discovered within minutes.
In the distance shouts came from the renegades.
She ignored them, concentrating only on climbing out of the slot canyon and onto the relative safety of the plateau beyond. By the time she reached the top, she was trembling with the effort of levering her body up the narrow opening. She heaved herself over the edge and lay flat, breathing in great gasps, trembling all over and stinging from the scrapes and cuts she had gotten from the stone walls.
What am I complaining about? she asked herself. He suffered a lot worse and kept going. And if I don’t do the same, he’s going to come to and thrash around and groan and Cascabel will find him and spend the next four days torturing him to death.
The thought gave her energy. The stranger was too strong and too courageous for her to let him die at Cascabel’s cruel hands. She pushed herself to her feet and began trotting across the top of Black Plateau, whose rumpled forests, meadows, and crumbling edges she knew as well as any human being ever had. The plateau was part of the summer grazing territory of Lucifer’s band.
She had spent five years following Lucifer’s band, caring for the sick or the lame, taming those animals that hungered for human companionship or easy food, leaving free those horses that could not accept anything from man’s hand, even safety. One of the tamer horses had become Janna’s only companion in the plateau’s wildness, coming to her freely, staying with her willingly, carrying her on wild rides across the rugged land.
She hoped she could find mare she called Zebra now. The band often grazed this part of the plateau in the afternoon. Zebra should be with them.
She found Lucifer and his harem grazing along one of the plateau’s many green meadows, some of which ran like a winding river of grass between thick pine forests. A tiny creek trickled down the center of the sinuous meadow.
Janna lifted her hands to her mouth. Moments later a hawk’s wild cry keened over the meadow. She called three times, then went to one of the small caches she had scattered across the plateau and surrounding countryside for the times when Cascabel amused himself by pursuing her. From the cache she took a canteen, a handful of rawhide thongs, a leather pouch that was full of various herbs, a blanket and a small leather drawstring bag that contained some of the gold that Mad Jack insisted was her father’s share of his gold mine. As her father had been dead for five years, Mad Jack simply paid her instead.
After a moment of hesitation, Janna removed a knife as well, the last item in t
he small cache. It took just seconds and a few lengths of rawhide thongs to transform the blanket into a makeshift pack. She slung the pack diagonally across her back and looked over to where the wild horses grazed.
Lucifer was staring in her direction with pricked ears, but he was not alarmed. Though he had never permitted her to come within fifty feet of him, he no longer ran from or threatened to attack her. He had come to accept Janna as a particularly slow and awkward horse that showed up from time to time carrying delicacies such as rock salt and grain—certainly no threat to his band despite the man odor that accompanied her.
By the time Janna filled her canteen at the small stream, one of Lucifer’s mares had come over at a trot, whinnying a welcome. Zebra was dust colored with black mane, tail, stockings, ears, muzzle, and a black stripe down her back. Cowboys called such horses zebra duns and prized them above all others for stamina, intelligence, and the natural camouflage that allowed them to pass unnoticed where other horses would be spotted by hostile Indians or equally hostile outlaws.
“Hello, Zebra,” Janna said, smiling and stroking the dust-colored mare’s velvety black muzzle. “Ready for a run? It won’t be far today. Just a few miles.”
Zebra nudged her muzzle against Janna with enough force to stagger her. She grabbed a handful of mane and swung onto Zebra’s back. A light touch of Janna’s heels sent the mare into a canter, which rapidly became a gallop. Guided only by the rider’s hands, heels and voice, the mare took a slanting course across a corner of the plateau, then plunged down the hair-raising trail used by the wild horses to climb up or down the plateau’s north side.
This particular route was one of the most difficult ways to ascend or descend the plateau. That was why Janna chose the route. To her knowledge, none of Cascabel’s men had ever used it. They gained access to the plateau through one of the two western trails or from the southern edge, leaving the northern and eastern areas of the plateau pretty much alone. That suited Janna very well—a slot canyon that opened up from the plateau’s eastern face was as close to a home as she could ever remember having.