Elizabeth Lowell (26 page)

She looked unhappily at the stallion but didn’t argue. What Ty said was true and she knew it as well as he did. She just didn’t want to have to force the wounded stallion to walk.

“I wish he was human,” she said. “It would be so much easier if we could explain to him.”

“How far do you think he can go?”

“As far as he wants to, I guess.”

“He moved fast enough getting here,”
Ty said dryly.

“He was running scared then. I’ve seen frightened mustangs gallop on sprained ankles and pulled hamstrings, but as soon as they stop running, they’re finished. They can barely hobble until they heal.”

Ty said nothing. He had seen men in the heat of battle run on a foot that had been shot off. After the battle was over, those same men couldn’t even crawl.

“The sooner we get going the better our chances are,” he said finally. “At the very least we’ve got to get to decent cover and wipe out as much of our trail as we can. Do you know any place near the meadow?”

She shook her head. “Not where a horse could hide long enough to heal. The only place Lucifer would be safe is my keyhole canyon, and I don’t know if he’d make it that far. By the time we got over to the Mustang Canyon trail and down into the canyon and then clear out away from the plateau to the Santos Wash trail…” She shook her head again. “It’s a long way from there to my winter camp.”

“And the renegades are real thick in Santos Wash,” Ty added. “We’ve got no choice, Janna. We’ll have to take Lucifer down the east face of the plateau. From there it’s only a few hours to your hidden canyon.”

Her objections died before they were spoken. She had come to the same conclusion he had. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it was their best chance. The thought of taking the injured stallion down the fearsome eastern edge of the plateau, and from there through the tortuous slot canyon, made her want to cry out in protest.

But it was their best hope of keeping Lucifer—and themselves—safe while his bullet wound healed.

“I know how you feel about restraining a horse, so I won’t ask you to do it,” Ty said firmly. “I don’t think Lucifer’s going to take too kindly to it, either, but there’s no damn choice.” He looked at her. “Get your medicine bag packed and stand lookout up on the ridge.”

“I’ll help you with Lucifer.”

“There’s not room enough for two of us.”

“But I’m used to mustangs.”

“You’re used to coaxing mares into gentleness when they have all the room in the world to run. Lucifer is a stud and trapped and hurting and probably of no mind to be meek about wearing his first hackamore. I don’t blame him a bit. I’ll be as gentle with him as I can, but I want you a long way away when I pull off that blindfold. Besides, someone has to stand watch. That someone is going to be you.”

She looked into the crystalline green of his eyes and knew that arguing would get her nowhere. “I’ll bet you were an officer in the war between the North and the South.”

He looked surprised, then smiled. “You bet right, sugar. Now shag your lovely butt up onto that ridge. If you see something you don’t like, give me that hawk cry you use to call Zebra. And don’t forget my pistol.”

Without a word she tucked his pistol in place behind her belt and began climbing out of the ravine. When she was safely up on the rim, Ty turned to Lucifer once more.

“Well, boy, it’s time to find out if all your piss and vinegar is combined with common sense, or if you’re outlaw through and through.”

Speaking gently and reassuringly, he reached into his backpack and pulled out a pair of sheepskin-lined leather hobbles that he had taken from the Preacher’s store in hope of just such an opportunity to use them. When the hobbles were in place on Lucifer’s front legs, Ty cut through the cloth that joined the stallion’s hind and foreleg.

Lucifer quivered but made no attempt to lash out with his newly unbound feet. Ty stroked the horse’s barrel and talked soothingly until the stallion’s black hide no longer twitched and trembled with each touch.

“You did real well, boy. I’m beginning to think you’re as smart as you are handsome.”

He went to the backpack for the length of braided rawhide and the steel ring he had also bought. A few quick loops, turns, and knots transformed the ring and rawhide into a workable hackamore.

“You’re not going to like this, but you’ll get used to it. Easy, son. Easy now.” As he spoke, he slipped the makeshift hackamore onto the stallion’s head.

Lucifer snorted and began trembling again as soon as he felt the rawhide against his skin. Patiently Ty rubbed the horse’s head and neck and ears, getting him used to the pressure of human hands and hackamore on his head. Lucifer calmed quickly this time, as though he were losing the ability to become alarmed—or questioned the necessity for alarm—at each new thing that happened.

Ty hoped that it was common sense rather than weakness that was calming the stallion, but he wouldn’t know until he got Lucifer up on his feet how much strength the wound had cost the horse.

“Well, son, this is the test. Now you just lie still and show me what a gentleman you are underneath all that bone and muscle and wildness.”

With slow, smooth motions, Ty eased the blindfold down Lucifer’s nose until the horse could see again. For a moment the stallion made no movement, then his ears flattened and he tried to lunge to his feet. Instantly Ty pinned the horse’s muzzle to the ground and held it there, all the while talking soothingly and petting the rigid muscles of the stallion’s neck as he struggled to get to his feet and flee.

Ty never knew how long it took to get through Lucifer’s fear to the rational animal beneath. He only knew that he was sweating as hard as the stallion before the stud finally stopped struggling and allowed himself to be calmed by the voice and hands whose gentleness had never varied throughout the pitched, silent struggle.

“How the hell did she ever hold you long enough to get the blindfold on?” Ty wondered aloud as he and Lucifer eyed each other warily. “Or were you just used to her smell?”

The stallion’s dark, dark eyes regarded Ty with an intelligence that was almost tangible. There was no malevolence, no sense of a feral eagerness to find an opening and strike. There was simply an alertness that had been bred into the horse’s very bones and had been honed by living in the wild.

“Wonder who your mammy was, and your daddy, too. They sure as hell weren’t bangtail ridge runners. You’ve a lot of the great barb in you, and maybe some Tennessee walking horse thrown in. My daddy would have traded every stud he ever owned to get his hands on you, and he would have considered it a bargain at twice the price. You’re all horse, Lucifer. And now you’re mine.”

Lucifer’s ears flicked and his eyes followed each motion Ty made.

“Well, you’re half mine,” he amended. “There’s a certain stubborn girl who owns a piece of you whether she admits it or not. But don’t worry, son. If you can’t take the tame life, I’ll set you free just like I promised. I don’t mind telling you, though, I hope I don’t have to. I left some fine mares with Logan. I’d love to take you up to Wyoming and keep you long enough to have at least one crop of foals from you.”

While Ty talked he began to shift his weight off the stallion’s muzzle a bit at a time until very little was left to hold the horse down.

“Ready to try getting up again? Slowly, son, slowly. Real nice and gentle. You lunge around this little gully and you’re going to hurt both of us.”

Once Lucifer realized that his head was free, he rolled off his side and got his feet underneath him. He quickly learned that the same man who could pin his muzzle to the ground could also help getting him to his feet with a few judicious pulls on the hackamore rope. Very shortly the stallion was standing again, unblindfolded and trembling all over at the strangeness of being close to a man.

“You’re as smart as you are handsome. It’s a shame you ran loose so long. You would have been a fine partner for a man, but after all these years I doubt you’d accept a rider. But that’s all right, son,” Ty said, slowly coiling the rawhide lead rope until he was right next to Lucifer’s head. “I don’t need to strut and show off how grand I am by breaking you. There are a thousand horses I can ride, but you’re the only one I want covering my mares.”

The words meant nothing to the stallion, but the calm voice and gentle, confident hands did. Lucifer gave a long snort and stopped rolling his eyes and flinching at every touch. Slowly he was accepting the fact that although man in general had been his enemy in the past, this particular man was different. The stallion had been pinned and blinded and helpless, but the man hadn’t attacked him. Obviously he wasn’t going to, either.

As the stallion slowly relaxed, Ty let out a long, quiet breath. “You’re going to make it easy on both of us, aren’t you? I’m sure glad that bullet and a few miles of running took the starch out of you. I’ve got a feeling you wouldn’t have been nearly so civilized about this if I’d caught you fresh. But then, if you’d been fresh, we’d never have caught you, would we? The Lord works in strange ways. I’m glad He saw fit to give you to us, if only for long enough to heal you and set you free.”

Ty stood and praised the stallion for a long time, until at last the horse let wariness slide away and weariness claim his big body. With a huge sigh, Lucifer allowed his head to drop until it all but rested against Ty’s chest. Standing three-legged, favoring his injured hip, the stallion took no more notice of the man than if he had been a foal.

Slowly Ty bent until he could release the hobbles on Lucifer’s front legs. The stallion’s shoulder muscles flinched and rippled as though shaking off flies, but that was all that he did when he realized he was free.

“That’s real good, son,” Ty murmured, stroking the stallion’s black hide. “Now let’s see if you’re going to try to kill me the first time I tug on that hackamore.”

As Ty slowly tightened the lead rope, Janna watched with breath held and her hands so tightly clenched around the spyglass that her fingers ached.

“Be good, Lucifer,” she prayed. “Don’t go crazy and hurt Ty when that hackamore gets tight.”

The horse’s head came up sharply when the hackamore began to exert pressure behind his ears and across his upper neck. He snorted and shook his head, but the gradually increasing pressure didn’t diminish. Trembling, sweating nervously, ears swiveling forward and then away from the man’s gentle voice, the stallion tried to understand what was happening, how to meet the new threat. When he attempted to back away from the pressure, it got sharply worse. When he stood still, it got slowly worse.

But when he limped forward, the pressure lifted.

“That’s it,” Ty murmured, slacking off on the lead rope immediately. He petted Lucifer, praising the horse with voice and hands. “Let’s try a few more steps, son. We’ve got a long way to go before we’re safe.”

It didn’t take Lucifer more than a few minutes to understand that a pressure urging him forward meant walk and a pressure across the bridge of his nose meant stop.

“You’re not an outlaw at all, are you?” Ty asked softly, stroking the horse’s powerful, sweaty neck. “Men have chased you, but thank God no man ever had a chance to ruin you with rough handling.”

Lucifer flicked his ears as he followed the calm sounds of Ty’s voice while the man backed up, paying out lead rope as he went.

“All right, son. It’s time to get you out of this hole.” Slowly he tightened the lead rope. “Come on. That’s it…that’s it. One step at a time, that’s all.” His mouth flattened as he saw the stallion’s painful progress. “That hip sure is sore, isn’t it?” he said in a low voice. “Well, son, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, I’m afraid. But you’ll live, God willing.”

Ty coaxed the limping stallion along the bottom of the ravine until they came to a place he had spotted from the ridge above, where the sides of the gully were less steep. He climbed halfway out, turned and began applying a steady pressure on the lead rope once more.

“Up you go. It will be easier to walk once you’re on sort of level land again. Come on...come on...don’t go all mulish on me now, son. It’s not as steep as it looks.”

Lucifer disliked the idea of climbing the gully, but he disliked the slowly tightening vise of the hackamore even more. Suddenly he lunged forward, taking the side of the ravine in a hurtling rush. Ty leaped aside just in time to avoid being trampled and scrambled up the slope after the stallion. Once on top, Lucifer came to a stop and stood three-legged, trembling from nervousness and pain.

Janna left her lookout place on the ridge and ran down to meet Ty, slowing to a walk so as not to frighten Lucifer.

“No one in sight,” she said quietly.

“All right.” Ty lifted his hat, wiped his forehead and resettled the hat with a hard tug. “How’s your arm?”

Surprised that he had noticed, she hesitated and then shrugged. “Better than Lucifer’s haunch.”

“Hand over your pack.”

She tried not to wince as he helped her out of the rawhide straps, but she couldn’t conceal her left arm’s growing soreness. With gentle fingertips he traced the dark bruise where one of Lucifer’s hooves had struck a glancing blow.

“Any numbness?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“All your fingers work?”

Silently she wiggled each of them in turn.

“Can you scout for us?” he asked, releasing her arm, caressing her all the way to her fingertips.

Suddenly breathless, she nodded.

“Cat got your tongue?”

She smiled and stuck her tongue out at Ty.

“Is that a promise?” he drawled. He smiled and touched her lips with his fingertip. “Stick it out again, sugar.”

“I don’t think—”

That was as far as she got before he bent and took what she had promised to him a moment before. Surprise stiffened her for an instant before she sighed and invited him into the softness and warmth of her mouth. Almost shyly she touched his tongue with her own, retreated, then returned to touch fleetingly again and again, until there was no more retreat, just two mouths in a seething, seamless mating.