Only 03 - Only You

Willy, an innocent girl who wanted love.”
    Leather hissed over leather.
    “I’m going into the wilderness with an experienced little cheat who wants half of a gold mine.”
    Reno snapped the stirrup into place. The creak of leather was like a cry in the silence.
    “If we find the mine, I’ll have to look sharp or she’ll steal me blind and shoot me in the back, or leave me to be shot up by the likes of Jericho Slater,” Reno concluded harshly. “She’s done it before.”
    From the house came the sound of an iron triangle being struck with a metal wand as Willow called the men in for breakfast.
    Reno yanked Eve’s saddlebags off the corral fence, took the bedroll from her hands, and secured both behind her saddle. When he finished, he spun around, picked Eve up, and dumped her in the saddle.
    Only then did he turn to Caleb.
    “Tell Willy good-bye for us.”
    Reno sprang into the blue roan’s saddle like a big cat. A swift motion of his hand jerked Shaggy One’s lead rope free of the corral rail. He wheeled Darlin’ around and touched her with his spurs.
    The mustang headed out of the yard at a briskcanter. The two Shaggies and the lineback dun followed.
    So did Caleb’s voice.
    “Run while you can, you hardheaded son of a bitch. There’s nothing stronger than a silk rope. Or softer!”
    R ENO knew they were being followed. He pushed the horses hard from dawn until dusk, covering twice as much ground as a normal traveler would, hoping to wear down Jericho Slater’s horses.
    Right now Slater had the advantage, for his long-legged Tennessee horses were faster than the mustangs. In the desert, the advantage would quickly switch. The mustangs could go faster and longer on less food and water than any horse Slater had.
    Not once through the long hours of riding did Eve complain about the pace. In fact, she said nothing at all except in response to a direct question, and Reno had very few of those.
    Gradually Eve’s anger gave way to curiosity about the land. The high, open country was slowly filling her with both peace and a heady sense of being on the edge of a vast, undiscovered land.
    To her left a high, ragged mesa rose, covered with piñon and juniper. To her right were the rolling slopes of low, pine-covered ridges. Behind her was a beautiful valley bounded by granite peaks, rugged ridges, and the immense, shaggy mesa with its cliffs of pale stone.
    Even without the journal to guide her, she knew they were slowly descending from the green and granite heights of the Rockies. The land itself was changing beneath the agile feet of the mustangs.Foothills melted into plateau tops separated by steep, stream-cut ravines. Rocky stream banks had been replaced by dirt banks deeply cut and sandy tongues in river bends. Sandstone and shale had replaced granite and slate.
    Graceful aspens and dense stands of fir and spruce had given way to cottonwoods and pines, piñon and juniper. Scattered, big sagebrush appeared in place of scrub oak. Clouds gathered and thunder rolled down from the peaks, but no rain fell at the lower elevations.
    And over all loomed the dark mesa. Eve could not take her eyes from the ragged thrust of land, for she had seen nothing like it before. Plants grew on the mesa’s steep sides, but not enough to conceal the starkly different layers of stone beneath. No rivers or creeks drained its ragged length. No water winked from its ravines. No tall trees grew on its crest.
    The map in the Spanish journal hinted that the mesa was only the beginning of the changes. It was the lip of an enormous, high plateau that was as big as many European nations. Ahead, beyond the setting sun, the plateau’s highlands fell away in immense stone steps that ultimately unraveled into countless stone canyons.
    Eve couldn’t see the stone maze, but she sensed it just over the horizon, an end to the mountainous terrain that had begun in Canyon City and had continued for hundreds of miles.
    The stone maze was a land of awesome dryness where no rivers flowed except after storms, and then only briefly. Yet at the bottom of the deepest canyon was a river so mighty that it was like death itself; none who crossed its boundaries returned to speak of what lay on the other side.
    Eve wanted to ask Reno how such a thing couldbe, but did not. She would ask for nothing from him that wasn’t part of the devil’s bargain they had struck.
    And the thought of having to keep that bargain—of giving herself to a man who