Only 05 - Autumn Lover

mustangs.
    Bugle Boy grazed calmly just a few feet away. From time to time he raised his head and looked around. Then he went back to grazing.
    Overhead, hawks turned lazy circles in the deep autumn sky.
    Elyssa looked across the gully where Hunter was working his way up to the top of the ravine on foot. With an intensity she wasn’t aware of, she watched his every move. She enjoyed his unique combination of masculine strength and grace.
    At the moment Hunter was moving very carefully. He had no desire to give away their position to mustangs or hostile men. A small spyglass was in his hand.
    The horses Lefty had seen near the gully weren’t wholly wild. A Ladder S brand had been put on most of the animals.
    But the horses were nonetheless spooky.
    “Hope Lefty was right about those brands,” Morgan said softly to Elyssa. “We need more horses the wayguns need bullets. Green-broke mustangs aren’t good enough, especially if it comes to shooting.”
    “Lefty knows Ladder S horses,” Elyssa said in a low voice. “If he says they’re ours, they’re ours.”
    “What if they’re wearing the Slash River brand?”
    “Then the brand will be so new the flesh won’t have healed,” Elyssa said bluntly. “And a Ladder S brand will lay just beneath.”
    “Likely,” he agreed. “You plan on killing one and skinning it out to be sure?”
    Elyssa grimaced. The customary way to prove that an old brand had been altered was to kill the animal and peel off the part of the hide that had been branded. From the inside, the first brand usually showed clearly, no matter what changes had been made to the outer hide.
    “I’ll take Lefty’s word for it,” she said.
    “Them Culpeppers won’t.”
    “The Culpeppers are keeping low to the ground since the shooting odds have changed,” Elyssa said dryly.
    “Like Hunter says, it’s the nature of snakes to be low to the ground. Don’t mean there’s no poison in their fangs.”
    Elyssa’s eyes narrowed against the wind that was gusting over the land. To her immediate left lay the nearly dry marsh. Tawny reeds bent and rattled and bowed beneath the weight of the wind. To her right the grassland rumpled up to the base of the Ruby Mountains. Storm clouds were gathering over the peaks, concealing their jagged outlines.
    The wind rushing down from the heights had the taste and feel of winter in it.
    “Then you think Hunter is right, that the Culpeppers are just waiting for us to do all the work of roundup before they attack?” Elyssa asked.
    “First thing you learn about Hunter,” Morgan drawled, “is that he’s usually right.”
    “Not always.”
    Morgan’s smile flashed.
    “No, ma’am, not always. He chose the wrong side in the war, and that’s gospel.”
    Shifting in the saddle and shading his eyes against the brilliant, relentless sun, Morgan looked behind them. Unlike his soft, easygoing voice, his eyes were swift, probing, and hard.
    “Of course,” Morgan said, “joining up with the South was mostly Case’s doing, and Belinda’s. Young hotheads, believing all that moonshine about nobility and cotton.”
    “Belinda?”
    “His wife, God rest her soul.” Then, under his breath, Morgan added, “More likely the devil is closer to her resting place.”
    Elyssa didn’t hear. Knowing the name of Hunter’s dead wife made her all too real.
    Hunter had loved a woman. He had married her. She had died.
    And now his heart was buried with her.
    “Case?” Elyssa asked quickly. “Who is he?”
    “Hunter’s younger brother.”
    “Did he die, too?”
    “No, ma’am, though more than one Union boy did his best.”
    “Including you?”
    Morgan shook his head.
    “I owed the Maxwell brothers my life,” he said simply. “When the time came, I helped them the same way they had helped me.”
    “How?”
    “I helped Case get into the prison where Hunter was being held. Case did the rest.”
    Elyssa flinched at the thought of Hunter being imprisoned. Military prisons had been infamous for the pain they inflicted on their inmates.
    “Case might have been a hothead before the war,” Morgan continued, “but he got cured of it all the way to the bone. He’s a hard man, now. Real hard.”
    “And before the war?” Elyssa asked. “Is that when Hunter helped you?”
    Morgan nodded.
    “What happened?” Elyssa asked.
    Sighing, Morgan shifted in the saddle and reined his horse to the right so that he could watch a fresh section of marsh.
    “Long before the war,”