Blaze! Bad Medicine by Michael Newton

Author:Michael Newton [Newton, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rough Edges Press
Published: 2017-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Climbing through the foothills of the Casa Grande Mountains naturally took more time than crossing open desert flats. J.D. and Kate never caught sight of the patrol they were pursuing, which was fine, as long as they had clear hoof prints to follow without splitting off from their northbound course. But while they met no one along the way, J.D. still had a sense of being watched, from somewhere higher up, hoping that he was wrong—or, at the very least, that their observers were not peering over rifle sights.

"I feel it, too," Kate said, before he'd had a chance to mention anything.

"Feel what?" he asked.

"You know what. Like somebody's spying on us. Or did you feel something else?"

It was a kind of magic trick she played on him sometimes, acting like she could read his mind. J.D. had no belief in such things, any more than gods and demons, but in fact, he would be lying if he said Kate wasn't right guessing his thoughts, more often than she missed the mark.

"Okay, I feel it," he admitted. "But it could be nothing."

"Could be something," she replied. "Apaches or the boys in blue."

J.D. leaned back to scan the rising crags and peaks that loomed above him. Stacked beside some other mountains he had seen, the Casa Grandes weren't so big, but they afforded countless perches for a nest of snipers, and a fall from any one of them would finish him as surely as a bullet to the head or heart.

But it might hurt a great deal more.

"I doubt the cavalry came all this way to sit and stare back down at us," he said.

"They could be resting, getting curious about how come we're trailing them."

J.D. could poke holes in that argument all day, but nothing he might say mattered a damn until they found out who or what, if anything, was watching them from overhead. And in the meantime...

"Feels like Indians to me," he said at last, not liking how it sounded.

"Yeah," Kate said. "Me, too. I didn't want to be the first who said it, though."

"Winchester ready?" he inquired.

"Always."

Meaning a live round in the chamber, underneath the rifle's hammer, and its tubular magazine loaded with fifteen more of the same .44-40 cartridges fired by their twin Colt Open-Top revolvers. Each of them had twenty-two shots on tap before reloading, and if they hadn't hit someone by then...well, it would be peculiar, to say the very least.

And it would likely mean that both of them were dead.

Another fifty yards, picking their way uphill over a field of mountain scree, when suddenly a shot rang out, echoing in among the higher peaks. J.D. and Kate both hunched their shoulders, reaching for their rifles, ready to dismount, but then came more shots from above, no bullets following in their direction.

"What the hell?" Kate blurted.

"Soldiers," J.D. answered. "I hear Sharps carbines. Sounds like they found the raiders they were looking for."

* * *

Lieutenant Ellwood Brannon had begun to tire of climbing, feeling vaguely seasick from the way his gelding rocked and swayed along the narrow mountain trail.

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