Dead Man's Gold by Cameron Judd

Author:Cameron Judd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

In the lodge house, Jordan Mahaffery snapped up his head.

“You hear that?”

“Gunshots,” Mongold said.

“What the hell … ?” Mahaffery grabbed his rifle from the corner and headed out the door and around the lodge house. Another shot sounded from out in the valley, a high, cracking sound at this distance.

Mongold came to Mahaffery’s side. “Reed and Lennis must have run across trouble. But who? The one who me and Emmett chased?”

“Has to be. Who else could it be?”

“But there were more shots than I’d expect from them finding one unarmed man.”

“Maybe that runaway got his hands on a weapon, somehow. He managed to find a pick to kill Emmett with, didn’t he?”

Another shot, then another, closer this time.

“Hey!” Mahaffery exclaimed. “There they come!”

Mongold didn’t see Van Huss and Yeager nearly as quickly as Mahaffery had. But soon even his piggish, myopic eyes spotted them. Both were running as hard as the snow would allow, back toward Texas Gulch. They leaped snow drifts and bounded over the rugged terrain with the kind of grace and athletic prowess often inspired by mortally dangerous encounters.

They were breathless by the time they reached Mahaffery and Mongold, and leaned over with legs bent, hands on knees, gasping out white clouds of steam.

“Two men … tried to take us,” Yeager managed to get out.

“Two men?” Mahaffery said.

“Yes … Never seen them before.”

Van Huss found his voice and added, “One of them was young … the other an old fellow.”

“Almost had us, too,” Yeager said. “But we moved … quicker than they’d anticipated. Did you hear … the shots?”

“I did. Did you hit them?”

“No. And they didn’t hit us. We were lucky. They had rifles, us just our pistols.”

“Two men … how in the devil? And where did they come from?”

“No idea, Jordan. No idea.”

“The younger one … might he have been our running man, the one Mongold and poor old Emmett chased?”

“We’d have known him. It wasn’t him. I swear, these two were strangers.”

Mahaffery let out a slow breath. “Get back inside. Let’s go have a word with the good people of this sorry camp. I have a feeling some of them might know who this pair is. If there’s somebody living elsewhere in this valley, somebody here’s bound to know about it.”

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