Return to Sundown Valley by Cole Shelton

Author:Cole Shelton [Shelton, Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was first light.

The smudge of grey over the far eastern rim of Whispering Pass turned into blazing gold as Luke Dawson followed the hoof prints to the creek bank. There he mounted Red Jack and rode through the freezing water to the bed of reeds on the other side. He saw where horses had ploughed a path through the tall, stalky reeds to a ferny flat. Here snapped ferns and hoof marks in the clay clearly showed him the killers’ trail.

Halting the chestnut, he took a close look at the tracks in the new light flooding into the pass. There were five sets of hoof prints. One would belong to the Navajo’s pony, which meant there were definitely four riders he was trailing. By now they were six hours ahead of him.

The tracks followed the creek out of the pass, then headed northeast across two wide flats. Luke was glad they were well ahead of him right now because any man with a rifle on the far side of a flat could pick him off easily as he rode the open space. Deer watched him from a distance and a lone buzzard circled overhead as he finished crossing the flats. The trail was fresh, easy to read through this high country wilderness.

It was mid-morning when he came upon the hollow where the murderers had stopped to rest their horses. Cigarette butts littered the flattened wild rye grass and tiny wisps of smoke curled like worms from a small black circle in the earth, betraying where they’d lit a fire to boil coffee.

Luke pushed ahead, tracking the hoof prints down from the mountains. He forded a lazy river and then rode through a silent, low-walled pass. Here the clay became harder, making the hoof marks less pronounced, slowing him down. Once he even lost the trail, meaning he had to scout around until he found the tracks once more. He told himself that Honani would have picked them up in half the time. High noon passed. Four hours later the shadows began to lengthen as the trail forked south towards a shallow valley.

He saw more cigarette butts and deeper hoof marks in mud where they’d rested their horses again by a waterhole.

Luke kept riding, threading his way through sagebrush and bald boulders right to the rim of the valley. That’s when he saw the smoke curling languidly into the dusky sky.

He halted Red Jack and looked across the valley below. The smoke was coming from a fire burning out the front of a crude cabin that had been built between two arrowhead pines. The back wall of this stone cabin was wedged into the crumbling granite slope that hemmed in the far side of the valley. The hoof prints he’d been following led down a steep slope to the valley floor. They looked to be headed straight in the direction of the cabin.

But it was all open country. If the killers were holed up in that cabin, they’d see him coming.

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