CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE WEATHER JUST plain sucked, but that was okay with Drake Carson. In his opinion, rain was better than snow any day of the week, and as for sleet...well, that was wicked, especially in the wide-open spaces, coming at a person in stinging blasts like a barrage of buckshot. Yep, give him a slow, gentle rainfall every time, the kind that generally meant spring was in the works. Anyhow, he could stand to get a little wet.
Here in Wyoming, this close to the mountains, the month of May might bring sunshine and pastures blanketed with wildflowers—or a freak blizzard, wild enough to bury cattle and people alike.
Raising his coat collar around his ears, he nudged his horse into motion with his heels. Starburst obeyed, although he seemed hesitant about it, unusually jumpy, in fact, and when that happened, Drake paid attention. Horses were prey animals and, as such, their instincts and senses were fine-tuned to their surroundings in ways a human being couldn’t equal.
Something was going on, that was for sure.
For nearly a year now, they’d been coming up short, Drake and his crew, when they tallied the livestock. Some losses were inevitable, of course, but too many calves, along with the occasional steer or heifer, had gone missing over the past twelve months.
Sometimes, they found a carcass. Other times, not.
Like all ranchers, Drake took every decrease in the herd seriously, and he wanted reasons.
The Carson spread was big, and while Drake couldn’t keep an eye on the whole place at once, he sure as hell tried.
“Stay with me,” he told his dogs, Harold and Violet, a pair of German shepherds from the same litter and two of the best friends he’d ever had.
Then, tightening the reins slightly, in case Starburst took a notion to bolt instead of skittering and sidestepping like he was doing now, Drake looked around, squinting against the downpour. Whatever he’d expected to see—a grizzly or a wildcat or even a band of modern-day rustlers—he hadn’t expected to lay eyes on a lone female. She was just up ahead, crouched behind a small tree and clearly drenched, despite the dark rain slicker covering her slender form.
She was peering through a pair of binoculars, having taken no apparent notice of Drake, his dogs or his horse. Even with the rain pounding down, they should have been hard to miss, being only fifty yards away.
Whoever the lady turned out to be, he wasn’t giving her points for alertness.
He studied her as he approached, but there was nothing familiar about her. Drake would have recognized a local woman. Mustang Creek was a small community, and strangers stood out.
Anyway, the whole ranch was posted against trespassers, mainly to keep tourists on the far side of the fences. A lot of visiting sightseers had seen a few too many G-rated animal movies and thought they could cozy up to a bear, a bison or a wolf and snap a selfie to post on social media.
Some greenhorns were simply naive or heedless, but others were entitled know-it-alls, disregarding the warnings of park rangers, professional wilderness guides and concerned locals. It galled Drake, the risks people took, camping and hiking in areas that were off-limits, walking right up to the wildlife, as if the place were a petting zoo. The lucky ones got away alive, but they were often missing the family pet or a few body parts when it was over.
Drake had been on more than one search-and-rescue mission, organized by the Bliss County Sheriff’s Department, and he’d seen things that kept him awake nights, if he thought about them too much.
He shook off the gruesome images and concentrated on the problem at hand—the woman in the rain slicker. Wondered which category—naive, thoughtless or arrogant—she fell into.
She didn’t appear to be in any danger at the moment but, then again, she seemed oblivious to everything around her, with the exception of whatever it was she was looking at through those binoculars of hers.
Presently, it dawned on Drake that whatever else she might be, she wasn’t the reason his big Appaloosa gelding was so worked up.
The woman seemed fixated on the wide meadow, actually a shallow valley, just beyond the copse of cottonwood. Starburst pranced and tossed his head, and Drake tightened the reins slightly, gave a gruff command.
The horse calmed down a little.
Once Drake cleared the stand of cottonwoods, he stood in the stirrups, adjusted his hat and followed the woman’s gaze. Briefly, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, after days, weeks and months of searching, with only a rare and always distant sighting.
But there they were, big as life; the stallion, his band of wild mustangs—and half a dozen mares lured from his own pastures.
Forgetting the rain-slicked trespasser for a few moments, his breath trapped in his throat, Drake stared, taking a quick count in his head, temporarily immobilized by the sheer grandeur of the sight.
The stallion was magnificence on the hoof, lean but with every muscle as clearly defined as if he’d been sculpted by a master. His coat was a ghostly gray, darkened by the rain, and his mane and tail were blacker than black.
The animal, well aware that he had an audience and plainly unconcerned, lifted his head slowly from the creek where he’d been drinking and made no move to run. With no more than a hundred yards between them, he regarded Drake for what seemed like a long while, as though sizing him up.
The rest of the band, mares included, went still, heads high, ears pricked forward, hindquarters tensed as they awaited some signal from the stallion.
Drake couldn’t help admiring that four-footed devil, even as he silently cursed the critter, consigning him to seven kinds of hell. The instant he pressed his boot heels to Starburst’s quivering sides, a motion so subtle that Drake himself was barely aware of it, the stallion went into action.
Nostrils flared, eyes rolling, the cocky son of a bitch snorted, then threw back his head and whinnied, the sound piercing the moisture-thickened air.
The band whirled toward the hillside and scattered.
The stallion stood watching as Drake, rope in hand and ready to throw, drove Starburst from a dead stop to a full run.
Before Starburst reached the creek, though, the big gray spun on his hind legs and damn near took wing