***

  They had made camp two thirds of the way down the west slope, in a cleared area near where a logging track intersected the main road down into the valley. There was plenty of room for the Espenshied, a stream nearby, and enough grass for the oxen. The animals were still yoked and chained; Rudabaugh had wanted them kept that way, to save time if he decided to go after the munitions tonight.

  And that was just what he had decided, after two hours of scouting and another hour of listening to talk in the Big Tree Saloon.

  It was near dark when he got back to the camp. Patch and Chavis were eating hardtack and jerky and cold beans; he'd told them not to make a fire because he didn't want to call attention to them or to the big freighter. The oxen moved sluggishly in their traces, but the only sounds they made were the faint chink and jingle of their chains; Patch had removed the harness bells. The heat-heavy air was ripe with the stench of their droppings, and urine-damp.

  Rudabaugh was hot and thirsty from the uphill climb. He went to the shallow stream first, filled his hat and doused water over his head, then drank out of his cupped hands. When he turned, he saw Patch and Chavis watching him. He went over and squatted next to Patch, who had his back up against one of the wagon's huge iron wheels, and stripped off a piece of jerky for himself.

  "Anybody come by with questions?" He'd told them to say that they were freighters out of Ukiah, that they'd had to lay over here for repairs on the wagon.

  Patch shook his head. Chavis said, "Only seen one man with a wagon, and he never give us a look. How's the lay down there?"

  "Same as it looked from up above. Good."

  "What about Trace?"

  "He's here," Rudabaugh said. It was what he'd gone to the saloon to find out.

  "So we do it tonight?"

  "No sense in waiting."

  Patch stirred himself. He had a twitchy look about him now, as if something had spooked him. "You sure Trace ain't got anybody in that house with him?"

  "No family left, woman who cooks for him lives in town. I told you that already."

  "Armed guards is what I meant," Patch said.

  "I told you that, too. If he brought in guards, people would start getting curious. Nobody here knows what he's been up to."

  "All seems too damn easy…"

  "Sure it is," Chavis said. He was rolling one of his loose, dribbly cigarettes. "You think we'd he here if it wasn't, just the three of us?"

  Patch's eyes twitched between Chavis and Rudabaugh, then skyward, then back to Rudabaugh. "Mountain lumber mill," he said. "It's a hell of a place to cache weapons."

  "Not when you look at it with Trace's eyes.

  Only better place would be a church."

  "He must be crazy, this Trace. Buildin' an army and cachin' weapons to wipe out a bunch of Indians. Craziest thing I ever heard."

  "Sure he's crazy," Rudabaugh agreed. "So what?"

  "Can't tell what a crazy man will do, that's all."

  Rudabaugh's patience was wearing thin. "You want shut of this, Patch?" he said, soft.

  Patch scrubbed a hand through his whiskers. His eyes flicked skyward again, somewhere beyond Rudabaugh's left shoulder. "No," he said. "I come this far."

  "What makes you so jumpy? You act like a horse with burrs under his blanket."

  "Nothing," Patch said. And once more his gaze went up and to the northeast.

  This time Rudabaugh turned to see what Patch was looking at. The only thing in the night sky off that way was a faint smoky-red glow above the wooded hills. If you looked at it long enough, the glow seemed to pulse some.

  "Forest fire," he said, and the words made Patch jump. "Place called Pine Hill. They were talking about it in the saloon."

  "How far away?" Patch asked nervously.

  "Thirty miles. What the hell, Patch?"

  "I don't like fires."

  "No? Why not?"

  Patch grimaced and shook his head.

  Chavis said, "Shit, man, it's thirty mile away. It ain't goin' to run on over here and roast you."

  "Shut up! Shut up about that!"

  The sudden, sharp words surprised Rudabaugh. Most men were afraid of Chavis and spoke careful around him; until now Patch had been no exception. It was no surprise that Chavis didn't like it. He swung around to face Patch, his huge hands as big as the heads on a pair of nine-pound hammers.

  "What the hell you say to me?"

  "Just don't talk about roastin' nobody-"

  Chavis hit him, a backhanded blow that knocked Patch over backward and bounced his head off one of the wagon's iron tires. Blood crawled out of Patch's mouth like shiny black snake; he lay there dazed. Chavis would have hit him again if Rudabaugh hadn't caught one of his arms and said, "Easy, Chavis, you want to lay him up so he can't drive the wagon?"

  He had to say it again before the words cut through Chavis's anger, meant enough for the tightness in him to loosen. Chavis shrugged off his hand and said, "He talks to me like that again, I'll break his goddamn neck."

  "All right."

  "You hear me, Patch? I'll break your goddamn neck."

  Patch made a sound in his throat but no words.

  Rudabaugh said, "We got work to do. Chavis, climb inside and get the lantern ready. Don't light it yet."

  Chavis hesitated, glaring down at Patch. Rudabaugh said, "Go on," keeping his voice neutral. Chavis moved then, around to the rear of the Espenshied, where he yanked aside the canvas draw curtain that hung from the wagon's tilt. He climbed up inside.

  Rudabaugh watched Patch get slowly to his feet, spit out a glob of blood. He'd worked with all kinds of men over the years, hard and soft and everything in between; these two weren't the worst, but they weren't the best, either. He hadn't had any trouble with them coming up from San Francisco, and he'd better not have any more than this one little skirmish. Patch and Chavis weren't going to botch this job. He'd shoot both of them before he let that happen, even if it meant loading and driving the Espenshied himself. This was the biggest job he'd ever been a part of, and if it went according to plan, it would be his last.

  More than a quarter of a century on the owlhoot trail - ever since those days back on the Kansas-Missouri border before the war, when he'd been a wild-ass button. Had his share of adventure and excitement in all that time; rode with Quantrill later on, among others, and killed his share of men, and felt the weight of thousands of dollars in his pockets more times than he could count. But the money hadn't stayed in his pockets long. No, it all went into the purses of deadfall owners and whores and faro bankers. Getting on in years now, forty-two his next birthday; grown tired of the fancy women and the company of men like Patch and Chavis, and of the fear of a hangrope that still ran so deep and raw in him that it troubled his sleep and woke him up sometimes, all fevered and shaking.

  The West was changing, changing fast. Why couldn't he change with it? There was a roadhouse up at Whiskey Slough in the Sacramento Delta - run-down place that could be bought cheap. Buy it, fix it up, put in some gaming tables for the suckers, hire a couple of percentage girls… hell, he could live out his days in comfort and ease. That was just what he planned to do. And nobody, least of all a couple of rattlepates like Chavis and Patch, was going to keep him from doing it.

  Right now he'd handle them easy and quiet, with words. But after they had the munitions… well, what he did then was up to them. He went over to Patch, put a hand on his shoulder, and said in a voice that wouldn't carry, "Don't rile Chavis like that again. I mean it, Morley. He'll kill you, just like he said. I won't be able to stop him."

  "Crazy," Patch said. "Him and Austin Trace both."

  "You say that a little louder, he'll kill you right now. You want him to have your share?"

  "No."

  "Then don't rile him. Do what I tell you, keep your mouth shut, and don't worry about a forest fire that's thirty miles away. We'll be back in San Francisco in three days, lying with twenty-dollar whores, before that fire ever gets anywhere close to this valley. Hear?"

  "I hear."

  "Go on into the wagon."

  He gave Patch a little push, followed him around to the rear and up into the cavernous space - all of it empty except for Chavis and the few supplies they'd brought with them. Rudabaugh told Chavis to light the lantern. A sulfur match flared, filling the wagon with its fumes. While Chavis attended to the lantern, Rudabaugh took the map out of his shirt and spread it open on the rough bed boards.

  The map had been drawn by a gent named Duggan in San Francisco who had once worked for the Big Tree Lumber Company.

  Rudabaugh didn't know where Untermeyer had found Duggan; Untermeyer knew things the president of the United States didn't know and could find people the Secret Service couldn't. It was Untermeyer who had gotten wind of Austin Trace's cache of weapons, and Untermeyer who had hired Rudabaugh, and Untermeyer who would pay him thirty thousand in gold and Chavis and Patch each twenty thousand when the ordnance was delivered to him at his freight warehouse on the Embarcadero. What Untermeyer intended to do with the guns and ammunition, how much a profit he would realize, was nobody's business but Untermeyer's. All Rudabaugh cared about was his thirty thousand and the roadhouse it would buy him at Whiskey Slough.

  He took the lantern from Chavis, set it down where the flickery light shone on the map. "All right," he said. "Now this is what we do… "

  CHAPTER THREE

  Matt Kincaid's ranch was tucked into one corner of a little mountain valley two miles from Big Tree. One-room cabin, barn and corral, combination woodshed and icehouse - all of which he'd built himself, his first spring and summer here, keeping house in a tent until the cabin was finished. A creek came down out of the heights and meandered along the edge of the meadow where his cattle grazed. Good sweet grass, plenty of shelter from the winter snows, and only one narrow track in and out of the valley that he had fenced and gated to keep the cows from roaming. He had over thirty head of prime beef now, intended to run a peak number of eighty - about all the valley would support.

  It was an easy life, a good life. Or it had been until he began to take notice of Rose Denbow. And until Austin Trace's odd behavior put the mill's future in jeopardy. Now nothing seemed simple or easy any longer.

  Dusk was falling when he returned from Big Tree. The meadow grass was sun-dried from the long drought - more than three months now since the last rain - and he thought again of the fire over at Pine Hill. The faint glow of it was visible to the northeast, a ruddy, sullen stain on the gathering dark. The fire danger was just as bad here, as Sam Honeycutt had reminded him earlier: one more thing to fret his mind.

  He took his grulla into the corral, unsaddled the animal, rubbed it down, then turned it out with his other horse, a blaze-faced roan. Then he forked some hay into the trough for them. The sky was blue-dark by the time he finished, except for that stain in the direction of Pine Hill. He went into the cabin. Evening shadows and thick heat filled it; he set about lighting one of the lamps.

  The furnishings - and his belongings - were few. This was because his needs were simple. Food, water, a comfortable chair, a comfortable bed, a book to read now and then: what else did a man need? Well, now there was a different answer to that question. And that answer made the cabin seem barren and wanting tonight.

  The heat and the beer he'd drunk at the Big Tree Saloon had made him thirsty. He caught up the bucket and went out to the creek. Usually it ran full, even in the summer; now, after all the rainless days, it was less than half its normal size. But at least the water was still cold and sweet. He filled the bucket, took it back inside, drank two dippers full and part of a third before he had slaked his thirst.

  Too hot to build a cookfire, he decided. He cut two thick slices off the loaf of bread he'd made from ground acorn meal and pine nuts, slathered butter on each, added two slices of cold beef. He'd thought he was hungry, but when he took a bite of the sandwich, he found that he wasn't. He forced himself to eat, anyway.

  He thought again that he shouldn't have approached Will Denbow in the saloon. Denbow was Rose's husband, for one thing; and for another, he was a bitter, angry man who spurned everyone since the mill accident and the loss of his leg. So what was the sense in trying to hold a conversation with him? Kincaid had done it on impulse, without purpose… and yet it bothered him that he might have had a purpose after all. Such as wanting to convince himself that Denbow, in spite of his handicap, was unworthy of Rose. Such as looking for a convenient excuse to act on his own feelings for her.

  He didn't want to believe he was that desperate. But maybe he was. He had never been in love before, had never had to cope with feelings as strong as this. He'd been a solitary boy, growing up in that orphans' home in Modesto, and he'd been a solitary man through the succession of jobs - farm worker, cowhand, mustanger - that had led him from the San Joaquin Valley to this mountain retreat. In the past he'd always shunned personal involvements as a threat to his freedom and his solitude; when the need for a woman became too strong, as it did once or twice a year, there were always bawdy houses nearby - one in Springwood that he'd visited last fall.

  But now his freedom seemed empty, and the solitude had become something that approached loneliness.

  He kept telling himself that he wasn't a wife stealer; that trying to take Rose away from a one-legged man wasn't just shameful, it was devilish. But all the inner talking hadn't done a lick of good. When it came right down to his own peace of mind, his own needs, he suspected he wasn't selfless enough or charitable enough to do the gentlemanly thing.

  Sooner or later, right or wrong, he was going to force the issue with Rose.

  And if she spurned him, as likely she would? Would he be strong enough then not to keep on pursuing her? He thought perhaps he would, but he didn't know for sure. He didn't want to think about it. This whole business was painful enough as it was.

  Kincaid finished his sandwich, but only because he didn't believe in wasting food, and cleaned up after himself as he had been taught to do in the orphanage. When he was done, he stood in the middle of the room and looked at his books. No, there was no use in trying to read; he wouldn't be able to concentrate tonight. At length he lighted his big railroad lantern and carried it outside to the woodshed.

  It was full dark now. There was starlight but no moon yet. The breeze of the afternoon had died and the air was hot, still, heavy with the scent of dry grass and resin. Insects buzzed and sang; there were rustlings in the woods beyond the creek. Another peaceful summer night.

  Another lonely summer night.

  Damn it, he thought. He got the double-bitted ax out of the shed, set to splitting logs into firewood for the coming winter. He worked fast and hard, swinging the ax most savagely, until sweat drenched him and the muscles in his arms and shoulders began to ache.

  But it was no use. No use at all.

  At the end of an hour he put the ax away, went back into the cabin to sponge the sweat off his body, and put on a clean shirt and a clean pair of Levi's. Then he saddled the roan and rode out across the meadow and up through the cut and down into Big Tree Valley.

  He was not going to see Rose; he was only taking a ride to relax him so he could sleep, going back into town for another beer at the saloon - where Will Denbow would still be sitting, as he sat every night until the midnight closing. He was not going to see Rose, not tonight, not yet.

  Lying to himself all the way down.

  ***

  Sitting on the porch, in the shadows cast by the old tan oak tree that grew beside the house. Rose saw the shape of a man come along the dusty street and pause outside the gate. At first she couldn't tell who it was; then, when he turned to the gate and opened it, she recognized him.

  Matt Kincaid.

  She felt surprise and puzzlement - and a faint quivering in her stomach, a tightening of body muscles. She watched him walk slowly up the path to the porch and mount the stairs. The shadows hid her from him, and he went ahead to the screen door. He hesitated again, seemed to take a breath, and finally reached out to knock.

  Rose found her voice. "I'm over here."

  His head swung toward her; then he moved over to where she sat. "I didn't see you in the dark," he said.

  "I know."

  "Too hot inside?"

  She nodded. "It isn't much better out here."

  There was an awkward silence, as if he didn't know what to say next. Or as if he knew exactly what he wanted to say and was reluctant to say it. Rose sensed that there was a tautness in him, an uncertain purpose, and she was suddenly afraid. Of his feelings for her. Of hearing them spoken, being confronted with them. And of herself because she was not ready to face any of it yet.

  She said, "Why are you here?"

  "I… think we should talk."

  "It's late for a social call."

  "I know. But we have to talk, Rose."

  "Mrs. Denbow," she said, even though they had been on a first-name basis for some time. "What is it you want to talk about?"

  "I think you know. "

  "No," she said. "No, I don't."

  "… May I sit down?"

  No, she thought. And said, "Yes."

  He sat on the chair beside her, not touching her, being very careful about that. It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but his face seemed full of conflict. This isn't any easier for him than it is for me, Rose thought. But she sensed that he would go ahead with it just the same. As if he were compelled - and that frightened her all the more.

  He said, "What do you think of me?"

  "… I don't understand what you mean."

  "How do you feel about me?"

  "I have no feelings for you," she said quickly. "I hardly know you."

  "You do have feelings. I think they're the same as mine for you."

  "No," she said.

  "Yes. Yes, Rose."

  She sat stiffly, not responding.