“That it was, General. That it was. Blacks and whites and Indians and Orientals and Hispanics all mixed up and workin’ together without nary a hitch. Then the Great War fell on us.”

  She stirred the potatoes and turned the thick-sliced bacon. Four eggs were sitting off to one side, ready to be cracked and dropped into the hot grease.

  “And? . . .” Ben prompted.

  “Oh, those of us that made it through the first few days held together for several years. Then one by one we grew smaller and smaller. Ambush, gangs, illness. Then it was just me and my husband and two sons, and my oldest son’s wife. One day my husband went out hunting and never came back. His horse came back late that day, blood all over the saddle. I never did find his body. Then my youngest got all tangled up with a grizzly one day. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. David should have known better than to get as close as he did, especially when that grizzly had cubs with her. He lived for five days afterward. It was a hard death. Then came Simon Border and his religious nuts, followed shortly thereafter by Colonel Runkel and his bunch.”

  That startled Ben. “Runkel’s been in here that long?”

  “Not in this area, but he’s been with Border for over a year. Maybe a lot longer than that. I’m not sure. Runkel’s men killed my oldest boy and took his wife, Betsy, prisoner. They had their way with her, until they tired of her. Then they killed her when she was trying to escape. One of them told me all this, after I used the hot end of a runnin’ iron on him a time or two.”

  Ben smiled. This was one woman to, as he used to write in his Westerns, ride the river with.

  Jenny caught his smile and blushed. Ben had seen very few women blush since the age of so-called female liberation. Being somewhat of an old-fashioned sort of man, Ben rather liked it.

  “I got a little carried away with that runnin’ iron,” Jenny admitted.

  “Perfectly understandable.”

  She speared out the bacon, scraped out the potatoes, and then cracked and dropped in the eggs. “Scrambled or over easy?” she asked.

  “Either way is fine.”

  Ben could not recall when a breakfast tasted so good. He took his time, chewing slowly, savoring each bite. Then they both leaned back, coffee mugs full. Ben rolled a smoke and offered the makin’s to Jenny. She hesitated and then took the bag and papers.

  “I ran out of smokes some months back. Never did smoke much. But I always enjoyed one after a meal. Thanks.”

  She rolled her cigarette slim and tight and quick. Then the man and woman spent a couple of moments just staring at each other.

  Ben broke the silence. “Do you live far from here?”

  “‘Bout ten miles. I got me a cabin in a little valley. It was me and my husband’s getaway place. No roads, no electricity, no runnin’ water ’cept what you pump up yourself, wood-burning stove, no indoor plumbin.’ But you got to be right up on it before you can spot it. Not far from the cabin is a little hidden meadow. That’s where I keep the horses and a few head of cattle. The hogs is sort of on their own and they’re ’bout half wild now. You got to hunt ’em.”

  “So you’ve been following me?”

  “Yeah. In a way. I was curious as to who it was takin’ on Runkel and his men. I couldn’t believe it was you at first. Then I thought you might be about half-nuts when I heard you stickin’ the needle to Runkel the way you did. Then I finally realized you were tellin’ your people you were all right and about Runkel’s reinforcements comin’ in. Smart.” She took a sip of coffee and a drag. “But you don’t have to be doin’ this, General Raines . . .”

  “Call me Ben, please.”

  “Okay, Ben it is. So I figure you’re ’bout half curly wolf, the other half puma, and you’re not goin’ to let anybody push you around. Then I remembered all your books. My husband had them all. I still got most of them up at the cabin. I hauled them out and read a couple. You got in trouble with the government over a couple of series of books, didn’t you?”

  Ben chuckled. “I sure did. I was visited more than once by federal agents from various departments, agencies, and bureaus.”

  “Well, screw ’em if they can’t take a joke. I never did have much use for big government. And I can’t hardly tolerate these cry-baby liberals.”

  “I think we’re going to get along, Jenny.”

  She fixed those grey eyes on him. “I ’spect we will, Ben.”

  Ben helped with the cooking and eating utensils and then rolled his bed and packed up while Jenny carefully put out the tiny fire and covered it.

  “That’s a hell of a load you got there, Ben. Let’s share it. Let me have the rifle and the rucksack. It’s a long walk to my cabin. We might not even make it this day. Rain comin’ in. Gonna be a storm.”

  Ben looked up at the sky. Clear and blue.

  She smiled at him. “I can smell it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Jenny. It’s your country.”

  “Was,” she corrected. “And will be again, soon’as we kill all those Nazi bastards and run Simon Border and his fruitcakes out. You ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  As Ben followed the woman away from the camp, he couldn’t help but observing: Nice view from the rear, too.

  TEN

  About noon, the sky darkened and the rains came. Ben and Jenny spent the rest of the afternoon and evening warm and dry sitting under a nature’s-hollowed-out overhang overlooking a meadow. They were about five hundred feet above the meadow and hidden from eyes below by brush.

  “You know most of the little hidey-holes in this country, Jenny?”

  She smiled. “Don’t nobody know everything ’bout this country, Ben. There are caves and little hidden places that have never had a human eye put on them. At least not to my knowledge. A lot of this country is as wild as the day God made it. Any number of people have come into this country and never come out . . . or been found, for that matter.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “I find human skeletons from time to time. First one really jarred me. I was just a kid. Used to come up here with my daddy. I was ridin’ around one day and ‘boom.’ There it was, a bony hand stickin’ out of the sand along a creek. I rode quick back for my daddy and we dug him up. Found an old six-shooter and the metal parts of an old repeatin’ rifle. Daddy said the man was probably a wanderer; been dead for about a hundred years, he reckoned. Horse might have throwed him, Injuns might have got him. Who knows? We reburied him along the creek bank. One time I found several skeletons in a cave. Had metal breast-plates and helmets and old-timey muskets alongside ’em. Spanish explorers, I suppose. I just left them be to rest in peace. Before the Great War, there were tiny bands of Injuns livin’ out here. People from a number of tribes: Cheyennes whose ancestors refused to surrender a hundred years or more ago, various descendants of Sioux, all kinds of Injuns, but not that many of them. They pretty much stayed to themselves, but Daddy would help them when he could: get medicines for sick kids and so forth.”

  “Where are they now?”

  She cut her eyes. “Some are still around. They been watchin’ you, too. Wonderin’ ’bout you. They know where we are right now. Bet on it. But they’re not savages, Ben. Many are well-educated. We share what we have from time to time.”

  “Would they help us, Jenny. I mean, join us in the fight against Runkel and his men?”

  She smiled at him. “Why the hell should they help the white man, Ben?”

  “Good point. But there was right and wrong on both sides, Jenny. The Indians broke just as many treaties as the white man.”

  “Oh, I know that, Ben. But I still think they got a dirty deal.”

  Ben smiled. “So do I.”

  Jenny looked out at the thick falling rain. She shivered. “It’s goin’ to be cool tonight.”

  “Yeah. Must be a front moving through.”

  “Fire’s goin’ out.”

  “You want me to add more wood?”

  “No.”

  “You plan to just lay there and shiver?”

  “You have something else on your mind?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Move over.”

  * * *

  They were a little awkward with each other come the dawn, but that did not last long. After the third time of bumping into each other and then looking at one another in silence, both Ben and Jenny began laughing at their antics. That broke whatever tension was left between them.

  “You want to know how many men I’ve been with in my life, Ben?”

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  “You’re number two. My husband was the first.”

  Ben looked at her over the rim of his coffee mug, then slowly nodded his head. Even though Jenny had come of age during that time just before the turn of the century, when sex was viewed by so many as no more important than two rabbits humping, still there had been women, and men too, Ben supposed, who placed a great deal of value on that most important sharing between a man and woman.

  They chatted for a time over breakfast, bacon and fried potatoes, then packed up and headed out. The rain had ceased during the night and it was much colder than the day before, with a strong wind out of the north.

  “We’re about four miles from the cabin, Ben,” she said. “Right up here we’ll take an old Indian trail that leads off to the right; come up to the cabin that way.”

  They had not gone another mile before Jenny held up a hand and dug in her pack, pulling out battered old binoculars. She adjusted the magnification for the range and sighed.

  “What’s the matter?” Ben asked.

  “My horses,” she said, casing the binoculars. “They got loose. Two of them grazing over there.”

  “They do that often?”

  “No. Probably a puma or a bear got close and they broke out. They’ll come home.”

  “We weren’t going to do any riding anyway, were we?” Ben asked.

  She looked at him and smiled. “No. What we’ve got to do is best done on foot.”

  “That’s a relief,” Ben muttered. Ben could ride, did ride as a kid, but in later years felt the same way about horses as Jersey did about jumping out of airplanes.

  Jenny laughed at the expression on his face. “Not much of a cowboy huh?”

  “Not much, Jenny.”

  “Well, we all have faults,” she kidded him in a gentle way.

  The cabin had been very cleverly built, set up in front of a cliff, on a slope, amid a stand of timber the builder had wisely left alone. If one was not looking specifically for the cabin, odds were it would not be seen.

  “That took someone with some engineering knowledge to build,” Ben remarked.

  “Yes, it did. My father had a degree in engineering and architecture. But he could never get ranching out of his system. He lived for a time in Chicago where he worked for a big firm. But he wasn’t happy. He came back home and met my mother and got married, returned to the ranch, and never left it. Come on in and take a load off, Ben.”

  The cabin was snugly built, out of stone and logs: two big rooms. Living and cooking and dining area, and a bedroom.

  “The bathhouse is out back,” Jenny said. “Daddy built it sort of like a sauna, where you can heat the rocks and bathe comfortably even in the coldest of days. There is a natural tunnel leading to the meadow behind the cliff front. The horses broke out of the rear, though. They always do.”

  “Want to check back there?”

  She shook his head. “Later. No point in it now. Let them graze on new grass. We won’t be needing them.”

  “One thing puzzles me.”

  “What?”

  “The bacon you brought. It wasn’t overly salted, so how do you keep it from spoiling?”

  She laughed. “Come on, let me show you something. I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like it. My father planned well before he built this cabin. He must have ridden over thousands of acres before he chose this land. Then he bought a ninety-nine-year lease on it. Not that it makes any difference now. Come on.”

  He followed her out the back into the tunnel that led to the meadow. Then she just disappeared. Took Ben a minute or so to find her. And then because she giggled. He crouched over and stepped into a wonderland.

  Ben had never been thrilled about caves. A spelunker he was not. But this cave amazed him. It was an ice cave. He’d heard and read about them, but never seen one.

  “You want to keep things just cold, you store them closer to the surface. To freeze them, you go down here about a hundred feet, and store them. Nature’s deep freeze.”

  “Well, I’ll just be damned!”

  “Neat, hey?”

  “I’ll say so.”

  “The entrance was not nature made. Daddy hacked it out after some Indians told him about the legend of the ice cave. He just took a chance and it proved out.”

  Ben looked around him. “Quite a refrigerator.”

  Jenny had put up vegetables from a large garden she tended, quick frozen fresh, and there were two sides of beef hanging.

  “Steak for supper tonight, Ben, with corn and beans.”

  “Sounds great to me.”

  “Then we’ll start hunting at first light.”

  “For the horses?”

  “No. For Runkel and his Nazis.”

  With a place now to stow his gear, Ben could move faster, and he had to move to keep up with Jenny. She went over and through the rocks like a mountain goat, following trails that Ben was certain had been made by mountain goats. But within two hours, she paused and pointed to a thin sliver of smoke rising from the timber.

  “Runkel’s camp. Now you take over.”

  “It would make me very happy if you just stayed out of it, Jenny.”

  “Forget it, Ben. I have more of a score to settle with those bastards than you. I’m in it all the way.”

  Ben nodded. He didn’t have to ask if Jenny was a good shot. He could tell by the way she handled her old bolt action 30.06 she knew what she was doing. “All right, Jenny. First, we determine how many men are in this particular camp and what our odds will be of getting away alive. Then we decide where we’ll link up after it’s over. Then we split up and start some long-distance shooting.” Ben pointed. “You’re on that ridge over there, I’m over there.”

  She studied the ridge he had assigned her for a moment. “Suits me.”

  “What’s the longest shot you ever made?”

  “Oh . . . ’bout five hundred yards, I reckon.”

  “Let’s go check this out.”

  They worked their way close and together studied the camp through long lenses.

  “Be like shootin’ sittin’ ducks,” Jenny remarked.

  “You ready?”

  “See you in awhile, Ben. Good shootin’.” Then she was gone, fading into the brush, moving silently. She would circle the camp wide, then give him two clicks on a pre-arranged frequency when she was ready.

  Ben moved into position and waited. They both would be shooting from a good vantage point, and the distance would be long, but within the accurate range of both weapons.

  Ben took a sip of water and made himself comfortable in a prone position. He scooped up a mound of dirt in front of him to rest the rifle on, patted it firm, and waited, the earplug to the radio stuck in one ear.

  He heard two clicks and pulled the plug out and stowed the radio. They would not use the radios again.

  He pulled his rifle to his shoulder, snugged it up, and sighted in. He and Jenny were about a half a mile apart, on opposite ridges, looking down at a meandering little creek, Runkel and his men camped close to the stream.

  One of Runkel’s men took a canvas bucket and walked to the creek, preparing to fill it. Ben chose him. The man by the creek would be out of Jenny’s line of sight due to the trees to his left. The man knelt down, offering a full view of his back to Ben and began washing his face and hands in the cold water.

  “Nothing like going to hell with clean hands,” Ben muttered.

  He heard the boom of Jenny’s 30.06 but did not take the crosshairs off the man’s back. The man straightened up his back, still in a crouch, and turned his head. He waited a half second too long to react.

  Ben squeezed the trigger and when he had pulled the rifle down to sight in again, the man was facedown in the creek and not moving.

  The camp exploded in frantic activity. Ben had spotted Runkel moments before, but when he swept the camp through the scope, the colonel was nowhere to be seen. Runkel was an old hand, and had reacted instinctively, seeking cover from the unseen shooters.

  Ben sighted in on a man who had taken very dubious cover behind a tree that was just not adequate cover for him. He squeezed off another round and the bullet slammed into the man’s shoulder, knocking him backward, his mouth open in shock and pain.

  Ben shifted the rifle a few inches just as Jenny’s rifle sang its deadly song, the boom echoing across the little valley. Another of Runkel’s men went down in a lifeless sprawl. She was as good a shot as Ben had thought she’d be, and as she had said, this was personal to her.

  Ben set the crosshairs on a very iffy target and missed by a few inches. But the man then made the mistake of attempting to move in the wrong direction. If he had chosen the other way, he would have been in the brush and safe. Ben shot him in the hip just as he was scrambling on his hands and knees. The round flattened him out on the rocky ground, both hands to his bloody hip.

  Jenny fired once more and another man went down. Ben glanced at his watch. Their pre-arranged time was up. Ben began backing away, hoping that Jenny had checked her watch and was doing the same.

  But in the heat of combat, time was a fickle thing. It would seem to drag for some, and speed by for others. Ben made his way carefully through the brush and rocks, staying low, very much aware that Runkel would have snipers among his personnel . . . if they hadn’t already been taken out by the long-distance shooting.

  Ben checked his surroundings, visually checking the landmark Jenny had pointed out before they split up. He was almost dead on. He shifted a couple of compass points and picked up the pace.

  Runkel’s men would be very wary about moving out too soon, with no way of knowing if the snipers were pulling a muse, holding their fire deliberately. Ben and Jenny would have a good five or ten minutes to put some distance behind them.