Nightway (36 page)

“It’s going to get rough from here on,” he murmured aloud. “I’ve left tracks a blind man could follow. We’re going to have to take to the rocks now. It’s nothing you have to fear.” Hawk knew how sensations could be intensified in her drugged state. “It’s just going to be a little bumpy. You’re safe. Remember that. Nothing is going to hurt you.”

She made a faint sound, as if she’d heard him. It was likely she had, since peyote intensified the user’s perception of sight and sound. His voice had probably inserted itself into one of her dreams. Violence trembled through him, directed toward those who had done this to her. But it wasn’t the time for such an emotion, and Hawk suppressed it with iron control.

Ahead was a dry wash. Hawk pointed the buckskin at it and tugged on the sorrel’s lead rope. The horses would leave no distinct tracks in the loose sand. There wouldn’t be any way to distinguish them from the
impressions left by a flock of sheep that had passed this way a few days ago.

A hundred yards down the gully, a bank had been caved in by a gravel slide. Hawk spurred the buckskin up the loose rock. It plunged and bucked its way up the slope, sending a cascade of new gravel down to cover its trail. At the top of the slide was a jumble of boulders and a clay sand that the desert sun had baked as hard as concrete. Hawk followed it to the stone mesa that formed the walls of the canyon where the abandoned hogan stood.

His roundabout route added two miles to their journey. Their destination was ahead, below the canyon rim. He halted the buckskin and wrapped the lead rope around the saddlehorn in a half-hitch. Dismounting with Lanna in his arms, Hawk laid her on the ground well clear of the ground-tied buckskin, then went to investigate the last leg of their trip on foot. It had been a long time since he’d traveled the narrow trail winding down the cliff to the cave gouged in the canyon’s rock face. The erosion of wind, rain, and time might have wiped out part of it or all of it.

Crouching at the rim, Hawk studied first the canyon floor. It looked deserted in the early morning hour, but its inhabitants were many. A coyote was feasting on a rodent it had unearthed, and a long-eared hare was busy washing its face, pausing often to test the air for the scent of danger.

Almost directly below Hawk was a spring, the only source of water for several miles. During drought years, even this spring had been known to go dry. But where it trickled out of the rocky desert soil, a stand of cottonwood trees grew. One giant towered high, hugging the rock wall and reaching for the canyon rim. It was this tree, with its thick and spreading limbs, that
concealed the cave entrance from the view of anyone on the canyon floor, unless they specifically knew of its existence and exact location.

The old trail stopped at the narrow ledge outside the mouth of the cave. From there, the canyon wall sheered straight to its floor. Handholds had been chiseled into the rock face by the long-ago dwellers of the cave. They came within a few feet of reaching all the way to the bottom of the canyon. Hawk hoped they were still intact, since they would provide his quickest access to water. Otherwise, he would have to lower himself by rope and hope it was long enough to reach the bottom, or else ride all the way around to the mouth of the canyon, which meant leaving tracks for the searchers to find.

The rounding roof of the hogan was barely visible from his position, but he could see the remains of the stick corral and its fallen
ramada.
Satisfied that he could observe most of what went on in the canyon, Hawk began to move cautiously down the ledge of rock that formed the narrow trail to the cave.

There were places where erosion had cut into the trail, yet it was still possible for a sure-footed horse to traverse it. A fallen boulder blocked a third of the entrance, but it only added to the natural concealment of the cave opening. Entering the cool darkness, Hawk struck a match and held it high. The interior had been crudely hollowed out to form a large cavity, large enough to accommodate the horses, just as Hawk had remembered. He hadn’t trusted his memory because he didn’t know how much of it had been exaggerated by a child’s perception of size.

Emerging from the cave, Hawk climbed the trail to the top where he’d left Lanna and the horses. He gathered Lanna in his arms and carried her down the narrow trail to the cave. After making her as comfortable
as he could, he went back to lead the horses down, first the buckskin, then the sorrel. He checked to be sure Lanna showed no signs of waking up before he left the cave again.

A glance at the position of the sun in the morning sky warned Hawk that he was running out of time. When Chad discovered that he was gone, as well as Lanna, he would set out in pursuit of them. Hawk guessed that the search party would be split up into two groups—at Rawlins’ directions, since Chad would never think of it. One group would track them on horseback. But the other group, the one Chad would lead, would travel by pickup to the canyon. Depending on how quickly they got organized, the first group could be here within an hour—certainly not more than two.

It was the second group that concerned Hawk now, and the wiliness of Tom Rawlins. He retraced the last mile of their route. Where a metal horseshoe had left a white gash on the stone, he rubbed dirt into it. He sprinkled sand over any vague imprint of a hoof on the ground. He knew better than to sweep them away with brush, since the marks left by the branches would leave their own trail. Painstakingly, he repositioned stones that had been overturned, revealing their ground-darkened underbelly instead of the sun-bleached whiteness of the others around them. All the while he took care not to let his moccasined feet leave any tracks. He found the place where the flock of sheep had grazed and cut a shirtload of grass to feed the horses.

Satisfied that the only thing that could follow their trail now was a bloodhound, Hawk returned to the cave, tossed a third of the grass to the horses, and shook the rest out of his shirt near the rear wall before putting his shirt back on. Gathering twigs and broken pieces of branches the wind had blown onto the ledge from the towering cottonwood, Hawk built a tiny fire in
the rear of the cave and put coffee on to boil. He flexed his tired muscles and knew he would have to be content with snatched minutes of sleep for the next forty-eight hours. He rubbed his eyes, feeling their grating rawness, and rocked back on his heels to patiently wait for events to unfold in their own time.

What would happen if Chad found them? Hawk wasn’t sure how desperate his brother was. He would have to play it as it happened and prepare for the worst.

Lanna’s eyes opened slowly in the shadowy darkness. She had difficulty figuring out where she was. A horse stamped restlessly somewhere nearby. She felt the vibration of it beneath her. A light flickered and she focused on it. A man’s figure was hunched beside a small fire, his hands cupped around a tin mug. She began to understand the hardness of her bed and the darkness. They were camping out with the cowboys on the fall drive.

She turned her head to see if Carol was awake and was blinded by a patchwork of light flooding in through an opening in the darkness. It startled her, causing her to become instantly wide awake. Two horses were standing behind a rope strung in a diagonal line and tied around opposing rocks. In the shadowy dimness, she recognized the sorrel horse she had ridden the day before. The second animal was light-colored and a hand taller.

It slowly began to dawn on her that she was in some kind of a cave. Lanna scooted uneasily into a sitting position, her alarmed gaze racing to the man near the fire. Her movement had drawn his attention. With a trace of relief, she recognized Hawk, but his presence didn’t solve her confusion.

Straightening, he walked over to her and offered her
the cup in his hand. “Coffee? We only have one cup, and it has to serve as both pot and drinking mug.” He didn’t refer to the strangeness of her surroundings.

“Where am I?” Lanna absently accepted the cup he handed her. “How did I get here?”

“I brought you here,” Hawk admitted with casual ease.

“Yes, but…”—Lanna looked around her again—“ … where is ’here’? And how did you manage to get me here without me knowing it?”

“You were drugged.”

“Drugged? That’s nonsense!” She laughed in disbelief, then sobered when she realized he was serious. “What did you do? Give me something while I was asleep?” Her question held more bewilderment than accusation.

“Have you ever heard of peyote? You would probably be more familiar with it as the drug mescaline, which is obtained from the button-top of the peyote cactus.” He crouched down to be nearly level with her, balancing on the balls of his feet.

“Mescaline, yes.” Lanna had heard of that. “It’s a psychedelic drug, in most instances non-habit-forming and rarely leaving any lasting side-effects, depending on the user.” She recited what she remembered about it. “Are you saying that I took it?”

“It’s usually brewed into a tea,” Hawk stated.

“A tea.” Lanna began to realize what he was implying, although she didn’t understand how he knew about it. “Sassafras tea? I’ve been drinking a cup before I go to bed at night. Carol usually brings it to me”.

“Last night it was Chad.”

“Yes.” She nodded as a cold chill shivered down her spine. “He said Katheryn had sent some in a canteen
for me. It explains the dreams I’ve been having, doesn’t it? Why didn’t I suspect something before?” Lanna wondered as the truth became starkly clear. “But how did you guess?”

“I tried to awaken you from what I thought was a bad dream last night. I’ve seen the peyote dream-trance before. The Native American Church uses it as a sacrament in certain religious ceremonies under very controlled conditions. When I found the canteen of tea in Chad’s saddlebags, it confirmed my suspicions.”

“But why? What did they hope to gain?”

“The dream state or the time of heightened awareness lasts about twelve hours. Usually the effects of the drug wear off completely after twenty-four. But when it’s used regularly—and you’ve been taking it every night—those last twelve hours you lose interest in what’s happening around you—you don’t feel like doing anything.”

“That’s exactly what happened.” She brushed a hand across her face, suddenly realizing why she had been acting so strange. “I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so apathetic about everything. That’s why! But what does that accomplish?”

“Since you started having these dreams, have you signed any documents without reading them first?” Hawk questioned as he watched her closely.

“No, I—” Then she remembered. “Chad had some papers that he wanted me to sign. He said they were proxies so he could vote my shares.”

“Did you sign the papers?” His mouth thinned grimly.

“No. I didn’t feel like reading them, and, even though he explained to me what they contained, I wouldn’t sign.” Lanna was amazed that she hadn’t signed them. “I couldn’t understand why he was pushing me so hard.” She stared at him, reading in his
face his mistrust of Chad. “He was trying to cheat me in some way. That’s why he was drugging me.”

“I can almost guarantee it. Drink the coffee before it gets cold,” Hawk ordered.

She obediently took a sip, but her mind was still racing. “What do you suppose was in that document? Was I signing everything over to him?”

“It was probably much more subtle than that,” Hawk replied dryly. “More than likely, it was a legal document that gave him control of your inheritance, similar to a power of attorney, giving him the right to act in your behalf and depriving you of any say-so.”

“But Chad is already well off—rich in his own right. Why did he do it?” Lanna protested the lack of reason.

“It’s commonly known as greed.” Hawk smiled. “Why should he settle for half when there was a way he could get all of it?” He scooped up a handful of loose dirt from the cave floor and let it trickle through his fingers. “There might be another reason, too. All his life, Chad has been second. He was second to J. B. in Katheryn’s affections. Even Carol came to his marriage bed secondhand. In business, he was second in command to J. B. Maybe he even believed he was second to me. Chad hated sharing. When he learned he was sharing the inheritance with you, it was probably more than he could take.”

“And I thought he was being so good and kind to me.” She shook her head at her gullibility. “I kept thinking how much like John he was—so considerate and thoughtful.”

“J. B. was really considerate and thoughtful,” Hawk mocked. “He should have known that when he left you all that money, he was making you a target for every swindler in the country. That’s probably why Chad brought you to the ranch—to eliminate all the competition for control of your money.”

“But why drug me? I already trusted him.” Lanna combed her fingers through her hair as if to smooth out her feelings of confusion. “It never even occurred to me that I shouldn’t—not even after all the negative things you said about him. I thought you were just prejudiced.”

“Maybe he was worried that the Faulkner charm wouldn’t work on you. He might have discovered that you weren’t susceptible.” He crooked a finger under her chin and lifted it. “Were you?”

The searching fire of his gaze examined her expression. A tremor started in her heart and spread throughout her veins.

“I am definitely susceptible to the Faulkner charm, but not Chad’s,” Lanna informed him.

The corners of his mouth deepened in a pleased smile as his thumb held her chin still for his kiss. There was restraint in his passion, arousing, yet controlled. Lanna yearned for him madly, and she realized the lingering influence of the peyote was heightening the sensation. Hawk reluctantly ended the kiss to rub his thumb over the outline of her trembling lips.

“Under the circumstances”—his voice had a husky catch to it—“Chad must have decided he needed an alternative to his charm. At a guess, I’d say the solution came to him when Bobby Crow Dog showed up at the ranch.”

“Why?” Lanna was disappointed when Hawk took his hand away.

“If you aren’t going to drink that coffee, I am.” He lifted the cup from her hand and straightened to stand above her. “It was out of character for Chad to let Bobby Crow Dog stay at the ranch. But the old man would know where to get the peyote and not arouse anyone’s curiosity. Chad certainly couldn’t, not without starting rumors about his possible drug habits.”