Twisted Hills Read Online Free PDF

earth and the starlit sky. Taking a breath as if to settle himself for what lay ahead, he touched his boots to the dun’s sides.
    â€œLet’s be off, then,” he said quietly, feeling the horse jerk forward beneath him and down along the alleyway into a long gantlet of greater darkness. “We’ve got a long ride ahead of us.”
    The dun carried him forward at an easy gallop, the sound of its hooves falling flat and muffled in the dirt behind them. In the blind darkness the Ranger had no sighted path to follow, only a narrow slice of purple sky carved along the upper edges of rooflines above the blackness surrounding him and the horse. At the end of that corridor of purple sky, a three-quarter moon lay silver-white amid a thin veil of passing cloud. The Ranger rode into the moon until the blacker shadows fell behind him and the distant hills of Mexico stood up slowly like great beings arisen from sleep.
    When he reined left onto the trail toward the border, the Ranger let the reins slacken in his hand; and he let the dun set its own pace in the soft cooling night, liking the feel of the horse’s strong, easy gait. When the lingering howl of a wolf resounded off in the night, the Ranger noted the horse’s senses quicken, yet he felt no fear, no hesitation, no break in the rise and fall of hooves.
    â€œWe’re going to get along just fine,” he said down to the dun, patting a gloved hand on the horse’s withers. He upped the horse’s pace with a touch of his bootheels. And they rode on.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Twice in the night the Ranger had stopped along the rocky border trail. During his first stop, he had rested and watered the dun at a narrow stream of runoff water snaking down from a stone basin seated atop a low hillside. Approaching the runoff, Sam had seen red eyes rise from a black starlit mirror of water and level at him, unblinking, from the other side of the stream. Then he’d seen the eyes vanish in the darkness as the dun rode closer.
    When he’d finished watering and resting himself and the dun, he’d ridden on, looking back at length and seeing the red eyes reappear in his wake. He did not stop again until the first streak of silver-gold morning light mantled the far horizon.
    Atop a low rise of sand and layered stone, he spotted deep wheel tracks of a wagon that had swung up from the floor sometime in the night and rolled along the cusp of a low-sloping hillside. He noted that the hooves of only one horse lay between the wheel tracks, and these hooves were to the wagon’s left—the sign that one horse had been put upon to pull a two-horse rig.
    A heavily loaded wagon at that,
he further noted, judging the depth of the wheel tracks.
    He stepped down from the California saddle and walked along between the wagon tracks, leading the dun for the next half hour as morning swelled above the distant edge of the earth behind him. He had no doubt that the wagon would come into sight, and when it did, he saw it now sat farther back down the sandy hillside, tipped dangerously to one side.
    A peddler’s wagon, he decided, looking closer in the thin morning light. A single gaunt, white-faced roan stood to one side, its muzzle down, probing in vain for any trace of graze in the rocky sand.
    When Sam was within thirty feet of the wagon, he stopped again and stared at the blackness of an open rear door.
    â€œ
Hola
the wagon,” he called out, reminding himself right away that he was not Arizona Territory Ranger Sam Burrack. He was only one more lone rider—some gunman risen from the black desert night.
    â€œDo not come any closer,” a woman’s voice called out from the black open door. “I am not alone here.”
    Sam caught the slightest accent in her voice and tried to identify it. Romanian? Polish? Russian? He didn’t know. But he did know she was alone. Of course she was alone, he thought. Why else would