El Lazo - The Clint Ryan Series

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  Clint, Hawk, and Matt paused, listening to another shot that echoed to them from a mile or more ahead.

  “I know where they are,” Hawk said. “The trail narrows into a deep, climbing canyon, at Las Piedras Estrachas. It is a good place to keep the wolf at bay while the herd moves forward.”

  “Should we ride to help? Clint asked.

  Then we too would join those under the guns of the Yokuts. I know a way around. It is hard riding, but we could get in front of them. Then we would be the ones holding the high ground.”

  “Then lets ride,” Clint said.

  He heard Matt grumble. “Maybe the stocks weren’t so bad,” but the Kanaka followed his lament with a guffaw, and as always, a smile covered his face,

  They moved off the trail and crashed into the buckbrush. It pulled and grasped at them, scratched and punished, but they pushed through.

  The cover opened, and they found a narrow streambed and began to climb into the high mountains. After a mile of hard going, they stopped and changed horses. Clint looked at Matt’s exhausted horse and decided to let the Kanaka ride the big roan, while he took the smaller Indian mustang. They might have days of this ahead of them, and it would not do to lose a horse to a lame leg.

  They reached the head of the creek where it flattened out to its source in a high plateau and the riding became easy through massive live oaks and digger pines. Then, after crossing through a low patch of waxy-leaved red-barked manzanita, they started back down. The game trail was narrow and steep down a sandstone face, and the horses slipped and slid, but Hawk charged on.

  They had been ten hours in the saddle. It was late in the day by the time they moved through a heavy glade of buckeye trees. As serious as his mission was, Clint could not help but admire the long groupings of white blossoms hanging in profusion among the velvet leaves of the deep green trees.

  The glade opened onto a mile-wide sand-bottomed valley between steep rock outcroppings. A large muddy stream meandered through it. No one spoke as the sun beat down. Saddle leather creaked, the horses blew and snorted, and a man slapped at a fly.

  Again they changed horses, and when they had resaddled and allowed the horses to drink in the slow-moving stream, Hawk urged his horse into a canter. A roadrunner broke from the brush in front of them, a freshly caught lizard kicking in its long beak. It paced them for a few yards before it veered away. After a mile in the valley floor, the horses well lathered from laboring through the deep sand, Hawk found the tracks of the horse herd and turned back south. He worked his way up into a group of towering rocks, ramparts that overlooked a trail where over a hundred horses had passed—the way the rest of the Yokuts raiders would follow? Hawk assured them.

  “Are you sure they have not passed already?” Clint asked,

  “I am sure those who waited in ambush have not. See how the grass has sprung back up from the tracks of the animals? These came this way this morning.”

  They tied the horses deep in an offshoot arroyo where they would not be easily found, then made their way up into the rocks.

  “Have you used a pistol?” Clint called to Matt.

  “Never one with more than one shot,”

  “Just keep cocking and pulling the trigger.” Clint gave it to him, along with its powder horn, caps, and balls.

  Matt wandered down closer to the trail since he did not have the range of the long gun. Finding a place large enough to hide his big frame, he hunkered down into the shade of a rock ledge.

  Hawk carried bow, fox-skin quiver of arrows, lance, and ax. He moved off silently.

  Now we wait, Clint thought, and made himself as comfortable as he could.