Without warning, from beneath the thick shade of a low-hanging prickly pear cactus right beside the trail, there came a dry, metallic rattle. It was not a hesitant warning; it was the sharp, angry hiss of a thick diamondback rattlesnake, cold-blooded and agitated by the vibrating hooves of the livestock.
The serpent struck instantly, its triangular head lunging out with blinding velocity. The fangs grazed harmlessly against the thick leather of the bay’s left pack pannier, but the dry slap of the snake’s body against rawhide, coupled with the ferocious buzzing rattle, was enough to shatter the animal’s sanity.
The bay let out a high, squealing shriek of sheer terror. It wheeled violently on its hind legs, its eyes rolling white in panic. Before Ethan could wrap the lead line around the horn of his saddle or dig his spurs into Dutch’s flanks to absorb the shock, the bay lunged backward with the desperate strength of an eight-hundred-pound animal in the grip of blind fear.
The braided rawhide lead line—seasoned by sun and slightly brittle near the hondo—snapped with a sharp, sickening crack like a rifle shot.
"Whoa! Easy, boy, whoa!" Ethan shouted, dropping his reins to haul on the remaining line, but it was already too late.
The red bay bucked wildly, kicking out its hind hooves so hard that the heavy iron coffee pot strapped atop the pack clattered against the stones. Then, turning its tail to the wind, the bay bolted up the gravel bank of the wash and went tearing across the rocky flats toward the broken bluffs of the north, running as if the devil himself were snapping at its tail.
Ethan stared in disbelief for three long seconds, watching a dust cloud rise above the greasewood scrub.
"Damn your stubborn, jug-headed soul," Ethan breathed, his voice flat with furious exhaustion.
He could not simply let the animal go. If he lost the bay, he lost his provisions, his cooking gear, his spare ammunition, his bedroll, and the bill of sale for the very cattle he was driving. Worse still, without the water casks strapped to the sides of the rawhide panniers, Ethan would not survive the two-day trek across the dry benchlands to the Verde River.
Turning Dutch around, Ethan quickly rounded up his twenty steers, driving them with cracking shouts and whistling spurs into a deep, sheltered amphitheater between two limestone bluffs where there was sufficient wild grama grass and a shallow seep of alkaline water. He threw together a makeshift brush gate across the narrow neck of the ravine using dried mesquite branches and sharp Spanish bayonet plants. It was flimsy, but it would hold the cattle for twenty-four hours unless a mountain lion drifted down from the peaks.
"Stay put, you stupid beasts," Ethan muttered, fastening the last knot of rawhide around a mesquite stump.
Leaving his spare riding horse tethered securely in the shade of the gully, Ethan swung back into Dutch’s saddle, adjusted his battered felt Stetson against the rising glare of the morning sun, and touched his spurs to the gelding’s ribs.
The trail of the runaway bay was easy enough to follow across the first three miles. The panicked animal had carved deep, gouging hoofprints through the pale surface crust of the desert floor, snapping brittle limbs off creosote bushes and scattering bits of dried mesquite beans in its frantic wake. But by mid-morning, the terrain shifted drastically.
The flat gravel plain ended abruptly, colliding with the chaotic, fractured maze of sandstone known among local freighters and cattlemen as the Devil’s Ribs. Here, the red earth had been split by centuries of cloudbursts and earthquakes into a nightmare of winding canyons, sheer slickrock shelves, and blind box draws where a man could ride for three days without ever seeing the horizon. The heat began to beat down with brutal intensity, radiating off the vertical slabs of crimson rock until the air felt like the breath of a blacksmith’s furnace.
On the bare sandstone, the bay’s iron-shod tracks vanished completely.
Ethan dismounted to save Dutch’s strength, taking the bridle reins over his arm and walking ahead, his eyes narrowed into slits as he scanned the stone for any sign: a scuff of gray iron on red stone, a fleck of dried blood where a horse had nicked its fetlock on a sharp ledge, or a pile of fresh droppings.
"Come on, you red bastard," Ethan grumbled aloud, his tongue thick against the roof of his mouth. "You can’t eat rocks, and you sure as hell can't climb cliffs."
Around two in the afternoon, Ethan found a scrap of raw canvas caught on the thorny branch of an ocotillo bush halfway up a dry wash. A few yards farther along, half-buried in red sand, lay a battered tin cup and the broken neck of a glass liniment bottle. The pack had shifted and torn; the bay was shedding Ethan’s worldly possessions piece by piece.