Banner lunged into his collar with a violent snort, his iron shoes throwing frozen turf into the air. The wagon jerked forward with such force that Elias was nearly thrown backward over the seat. The wooden spokes groaned as the wheels struck the dry creek bed, skittering across sheets of slick river ice before the iron rims bit into the frozen earth.
Up on the bluff, a rider broke through the timberline. It was Vance, the Texan. He stood in his stirrups, pointing with a long-barreled Colt toward the fleeing wagon.
“There they go!” his voice carried down the coulee, thin and sharp. “Head 'em off at the lower crossing! Don't let 'em reach the main road!”
A shot whined over the wagon seat, slicing the cold air with the vicious hum of a hornet before snapping a thick cottonwood bough twenty feet to their left. The bay mare reared slightly in terror, but Clara hauled back on the left line with both hands, throwing her entire weight against the bit, forcing the animal’s head down and keeping the team aligned with the twisting channel of the creek.
“Hold on!” Elias yelled, twisting around in the seat.
He brought the Winchester to his shoulder, resting the warm barrel against the wooden rail of the buckboard. The wagon was pitching like a dory in a squall, the springs bottoming out against the iron axles with bone-jarring crashes. He waited for the wagon to level out over a stretch of sand, drew a bead on the lead rider descending the scree slope, and squeezed the trigger.
The recoil slammed into his shoulder. The bullet took Vance’s horse through the fleshy part of the shoulder. The mount screamed, tucked its legs, and cartwheeled down the steep gravel bank, throwing the Texan into a thicket of scrub oak.
“One down!” Elias barked, working the lever with a crisp clack-clack that spat a smoking brass casing into the snow behind them.
“There are four more behind the sandstone!” Clara shouted, her bonnet flying off her head, her dark braids coming loose and whipping in the wind. She was sawing on the reins, expertly guiding the galloping team through a treacherous labyrinth of deadfalls and river boulders. Her hands were raw, bleeding where the stiff harness leather had abraded her skin, but her eyes were fixed on the narrow gap half a mile downstream where the creek entered the box canyon.
Elias glanced at her profile. There was no hysteria in her face, no paralyzing terror. She was steering a team of half-wild horses at a breakneck gallop down an unmapped gorge as though she had been running cattle all her life.
“The box canyon narrows ahead!” Elias shouted over the deafening rattle of the wagon frame. “If we go through, they can’t flank us, but if Crowe’s got men on the south ridge, they can bottle us in!”
“Do we have another way out?” she demanded, ducking as a bullet whistled through the wagon canvas above them.
“Not with the wagon!”
“Then through the canyon we go!”
Clara lashed the horses again. The wagon plunged into the narrow mouth of the canyon. Here, the granite walls rose eighty feet straight up on either side, blocking out the daylight and plunging them into cold, blue shadow. The sound of their passage amplified into a terrifying roar—iron shoes striking bedrock, the groaning frame, the labored, rattling breath of the horses.
Behind them, the pursuers slowed. The canyon was too narrow for horses to ride abreast, and any man entering the mouth was riding directly into the sights of Elias’s carbine.
Elias kept his rifle trained on the canyon entrance, but no riders appeared. The sound of hooves faded into the distance.
After a mile of furious flight, the canyon walls tapered down into rolling hills covered in yellow buffalo grass. Clara gradually brought the lathered team down to a heavy trot, then to a trembling walk. The horses' flanks were heaving, white foam dripping from their lips and freezing into crystals along their bits.
She dropped the reins into her lap. Her hands were shaking violently, the adrenaline that had sustained her suddenly receding like a tide.
Elias lowered the hammer of his rifle. He looked at her hands, then reached out and laid his large, calloused palm over her bruised fingers. Her skin was ice-cold.
“You drive like an outlaw, Miss Reyes,” he said softly, his voice rough with spent breath.
Clara let out a shaky, trembling laugh that sounded half like a sob, but she didn't pull her hands away from his. She looked down at their fingers intertwined on the buffalo robe.
“My father used to run lumber down the mountain passes outside Taos,” she whispered, staring straight ahead at the vast, desolate landscape. “He always told me: if the horses smell fear on the lines, they’ll run you into the first ditch they can find.”