Chapter Seventeen.

Five men looked north over the river. The younger men were on horses. The leader was on the ground, squatting on his heels. He had a telescope to his eye. The older man sighed. He returned the instrument to its case. He hadn't found what he’d sought.

He announced, “She’s moving faster than I thought she could.”

Austin was astride his horse, looking at the landscape. His face was narrow, with high cheek bones, black hair and brown eyes. A patchy beard growing out in random tufts on his young face. He was the eldest of what Josiaha considered “His Kids.” Even though Austin was twenty-three, people still considered him one of Josiah's kids.

Austin growled, “We got to find her, or we’ll answer to her father. We can't come back without her.”

Damón spat on the ground. “She’s lookin’ for Mike. She’s never gonna stop chasing him.”

Tomás sighed, then agreed. “That girl ain't never gonna stop as long as she thinks he’s alive. We all grew up with her. The first time she laid eyes on that boy, she said she was gonna marry him. An' she meant it. You know her as well as I do.”

Gabriel shook his head and smiled, “She kissed me once, when we was fourteen years old.”

Austin glared at him. He asked, “What the fuck does that have to do with what we’re doing, pretty boy?”

Gabe looked at him and shrugged. He grinned so widely he looked like his teeth was in danger of falling out. “I’m just sayin', she kissed me.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“She’s a good kisser.”

“Who else have you ever kissed? And please tell us how she got your damned pistol while you was on guard duty?”

Gabe had a dreamy look on his face. “She punched me. Really hard.”

Austin shook his head angrily. The horses started shifting, sensing the tension in their riders. Austin was getting ready to roast Gabe when Josiah stood up.

Josiaha growled, “If the bunch of you ladies don’t shut the fuck up, I’m gonna shoot every fucking one of you right in your fucking head.”

He turned and faced the men who were following him and placed his hands on his hips, his right hand very close to the pistol he wore on his waist.

He enunciated, “Look at the fucking ground. Follow the trail. Don Manuel Maclusky has ordered me to find his daughter and bring her home. I will leave every fucking one of you rotting on the ground if you don’t start using your heads. Do. You. Understand. Me?”

He looked every one of them in the eye. He shook his head and continued angrily, “She's hidin' her trail. She be doing every fucking thing she ever learned to hide her trail.”

Austin shook his head. “You taught her how, and now you’re pissed she paid attention to ya?”

Josiah turned and gave Austin the stink eye.

Austin looked him right back and said, “Don’t you eyeball me, old man. We needs to find her and bring her back. This ain't the time to figure out who is going to be blamed for failing the don. Or who is gonna be rewarded for rescuing her.”

His attitude implied he would be the hero of this story.

Josiaha stared at Austin, unable to believe what he had just heard. Rescue her? She didn’t need a fucking rescuing.

He snarled. “Young man. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it, you’ll spend the rest of your life at Fort Maclusky in charge of the spring lambs and the fucking turnips.”

Gabriel raised his voice. “Both of yous stop it. Right now.”

Josiaha and Austin both turned and glared at him.

Gabriel said, “Stop it. This stupid arguing ain’t doing shit for us. We need to move faster.”

Tomás shouted, “Hey!“

The young man growled, “All of you needs to listen to me. Look at the trail we’ve been following. I’m telling you, Kathleen and the other person from that camp crossed the fucking river. That’s the reason we can’t find her. We’re on the wrong side of the damned river!”

Josiaha ordered his men, “Dismount. Make a fire, prepare a meal, feed the horses. Shut your fucking mouths. I want each of you to use your fucking heads. Figure out what you think is going on. Then you’ll each come to me separately and tell me what you think. I’ll listen to every one of you, but I AM IN CHARGE, and I’ll decide what we’re going to do.”

The four young men dismounted and started making a quick camp.

Tomás approached Josiaha after he finished hobbling the mounts and the pack animals. “Jefé, I’m telling you she crossed the river.”

“Save it.”

“Why won’t you believe me!?”

“Tom, I fucking believe you. Just making sure, alright? I believe you.”

The young man asked, “Why are you letting Austin get away with disrespectin' you? You are the head guard. They put you in charge of this posse. He’s out of his damned mind if he thinks señor Maclusky is going to replace you, especially with him.”

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“Tomás, you listen to me carefully. Señor Maclusky and I both know what is goin' on in Austin’s little brain. We have plans for Austin. They are probably not what he wants, but it will be good for him and Fort Maclusky. So don’t you worry about Austin being Austin. And if you spill a word of this to anyone, I’ll…”

“I know, I know, you’ll shoot me right in my fucking head.”

“Nope. I’ll beat you half to death. Only half to death means you remember the fucking lesson. I would hate to waste a lesson on a dead guy.”

Tomás stood still. He stared at Josiaha. Josiaha held his poker face for two seconds before he broke.

A smile cracked Josiah’s face. “Go help the others, Boy. And remember what I told you. Move dammit. Git!”

Tomás made a face at him, stuck his tongue out and said, “NYEEAAHH!”

Then he turned and ran.

Josiaha smiled. Damn kids. The kids knew he wouldn't do that. But he made his lessons memorable, and he had taught them all how to fight. He always held back during lessons. But sometimes they got cocky. So he would show them a little bit of what an actual fight was like. He shook his head as Tomás scrambled to help the others. Damn kids. He turned back and looked out over the landscape. His smile disappeared.

One of his kids was out there, and he was worried. He wasn’t worried about the fact that Kathleen was outside the walls. Walls were protection from the night, and things that prowled the dark. She didn’t need protection from the night, she could take care of her damnself. Walls protected the world from Kathleen. He was scared shitless about what might happen when she found the band of murderers she was after. She was going to get her ass killed, or worse, and the thought of that terrified him.

He had always treated all the children in Fort Maclusky the same; he played no favorites. But he did have favorites. Kathleen had been a lonely child. She was the eldest child, since the death of her brother Edwin. Edwin died of a broken neck when a rattlesnake bit his horse and it threw him off. Young Kathleen had always been following Edwin around, helping him while he took care of the duties assigned to him by his father.

The young girl had worshiped her older brother, three years her senior. After her brother’s death, she took over what duties she could, always learning and taking more and more responsibility. The other children had always kept her distant. They worried she might get them in trouble with the don. That she might get their parents in trouble. Get their family thrown out into the night.

When the Stevens family had proved the land across the river, the people of Fort Maclusky had been there to help. Michael and Pattie had become her best friends almost immediately. They didn’t care if she was the little princess of Fort Maclusky. He had been at the family dinner the night Kathleen had told her father she was going to marry Michael. Don Manuel Maclusky had just smiled at her and laughed. Doña Vida Maclusky had given her daughter a very shrewd look, but had said nothing.

Josiaha wasn’t sure how he was going to get Kathleen to come home. Short of tying her up and guarding her until she was in front of her father. Unlike her father, Josiaha had known that little Kathleen had meant what she said that night, four long years ago. And the years had only strengthened that conviction. She was going to marry that boy. Anyone that tried to stop her was going to have a rough time. He snorted. Kathleen would put a bullet into anyone that tried to stop her getting to Mike. Even him.

Kathleen had always been a scrapper. He had watched as she had gotten into fight after fight with all the young women in Los Gatos that had shown the slightest interest in Michael. He had taught ALL the children that fighting was the last resort. You could hurt or even kill someone by accident in a fight. She had wholeheartedly agreed with him, but she still beat the crap out of any girl that flirted with Michael. That showed some very strong feelings. Although, within the past six months, she had calmed down a lot in the fighting department.

He wondered if they were sleeping together. The more he thought about it, the more he was glad that she wasn’t his daughter.

Whatever the reason for her mellowing out, he was glad of it. She had always been very careful when she fought. She avoided causing permanent damage. No teeth knocked out or noses’ broken. Several landowners had made complaints to him about her behaviour, which he had dutifully passed on to her parents. Whatever punishments they had handed out to Kathleen, she had not complained. She knew the reason she was being punished. She said nary a word, knowing in that pretty head of hers that she would still beat some ass if necessary.

That Michael was tall, muscular, and very good looking didn’t help the situation. He had always been oblivious when some girl was flirting with him. Going along with the attention despite his uncertainty. However, these past six months, he had stopped noticing other young women altogether. Well, he had asked señor Maclusky for Kathleen’s hand in marriage. So that was probably a good thing.

He shook his head. Damón was right. Kathleen would never stop looking for him, not until she was dead.

***

Josiah had some skill as a tracker. Although he freely admitted many people that were better than him. His skill was what he would call passable. Some people could look at a set of week old tracks and tell you what made them. Then tell you what they were thinking when they made those tracks.

After discovering that Kathleen had left the fort, her father sent his fastest rider with two horses to the Messina Fort, ten miles southeast.

Domingo Franks was a tracker who could follow a field mouse over rocks.

The rider was told to promise anything that Domingo and the Messinas wanted in order to secure his services to track down and return Kathleen. The rider had returned as quickly as he could, both horses looking very much worse for wear. His news had not been welcome. Domingo had left at dawn on his way south to hunt an injured puma that had been attacking children and dogs in broad daylight.

Señor Maclusky had wasted no time after that unfortunate news in dispatching Josiaha and his handpicked party. Between Josiaha and Tomás, they had a decent team of trackers, with Tomás being far more skilled than Josiah was. Tomás had worked with trackers from other settlements. Josiaha and don Maclusky had chosen the rest of the party as guards and muscle.

The party had been making good time. But Kathleen and her new friend had given them the slip, and a bad windstorm had slowed Josiah’s posse down. Josiah wasn’t quite feeling frantic, but it would be hard to truthfully describe his feelings as anything else.

He had seen the Stevens’ place after the attack and had reached the same conclusion the others had. When they had started off in pursuit of Kathleen, they had started with fresh eyes. As if they knew nothing of what had happened. They discovered six different tracks that were following the bandits. Two of them were from Kathleen and her mule. Two sets of prints were unusual, with peculiar marks in the middle of the hoofprints. He had seen nothing like it before. They had found a dead man laying on the ground with a broken neck. Further along they had found evidence of a camp, and a green and gray coat and a wide brimmed dark green hat with a black cord like a hat band laying on the ground.

A scary idea entered his mind. Nobody had identified Michael's body amongst the dead. Even if Michael's body had been burned, his height shoulda been unmistakable. Josiaha thought that maybe, just maybe, Michael was still alive. Josiah had taught Kathleen how to track, but he knew his limitations in that area. She had only been as good as her teacher. It was starting to look like Michael was alive. And Pattie had been abducted. If he couldn’t get Kathleen to return home, maybe he and the boys could help her.

They needed to move faster, and they needed to cross the damned river. And then they needed to move faster still. They needed to catch up to her before she caught what she was chasing.

Josiaha made a decision. They would hug the river and cross to the opposite bank. They needed to do it quickly. This was turning into a fucking nightmare.