While they were packing, Gracie asked, “Did you hear anything last night?”
“No. I had a bad dream about something, but I forget now what it was about.”
“So maybe you heard what I heard.”
“I don’t know,” Danielle said. “Maybe. But who cares? He’s great, isn’t he? Justin, I mean.”
“You think they’re all great at first. This one is, but I’m sure you’ll screw it up somehow.”
Gracie cinched her sleeping bag stuff sack and started to carry it and her duffel toward the horses. On the way, she stepped off the path into the moist grass and bent down. The sod was churned up in several places exposing soft black soil. She looked up at her tent, which was twenty yards away. “This is where it happened,” she said to Danielle. “This is where the noises came from. Nobody tripped on a tent stake. It’s too far away from the tents.”
Danielle stayed on the path. She looked from Gracie back toward the camp. The adults were still milling around.
“So what are you saying?” she asked.
Gracie said, “I’m not sure. But there’s something really wrong going on. Something evil. Two grown men supposedly just left us in the middle of the night without a word to anyone. We’re supposed to believe that two guys who’ve known each other for a day get together and make a plan like that? Why didn’t anyone hear them or notice they were taking two horses? And did you see the way Jed and Dakota were treating each other? Or how Donna Glode and Tony D’Amato are acting?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“I know you didn’t. And why the big deal about taking another trail?” Gracie said. “We wouldn’t know what trail we’re on, anyway. Why does that matter?”
Cody Hoyt rode a tall gelding paint named Gipper behind Bull Mitchell’s black horse through a dark stand of lodgepole pine trees that seemed to have no end, on a trail that was so overgrown it barely existed anymore, and he called to Mitchell, “Are you sure you know where we’re going?”
It was mid-morning and up beyond the interlaced canopy of trees the sun was out and the sky was intense blue and cloudless. They’d been riding for four hours straight without a break and Cody felt quarter-sized spots on both inner thighs burn through his jeans into his flesh from leather ridges on the saddle. He knew little about horses except he’d never much liked them and he had the distinct impression Gipper thought the same about him, evidenced by the way the horse would drift off the path toward overhanging branches that, if Cody wasn’t alert, would have knocked him backwards out of the saddle to the ground.
It was still moist in the trees from a brief rain shower that came at dawn as they set out, and raindrops clung like tears to the tips of pine needles. Occasionally, there was a break in the canopy and light streamed through like jail bars. But mostly they’d been in the shadows on a trail that barely was and Bull Mitchell hadn’t said three words to Cody although the old man mumbled plenty to his horse. Mitchell trailed a packhorse with full canvas panniers and Cody rode his gelding behind them both.
Cody inventoried their weapons. Both he and Mitchell had rifle scabbards lashed onto their saddles. The scarred and faded wooden butt of a scoped.30–06 stuck out of Mitchell’s scabbard and a black polymer adjustable butt stock for a departmental AR-15 poked out of Cody’s. Mitchell’s rifle looked substantial and serious, Cody thought, while his high-tech semiautomatic rifle resembled a kind of toy. He’d switched out the thirty-round for a ten-round magazine so the rifle would slip into the creaky leather sleeve that simply wasn’t designed for it. Cody’s.40 Sig Sauer was clipped high on his belt, making the weapon difficult to get at but at least it didn’t rub along the saddle. Mitchell had strapped on a long-barreled.44 Magnum single-action Ruger Super Blackhawk revolver. Like his rifle, Mitchell’s handgun was rubbed nearly clean of blueing and the wooden handgrip was worn and scratched. He wore the.44 Magnum in a holster that covered most of his thigh. It was a bear weapon.
“I said,” Cody repeated, “are you sure you know where we’re going?” Mitchell pulled his horse to an abrupt stop, which caused the packhorse to do the same. Gipper used the occasion to stop, dip his head, and eat grass.
“I heard you the first time,” Mitchell growled. His voice was so deep it seemed to vibrate through the ground. He sounded annoyed.
“Well?”
“What do you think?” Mitchell said.
“I think we’ve been riding in these trees for a long time and even I can see we’re the first people to use this trail in years,” Cody said. “So it’s a little hard for me to believe we’re going to catch them on it.”
Mitchell shook his head as he looked away, as if deeply disappointed.
“What?” Cody asked.
