Free War Party (Ss) (1982) by Louis L'amour

over my shoulder at her. "Somebody is following after me. I figure it's them Cooper outlaws."
    Worst of it was, I had lost time, and here it was coming up to night, and me with a strange girl on my hands. Pa told me women had devious ways of getting to a man, but I never figured one would set out alongside a lonely trail thataway. Especially one as pretty as she was.
    Moreover, she was a lady. A body could see she was quality, and she rode there beside me, chin lifted and proud like she was riding the finest thoroughbred at a county fair, or whatever.
    "You running from something, ma'am? Not to be disrespectful, ma'am, but out in the desert thisaway it ain't-isn't-just the place a body would expect to find a lady as pretty as you."
    "Thank you." Her chin lifted a mite higher. "Yes, I am running away. I am leaving my husband. He is a thoughtless, inconsiderate brute, and he is an Army officer at Fort Whipple."
    "He will be mighty sorry to lose you, ma'am. This here is a lonesome country- I don't carry envy for those soldier boys out here, I surely don't."
    "Well! It certainly is not a place to bring an officer's bride. I'll declare! How could he think I could live in such a place? With a dirt floor, and all?"
    "What did he say when you left?" "He doesn't know it yet. I had been to Ehrenberg, and when we started back, I just couldn't stand the thought, so when no one was looking, I got out of the Army ambulance I was riding in. I am going to catch the steamer at Hardyville and go home."
    When I looked to our back trail, no dust hung in the air, and I knew we were in trouble.
    If it had been soldiers looking for this girl, they would not have stopped so sudden-like, and it looked to me like they had headed us and laid a trap, so I swung up a draw, heading north instead of west, and slow to raise no dust.
    It was a sandy wash, but a thin trail skirted the edge, made by deer or such-like and we held to it. When we had been riding for an hour, I saw dust in the air, hanging up there in a fair cloud about where I had come up to this lady. Again I turned at right angles, heading back the way I had come. Off to the north and west there was a square-topped mesa that was only a part of a long, comb-like range.
    "We are followed, ma'am," I said, "and those Coopers are mighty thoughtless folks.
    I got to keep you out of their hands. First off, we'll run. If that doesn't work, we'll talk or we'll fight, leaving it up to them. You hold with me, ma'am."
    "They wouldn't bother me," she said. "I am the wife of an Army officer."
    "Most Western men are careful of womenfolk," I agreed, "but don't set no truck by being an officer's wife. The Coopers murdered two Army officers not a week ago. Murdered them, ma'am. They just don't care a mite who you may be. And a woman like you-they don't often see a woman pretty as you."
    She rode up closer to me. "I am afraid I didn't realize."
    "No, ma'am, most folks don't" I said.
    It was still the best part of two days to Hardyville, and nothing much there when we arrived. It was head of navigation on the Colorado, and last I'd seen there were only three or four buildings there, and about that many folks.
    Nobody seemed to know how many Coopers there were, but the guesses ran all the way from five to nine. They were said to be renegades from down in the Cherokee nation and mighty mean. We held to low ground, keeping off skylines, finding a saddle here and there where we could cross over ridges without topping out where we could be seen.
    It was darkening by then, with long shadows reaching out, and when we came up the eastern flank of that mesa I'd headed for, we rode in deep shadow.
    When we found a way around the butte, we took it, and the western slope was all red from the setting sun, and mighty pretty. The wind blew cool there, but I'd found what I was hunting -a place to hole up for the night.
    A man hunting a night camp with somebody trailing him has to have things in mind.
    He wants a place he can get