Free Powder Keg by Ed Gorman Page B

his eyes and shaky voice.
    But there was one question I had to ask.
    “Chuck, you think you could give Jen a good idea of where Mike might be?”
    Given all his fear and pain, the smile was a surprise.
    “Probably won’t take long, Noah.” To Jen, he said: “You remember a place called ‘the dungeon’?”
    “Sure. We used to play in it all the time.” Now she smiled. “Sure. That would be the perfect place.” To me: “It’s a cave within a cave. Our folks forbid us toplay in it but of course we did. It looks like just a small cave but if you wiggle your way through this opening in the back of it, there’s this other cave that’s probably a good twenty feet deep. Mike always said it reminded him of a dungeon. So that’s what we called it.”
    “He’s there. That’s what I figure, anyway. I would’ve said that they’d never have found him but now that they have the map, they won’t have any trouble except for the storm. But even then, that cave is only about a tenth of a mile off the main path up the mountain. If Mike has been outside and left any tracks—they could find him pretty easy.”
    The storm was the only thing I’d been worried about until we found Chuck. Now we had the storm and two killers to be concerned with. And it was hard to say which would prove more dangerous.
    For the next ten minutes, Jen played nurse. She got Chuck settled onto his bed. She took the remains of the coffee, poured it into a tin cup, and set it on top of the potbellied stove to get reheated fast.
    All I could think about was getting on that mountain path. I was sure they’d killed Daly and they’d damned near done in Chuck.
    But Jen was now a mother of sorts and any man who tries to stop a mother from tending to one of her own is in big trouble.
    “You ride into town and see the doc if your head gets any worse. You hear me, Chuck?”
    “I hear ya, Jen.”
    “And don’t go sampling any whiskey. You need to stay sober in case you do have to go see the doc.”
    He winked at me.
    “She’d make a nice warden, wouldn’t she?”
    “You men wouldn’t last a day without women to tell you what to do.”
    “Them mountain men seemed to do OK for themselves without women, Jen.”
    “That was only because they were part bear. I’m talking about normal men like you and Ford here. You just hate to admit that women know a lot more than you give them credit for.”
    “She also thinks women should get to vote, Noah.”
    “She sounds pretty radical to me, Chuck.” Actually, I’d been in and out of Washington long enough to know that women, sooner than later, would be getting the vote. Then, I said: “We need to move, Jen. They’ve got a good head start on us.”
    So we said our goodbyes and went outside.
    “You think he’ll be all right?” Jen asked.
    “It’s not him I’m worried about. It’s us. Connelly and Pepper have to know that we’re not that far behind them. They’ll probably try and bushwhack us.”
    “You sure have some nice friends, Ford.”
    We mounted up and started out of the yard. The foothills were maybe a quarter mile away, the mountain base a mile or so. Visibility kept getting worse because of the swirling dark clouds that were an ominous predictor of what was to come.
    We were riding now for the last time. As soon as we reached the mountain upslope, we’d be walking our horses. The angle would be such that it was the only way to proceed safely.
    As we neared the foothills, the acid in my stomachstarted clawing at all the soft tissue in my gut, raising hell with it. I’d gone through the whole war like that. My stomach insisted on telling my brain what it didn’t want to hear. That soon there would be trouble. Maybe real bad trouble.

Chapter 18
    D idn’t take me long to realize that it was going to be a journey of fits and starts. Wind and snow would whoop up on the narrow mountain trail we were ascending and I’d have to argue with Jen to give our horses a rest from fighting the