Reckless Love

But Ty had heard Ja

With automatic motions Ty propped his backpack against a stone, sat on his heels and loaded the carbine to full capacity once more. The angle of the shadows on the canyon walls told him that he had several hours to wait until sunset came, much less full dark.

Leaning against the wall, carbine at the ready, Ty tried to convince himself that when dawn came he and Ja

Chapter Forty

The meadow's sunlight seemed blinding after the cool, dim passage into the secret valley. Ja

Ja

"Jack must have had a way in and out of this valley without coming through the slot," Ja

Zebra flicked her ears back and forth, enjoying the sound of Ja

"But you didn't hear Jack, and that old man was too weak to carry more than a few pounds of gold at a time, which means there was a lot of coming and going before those saddlebags were full. He had to have left some kind of trail, somewhere. He just had to."

And Ja

She urged Zebra into a canter, watching the rocky walls and lava flows, probing light and shadow for any sign of a faint trail. The valley narrowed in at the south end, where the ruins were. Beyond ascertaining that there was a clear spring welling up at the base of the ramparts that were just before the ruins, Ja

But Ja

In the country outside the valley, Ja

Crisscrossing the area around the ruins, Ja

A frisson of uneasiness ran through Ja

No matter how Ja

The farther back into the ruins Ja

With growing excitement Ja

"Easy, girl," Ja

Under Ja

What had once looked like a wide path was rapidly degenerating into a jumble of stone that resembled nothing so much as the debris that always built up at the foot of stone cliffs.

Ja

For a long time she simply sat, staring at the end of her carefully constructed and entirely false logic of hope. However Mad Jack might have come into the valley, it wasn't this way; and this had been by far the best hope of finding his path. The other possibilities-the random ravines and slender runoff gullies and crevices that opened into the narrowest end of the valley where Ja

But Ja

There was barely enough room for Zebra to turn around in order to head back where she had come from. Lucifer saw Zebra turning and followed suit. He led the retreat over the rough ground at a brisk trot, relieved to be free of the narrow passage between broken walls of stone. Zebra was equally relieved. She followed after the stallion eagerly.

They had retreated no more than a hundred feet when Ja

"Come on, girl. There's nothing up this trail but stone and shadows and maybe, just maybe, a way out of here."

Zebra didn't budge.

Ja