Green Calder Grass (Calder Saga 6)

“Any sign of Ty?” Chase made a scan of the open ground beyond the rider.

“No, sir.” Again the Garvey boy failed to meet his gaze. “I didn’t really expect to.”

Nobody called him “sir,” but it was something else in his tone made Chase stiffen. “Why not?”

“One of the reins is broke. I figure the horse was running and stepped on it.”

Leather creaked as Chase shifted in his saddle to address the rest of the men. “According to Cat, Ty was headed for the Three Fingers. The horse probably threw him somewhere in that area.”

“I don’t think he was thrown, sir,” Jed Garvey ventured hesitantly.

The “sir” business was beginning to annoy Chase. “Why not?” he asked with impatience.

“Because”—he paused and pulled the lame horse forward, turning it sideways—“there’s blood all over the saddle.”

The summer sun had already dried it a dark color. Chase reeled slightly. The sight of the big smear shut off the air from his lung and momentarily robbed him of speech.

Somewhere off to his left, Jessy murmured a pained, “Dear God, no.”

Soft as it was, her voice cracked over Chase like a whip. Immediately he sat tall in the saddle, his big shoulders squaring up. “You ride back to camp, Jessy.”

The crispness of his order wiped the stricken look from her face. “No, I won’t,” she replied in a voice equally firm in its defiance. “I am riding with you to look for Ty.”

“No, you aren’t. You are going back to camp now. And that is an order!” He was deliberately harsh with her. Ignoring the angry glare of her eyes, Chase fired his next order at the young Garvey boy. “You go with her. And get Amy Trumbo here on the double.”

Every instinct told Chase there was too much blood on that saddle. If they were lucky enough to find Ty alive, he would need medical attention as fast as they could get it to him. A registered nurse was the closest he could get to that, and Amy was a damned good one.

“Yes, sir.” Jed immediately urged his horse forward and gave a tug on the reins to the lame bay. It took a hobbling step forward.

“Leave the horse,” Chase ordered as his own mount shifted restively under him, catching the high tension of its rider and the blood smell in the air. “It will make its own way to camp. When it does, make sure no one goes near it. Logan will want to examine it.”

“Logan?” Jobe echoed with a puzzled frown. “Why—”

“There’s too much blood for this to be an accident.” It was a truth Chase had already faced. He spoke it now, with no feeling in his voice. Emotion was a luxury he couldn’t allow himself, not until he found his son. “Let’s go,” he said to the others and reined his dancing horse around the injured bay.

Out of the corner of his eye, he had a glimpse of Jessy as she angrily hauled her horse around and pointed it toward camp. He had a momentary regret that he had been so harsh with her. In his heart, Chase knew she was not a woman who needed to be shielded from the sometimes brutal realities of life. But he had been raised otherwise, and he hadn’t wanted her along.

The small band of riders bunched close to Chase as they rode off. Behind them, the bay horse issued a forlorn whinny and limped gamely after the two riders headed for camp.

The Broken Butte range was rugged foothill country, its rough terrain offering a thousand hiding places. Three Fingers was a name given to an area where three brush-choked coulees emptied into a shallow valley.

A half-mile from the entrance to the first, Chase raised his hand, signaling a halt, and reined in his horse. It sidestepped impatiently under him, swinging its rump into the horse on its right.

“We’ll fan out here,” Chase ordered. “Stumpy, you and Jobe check out the first finger. The rest of us will take the second. If we still haven’t found him, we’ll all look in the third.”

Acknowledging the order with a nod, Stumpy reined his horse to the left and sent it forward at a walk. Jobe swung his mount farther to the left, creating a good twenty feet of space between himself and Stumpy.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” Chase called after them. “And not just for Ty. You see anything, you holler.”

Stumpy responded with a lift of his hand, signaling that he had heard and understood. Maintaining his position in the center of the small search party, Chase walked his horse forward, resisting its head-tossing tug on the bit. As anxious as he was to find Ty, he knew a slow and thorough sweep was better than a hasty one. On either side of him came the dull thud of hooves on the hard ground and the rustling swish of dry grass against the horses’ legs.

The morning breeze carried to him the high-pitched bark of a prairie dog, alerting the rest of its town to the presence of riders. But Chase had no interest in them. He was intent on the area before him, searching for any sign that a rider had passed this way. But the hard, dry ground held few impressions, and none that resembled a hoofprint.

Periodically he lifted his gaze and scanned the countryside ahead of him, alert for any movement, anything that didn’t look as it should. He spotted a buzzard floating in the sky to the north on the lookout for carrion, as always. Its mere presence overhead was enough to twist his stomach into knots.

In a rare burst of impatience, Chase pulled up and bellowed, “Ty! Ty! Can you hear me?”

Startled, the other riders reined in, then waited and listened. The morning breeze whispered through the dry grass, but it was the only sound in the stillness. Chase hadn’t expected a response. The shout hadn’t been for Ty’s benefit. Chase