The Killing Breed by Frank Leslie Read Free Book Online Page B

who’d found themselves alone on the frontier, as she had when her father had turned her out after her mother had died, there were few other alternatives save starving to death. But she knew it had condemned her to a certain cynicism and darkness, a certain callousness. And she sometimes wondered, even when she was making love with Yakima, enjoying working in the cabin or out here in the stable and corral, if her past would leave her in peace.
     
     
    She hoped with all her soul that her luck would hold, that her happiness would endure—that the Fates would continue to allow her to enjoy her life out here with a good man whom she loved with all her heart.
     
     
    When she’d filled all the stock tanks with water from the windmill, hauling the buckets on an oak pole draped across her shoulders, she gathered tack in need of mending from the stable. It was now nine o’clock, judging by the sun kiting high and lens-clear above Bailey Peak. She’d spend the rest of the morning mending and oiling tack, but first she’d put on a fresh pot of coffee to help leach the autumn chill from her bones.
     
     
    She wished Yakima were here. She and the half-breed and Kelly had formed the stockman’s custom of midmorning and midafternoon coffee, kicked back in chairs on the cabin’s front porch. It helped break up the often grueling albeit satisfying ranch work that left them all exhausted by sundown.
     
     
    A slight breeze picked up, shepherding a tumbleweed into her path as she crossed from the stable to the cabin. She kicked the weed away, squinting against the dust, then turned suddenly toward the south, peering beyond the meadow toward the far line of trees showing spruce green now in the cool, crystal mountain sunlight.
     
     
    She’d heard something. A clipped voice on the breeze and possibly the rattle of a bit chain.
     
     
    Crazy Ann nickered behind Faith. Feeling a cricket of apprehension skitter up her spine, she stood staring for a minute, shading her eyes with her free hand. She half expected the wild stallion to come barreling over those knobs, stepping high and buck-kicking, head down, his dun mane blowing.
     
     
    After last night, she wouldn’t put it past the horse to lead Yakima and Kelly a half day’s hard ride from the ranch, then circle back for the mares he’d set his hat for.
     
     
    But there was nothing out there but the sunlight and rolling, sage-covered knobs and the line of thick pine forest beyond. Beyond them, mere shadows this time of the day, distant ranges rolled up like fog between here and Mexico.
     
     
    She continued striding to the cabin but stopped again suddenly when Crazy Ann and another mare whinnied almost in unison. Now there was something moving amidst the pines and firs, bobbing slightly above the sage. Her heart quickening, Faith lifted a shading hand once more.
     
     
    Not something.
     
     
    Someone.
     
     
    Riders galloped toward her, rising and falling with the swell of the land, moving out of the pines at the edge of her vision and out of sight behind a high, thimble-shaped butte. She’d only caught a momentary look, but there appeared to be five or six riders—white men, not Apaches. Sunlight flashed off steel.
     
     
    Faith felt a tightness in her shoulders. She turned with forced calm toward the cabin, stepped up onto the porch, and strode inside, where she dropped the tack on the kitchen table and grabbed her Winchester rifle off the deer antler rack on the living room wall.
     
     
    As she turned toward the door, which she’d left standing ajar behind her, she racked a fresh shell into the Winchester’s breech and stepped back outside, turning on the porch to face south.
     
     
    Hoof thuds rose clearly now as five riders loped toward her along the trail, a hundred yards away and closing. Watching them come, Faith cocked a hip and held the Winchester low across her thighs. Not a very friendly way of greeting newcomers, maybe, but since she was alone here,