The Burning Hills   (eBook - Adobe EPUB) (eBook)

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Wounded, dehydrated, and escaping a violent feud with the men of Bob Sutton's ranch, Trace Jordan is near collapse when he descends from the heat of the desert into a cool, secluded canyon. He wakes to find a beautiful woman gently caring for his injuries. Maria Cristina and her family have also suffered at the hands of Sutton and his men. The experience has left her hostile and defiant. But Jordan sees another side of Maria, and the more time they spend together, the greater his concern for her safety becomes. Sutton's men are watching and waiting for him to show himself. If he escapes, Maria will be left behind to face their brutality. But if he convinces her to join him, he will be leading her into a heat-blasted, waterless desert. And if that doesn't kill them, the Apaches will.

From the Paperback edition.

Excerpts:
Chapter One
On a ridge above Texas Flat upon a rock shaped like flame, a hand moved upon the lava. The hand moved and then was still. In all that vast beige-gray silence there was no other movement and no sound.

A buzzard swinging in lazy circles above the serrated ridge had glimpsed that moving hand. Swinging lower, he saw a man who lay among the rocks atop the ridge. He was a long-bodied man in worn boots and jeans, a man with wide shoulders and a lean tough face.

It was the face of a hunter but now of a man hunted. A man who lay with his rifle beside him and who wore a belted gun; but the man still lived and the buzzard could wait.

Below and stretching away from the very foot of the ridge to lose itself in shimmering distance lay the glaring white expanse of the playa. Beyond the playa and even now riding up to draws that would eventually open upon the dry lake were three groups of horsemen who rode with a single thought.

To left and right of the hunted man's position the comb-like ridge stretched away like a great wall dividing the dead white of the playa from the broken lands beyond. Once in those broken lands south of the border, a man might lose himself in any one of a thousand canyons and might himself be lost.

It was a land virtually without water, rarely visited by white men and roved only occasionally by Indians for whom this was a last stronghold and at whose hands no white man could expect mercy.

Great tablelands shouldered against the brassy sky, lofty pinnacles loomed higher still and over all that red and broken land the sun lay hot and dead heat gathered in the sullen canyons.

Far and away, beyond the broken land, some great peaks reached at the clouds, purple with distance, cool, remote and lost. In those mountains there would be water and there would be grass. There a man might find shade; there would be wild game; there would be sanctuary. The hunted man had not turned to look but he knew the mountains were there. He also knew what lay between.

Yet here and there even in that broken desert land between, if one but knew where to look, there would be water.

Northward, not yet within the range of the man's eyes, moved the searching riders. Yet the buzzard had already seen those moving shadows that stirred not with the wind but of their own choice.The buzzard saw them and after a time saw that these were men.

The buzzard could not reason but he knew the patterns that led to food. His entire life was built upon such fragments of knowledge and he knew that where such groups of men rode, death rode with them.

They were hard men bred of a hard and lonely land, men with eyes red-rimmed from sun-glare, faces whitened by alkali and muscles heavy with weariness. Yet they knew the man for whom they searched could not be far ahead and they pushed on, riding steadily into the hot still afternoon.

Trace Jordan could not see the riding men but he knew they were out there and he knew they looked for him. Once, seven hours ago, they believed they had him and his blood-stained shirt revealed how close a thing it had been.

They had caught him in the rocks above Mocking Bird Pass, brought to bay like a lean and hungry wolf pursued by hounds. And he had fought them there, a lean and hungry man, red-eyed and dangerous, a man driven and battered and hammered but a man not beaten, a man who had never been beaten.

A rifle bullet ricocheting from a rock had ripped an ugly tear through the flesh above his hip and he had lost...

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