Autumn Lover Read Free

the information Hunter had gathered himself. The ranch hadn’t changed from the description one of the soldiers assigned to Camp Halleck had given Hunter last week:
    The Ladder S is as unexpected and beautiful in this howling wilderness as a girl born of aristocrats on her mother’s side and restless plainsmen on her father’s side .
    But the army won’t be riding by the Sutton place for a while. The major is dead set on mapping passes and getting himself some redskins, and the Indians leave the marsh pretty much alone at this time of year .
    Hunter also knew what the soldier had been too discreet to say. The major in question was an out-and-out drunk, a man embittered by being assigned to the primitive West instead of the civilized East or the prostrate South.
    There was no doubt that the Ruby Mountains of the newly created state of Nevada were a wilderness barely touched by man. Nor had Elyssa’s parents chosen to settle near the northern end of the peaks, where wagon trains headed for Oregon passed nearby as they followed the uncertain course of the Humboldt River.
    Instead, the Suttons had settled amid the wild, desolate beauty of the east side of the Ruby Mountains. Behind the ranch house rose steep, rugged, jagged peaks.The pass through the Rubies that could be negotiated by wagons was far to the south.
    There were two other passes, but they were useful only to a man on horseback. Driving cattle through them, especially while under fire from the likes of the Culpeppers, would have been impossible.
    Passes, wagons, cattle, outlaws…
    Hunter had studied all of them when he realized that the Culpeppers were planning to go to ground in the Rubies. The war, and a bad marriage, had taught Hunter to control his potent, deep-running passions. He had become a careful man. A disciplined man.
    A deadly man.
    Now Hunter studied the outline of the Ruby Mountains against the glittering stars. He fixed it in his mind so that he could orient himself along the mountain range no matter what the light. It was a night-fighter’s trick, or an explorer’s.
    Hunter had been both.
    At least water won’t be a problem , he thought. This place is a remote oasis in the middle of one hell of a desert .
    No wonder the Suttons chose it .
    And no wonder the Culpeppers want to take it, now that someone else has done all the backbreaking work of hammering a ranch out of the wilderness .
    Though surrounded by desert, the Ruby Mountains were themselves not dry. Their high peaks raked moisture from the winter clouds and gave it back as runoff in the spring and summer. All the rills and creeks and streams on the east side ran down to the Ruby Marsh, flooding it with water and life.
    Then the melt stopped and the desert closed in until little was left of the marsh but miles of tawny reeds and small, hidden clearings around clean pools.
    Most of the clearings were protected by stretches ofmud too deep to cross. The remainder provided water and good grazing for cattle. But the paths through the tawny reeds changed with each rain. Today’s clear trail was tomorrow’s deadly bog.
    Even the Culpeppers hadn’t been brash enough to take on the rustling, seething mystery of Ruby Marsh.
    The marsh acted like a moat protecting the east side of the Ladder S lands. The mountains provided protection on the west side. The south was open to anyone willing to make a long, dry ride around the mountains. So was the north.
    The Culpeppers were not only willing to make the ride, they kept a man posted somewhere back up on the shoulder of the nearest peak, watching the Ladder S.
    No cattle had been permitted to leave the Ladder S. No new men had been permitted to get to the ranch, where they were desperately needed as cowhands.
    A sound stitched through the long exhalation of the wind. In the instant before Hunter identified the source of the noise, he turned, drew and cocked his six-gun.
    Just a horse rubbing his neck on the paddock fence , Hunter told