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tossed in a handful of ready-ground coffee, then pawed through his saddlebags until he found a chunk of jerky that did not have too much lint sticking to it. That and the steaming hot—if a trifle weak—coffee was breakfast. Not quite in the same category as the plates and platters of biscuits, sausage, flapjacks, and gravy he’d had back in Amanda’s kitchen, but it would do.
    When he was done with his sketchy meal, he poured the leftover coffee back into his canteen and saddled the mare. The burro took his packs without complaint, and once again their little caravan took to the trail, this time winding ever lower on the north shoulder of the mountain that sheltered Silver Plume.
    Three or more men and a little girl.
    They could be anywhere.
    He intended to find them.

Chapter 15
    â€œNo, sir, I don’t recall any such,” the gent leading the pack train said. He turned in his saddle and motioned for his helper to come up from the back of the train. “Say, Bob, you seen anything of a bunch of men, three or maybe more of ’em, traveling with a young girl? Would’ve been sometime in the past few days. This fella here is looking for ’em.”
    The helper rode around their string of mules and stopped beside the leader. He scratched his beard for a moment in thought, then shook his head. “Seen a couple other pack trains, but there wasn’t no women with them. Sorry.”
    Longarm’s fear was that a group with no females included might only mean that the girl was dead by now, but that was not something that would be easy to ascertain, certainly not just by looking. Hell, for all he knew these two could have been among the men who raided the Nellis camp and took the girl.
    And what of Frank Nellis? If he were still alive, surely he would show up somewhere soon. Or languish and die somewhere in one of those countless canyons if he’d been wounded and left behind by the raiders.
    Come to think of it, why did Jane Nellis abandon the man? Sheer terror, he supposed. Nighttime. Guns going off. Her daughter in the hands of the raiders. So she ran. It was not an unreasonable thing to do.
    Longarm had known women with sand, women who would have fought the raiders tooth and toenail to defend their child. Jane Nellis was not that kind.
    She did run for help, she said. That was what brought her to his little mountaintop camp, trying to steal a horse.
    Now the woman lay in Amanda Carricker’s feather bed, warm and comfortable and well fed. Taken care of by a pair of helpful women while he was up here on the mountain trails trying to sort out what had happened to her daughter.
    With very little effort, Longarm could resent Jane Nellis.
    But then who was he to judge? Certainly he would have reacted differently in that situation. But he was not a frightened, perhaps normally timid woman under assault by strangers, strangers who shot her husband and may well have killed the man.
    He sighed and thanked the men with this pack train. It was the third he had encountered and stopped to question so far today. No one had seen three or more men traveling with a young girl.
    â€œGood luck to you, mister,” one of them said, pulling his horse off the trail and motioning for his partner to lead their mule train on up the mountain.
    â€œAnd to you,” Longarm returned.
    He nipped the twist off a cheroot, lighted the slender cigar, and hooked a knee over his saddle horn. He sat smoking—and thinking—while the mule train lumbered past on its way south to Silver Plume or beyond.
    There were times, Longarm had to admit, when he wished he had the sort of simple life that those men had. Nothing to worry about except their animals and getting their cargo delivered on time.
    He grinned and blew out a series of smoke rings. Who the hell was he kidding anyway? He had tried the simple life. He had cowboyed, worked half a dozen other jobs. None of them had challenged him the way this one