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societies in which he’d traveled long ago.
    Tucker would like to have seen Lucinda, the woman he’d once thought to marry, in a buckskin dress with a fringe at the bottom.
    That thought was too much and he let out a silent chuckle. Hell, Lucinda’s skin had never been exposed to the open air. He took another look at the woman who called herself Raven, and the thought of bare skin sent an arrow of need piercing through him. Even his rib hurt as he drew in a long, ragged breath.
    Whoa, Tuck! This is not the time for fantasies, and a woman who calls herself a spirit woman sure as hell isn’t the one to fantasize about
. He had no explanation for the birds that had come to his rescue, but he wasn’t ready to believe in spirits. Still, his companion was giving him second thoughts.
    “How much farther to the bottom?” he asked.
    “From the sound of the water, I’d say we’re close.”
    Tucker inclined his head and listened. The only sound he could hear was the pounding in his head. Whatever the sweet-tasting water had taken away, the sun and the uneven ground had started up again. A dull roar sounded, growing louder. He could even feel it shake the earth beneath them.
    “Wait a minute. That’s not a river.”
    “Shush! Don’t talk,” the woman whispered.
    Both horses stilled, and Tucker waited. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Geronimo lift his head from beyond the boulders. Then he realized what he heard. Horses. Many horses, passing along the trail overhead. Theriders stopped and began to argue. One group wanted to go back, the other forward.
    “The old half-breed wouldn’t have disappeared without a trace.”
    Tucker recognized that voice. It was the bandit leader from the cantina, the one with the crossed bandoliers full of shiny bullets.
    “But Porfiro, what about his partner, the one with the gold hair who was rescued by the birds?”
    Tucker cringed.
Partner
? If they truly believed the old miner was his partner, they’d be on his trail forever. The bandits saw him as some kind of supernatural being. He might have laughed had it not been for the woman with the dark eyes who came from nowhere to ride beside him. It was too strange. He was just a cowboy, trying to stay alive. He didn’t believe in any spirit world.
    Yet the woman with him called him a cougar. She saw him as some kind of primitive creature. And she seemed to care. For too long there’d been nobody to care what he was. He’d become a faceless drifter who came and went with the seasons.
    All his family were gone. All except Lucinda. The woman he’d been engaged to marry was now the wife of the mayor of Cinderville, South Carolina. The Yankee who’d come there after the war had claimed the spoils of victory: the Farrell farm, the future Mrs. Farrell, and—Tucker allowed himself a silent laugh—the pigs that were the one part of the farm Lucinda had despised. Tucker had gotten past losing his family. He’d even gotten over Lucinda. Knowing that her new husband had turned the horse farm into nothing but a pig farm made up for it somehow.
    Yank moved restlessly.
    Raven looked up the trail at him and put a finger of silence to her mouth.
    “What was that, Porfiro?” the sidekick asked anxiously.
    “Some kind of bird, Juan. Let’s go on.”
    “A bird?” The fear in the first man’s voice was contagious. The others began to whisper.
    “Just a little hummingbird, you fool. Are you going to let a sound stop us from finding the treasure? Not Porfiro. I will be rich.”
    “I do not fear the hummingbird,” Juan answered. “It is the black birds. Look, one follows us. I am worried. Let us leave this place before dark.”
    More animated discussion followed, then the men moved off down the trail, quietly now, as if listening.
    Raven held Onawa still for a long time. The sound of a loose pebble could travel in the canyon, sometimes bouncing off the walls in an echo that was louder than the original. Finally she nudged the horse