Ambush Read Online Free

going to ride a hundred and thirty miles to make Gamble, Holly. Diablito’s pulled his whole bunch south, and soon he’ll be off the Wall. That’s when I’m going to climb it, and cut straight east across the base of the Peak, and put it between me and him. You got a horse. Go where you like.”
    Holly only stared at him. He lifted his glance briefly to the Wall, and then to the trail, and then back to Ward, and he groaned softly.
    The corner of Ward’s mouth lifted faintly. He said, “It’s a long ride, Holly, for ten dollars, a long, long, ride.”
    In the wretched, still afternoon heat of his quarters, young Lieutenant Linus Delaney was writing a letter, trying halfheartedly to make this evening’s post, which, once the heat of the day was gone, would leave Fort Gamble for Santa Fe with the mail. He was stripped to the waist, and had draped a towel around his neck. At intervals, he sponged his neck and chest with the towel.
    Pausing in his writing now, he raised his left hand toward the huge calabash he was smoking. The paper on which he was writing stuck to his hand, and he shook it loose with a gesture of disgust and rose.
    He was a young man of medium height, lithe and straight. His close-cropped curly hair, the color of ripe grain, was dark with perspiration. He swabbed his head carelessly with the towel, wiped his neck, and then carefully tried to puff his pipe alight and failed.
    Removing it from his mouth, he looked around the room. A small grin of deviltry touched his wide mouth, wrinkling the skin at the corner of his eyes, touching them with a dry and fleeting merriment.
    The room was a large one, running the width of the building. Besides the big clothespress in the middle of the back wall, there was a bed, a table, and chair on either side of the door. Ben Loring, captain and therefore his senior, had the choice half of the room fronting on the parade ground. His own looked out on the bakery, and the distant quartermaster sheds.
    Lieutenant Delaney picked up a match from his desk and carefully loosened the dottle in his pipe as he strolled across the room. On Loring’s side of the clothes-press, against its side and reposing in military neatness, stood a pair of almost new, custom-made cavalry boots.
    Linus dumped his pipe ashes into the right boot and shook the boot to distribute them evenly, afterward coming back and seating himself at the desk. It was his theory, unproven so far, that the ashes, once dampened by perspiration, would form a lye that would be highly uncomfortable to the wearer of the boot. And anything that added to the discomfort of that sober aristocrat, Captain Loring, was in Lieutenant Delaney’s opinion very much worth doing.
    He was writing again when he heard the knock on the frame of his door, which was open. He called, without looking up from his writing, “Anyone crazy enough to come in this steambath may enter.”
    â€œYour laundry, Lieutenant,” a woman’s voice said.
    Linus came out of his chair with a leap, and wheeled to regard the door. He started to reach for his shirt on the back of his chair, and then his hand paused.
    A young woman stood in the doorway, clean laundry folded over her arm. She was dressed in sober gray, and her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows. Her face was full and rounded, made curiously childlike by the mass of dark hair which was carelessly pinned off her neck atop her head. But what held Lieutenant Delaney motionless was the sight of her face: the right eye was swollen shut, discolored a red purple, and there was a bruise of matching color on the opposite cheekbone.
    The woman’s glance touched him, and fell away, and Linus said automatically, formally, “Come in, Mrs. Riordan.”
    The young woman stepped into the room and turned to Captain Loring’s bed. From the top of the pile of freshly ironed laundry over her arm, she began selecting clothes and laying them on the