Chapter 6 - The Ghost Ride Through Black Ridge
The cabin was an inferno within five minutes. The dry cedar shake roof roared with red tongues of fire, spitting embers into the night sky.
"The back cellar door!" Corvin yelled over the deafening crackle of burning logs. "It leads out to the dry irrigation ditch behind the corral!"
Kicking through the burning debris, Corvin kicked open the low root door. Tazhi was behind him, clutching her lever-action rifle. As they spilled out into the ditch, two men dressed in dusters rushed forward with sawed-off shotguns.
Tazhi moved before Corvin could raise his rifle. She lunged low like a mountain lion, swinging the heavy stock of her rifle into the first man’s jaw with an audible crunch. The second man turned his weapon toward her, but Corvin fired from the hip, the .44 bullet punching through the attacker's breastplate, dropping him instantly into the dust.
"To the horses!" Corvin yelled.
The stable was smoking, but the stalls were still intact. Corvin threw open the gates, slapping his big bay gelding and a black mustang into motion. They didn’t bother with saddles; there was no time. Grabbing the reins, Corvin swung onto the gelding bareback while Tazhi vaulted onto the mustang with effortless rhythm.
They burst out of the burning corral just as a dozen mercenaries emerged from the brush, weapons blazing. Bullets whistled past Corvin’s ears, kicking up geysers of sand around the horses’ hooves.
"Follow me!" Tazhi shouted, leaning low over the neck of her horse, her long dark hair whipping through the smoke.
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She led him not toward the open plains, but straight toward Black Ridge—a terrifying labyrinth of razor-sharp shale, narrow gorges, and vertical drops where a single missed step meant a fall of five hundred feet into the black abyss below.
Behind them, the shouts of the bounty hunters faded, replaced by the howling wind of the canyon. Corvin looked back once. The homestead he had built with his own two hands—the ledger, the cedar fence, the solitary life—was nothing more than a glowing pillar of fire illuminating the southern desert.
