Read Online The Devil You Know by Jo Goodman - Free Book Online

from his. “I reckon I got it in my head now why you need privacy. Holler when you’re done. I’ll be right outside.”
    â€œWonderful,” he muttered. Lord, he would be grateful when he could walk to the outhouse.
    *   *   *
    Willa made a striking figure on horseback. She sat tall and straight in the saddle, relieving her mare of the full burden of her slight weight. She was a skillful rider and learned most of what she knew from her father before he became a slave to the bottle. He had her in the saddle before she could properly walk; at least that’s what she had been told. It might even have been true because she felt the most at ease while she was riding, whether she was flying with the wind or resilient in the face of it.
    It was another cool morning, the fourth they’d had in a row, and Willa stopped once to pull a black woolen scarf out of her coat pocket and wrap it around her neck and the lower half of her face. In the east, the sun was climbing in a cerulean sky but not offering much in the way of heat, and to the north there was a front approaching, an endless gray cloud carpet unrolling in her direction.
    Willa’s mount was a sleek, cinnamon-colored mare with an ebony mane and dark brown eyes as expressive as those of a heroine in a dime novel. Willa named her after her personal favorite, Miss Felicity Ravenwood.
    Willa guided Felicity along Potrock Run until she came to the place where Annalea had found Israel McKenna. She dismounted, searched the area for what they might have missed the day before, and found a short length of rope, still knotted in the middle, with blood on it. She guessed that it was what had bound his wrists. There was nothing extraordinary about the rope itself—she had coils of the same back at the ranch—but the knot intrigued her because she hadn’t seen one like it used by cattlemen.
    Deciding that it was worth studying later, she stuffed it in the pocket where she had kept the scarf and remounted to cross the run. Felicity picked her way across the shallow stream with the same delicate care for her hooves that her namesake might have shown for a new pair of kid shoes.
    â€œYou have the sensibility of an Eastern debutante, don’t you, girl?” Willa gave her a light pat on the neck as Felicity climbed out of the run. “And the heart of Joan of Arc. Let’s go.”
    Willa followed alongside the trail of crushed grass and scattered rock. Twice she saw narrow strips of material torn from Israel’s jacket and trousers, and both times she left them where they lay. The trail divided in the midst of a stretch of old boxelders, and Willa reasoned the riders did not follow the same trail through the trees on their return trip. She found evidence of Israel’s passing in the heavily furrowed bark of several boxelders, threads of fabric snagged by the gray-brown trunks, and she kept Felicity moving slowly in that direction.
    When she reached the clearing on the other side, she sawwhat Cutter had observed in the multiple hoofprints, the movement of restless horses, and the damp outline of shoes that did not belong to any four-legged animal. She did not pause there long but kept going, taking the route the riders had used when they fled in hopes of finding where they had come from and where they had gone.
    She was crossing the meandering run a second time when she saw two riders approaching from the northeast. Willa urged Felicity forward until they were on the other side of the run and then held her up. She recognized the men as much from their mounts as she did from the manner they rode them. As a precaution, she opened her coat to put her Colt in easy reach and unstrapped the holster. She also had a rifle in the tooled leather scabbard if there was need for it, although she reckoned that if she were serious about using it, she would be taking aim right now.
    The lead rider was a large man, not heavy, but heavily