Powder Keg by Ed Gorman

headwinds and blinding snow.
    Then we reached a natural cove made out of scrub pines. There wasn’t any use trying to talk in that wind, so I turned in the saddle and pointed to the covelike formation of pines.
    She didn’t like it. She’d argued against the first time I’d told her we needed to stop. I understood her reason for wanting to keep going. I probably would have been just as single-minded if my brother was in the danger hers was.
    She relented and we both dropped off our horses and led them to the area I’d pointed to. The temperature hadn’t frozen my extremities yet. The wool scarf I had wrapped around my face had kept my nose and cheeks from freezing. But as I had to remind myself, we weren’t even a fourth of the way towardreaching the mountain plateau where Chuck Gage had said Chaney was likely hiding.
    The animals were white with snow. We brushed them off, though realistically in a few minutes they’d be white again.
    “I’m not waiting more than fifteen minutes,” she barked at me when we huddled inside the windbreak of the pines.
    “I know you’re in a hurry but there’s something you’re forgetting.”
    She laughed bitterly. “Let’s make an agreement, all right? You don’t know one damned thing about these mountains. I grew up here. So let’s agree right now that you don’t give me any more of your so-called advice, all right?”
    “I may not know the mountains but I know horses.” The snowstorm had put me in as bad a mood as it had her. “And I’ll tell you one thing. One little piece of bad luck with our horses and then we’ll really be behind Connelly and Pepper. There’re a hundred places on this trail where our horses could stumble and hurt themselves. And then what? Then we’re on foot.”
    But she was relentless. Her cold red cheeks and the snow trapped in her eyelashes had given her a doll-like look. But the dark eyes were angrier than ever. She might look like a doll but she was a damned angry one. “You think I haven’t thought about the horses? But my brother’s life is at stake here, federal man. This is just a job to you. But to me it’s saving my own flesh and blood. So I’m going to push my horse as hard as I can. And if it breaks a leg and has to be shot, so be it. And if you don’t like the way I’mpushing my horse, you can always head back. You want revenge for your friend. But your friend’s already dead. My brother is still alive—at least hopefully. And I’m going after him right now whether you’re with me or not. Now do you understand me, you stupid bastard?”
    And with that, she stalked over to her horse and threw herself up on the saddle and headed back for the trail again.
    We didn’t speak for a good hour or more.
    The snow thinned, the wind backed down some. The sun came out for ten minutes. It had a hallucinatory quality. Middle of a snowstorm—even if it had abated to a degree, it was still a snowstorm—you don’t expect to see the sun. It put me in mind of all those desert stories where the man dying of thirst begins to imagine fountains and creeks. Was I imagining the sun?
    “Maybe we’re catching a break,” she said.
    I’d been expecting her to still be of the snarly persuasion. I didn’t know if she always had this fierce side or if her brother’s situation had created it. But now her voice was gentle, friendly.
    “Is that really the sun?”
    She laughed. “That’s what I was thinking. I know people imagine they see things when they get snow-blinded. But since we both see it maybe there’s a possibility that it’s really there.”
    I looked up to check on it again. A round golden ball throwing off waves of energy behind a screen of snow.
    “I want to say something, Noah.”
    “You don’t need to. I know you’re sorry you snapped at me back there.”
    And she snapped at me again. “I was going to say that I was serious about you going back. I can do this alone.”
    “Oh.”
    “You really thought I was going to