I grasped the door frame and waited, my heart pounding in my ears. Wetzel stood directly behind me, the muzzle-loader in his hand, the tail of his coonskin cap bouncing in the wind, his eyes narrowed.
"Five," the co-pilot said suddenly. "And a four, and a three, and a two, and a one—target!"
I dived headfirst into blackness. I spun madly earthward, but in the back of my mind a calm voice counted off the seconds. Then I yanked at the ring-cord, black folds of nylon rustled above me, I heard a sharp report like the crack of a giant whip, the straps at my shoulders yanked painfully, and I was floating gently down toward the night-shrouded surface of Colorado.
I landed in a meadow, if that was what they called it this far west. I came down hard but in the way they had told me would prevent injury. There was no wind to yank me about before I could unship the parachute, and within seconds I was on my feet and searching for some sign of Enoch Wetzel.
Unexpectedly a hand struck me lightly on the back. I was jumping aside and reaching for my gun when the frontiersman's quiet voice reached me. "You scare mighty easy for an Injun."
I said, "We should be about a mile, two at the most, south of the road where that Army tank picked you up yesterday afternoon. Let's find it."
"Aye."
The land was by no means as flat as I had expected. Fortunately most of it was relatively open, with only scattered clumps of trees and bushes. There were too many small unexplained night sounds, but none of these appeared to alarm Wetzel in the slightest, so I managed to ignore them. Once we flushed a long-eared rabbit, and it was five minutes before I could get my heart out of my throat.
A barbed-wire fence, the first we had encountered, told me we had reached a road. It wasn't paved or even graveled—just a ribbon of dirt pointing east and west as straight as an Apache lance. Nothing moved along it in either direction as far as I could see. A line of telephone poles bordered one side.