"Sorry," Dean apologized. "Guess I was tailgating too close. Are you all right?"
The other rider doffed her helmet, spilling waves of blond hair. She was a gorgeous creature in her early twenties with a figure that would make a monk sigh.
"Were you drafting me or just checking out my ass?" she asked with a smile, as she looked him up and down.
"Sleeping on the job was more like it. I should know better, but I kind of fell in back there with your pace. Sorry."
"No harm done. We'll just blame it on the rabbit." She extended her hand. "Hi, I'm Betty, from Boise."
"David from Pennsylvania" didn't have the same ring as he shook her hand and introduced himself as she remounted her bike.
"It's my turn to check out your buns," she said, still smiling. "You take the lead for a while-I'm tired of eating all the bugs."
"Sure thing," Dean smiled as he mounted his bike. "But fair warning-I'm hitting a very fast pace."
"We'll see," she said as she replaced her helmet and began to follow him.
The two pedaled together most of the afternoon, enjoying the pine-scented air, the cool breeze that hugged the base of the mountains and the yellow sunshine of a perfect spring day. Their pace was sufficiently similar that neither seemed uncomfortable keeping up with the other. There was little conversation but at one point when they were exchanging the lead and Betty pedaled ahead, she called to him over her shoulder.
"Are you married?"
"Nope," he replied.
"That's nice," she answered as she sped ahead. A large group overtook them outside of Durango and they became separated in the pack as she became caught up in a blur of color and then was gone. All in all, riding together had made for a most pleasant afternoon.
Aside from the anticipation of locating Jeffrey Byrne and the uncertainty surrounding it, Dean felt pretty damn good. The first day was behind him, his muscles weren't overly sore, he seemed to be adjusting to the altitude and he had conquered more hills in one day than a year of Pennsylvania biking would offer. Lurking in the back of his mind, however, was the frightening knowledge that later in the week he would have to bike twice the first day's distance on terrain quite unlike the relative level course of the Cortez-to-Durango run.
Durango, Colorado, once one of the wildest cities in the old west, was now the home of 12,000 citizens and one of the country's last narrow-gage railroads. The Denver and Rio Grande Western made daily warm-weather trips up the mountain to the mining town of Silverton, 40 miles away. Nowadays the cargo was tourists and not precious minerals. But the bikers wouldn't have time for such excursions. They were far too busy stretching muscles and preparing for the more torturous miles that lay ahead.