A Lady of the West (22 page)

Startled, Garnet looked at him. He couldn't remember Quinzy balking at anything before. But now wasn't the time to buck him on it. Instead he said, “I got plans for the little sister, not Miz Roper. Good plans.” He laughed.

Quinzy chuckled, too. “Yep, she is right purty, ain't she? Reckon the fuzz a-tween her legs is as yeller as her head?”

Just thinking about it made Garnet start breathing faster. That was something else he was mad about; he hadn't seen Celia leave the house in days. The women were holed up inside like Injuns were attacking or something.

“When you plannin' on makin' your move?” Quinzy asked.

“Don't know.” Now he wished he hadn't said anything, because if he didn't do something it would make him look like a coward. On the other hand, he couldn't do anything until he could get at the Major's wife.

So all he could do was wait it out.

A lone, dusty rider approached the ranch late one afternoon, slumping in the saddle with fatigue. Angelina Garcia was the first to see him and her eyes brightened at the thought of having a new man, but she didn't move from her languid slump against the barn wall.

The next one to see the rider was one of the gunhands. He nudged Garnet, pointed out the stranger to him. Garnet looked without much interest; it was
just another down-at-the-heel wrangler, one of the thousands who had poured west after the end of the war, drifting and looking for work.

Jake watched the man ride in and made no effort to speak or attract his attention. Time enough for that later. What the hell was he doing, riding in here like this? If anyone noticed their resemblance, people would get suspicious. But when the rider turned his head, Jake stifled a grin as he saw that the man had grown a short, dark beard. Smart.

Work was what the man asked about, and Garnet considered it. He didn't have to ask the Major every time he hired a cowpuncher because they tended to drift out as often as they drifted in. But, as dirty and tired as he was, this man didn't have the look of a cowpuncher. Maybe it was his eyes, cool and guarded; maybe he just looked a mite too comfortable with the iron strapped to his hip, the handle worn smooth with use. If he guessed right, this was a gunnie, maybe on the run. They could always use another gun, but the Major liked to look them over himself. Of course, the Major had been acting so loony lately, Garnet would be surprised if he could talk sense.

To hell with the Major. What he liked wouldn't make a difference much longer, anyway. “Yeah, find a place to bunk down,” Garnet said. “You any good with that piece you're wearin'?”

“I'm alive,” the man said flatly as he swung down from the saddle.

“How're you called?”

“Tanner.” He offered just the one name, and Garnet didn't ask if it was the front or the back one. Hell, it probably wasn't his real name, anyhow.

Tanner took care of his weary horse before seeking any sort of comfort for himself. He watered and fed the animal, brushed the dust from its coat, and put it in an empty stall. Slinging his saddle onto his broad shoulder, he went in search of the bunkhouse.

Like all of the buildings except the wooden barn,
the bunkhouse was made of thick adobe, so it was cool in the summer. Regardless of that, weather permitting, a lot of the men preferred to sleep outside rolled in their blankets. Tanner had his choice of empty bunks. They didn't look too dirty, and he didn't much care. He was so tired he thought he'd probably be able to sleep standing up. Figuring there wasn't anything he could do or find out that wouldn't wait until morning, he pulled off his boots, slid his .44 under the thin pillow, and went to sleep. He didn't feel the lumps in the mattress.

It was a little after midnight when he woke, feeling human again. Not wanting to disturb the men nearby—including Garnet, he saw—he silently slid the .44 back into his holster. Patting his pockets for the makings of a cigarette, he carefully rolled, licked, and lit it with a straw he'd stuck into the stove. He then picked up his boots and tiptoed out like a man who just wanted a smoke in the middle of the night. Outside, he pulled on his boots and started wandering around, smoking and looking at the stars. It was a moonless night, but that made the stars just that much brighter. It was the kind of night when sound carried for long distances.

He walked to the corral and leaned against the fence while he finished the cigarette. Only then did he go into the stable to check on his horse, which was dozing comfortably. Still wandering, he next visited the barn.

“About time you woke up,” a low voice said, and he turned to look at his brother.

“Anyone around?” Ben asked in an equally low voice.

“No.” Jake had waited through the long hours to make certain no one entered the barn. Still, he and Ben walked deeper into the building, away from the doors. Rubio snorted and stamped a hoof, a signal that he didn't like being awakened.

“What the hell's going on?” Ben felt he was entitled to the ill-temper in his voice. “Your telegram said to
get here as fast as possible, that things had changed. I started rounding up the men we've hired, then left the rest of it to Lonny with orders for him to get them here pronto, and I lit out. I damn near rode my horse into the ground, then I get here and everything seems quiet. I figured they'd found out who you are.” He didn't say that he had halfway expected to find his brother dead, but both of them knew the consequences if anyone found out who they were before their men got there to back them up.

“The Major has got himself a wife.”

“So?”

“So when he dies, she inherits.”

Ben was silent as he absorbed what this meant to their plans. “Shit,” he said.

“Yeah. She's a lady, young enough to be his daughter. Her cousin and little sister live here now, too.”

“So what're we going to do? We can't kill an innocent woman.”

“No, but a widow can remarry.”

Again Ben was silent, thinking it through. “You'd marry her?”

“Can you think of any other way?”

“No, but there's another side to it, too. Will she marry you?”

“Yes,” Jake said. Victoria was still pouting over that damn horse, but he'd held her in his arms and felt the strength of her response often enough to know he could make her do whatever he wanted.

“There's going to be some shooting when we take the ranch,” Ben pointed out. “There's a chance the women might be hurt.”

“Not if I can help it. When we have some backup, I'm going to call McLain out, make him face me. If I go up against him while you and the men watch the others, there shouldn't be any wild shooting.”

“Hold it right there.” Ben moved around to face his brother. “You're not going up against him alone.”

“It makes sense.”

“The hell it does. This is my fight, too, and I'm going to have it, not stand around while you take all the risks.”

In the darkness Jake couldn't see Ben's face, but he didn't have to. There was no way he could keep Ben out of the fight. “All right. How long will it be before the men get here?”

“A few days, maybe a week. Lonny will push 'em hard.”

A week at the most. Everything in Jake tightened at the thought of it finally ending. He wanted McLain dead so much it hurt. He wouldn't even let him be buried on Sarratt land. A week, then the land would be theirs again—and Victoria would be his.

“McLain's going loony,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. He was tired, but every nerve in his body had been jumping since he'd seen Ben ride up. “There's no way of telling what he'll do. He's started running around and babbling about the Sarratts coming back—”

Ben stiffened. “Well, hell, he's right, but how did he know?”

“He doesn't. That's just it. Every time something happens, he starts slobbering and muttering about the Sarratts getting him. If a steer dies, he thinks it's been poisoned. If he hears a shot, he thinks it was fired at him.”

“Looks like the bastard's sins are coming home to roost, after all.”

“The point is when we move we'll have to move fast. We'll have to come in at night quiet and slow. Most of the men are out with the herds at any one time, so we'll only have to deal with about a third of them here at the house. We'll take the bunkhouse first, and we'll have to do it without any shooting. When those men are taken care of, we can get the house. McLain sleeps in the big front bedroom.” It had been their parents' bedroom. “We'll go in quiet and bring him out.” Victoria would be in the bedroom, too, he
thought. He didn't want to see her in bed with McLain, but he'd do whatever he had to do, even if it meant killing McLain in front of her.

Ben nodded. “We can't take a chance on anyone seeing our men, then. I'll leave in a couple of days to meet them. But once I leave, I won't be able to just wander back in without making Garnet suspicious. I'll hold the men at Parson's Pass. We can't move without knowing if you're ready or not, so you'll have to come tell us.”

Jake didn't like the idea of leaving the ranch even for the four days it would take to get to Parson's Pass and back, but there was no other way. The women would just have to do what they'd been doing anyway and stay inside the house.

“This is the one and only meeting we can have,” he said. “It's too risky; someone might see us together. From now on you don't know me.”

Ben yawned. “Never saw you before in my life, feller,” he said as he walked away.

W
ho's that?” McLain asked suspiciously, looking at the new gunhand.

“Says his name's Tanner.”

“Where's he from?”

“He didn't say, and I didn't ask.” Garnet moved a step away from McLain; the man stank of sour whiskey.

McLain's eyes were even redder than usual, the pupils contracted to tiny points. “Get rid of him. I don't want any strangers around here. He might be one of Sarratt's spies.”

“Don't be so goddamn stupid,” Garnet snapped, abruptly out of patience. “We killed the little bastards, remember? I put lead in both of them.”

Once McLain would have turned on him like a rabid wolf for talking back, but now he only wagged his head. “We never found their bodies. We looked, but we didn't find them.”

“They're dead, I'm telling you! Shot up the way they were, no food or water, no way of getting to a doctor, there's no way they could have lived. You're worrying about damn ghosts and it's spooking the men.”

McLain peered at him with owlish concern. “If they died, why didn't we ever see any buzzards? The buzzards would've found 'em even if we couldn't.”

“They're
dead,”
Garnet hissed. “It was twenty years ago. You think they wouldn't have been back long before this if they'd been alive?”

There was no logic that could penetrate McLain's feverish certainty. “They waited until I got married. Don't you see? They want to kill my wife, the way I killed theirs.”

“You didn't kill their wives, you killed their mama.” Garnet thought he would explode with frustration. The idiot couldn't even think straight!

“But they can't kill my mama, so they're going after my wife!” McLain shook his head at Garnet's lack of understanding. “They're doing it because she's mine, see? But they won't get
me;
I'm keeping a lookout for them, every night, waiting. The bastards are gonna try sneaking up on me, but they'll be the ones surprised because I'm waiting for them.”

“Jesus.” Garnet looked at the man and shook his head, seeing the futility of arguing. He'd worked for McLain all these years because the Major had been even dirtier and sneakier and more brutal than he was himself, but now all he saw was a loony, stinking old man. McLain's deterioration had happened quick, but Garnet felt neither sympathy nor loyalty for him. While McLain had been strong, Garnet had run with him. Now that he was weak, Garnet planned to destroy him with no more compunction than he would squash an insect.

“Why don't you go back in the house and let me worry about the men,” he told McLain. “I'm the foreman, ain't I?”

McLain gave a hollow chuckle. “Yeah, but I'm the boss and don't you forget it.” He peered at Garnet with rheumy eyes. “You think I'm crazy, but you should be watching for them, too. They're after you
just the same as they are me. You're the one shot their daddy.”

Nodding at the indisputable truth of what he'd just said, McLain shambled back toward the house. He was tired, so tired from all the nights of keeping watch, but every time he slept he saw that damn little bastard coming at him with that knife. He didn't dare even lie down in his bed anymore, but sat up in a straight chair so that if he nodded off he'd fall and wake himself up. He didn't get much sleep that way, but neither did he dream.

Disgusted, Garnet turned his back on McLain's retreating figure. “Hey, Tanner!”