Catch a Shooting Star jd edit 03 12 2012 html (20 page)

Madeline hesitated as she watched in awe at his accomplished experience with a gun and it amazed her to see him handle them as if they were a part of his body.  His anger brought her back to his attention and she nodded quickly before she lifted her lilac skirt and skipped down the stairs to the dirt road.

The trio walked around to the back of the hotel and picked out a handful of cans and bottles and then they walked to the back of the livery stable where there was a broken and unused corral.  Travis lined the targets on the fence while the others waited a few hundred feet away.

As he returned to stand beside Maddie, he nodded at her to get ready to aim and fire.  Nervously, she raised the pistol to eye-level, closed one eye and found a target in her sight.  She checked her stance, as her brother had taught her many years ago and then blinked as her forefinger pulled the trigger.  After the gun exploded, sending it’s bullet into the side of one of the cans, she secretly rejoiced that she had actually hit it.  Then, she lowered her weapon and looked at Travis, her face filled with pride.

“Not bad,” he said, nodding his head.  “Of course, you do know that we will be fighting more than one man and those men will be shooting at us.”

With a nod, she said matter-of-factly, “Yes, of course.”

“Well, then, you need to be able to shoot as many times as you can in one swift move,” he explained amiably as he checked his load on one pistol and then the other.  He took a breath before he continued, “Now suppose you were up against five banditos, the cans being the bad guys, and they are all charging at you with guns a’blazin’.  The one to your left is a fat ugly Mexican bast—cuss carrying a repeating rifle.  The two next to him only have one pistol each, so they’ll be easier to take on.  And the one in the middle, he’s the leader, the head honcho.  He’s got a shot gun, a pistol, a knife and a rifle slung across his back.  The one on the far right has a machete and he’s fast as lightning.  Now, you know you only have six bullets and only a few slug-dodging seconds to defend yourself.  Now, tell me.  What is the order that you would take them out?”

Dumbfounded, Madeline stared across the corral at the line of targets, trying to remember what each one stood for and how much firepower each was supposed to have.  She pointed to the one in the middle and said, “I’d take the head honcho out first and then the repeating rifle, the two men with a pistol each and then Mr. Machete because even though he’s fast, he has to dodge my bullets to get to me.”

“Very good,” Travis said, impressed with her quick thinking and then he asked, “Do you think you can do it?”

Put on the spot, Madeline balked, shuffling her feet and toying with the butt of her pistol.  She tried to raise it to ready herself for the fast-paced shooting that he expected her to perform, but she lowered it again in despair.

Seeing the worry in her eyes, Travis said to Hayden, who had been equally impressed with what she had said, “Will you go and get some more cans?  I think we will be here awhile.”

After Hayden left them, Travis stepped behind her and his long arms encircled her, taking her hands into his and lifting her arms parallel to the ground as he said, his voice soft and encouraging, “If you keep both eyes open,  you can see what’s going on around you.  Try to concentrate on the middle target while still keeping an eye on the others.  Give two good squeezes on the trigger and let’s see if you can drop more than one desperado.”

She could feel his strong chest against her back, his hot breath against her cheek but she had to concentrate on the task at hand in order to convince him that she was as good a shot as Hayden had said she was.  She wriggled her feet apart to steady herself and she started to close one eye again, but she remembered his advice and she opened it and then glared at the menacing targets as if they were real enemies.  With his encouraging whispers in her ear, she squeezed off the trigger three times.

“Got Damn!” Travis exclaimed, not taking the Lord’s name in vein, yet cursing nonetheless.  “That was amazing, Maddie!”

She felt his body leave hers as he clapped his hands in appreciation of her prowess with a pistol.  A smile beamed on her face as she turned around to face him, her violet eyes bright with pride at not only sending three cans sailing into the morning air, but for impressing this obviously accomplished gunfighter.  With a cocky grin, she blew the smoke from the end of her gun and then let the heavy pistol fall to her side as she said, “Let’s see you drop them.”

“Well, alright,” he drawled, just as cocky, while he nodded once with a smile and stepped back to the fence to replace the cans.  Then, he returned to her side, eased her away from him a few inches and then stared at the fence for, what seemed to her, was only a split second before all six chambers of his left-hand pistol were emptied upon the fence of menacing enemies.  

An amazed whistle was the response from Hayden, who had just returned with more cans and he dropped them at his feet as if his arms could no longer hold them.  He put his hands upon his hips and declared, “Mighty fine shootin’ there, pardner.  You should be working for me!”

Travis chuckled as he began picking up the cans at Hayden’s feet and said, “Right now, I’m only working for myself.”

“That was amazing!” Madeline exclaimed, keeping her eyes trained on him as he gathered the cans into his large hands and then walked over to the fence.  “I’ve never seen shooting like that.”

“That’s nothing,” Hayden said.  “That man can clear out a room full of gunfighters before they have a chance to raise their eyebrows and be out the door before the smoke clears.”

“You’ve seen him shoot before?” Madeline asked of Hayden.

“Yep,” he said with a nod.  “He and I are old friends.  We used to be partners, how long ago was it?”

Madeline’s eyes went from Hayden to Travis, who answered without a smile, “Six years, I believe.”

“Damn—er , pardon me, Maddie.  Darn, that was a long time ago,” Hayden said before he continued to explain to her, “We were all Texas Rangers, me and Corbett and Tito and a few other men.  Back when the state was in an uproar, when there was no law for miles around and it was up to us rangers to keep the peace.  We had to ride for days sometimes just to get to the next town or the next scuffle with Injuns or Mexicans or gunslingers.  But, we put ‘em all straight.

“Now, there’s not much need for us since things have settled down a bit.  We kinda split up and lost track of each other.  I found this nice little town and settled down, Travis went back to his blood-thirsty revenge mission, and Tito, didn’t he get married and head down to Mexico?” he asked Travis, who nodded.

“Del Rio,” Travis answered.  “But, he’ll be meeting me just outside the village to give me a hand.”

Hayden shook his head in envy while he said, “I wish I could be there.  Sounds like a Hell of a party.  Pardon me, Maddie.”

“It’s alright,” she said with a shrug.  “I’ve heard worse.”  With an inward smile and a glance at Travis, who smiled back at her, she thought to herself that she had even said worse.

Hayden ducked his head and smiled at the two who seemed to have become friends in the short time that he had gone to gather cans.  He left them to go to the fence and pick up the bullet-ridden cans, and as he examined one, he had to laugh for it was an empty tin of Professor Peterson’s self-rising flour with the good professor’s face painted on the outside.  There, between the portrait’s eyes was a single bullet hole.  He walked back to Travis and tossed the can to him, saying, “Just like old times, eh?”

Travis turned the can around to look at his handiwork and had to smile about the memory of the time he had to down a gunslinger with a bullet between the eyes and he said, “He never saw it coming.”

They all laughed, including Madeline, who wondered if there was an inside joke about it between them and then Hayden explained, “You see, Maddie, there was this gunslinger up in San Antone who thought he was the best in all of Texas.  He’d killed three men before we made it up there and he’d believed that no one else would challenge him.  Well, we rode into town, headed over to the saloon where the man was filling his belly with gut-rot and talking like he was ten feet tall and bullet-proof.

“Ol’ Corbett here, he walked into that saloon, flipped the man a coin and told him he’d buy a drink for any man who could kill that many men and when the gunfighter tried to catch it, Travis shot him right between the eyes.”

“Wasn’t that unfair of you to catch the man off guard like that?” Madeline asked, looking up at Travis, who shrugged in indifference.

“Ask those three widows about unfairness, they’ll say he got what was coming to him,” he said as he left her to line more cans on the fence.

Nodding, she realized that he had done what was necessary in the circumstances that he had faced.  She watched his lean body bend over the fence, which had come to her shoulders yesterday when she had lined up cans on it.  She could not help but admire him and the audacity that he exuded like rays of sunshine, a confidence that she now found alluring, despite the fact that the very boldness that he had showed last night had made her hate him.  When he turned to walk back to them, she averted her eyes, hoping that he had not noticed her staring at him.

But, Hayden had and when his friend stopped at his side, he nudged Travis without saying a word.  In their manly unspoken conversation, they exchanged a wordless dialogue that concerned Madeline’s fascination with Travis, the discussion ending in quiet chuckles from both.

Ire building in Madeline’s mind at the thought of them trading looks that were obviously ridiculing her, but she shook it off and smiled at them as if she knew exactly what they were laughing about and she stepped in front of them as she raised her pistol toward the line of cans and took her anger out on them instead.  As if a tornado had torn through the cans, they flipped skyward in a wave of tin that flew as if the cans were connected with twine and the one before it pulled the next one up to its height and then back down to the ground.  When the last can clanked to the dirt, she let her hand drop and looked at the two men, whose mouths had dropped in admiration at her accomplishment.

She turned to Travis and narrowed her eyes at him while she asked, “Are you still wondering if you should take me with you?”

A whistle escaped his lips before he removed his Stetson and scratched his sandy brown head and said, “I don’t think you’d take no for an answer, darlin’.”

“Nope,” she said with confidence as she tucked her pistol into her skirt and said, “When do we leave?”

“Can you be at the hotel steps at dawn?”

“Sure, I just have to pack a few things,” she said excitedly.

“You don’t want to pack too many, um, personals,” Travis told her with an embarrassed look on his face.  “You don’t want to weigh your mount down.”

“Mr. Corbett,” she asked, her face tilted up toward him.  “How much do you weigh?”

He cocked his head in question as he answered, “About one eighty-five, why?”

“And your saddle and gear?” she continued her questions.

“About one fifty.  What are you getting at?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest.

“Well,” she started, tapping her chin with a forefinger.  “That leaves me with about seventy-five pounds of ‘personals’ as you call them, before I weigh my horse down too much.”

“She’s got you there,” Hayden piped in and received a cuff on the arm from his irritated friend. 

“Be ready at sun-up or you’ll get left behind,” Travis growled at her as he turned on his heel and left her and Hayden watching after him.

“He can be a hot-head, Maddie,” Hayden told her as he looked at his retreating friend’s back.  “Don’t let him get under your skin, though.  His temper is short-lived and it isn’t always directed at you personally.  So, don’t take it that way.”

“Thanks, Hayden,” Madeline said appreciatively as she, too, watched the man in question walk away.  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Her eyes followed Travis as he strode to the hotel and stomped up the steps and across the wooden porch and then as he threw open the door and stepped inside.  In her mind, she wondered if what Hayden had said was true, that Travis wouldn’t direct his anger toward her or if she would somehow be the cause of his resentment in the coming days.

She waved good-bye to her friend and then followed Travis’ steps into the hotel where she put together a few things for the trip and then went to the kitchen where she found Jake and Margaret having coffee.  She told them that she and Travis were going to kill her husband and got different responses from each of them.

“That’s dangerous!” Jake admonished her.  “That man’ll kill you before you have a chance to do him in.”

“I think it is brave of her to go down there and give him what he deserves,” Margaret disagreed with her husband.

“You want her to risk her life just to show that man that she hates him?” Jake asked, his anger growing.

“And to get my son back,” Madeline interjected.

“Yes, to get her son back,” Margaret agreed, tapping her husband on the forearm.  “The boy has been without a mother for too long.  It’s about time she gets the courage to take that devil on.”

“So that gunman that is going with you,” Jake asked, still concerned, but realizing that he would not change her mind.  “Is he good at what he does?”

“He’s the best,” she said with assurance.  “I have all the confidence in the world that Travis Corbett is the man for me.”