Foxfire Bride (9 page)

"You speak Indian?" Brown asked, sounding impressed.

Fox looked pained. "I can speak to Paiutes, Shoshones, and Utes. If an Apache shows up, we're in trouble."

"Say something in Indian," Hanratty said.

The firelight made both men look worse than they had in daylight. Deep shadow darkened black swollen eyes, while a burst of flame made cuts and scrapes appear livid.

"If you had an Indian name, it would be Mean and Ugly," Fox said, speaking Shoshone. From the corner of her eye, she saw Peaches smile. He knew just enough to catch the drift of what she'd said. She winked at him.

"What did you say?" Hanratty demanded, looking from Fox to Peaches.

She stood and stretched. "I said it's been a long day and tomorrow will be, too. We'll go as far as the Sand Springs station."

In the morning they all inspected the arrows driven into the gate as they rode out of the adobe enclosure. Fox was glad that Hanratty hadn't been on the platform overlooking the front or there would have been some dead Paiute kids. Hanratty and Brown were hard men to like.

"We were lucky yesterday," Tanner said, riding up beside her leading Peaches's string of mules. When Fox lifted an eyebrow, he shrugged. "Mr. Hernandez didn't complain, but I could see his shoulder is troubling him."

Just when Fox thought she had Tanner figured, he did something or said something that showed her how wrong she was. She had decided he preferred to remain aloof, wanted to draw a line between himself and his employees. Now here he was doing Peaches's work, leading a string of mules.

"If Hanratty or Brown had been on the platform we were on"

Fox's eyes widened. This wasn't the first time he'd said the same thing she was thinking. What did that mean? Anything? When she slid him a glance, his expression was tight.

"You're carrying a lot of money," she said in case he was having second thoughts about hiring guards. Defending Hanratty and Brown wasn't a comfortable position, but Fox suspected the time would come when she'd be glad to have two extra guns present. "They're keeping up, doing their share of the work."

Tanner gave her an unreadable look then squinted against the grains of sand blowing on a sharp breeze. "How long will we be camping in abandoned pony express stations?"

"Until we reach Utah territory. Then the pony express stations turn north and we continue east."

"It's a smart choice." He spoke slowly as if he'd given the matter some thought. "If we'd been in the open last night, things might have gone differently."

"You aren't complaining that you're not getting your money's worth? That you could have found the stations on your own?" She wasn't sure if she was teasing or not.

"I'm getting my money's worth," he said firmly. A smile curved his lips. "Left to my own devices, I could wander around out here for days looking for the next station."

Fox laughed. "I doubt that, but it's nice of you to say so."

Tanner had weighty matters on his mind and it didn't surprise her that he seldom smiled. When he did, his face softened and his mouth relaxed. Those occasional smiles made Fox's scalp tingle and her mouth go dry, which annoyed her no end.

During the next two days, whenever the hours in the saddle turned dull and tedious, she tried to pin down what it was about Matthew Tanner that caused her body to respond in rebellious ways that she didn't welcome.

He was a different sort of man than she usually encountered. Better educated, better dressed, more mannerly. Confident enough that he could ask questions if he didn't know something. And he was willing to stand back and recognize Fox's expertise without appearing that it cost him anything to do so.

Moreover, Tanner seemed wealthy and his father even more so. Whenever Fox tried to grasp how much money fifty thousand dollars actually was, her brain froze. Last night she'd given Peaches a hand moving the coins, slinging a bag over her shoulder and wincing at the weight. The bags weighed almost twenty-five pounds apiece. Never in her life had Fox expected to handle that much money or know a man worth that much.

But the strange breathlessness that came over her when Tanner stood too near had nothing to do with money or education or manners. She suspected the reason was more about wide shoulders and sunburned hands and a lean muscled body and an intensity that sent shivers up her spine.

Which meant that she was as shallow as a pot lid, she thought with a sigh.

In the morning Tanner could see his breath hanging in the chill air in front of his shaving mirror. Here at this altitude the nights were frigid and dawn sparkled across ground and boulders rimed with frost. Sound and scent sharpened in the cold air, and grits, fried ham, and strong coffee had never smelled as good.

After toweling his face, Tanner adjusted his collar and buttoned his shirt, pulled up his bracesor suspenders, as they called them out hereand donned his jacket. The heat of the campfire on his face and hands was welcome as he ate, the food as hot and delicious as he'd anticipated.

"Whoever made the coffee this morningit's especially good."

Peaches flashed a white-toothed smile. "Coffee's my specialty."

"It was cold last night," he said to Fox who sat staring into the fire with a surly expression. "Did you sleep well?"

"I hate people who are cheerful in the morning," she muttered, flicking him a glance and then glaring at Peaches.

"This is the best time of the day," Peaches said with a laugh.

"The hell it is ," Jubal Brown snapped. "You can say that only because you weren't up and down all night trading off the watch." Smothering a yawn, he reached for more coffee.

Morning might not be Fox's favorite time, but Tanner noticed that she had washed her face, braided her hair for the day, and she had already helped Peaches load the mules.

"I'm getting the idea that Nevada is a succession of mountain ranges separated by long bowl-shaped valleys. Is that correct?"

"You have to have conversation in the morning." For a minute he didn't think she would say any more, then she sighed. "If you crumpled a piece of paper that's what Nevada looks like. A succession of north/south ranges and valleys." Tilting her head, she squinted at the sky. "It's time to get moving. We'll lose a couple of hours when we reach the valley."

There wasn't much forage in the mountains, merely a few dry tufts between rock outcroppings. To satisfy the horses and mules, they would have to let them graze in the broad valley below. At this time of year the grass wasn't abundant even on the valley floors.

Today the descent was gradual and relatively non-eventful, with only one narrow cut through substantial rock walls that looked difficult for Fox and Peaches to negotiate since they were leading the mules. Their expertise was a pleasure to watch.

And then a cool enjoyable morning erupted into chaos quicker than Tanner would have believed possible. One moment he was gazing out at the wide bowl-shaped valley below, thinking it would be an easy crossing, the next minute he heard Fox and Peaches shouting and swearing.

Tanner watched it happen. The second mule in Fox's string balked at the incline. In rapid succession the twine broke between the mules as it was supposed to in a dangerous situation. Then the lead mule jerked the rope out of Fox's hand and her string was free and running toward the valley. In an eyeblink the string Peaches led also broke free and also trotted toward the valley floor. The mules reached the valley in time to scatter in all directions before Tanner and the others came off the mountainside and reined up hard.

Fox swore for a full minute then shook her head at Peaches. "Damn it! Any idea what spooked them?"

"Not a notion. Oh Lordy, look at that."

Tanner followed Peaches's frown and watched the money mule lie down and roll in the distant valley grass, then do it again.

Fox pulled her fingers down her throat. "She's trying to scrape off her load."

The mule succeeded. The top pack busted loose and dropped, but that wasn't the worst of it. When the mule pushed to her feet and trotted farther down the valley, gold coins bounced out of the pannier.

Not trusting his eyes, Tanner grabbed the spyglass from his saddlebags. Son of a bitch. The pannier and one of the bank bags had been pierced by the Indian boy's arrow. He knew about that. The hole had seemed harmless enough for the last couple of days, but it hadn't withstood the mule's rolling. The spyglass revealed that the hole was now a tear and leaking gold coins with every step the mule took.

"All right," Fox said after a minute. By now Tanner knew that she slapped her thigh with her hat when she was angry and frustrated. Sun blazed on her hair. "You and your men go after the money mule," she said to Tanner. "Me and Peaches will chase down the other five. If you finish first, come and give us a hand. Are you happy with that plan?"

At the moment he wasn't happy about anything. The damned mule was scattering twenty-dollar gold pieces over a wide area. "Let's get the mule first," he ordered Hanratty and Brown, "then we'll pick up the coins."

It took them forty-five minutes to corner and capture the money mule, and would have been impossible, in Tanner's opinion, if there hadn't been three of them doing it. At the end of the chase he was hot, sweating, and had decided that he'd never hated an animal as much as he hated that mule.

"I'd shoot the damned thing," Hanratty said, wiping his forehead with his bandanna, "except she'd figure out a way to get my gun before I could pull the fricking trigger."

Brown nodded. "My daddy had a mule. She was smarter than all the horses put together."

Tanner could believe it. Sliding to the ground, he approached the mule and took a close look at the pannier. The frame was busted. The tear in the canvas side panel had lengthened to eight inches. There were gold coins scattered over several acres.

He was thinking about shooting the mule himself when Fox rode up and swung off her mustang. "I'll stake her right here," she said, passing him with a hammer and a metal spike. "Peaches will collect her once he gets the others settled down."

"You and Peaches caught the other five?" Tanner asked, struggling to keep his voice level. After he spotted the mules about a half mile away, he turned back to Fox. It would never have occurred to him to carry a hammer and metal spikes in his saddlebags.

"Peaches is chasing down the last of them. The others are staked with enough rope to allow grazing."

For the first time it registered on Tanner that she was wearing glasses with blue lenses to protect her eyes from the sunlight. As hard as he tried he couldn't recall if she'd worn the glasses yesterday. What he wanted to know more than that was how she and Peaches had caught five mules while he, Hanratty, and Brown were making fools of themselves chasing one. He decided he didn't want to know badly enough to ask.

She took off the glasses and scanned the valley searching for sunlight bouncing off gold. It wasn't hard to spot. "There's no easy way to do this," she said finally. "I'll get some pots and then we'll all go treasure hunting." She gave Tanner a shrug. "Meanwhile, you might want to stitch up that tear."

"I suppose you've got a needle and thread in there, too," he said, watching her stow the hammer in her saddlebags.