Judith E French (29 page)

Horses, cows, or kids, he didn’t give a tinker’s damn what she wanted to raise or where she wanted to raise them. He could turn his hand to just about anything, and he was tired of hunting men.

It was time someone else tracked down the Texas Jack Cannons and the James boys. His belly was empty. His arm hurt like hell, and he had blisters on both heels from walking half the night. Damned if he wasn’t getting too old for this business.

He’d left a note for Tamsin under Billy’s pistol. He’d drawn a map showing her the way back to Sweetwater
and left instructions to get to Max Spence’s place and have Max contact Dimitri.

If he didn’t make it back, she could take Dancer and ride. He’d have to put his faith in Dimitri to get her out of trouble with the law. Nobody else could do what he had to do this morning.

The back door opened and Billy limped out, using a barrel slat for a crutch. He had a thin mustache, wore bloodstained rags wrapped around his head, and carried a shotgun.

“Three left,” Ash muttered under his breath. He hadn’t expected the injured man to be able to walk this morning, let alone carry a weapon. It showed that outlaws had grown tougher than they used to be. Or that he was a complete fool for letting Tamsin talk him out of killing Billy where he’d found him.

A trickle of sand rolled down from the bluff above him, and Ash tensed. Had Jack or Boone slipped out and come up behind him?

A cold sweat broke out on his skin. He didn’t dare move and give away his position, but neither could he lie here and wait for a bullet through his back.

Slowly Ash turned his head. No silhouette of a man loomed above him. The grass and wildflowers that sprouted from the overhang seemed undisturbed. What then could—

He froze as something heavy slithered over the back of his calves just above his boot tops. His breath caught in his throat, and his heart bucked against his chest. A long second passed, and then another.

From the corner of his eye Ash detected motion. At the same instant, a dry buzzing turned his gut inside out. Ash’s mouth shriveled as though he’d eaten a green peach when the rattlesnake’s diamond-shaped head appeared inches from his right elbow.

The serpent’s body slid over Ash’s legs, and the flat expressionless eyes gleamed with moisture as the snake flicked a long, thin tongue. Ash remained motionless. He knew it wasn’t possible, but he would have sworn he could smell it.

The rattler smelled of death.

Sweat dripped into Ash’s eyes. His lungs began to burn for lack of oxygen, and his fingers cramped on the damaged rifle stock. Somewhere high above, he heard a hawk shriek a plaintive cry. Ash’s parched mouth tasted of lead.

Slowly the scaly, gray-green patterned body coiled and sounded another lethal warning, a dull vibration like the rattle of seeds in a dried gourd.

The snake turned its huge striped head to stare at him with frigid, glassy eyes, and Ash’s bowels clenched. When he was twelve, he’d seen a boy bitten by a big diamondback. His leg had swollen to gigantic proportions and turned black. And all his parents’ prayers hadn’t been enough to save him from a screaming death.

A prairie rattler wasn’t as volatile as a diamondback, but one this size packed enough poison to kill a horse.

Ash didn’t know how much longer he could hold his breath, but instinct told him that any movement could trigger a deadly strike.

Then something rustled in the grass. The snake’s head snapped around as a white-bellied deer mouse popped into sight. The tiny rodent rose on its hind legs and sniffed the air.

The rattler blinked.

Emitting a faint squeak, the mouse darted off. The snake leapt after it, and both vanished from view. Ash inhaled deeply, remembering Billy and his shotgun just before the weapon blasted.

Ash snapped his rifle up, preparing to return fire, then realized that the outlaw hadn’t been shooting at him.
Ash’s breathing slowed and his heart quit jumping as he watched the man walk into the tall weeds and lift up the rattlesnake.

The back door flew open, and Boone Cannon showed his face. Boone had aged a lot since Ash had last seen him. His blond hair had darkened and thinned, and one side of his face bore an ugly scar. “What the hell you shootin’ at, Billy?”

“Thought it was a rabbit,” the man with the shotgun answered. “Ain’t nothin’ but a damned ole rattler.” He heaved the headless body of the twitching reptile over the top rail of the corral, and the horses shied and crowded to the far side. Billy laughed. “Skittish, ain’t they?”

“Jack don’t like being woke up this early by you actin’ the ass,” Boone said. He walked out a few steps from the back door, scanned the valley, and fumbled with the front of his trousers.

As Boone relieved himself, Ash’s finger tightened on the trigger. If he fired now, he could drop both of them before they could shoot back.

Common sense told him that’s just what he should do, but he couldn’t. He’d killed more men than he wanted to remember, but he didn’t like the way he’d felt when he’d shot that man out of the saddle yesterday.

“You’d be no better than they are,” Tamsin had said.

Maybe he’d lost his taste for killing when he thought that trash like these two deserved more than being mowed down with no more thought than Billy had destroyed the snake.

“Drop your guns! You’re under arrest!” he shouted.

Billy jerked the shotgun to his shoulder, and Ash drilled him through the heart with a single bullet.

Boone drew his Colt and started firing as he backed toward the house. Ash’s bullet caught him in the groin.
Boone staggered back and fanned the hammer, spraying the ground near Ash with lead. Ash’s next round caught him through the throat. He fell, half in and half out of the open doorway.

Ash leapt to his feet and ran for the house. Then Jack Cannon appeared at the front corner of the cabin with a rifle in one hand, a pistol in the other.

Bullets whizzed past Ash’s head like angry bees. One shot. He dived for the ground and rolled as Jack kept up a steady hail of lead.

Sand exploded in Ash’s face as he scrambled to find some shelter from the bullets. He hunkered down behind a pile of rotting fence posts, and got off a shot at Jack as he dashed for the corral.

Jack was already over the corral fence. Ash took careful aim and fired. The bullet plowed through a railing and drove into Jack’s left knee. He swore, fell, dropped the rifle, and struggled to his feet. Panicked horses milled around him, and Ash saw him grab Shiloh’s saddle.

Jack twisted and tried to get off another shot. When the pin clicked on a spent shell, Ash was up and running toward him. The outlaw swung up onto Shiloh and lashed him toward a low place in the fence. Then Ash saw something out of the corner of his eyes. He glanced in the direction of the spring and saw Tamsin riding toward him on Dancer.

Swearing, Ash whirled back toward the corral as Jack galloped toward the broken rail. Ash’s final bullet hit him in the right breast.

Jack sagged forward and dropped the reins. Ash whistled. The gelding turned hard to the left, nearly throwing the outlaw out of the saddle. Jack grabbed a handful of horn and stayed with the horse as he shied and came to a trembling halt halfway between Tamsin and Ash.

“Don’t shoot me!” Cannon yelled. “I give up! Don’t shoot!” He slumped forward and raised one hand over his head. “I’m dropping my gun. See.” He let the empty pistol fall.

Ash’s finger tightened on the trigger of his Colt. He’d never wanted anything so badly in his life as he wanted to put two shots into Jack’s belly and watch him die slow and ugly.

The outlaw with the pretty-boy features had aged since Ash had seen him last.

He wanted to kill him just the same.

“You don’t deserve to live,” he said. “Give me one reason, Jack, why I shouldn’t—”

“ ’Cause I know you, Morgan. You ain’t got the balls to kill me. Just like you didn’t have the balls to satisfy that pretty little wife of—”

Cannon’s eyes widened as a crimson flower blossomed on his chest. “I … I …” Blood spilled from his open mouth, and he toppled out of the saddle.

Tamsin lowered Billy’s smoking pistol. “He had a derringer hidden in his boot. He would have murdered you, Ash.”

He stared at her, still unable to believe what he’d seen. “You killed him.”

“What was I supposed to do, let him kill you?”

“Hell, woman,” he said as he lifted her down off Dancer. “I’m glad you did. I just can’t believe you made that shot from the back of a horse. Do you know how many marksmen would miss—”

“I couldn’t miss.” She tilted her face up to kiss him. “I was the only hope you had.”

He held her for a long time, until she stopped trembling, and his heartbeat returned to normal.

“I suppose we need to take them back to Sweetwater for a Christian burial.”

Ash shrugged. “It would be the only decent thing to do.” Then he added, “Of course, we could dig graves ourselves. If we had a shovel.” He buried his face in her hair and hugged her again. “But since we don’t, I’d say it’s best we leave them to the coyotes.”

It was hot enough to fry eggs on the wooden sidewalks of Sweetwater the afternoon of Tamsin’s trial. Not a breath of air stirred in the Rooster’s Den, the town’s largest saloon.

Judge Buckson Marlborough, presiding justice, had taken one look at Henry Steele’s chambers and appropriated Howie Knight’s thriving business establishment for the proceedings. So much attention had been raised by the trial among the good citizens of Colorado Territory that seating was at a premium and the street outside was crowded with gawkers. One enterprising woman had filled the back of her wagon with a barrel of sweet cider, gingerbread, and pies, and was selling slices faster than her husband could count change. Across the street from the Rooster, a Baptist minister stood on a packing crate and preached the gospel to one aging Ute Indian, a German immigrant in lederhosen and steel-toed clodhoppers, and three heavily rouged ladies currently on holiday from their positions at the Rooster’s Den.

Children, dogs, and poultry wandered amid the throng of noisy onlookers. Horses whinnied, chickens scratched, dogs barked, and babies wailed. Shopkeepers had moved their goods to the sidewalks in front of their establishments and were doing a brisk trade.

Inside the saloon, Tamsin fought a rising nausea in her
stomach and tried to make eye contact with the jury as Dimitri had instructed. Twelve stern-faced men sat on hard wooden benches and stared at her with varying degrees of contempt as Henry Steele completed the final minutes of his damning testimony against her.

The splintery floorboards were sticky under her feet, and the overpowering stench of years of spilled beer, vomit, blood, and stale tobacco made her light-headed. Since her grandfather had always insisted Tamsin had the strength of a workhorse, her physical weakness made her believe that her suspicions were a certainty.

In the last harried weeks, her woman’s time had come and passed without a show of blood. She’d tried to remember the last time she’d had her flow. It was definitely before Sam Steele’s death. But after—she couldn’t remember.

She strongly suspected that her intuition had been correct when she’d felt that she and Ash had made a child that glorious day at the hot springs.

“Tamsin?” Ash laid a hand on her bandaged arm.

“Mrs. MacGreggor. Are we boring you?” Judge Marlborough asked.

His sarcasm sliced through her reverie, and she jerked upright. To her shock, she saw that the witness chair beside the justice’s table was empty. Henry Steele had already taken his seat with the prosecutor to her left. The lawyer representing Colorado Territory, Russell King, was a big man with a paunch, gray sideburns, and a double chin.

“Will you honor us by taking the stand, Mrs. MacGreggor?” King asked sarcastically. The crowd loved his remark. Even two of the jurors snickered.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured as she got to her feet.

“It’s all right,” Ash said quietly.

She really did feel unwell. The room seemed to be pitching. She wondered if they had earthquakes in Colorado.

Dimitri took her arm and helped her up the two steps to the bottom landing of the staircase where Judge Marlborough presided. Today the doors to the social chambers above, which Tamsin supposed to be usually well oiled, remained firmly closed. According to her friend and lawyer, the upper floor of the Rooster was given over to lodging for gentlewomen. Tamsin doubted that there was a genuine lady among them.

Russell King asked question after question, all styled in a manner to make her look guilty. Dimitri had received letters from her hometown assuring the judge that Dancer and Fancy were legally hers. Unfortunately, statements from strangers in Tennessee didn’t hold much water here in Colorado.

Tamsin tried to remain calm. She answered each accusation fully and with dignity. Some truths rang harsh in the courtroom.

“You admit to this jury that you went to Mr. Steele’s stable with the express intention of stealing two valuable thoroughbreds?” the prosecutor asked.

“You don’t understand,” Tamsin began. “These were my—”

“Answer the question,” King said.

“It’s not possible to steal my own—”

Judge Marlborough rapped his gavel on the table. “Yes or no, Mrs. MacGreggor.”

Tamsin bit back a peppery reply and said, “No. I did not.”

King smiled. “Then why, may I ask, were you trespassing on property you had specifically been ordered to stay—”

“I think you should ask Judge Steele what he was doing there in the middle of the night,” she replied.

“Objection,” King protested. “The defendant is evading my questions.”

Tamsin felt hotter and hotter inside the layers of clothing and boned corset Dimitri’s wife had insisted she wear. The black silk taffeta folds of the flounced dress with its high collar and tight waist smothered her. Sweat beaded on her face and collected in the hollow of her upper lip. If she didn’t get off this witness stand soon, she’d faint.

“Mrs. MacGreggor. Mrs. MacGreggor, you will answer the questions put to you by …”

The judge droned on, but Tamsin forced herself to sit straight and keep watching the members of the jury. She shifted her gaze from one to another with what she hoped was an honest demeanor.