Miss Phipps and the Cattle Baron (28 page)

Adam surprised her by saying nothing, and she
got the eerie feeling as he sat looking at her, that he knew
something she did not, and that it was not good for her. After a
long stretch of silence, she said, "Why did your two cowboys leave
here so quickly? I assume they worked for you since they came out
of your barn and left on horses tied there."

Adam's eyes shifted uneasily between
Priscilla and his mother, almost like a small boy who'd been caught
doing something, before he replied, "I sent them on an errand in
town... nothing special, just something I'd forgotten to have them
do."

"Like try to intercept my next shipment of
Readyprint before it's delivered to me?" Priscilla said, with
irony.

Adam propped his elbows on the armrests of
his chair, folded his hands together and steepled his fingers—a
gesture Priscilla noted him doing in the past when he was uncertain
about something—and said, while holding her gaze, "I know you think
that whatever I do at this time is in the interest of the Stock
Growers Association, but you're wrong. I care about you, and I'm
worried that you'll do something that will jeopardize your own
safety. You need to trust me when I ask you to not do anything at
this time, and let me take care of things."

"Trust you, Adam? Why on earth would I do
that?" Priscilla said, holding his unyielding gaze. "We're on
opposite sides of every issue I can think of."

"Not every issue," Adam reminded her,
cryptically.

Priscilla did not have to look at Lady
Whittington to know that the woman knew precisely what Adam was
referring to—not that the two of them had bedded down together, but
that there was a very strong physical attraction between them, as
Priscilla had already admitted to Lady Whittington. "And what issue
is that?" she challenged, deciding that it was time for Adam to
admit to his mother that their relationship was nothing more than a
physical attraction that would fade before anything more could come
of it.

Adam studied her soberly, as if at a loss
what to say. Then his eyes shifted to his mother and back to
Priscilla, and he said, "We will discuss it at another time."

"No," Priscilla said, standing, "I don't
believe we will, because it seems we have nothing more to discuss."
Turning from him, she marched out of the house and got in the coach
to wait for Lady Whittington.

It wasn't any time before Lady Whittington
joined Priscilla in the coach. After the driver gave the command,
she said to Priscilla, "Adam was very troubled just before I left,
not over what's going on with the cattlemen, but because of
something concerning you, but he didn't say what it was, only that
it had to be done. When I tried to question him, he was back to
being the bear of a man he's become when the subject of you is at
hand."

"Then I have to imagine that it had something
to do with those two cowboys rushing off like they did."

Lady Whittington nodded. "Yes, I'm sure of
it. But that still doesn't change the fact that Adam's in love with
you, so whatever he did, I have to believe he did it to protect you
in some way, not for any other reason."

There was little more to say for the duration
of the ride back to Cheyenne, and when they pulled up to the front
of the house on 17th Street, Priscilla turned down Lady
Whittington's invitation to come in and have tea, and instead got
on her Rover and headed back to
The Town Tattler
building.
But to her shock, when she stepped inside, she found her press
smashed beyond repair, as if someone had taken a sledge hammer to
it.

She rushed to the backroom, intending to go
through it and out the back door to Jim's place to verify that it
was Adam's cowboys who had done it, and found Jim sitting in the
corner of the room, hands and feet tied, a gag over his mouth, but
otherwise unharmed. She quickly removed the gag, then went about
working on the knots holding the cords on his hands, while saying
to him, "Was it two cowboys who did this?"

Jim nodded. "They came walkin' right in, one
with a sledge hammer in his hand, and first sent the women off,
then told me they weren't goin' to hurt me, just had to stop the
paper from goin' out. They took me in here and tied me up. I heard
'em smashin' the printer, but couldn't do nothin' about it."

Priscilla was almost too angry to speak,
knowing that Adam was behind it. But now she had no feelings for
him, in spite of what Lady Whittington insisted about Adam loving
her. He'd managed to crush whatever feelings she might have had
left for him when he'd had her printer smashed. "Well, there won't
be any paper going out," she said.

After releasing the last knot holding Jim's
hands and feet, she went back into the printing room to look for
Frank Buchanan's written statement. When she couldn't find it, she
said to Jim, "Do you have any idea what happened to the copy that
Libby and Abigail were typesetting?"

Jim shrugged. "No. Ah was tied up in the back
room."

When Priscilla couldn't find it, she said,
"Well, this isn't over yet. I'll write out my editorial by hand and
include everything Frank Buchanan told me and post it on the front
of the Town Hall for everyone to read." That being said, Priscilla
took out a page of paper, reached for the inkwell and a pen, and
began writing...

The Daily Leader and The Daily Sun made
claims that EllaWatson and Jim Averell were people of the lowest
character, in order to distract readers from the real reason the
pair were hanged. But when homesteaders fence in pastures, and dig
irrigation ditches to water their stock, it upsets the cattlemen
who lay claim to all of the government land around. Could it be
that land disputes, not cattle rustling, are what the lunching was
about?

CHAPTER TWELVE

'I do not want a husband who honors me as
a

queen, if he does not love me as a
woman...'

—
Elizabeth I to the French
Ambassador

While sitting at the large conference table
in one of the meeting rooms at the Cheyenne Club, Adam read
Priscilla's hand-written editorial that she'd posted on the front
of the Town Hall building the day before. It hadn't been posted
more than a few minutes before one of the members of the club
ripped it down and brought it in.

The problem was, Adam believed everything
Priscilla had reported.

He'd heard, firsthand, Gene Crowder and Ralph
Cole's accounts, and didn't doubt their validity. And Priscilla's
recap of Frank Buchanan's eye-witness account sounded every bit as
credible. But what Buchanan witnessed meant nothing unless he came
forward, because his handwritten statement had been taken by one of
Adam's boys when he found it laying on the composing table, and in
his rush to return to the ranch with it, the paper came up missing.
After retracing the men's tracks and not finding any sign of it,
Adam assumed it had been taken away by the wind, so whatever
Priscilla quoted Buchanan as saying in the editorial would mean
nothing to a grand jury, without Buchanan's actual, hand-written
and witnessed testimony to support it. So unless witnesses came
forward, six men would get away with premeditated murder. Adam
could see it no other way.

He hadn't gone to see Priscilla since she'd
stormed out of the ranch house two days before, because he knew
that after she'd returned to her place to find her printing press
destroyed, knowing he'd been the one behind it, she wouldn't
welcome him back in her life, and with good reason. But she had to
be stopped from writing the editorial that day, for her own safety.
Six men had just murdered a man and woman in order to send a
chilling message to anyone who would get in the way of their cattle
operations, and they'd make sure that whatever it took, Priscilla
wouldn't complicate things by casting doubt on their proclaimed
right to have a lynching party for their fabricated crime of cattle
rustling. But that didn't mean he wouldn't cast doubt.

He did not fear these men.

Eyeing the men staring at him, A.J. Bothwell,
Tom Sun and John Durbin—all members of the lynching party—among
them, he said, "I've been doing some checking into Ralph Cole's
assertion that certain members of the association have been making
false homestead claims by placing a cabin on a piece of land,
filing a claim, then moving the cabin to another location to do the
same. I wasn't surprised to find evidence that this has been taking
place. Which also validates other claims Cole made when I was at
Ella Watson's place the day before she and Jim Averell were
murdered." He used the term
murdered
to make clear his
position on the hanging.

"No one murdered anyone," Lionel Merrill
said, a one of the cattleman Adam suspected of making a claim with
a moveable cabin. "Cattle rustling's a hanging offense. The men
were just carrying out justice."

"Justice takes place in a court of law," Adam
said, "not on the banks of the Sweetwater. What happened with Ella
Watson and Jim Averell was premeditated murder, plain and simple."
He looked around at the faces of the men, seeing not a friendly one
in the room, and not caring. He started rolling up Priscilla's
hand-written editorial.

Lionel Merrill slapped his hand down on the
editorial to stop what Adam was doing, and said, "What do you
intend to do about the woman who wrote this?"

"Move your hand, Merrill," Adam said, "or
I'll throw you across the room."

The man moved his hand and stepped back,
while waiting for Adam's response.

Adam continued rolling up the editorial. "If
you really want to know, Merrill," he said, holding the man's gaze,
"I plan to marry her." He shoved the roll under his arm.

The chatter of the men died. Adam looked
around the room, his eyes moving from face to face as he said,
while focusing on A.J. Bothwell, "In fact, I plan to make a lot of
changes in my life, starting with resigning from the WSGA. I know
I'll be blacklisted, and I don't much give a damn. What's happening
behind closed doors here is not only unethical and immoral, it's
also illegal, and I'm not going to be a party to it."

"Where are you taking that editorial?" A.J.
Bothwell asked.

Adam held the man's caustic gaze. "Someplace
where it will come back to haunt you and Sun and Durbin and the
other murderers in your lynching party," he said, seeing the man's
gaze falter, though only momentarily.

"Then you'd better be watching your back,
Whittington," Bothwell said, "because once a man's blacklisted, his
life isn't worth a plug nickel."

"I'll keep that in mind," Adam said. "In fact
I might quote you on that."

Bothwell let out a loud guffaw. "Who are you
going to quote it to, Whittington? Your plain-faced spinster so she
can write about it in her scandal sheet? I don't imagine anyone
would take seriously anything printed in that rag." He looked
around at the men at the long table and was met with guffaws, and
wry smiles, and nodding heads.

"Well, we shall see, won't we, gentlemen.
Good day to you." Adam nodded to the men, then turned and left the
Cheyenne Club for the last time. And for the first time since the
day he met Priscilla and learned she'd absconded with his bride, he
knew precisely what he was going to do, which would also get him
back in Priscilla's good graces.

***

Priscilla leaned her Rover against the front
of
Redman's Feed and Tack
, and went inside the store. She
was immediately greeted by a bouquet of grain and molasses and
leather, along with the disturbed voices of three men engaged in a
discussion about the hanging. In fact, everywhere she went, the
hanging was the topic of heated conversation, and emotions were
running high. Mr. Redman, proprietor of the shop, who'd been
leaning his elbow over the handle of a push broom, stepped away
from the men, looked at Priscilla thoughtfully, and said, "You're
the lady from
The Town Tattler
. I've heard a lot about your
paper from my wife, who's been to some of your meetings. And I've
been thinking about running an advertisement for the store, along
with a special offer for the young chicks coming in, when they're
purchased by the dozen."

"My paper is shut down temporarily, "
Priscilla said, feeling her temper rise as she imagined Adam's
cowboys taking a sledge hammer to her press and destroying her
dreams. She was tempted to state who she thought was behind it, but
refrained until she'd spoken to Adam directly to see what he had to
say about it. It would be difficult for him to deny though, after
seeing him coming out of the stables, followed by his two cowboys,
who left at once, and whose description matched that of the men who
tied up Jim. "As soon as I have things up and running again," she
said, "I'll be able to include your advertisement. When a new
advertisement first goes in the paper, I always include a short
piece about whatever is being advertised... in your case, your
young chicks. Are they layers or fryers?"

"Both," Mr. Redman said.

"Good," Priscilla replied. "Then maybe we can
include some recipes for chicken dishes, if your wife would like to
put some together. She can post her name along with the recipes,
and they will be included in our recipe column, which has gotten
very popular." Even as she passed on the information to Mr. Redman,
Priscilla knew she was only just barely hanging onto her dream. But
she couldn't let go. Not just yet.

Mr. Redman smiled. "I think Katherine would
be pleased to do that," he said. "She's real proud of her recipes.
Some have come down through several generations." He leaned his
broom against the wall, and said, "So... what can I get for you
today?"

"Just mash for my laying hens," Priscilla
replied. "But this being my first visit to your store, I'll just
look around a little." She was surprised at the wide assortment of
items offered in the store, in addition to grain and harnesses and
other tack, and the extent of them—toy tractors and corncob dolls
and small kitchen items and other small notions tucked into every
nook and cranny. She'd been so busy with the paper that, until now,
she'd sent Jim or one of the women to fetch the grain and mash for
her laying hens.