Sunset Embrace (16 page)

T
he man took a chair at an empty table in the smoky saloon and absently spread out the curled, yellow sheets of paper on its nicked surface. His companion took the opposite chair after first scanning the other patrons in the barroom. It was a habit of his profession. "Whiskey?"

"Yes, please," the first man absently replied as he continued to peruse the posters.

He was as unaware of Howard Majors, signaling to the barkeeper for a bottle and two glasses, as he was when they arrived. Only when Majors had poured him a draught and slid it across the table, did he look up. His expression was ravaged, that of a man coming out of a bad dream. He grasped the shot glass and tossed the burning contents down his throat. Usually a gentleman where drinking intoxicants was concerned, he uncharacteristically reached for the bottle himself and poured another glass. When the whiskey had stung a raw path down his throat into his stomach, he raised hate-filled eyes to his host.

"That bastard married my daughter." His fist thumped the table. The fingernails were well manicured, but it was a purely masculine hand, and the way the fingers were tightly clenched reflected his personality. He was a man accustomed to getting his own way, of exercising control on himself and everyone around him, of rarely being duped, of getting revenge if necessary. "God! When I think about him sharing her bed!" He slammed his fist down harder on the tabletop, sending the posters scuttling across it and sloshing the whiskey in the bottle.

"I hated to show you these," Majors said with commiseration. "I immediately thought I recognized him in the wedding portrait you showed me, but I wanted to be absolutely certain by closely comparing that photograph to these posters. There's no doubt it's the same man, even with the moustache. The law has been after him for years. The Pinkerton Agency has been asked on many occasions to try to apprehend him."

"Ross Coleman is really Sonny Clark," Vance Gentry said bitterly. "My daughter is married to a gunfighter, an outlaw, a man wanted for murder, bank robbery . . . God!" He groaned, dragging his hands over his ruddy face, distorting the aristocratic features beneath the snowy white crown of hair. "What has he done with her?"

Wordlessly Majors poured the man another drink and he gulped it down. "If he's hurt her in any way, I'll kill him." His lips barely moved as he made the vow. "I wanted to anyway every time I saw him touch her. I knew he was scum the first time I laid eyes on him. He had a way with horses, otherwise I would never have hired him." His straight, white teeth clamped together. "Why didn't I heed that gut feeling?"

"Well," the Pinkerton detective said with cool professionalism, "we have to locate them before either of us can do anything."

"He could have killed her and run off with that cache of jewelry."

The man was working himself up into a lather and Majors couldn't let that happen. The only way to find Clark was with a clear head and level thinking. The young man was wily and had cagily eluded the finest lawmen for years. Detective Majors was going to bring him in, and he wouldn't let a hothead like Gentry bungle it. "I don't think he has disposed of your daughter. That's not his style. Sonny is wild and reckless and mean, and he did his fair share of killing, but it was always when he was in a pinch, backed into a corner and trying to escape. He didn't kill on whim. Besides, you said he adored your daughter."

"I said he
seemed
to adore her. He fooled us in every other instance, how can you expect me to believe he truly loved her? The servants said they'd been gone for weeks by the time I returned from Virginia. Not a note. Nothing. Is that the behavior of an affectionate son-in-law? No telling where he has dragged her."

"We'll find them."

Majors's platitudes were wearing thin. "Well, you didn't find him before, did you?" Gentry barked. "With these posters scattered all over the Mississippi Valley, you weren't able to find Sonny Clark."

"We stopped looking because we thought he was dead. That's why I had to dig the posters out of an old file. He got shot up in a bank robbery. We felt for certain the rest of the James gang had left him for dead somewhere. Apparently that's exactly what happened, because on all the subsequent jobs Jesse and Frank have pulled, he hasn't been with them. We never heard from Sonny again until you walked into my office the day before yesterday and showed me that picture of your daughter and her husband, Ross Coleman. I figure he holed up somewhere until he was healed, changed his looks, and took on the aspects of a law-abiding citizen."

The glasses on the table rattled again, this time because a man drunkenly stumbled against it. He half fell over Majors before righting himself. "Pardon," he mumbled as he ambled to the next table and collapsed into the chair. "Whiskey," he bellowed.

Gentry eyed him with disgust. He was filthy, his clothes stained with dried blood. Maybe his unsteady gait couldn't be attributed solely to drunkenness. His thin hair and scalp were matted with clotted blood. The man reeked of unwashed flesh. Gentry was about to suggest that he and Majors go somewhere else to continue their discussion, but Majors was already speaking.

"I've been nosing around. The old man who lived up in the hills." Majors checked his note pad. "John Sachs. He was dead and apparently had been for weeks when our men finally found their way to his cabin. No sign of a struggle. He obviously died of old age. No help there as to where Clark might be headed. There was a wagon train organized last month in McMinn County."

Gentry scoffed. "You don t know him as well as you think, Majors. Ross . . . Sonny is restless, active. He's constantly moving. He rides a horse better than any man I've ever seen."

"So I've heard from plenty of posses," Majors said dryly.

"He wouldn't attach himself to something as slow moving as a wagon train."

"But that would protect him too. Traveling with his wife like any other immigrant wouldn't call attention to him."

Gentry was already shaking his head adamantly. "I know the man better than you do. If he's got a pocket full of jewelry, and believe me, its value would amount to a considerable sum, he wouldn't be heading to the frontier with it. New Orleans, New York, St. Louis maybe, places where those jewels could be sold for cash."

"Maybe you're right, but we have no leads."

"That's what I'm paying you for, Mr, Majors," Gentry said in a sour tone, "I'll head for New Orleans. I'm familiar with the city."

"Very well. I'll go to St. Louis. We'll communicate through cables sent to my office here in Knoxville. I'll have posters printed with his 'new' face on them."

"No," Gentry said sharply, causing the man at the next table to peer at them closely with shrewd eyes. "I don't want anyone to know that my daughter is married to a notorious outlaw and that he tricked us both and robbed us of valuable heirlooms."

"That will make our job harder, working alone without the help of local law enforcement folk."

"But it may also save Victoria's life. I've never seen him raise a hand to her or he wouldn't be alive today. But I've never seen him desperate either. I don't want him alerted. We don't want Ross Coleman to panic."

"You may be right at that. Witnesses have tried to describe his hair-trigger reactions. They defy description. Finding Sonny Clark will be my last official duty with the agency before my retirement. I don't want any deaths on my conscience."

"Except his."

The bone-chilling determination in Gentry's tone sent shivers down Majors's veteran spine and he was tempted to remind the man not to take the law into his own hands. He wanted Clark taken alive and hoped that by the time they located Victoria Gentry and her husband, her fathers hatred would have subsided. "Let's get started," he said, rising and tossing several coins on the table.

The men pulled on their hats and left the saloon as it was being prepared for the evening crowd. The barkeeper was busy washing glasses behind the bar. A young man was desultorily pushing a broom around the floor as he watched the foot traffic of Knoxville parade by.

The man with the injured head stood, reeling until he gained his equilibrium. Purposefully he let himself stumble into the table the other men had just vacated. As he did, his hand covered the coins and swept them into his palm. It was a far greater amount than what he had left to pay for his own drink. His bleary eyes tried to focus on the outdated wanted posters which still littered the table. He couldn't read, but he knew what the posters signified. And he had heard the mention of stolen heirlooms. Never passing up a chance to get something for nothing, he crammed the crackling sheets beneath his blood-stained shirt and staggered toward the door. No one had seen him pick up the money. No one was paying him any attention. So far so good.

"Hey, mister."

Shit! "Yeah?" Belligerently he turned toward the barkeeper.

"Better have that head seen to."

He relaxed and slid a smile over his uneven, broken yellow teeth. "Sure thing."

"How'd you get your head bashed in that way anyhow?"

He smiled again, the sly, cunning grin of a scavenger. "Got a little too feisty with my woman. She clouted me over the head with a rock."

The barkeeper laughed good-naturedly. "Doubt if I'd let her get away with that."

The grin turned into a malevolent smirk. "I don't intend to." If it was the last thing he did, he would find that bitch and give her what she had coming. He took one more step toward the door, then paused. Something the two dandies had said came back into his alcohol and pain-dazed mind. "Say, you hear sumpin' 'bout a wagon train startin' up in McMinn County?"

"No, can't say that I have," the barkeep said, polishing a glass with a muslin towel. "But it wouldn't suprise me any. Had a helluva flood down that way last spring. Folks have been trying to salvage what they could of their farms after the war and the floods and all. Lot of 'em are getting out."

The man at the door rubbed his beard-stubbled Jaw musingly. A wagon train of families looking for new homesteads would be a good hiding place. "Think I'll mosey down that way and have a look-see."

He went out the door, chuckling to himself and wondering when the friendly barkeeper would notice he had been robbed.

* * *

She liked the way his hair fell over his forehead. His head was bent over as he cleaned his guns. The rifle, already oiled and gleaming, was propped against the side of the wagon. Now he was working on a pistol. Lydia knew nothing of guns, but this particular one frightened her. Its steel barrel was long and slender, cold and lethal. Ross brought it up near his face and peered down the barrel, blowing on it gently. Then he concentrated on rubbing it again with a soft cloth.

Their first day of marriage had passed uneventfully. The weather was still gloomy, but it wasn't raining as steadily or as hard as it had been. Nevertheless, it was damp and cool and Lydia had spent most of the day in the wagon. Ross had gotten up early, while it was still dark, and had shuffled through trunks and boxes. He seemed intent on the task, and she had pretended to sleep, not daring to ask what he was doing. When she did get up and began to move about the wagon she noticed that everything that had belonged to Victoria was gone. She didn't know what Ross had done with Victorias things, but there was nothing of hers left in the wagon.

Lydia watched him now as he unconsciously pushed back his hair with raking fingers. His hair was always clean and glossy, even when his hat had mashed it down. It was getting long over his neck and ears. Lydia thought the black strands might feel very good against her fingers if she ever had occasion to touch them, which she couldn't imagine having the nerve to do even if he would allow it. She doubted he would. He treated her politely, but never commenced a conversation, and certainly never touched her.

"Tell me about your place in Texas," she said softly, bringing his green eyes away from the pistol to meet hers in the glow of the single lantern. She was holding Lee, rocking him gently, though he had finished nursing for the night and was already sleeping. They were killing time until it was time to go to bed.

"I don't know much about it yet," he said, turning his attention back to his project. He briefly told her the same story about John Sachs that he had told Bubba. "He sent for the deed and, when it came back in the mail, there was a surveyors description attached to it."

His enthusiasm for the property overrode his restraint and the words poured out. "It sounds beautiful. Rolling pastureland. Plenty of water. There's a branch of the Sabine River that flows through a part of it. The report said it has two wooded areas with oak, elm, pecan, cottonwoods near the river, pine, dogwood—"

"I love dogwood trees in the springtime when they bloom," Lydia chimed in excitedly.

Ross found himself smiling with her, until he realized he was doing it and ducked his head again. "First thing I'll have to do is build a corral for the horses and a lean-to for us." The word had fallen naturally from his lips. Us. He glanced at her furtively, but she was stroking Lee's head and watching the dark baby hair fall back into its swirls after it was disturbed. Lee's head was pillowed on her breasts. For an instant Ross thought of his own head there her touching his hair that way with that loving expression on her face.

He shifted uncomfortably on his stool. "Then, before winter, I'll have to build a cabin. It won't be fancy," he said with more force than necessary, like he was warning her not to expect anything special from him.

She looked at him with unspoken reproach. "It'll be fine, whatever it is."

He rubbed the gun barrel more aggressively. "Next spring I hope all the mares foal. That'll be my start. And who knows, maybe I can sell timber off the land to make some extra money, or put Lucky out to stud."

"I'm sure you'll make a success of it."

He wished she wouldn't be so damned optimistic. It was contagious. He could feel his heart accelerating over the unlimited prospects of a place of his own with heavy woods and fertile soil, and a prize string of horses. And he wouldn't have to be looking over his shoulder all the time either. He had never been in Texas. There wouldn't be as much threat of someone recognizing him.