Jake took a swig from the bottle by his knee, gave a contented sigh as the liquor plunged down his throat, sending a pleasing chill through his spine. He’d just set the bottle back down by his knee and corked it when he heard twigs snapping and brush rustling somewhere on the other side of the fire.
Instinctively he put his hand on the butt of the Deane-Adams he’d stolen from an Englishman riding the Hatch and Hodges stage line from Contention to Tucson, but didn’t bother to draw. Only one man in all the Southwest could possibly make as much noise on a quiet desert night as the one approaching him now.
“Well, I walked a complete circle around the camp and didn’t see hide nor hair of a thing,” Ed Hawkins said as he appeared through the brush, stepping into the small circle of wavering orange firelight. He plopped himself on a rock, breathing as though he’d run five miles, saying, “Heard a bat flappin’ around and a coyote howling for some nooky, but that’s about all.”
“You know, if I was anybody but me you’d be dead right now,” Jake said.
Ed looked at him, puzzled. “What are you talkin’ about?”
“The way you just sauntered up to the fire just now, kicking every rock within ten feet, snappin’ every branch, and pushin’ through the brush like some clumsy ol’ Missouri mule.”
“Oh, come on, Jake. You knew it was me out there.”
“Yeah, I knew it was you because of all the noise you made.”
“Well, if I wouldn’ta made so much noise, you mighta gone and shot me!” Ed said, as though he were trying to convey a simple message to an ornery child.
Jake leaned forward and looked angrily into his brother’s eyes below the tattered brim of Ed’s faded derby hat, which had also come from the Englishman. “Don’t make so fucking much noise!” Jake hissed.
“Okay, Jake. Don’t get so damn mad.” Ed gestured to the bottle. “Pass it over ’fore you hog it all.”
When Jake slapped the bottle into Ed’s hand, Ed uncorked it and took a long pull. Smacking his lips and recorking the bottle, he said, “You’re just mad over what happened in town. But if I told you once, I’ll tell ya again, there wasn’t no way in heaven or hell I was gonna start anything with Jack Cameron right there on the street. He woulda shot me first and then you!”
“The truth is, Ed, you’re a coward,” Jake mused.
“You can call me names all you want, but if I was as trigger-happy and hotheaded as you, you and me would both of us be dead, not on Cameron’s trail like we are now. We wouldn’t know where those two Clark people are headin’ for, all bound and determined like they are. You think they woulda hired us after a shoot-out on Main Street with Cameron, even after learnin’ who we are?”
Ed wagged his head. “No sir. Brother, the way things stand now, we can trail those people all the way to wherever the hell they’re goin’, get whatever the hell they’re goin’ to get after they done got it, and kill Cameron to boot! Back-shoot him, which is just exac’ly what he deserves.”
Jake had finished cleaning the barrel and was now rubbing the stock of his Sharps with a rag he’d dipped in linseed oil. He had to admit, his brother had a point.
“Yeah, well,” he growled, “things sure woulda been a lot easier if Cameron wouldn’t’ve come along in the first place.”
“They sure woulda,” Ed agreed. He fished in the pocket of his canvas coat for jerky.
“As soon as I would’ve found out where they’re headed and what they’re headed for—it has to be gold or they woulda told me—we coulda killed Mr. Fancy-Pants and had us a party with the girl all the way to old Mexico and back.” Jake shook his head hard. “Damn—that’s a fine-lookin’ woman! Gives me the shakes just thinkin’ about what I could be doin’ with her right now.”
Ed tipped back the tequila and stared into the fire, eyes glazing with thoughts of Clark’s lovely young Mexican wife, imagining what a woman like that would look like stripped naked and tied to a tree, maybe, or staked out on the ground. Screamin’ and squirmin’, pleadin’ for her life.
He’d never had any women but whores. His stepsister did him once, back in Kansas, but she’d been big as a heifer and smelled like pig shit.
“I can’t wait to catch up with them folks,” Ed said, and took another savory pull from the bottle.
Jake grabbed the tequila away from him. “Yeah, well, if you plan on catchin’ up to ’em at all, you better learn how to move quiet, you lummox!”
CHAPTER 21
MARINA WASN’T SURE what to make of Jack Cameron.
They had been on the trail together now for over a week and he had hardly said two words to her. She could see that he was by nature a taciturn man, but sometimes she sensed that he was attracted to her, only to have her intuition undercut by the way he ignored her.
Maybe he disapproved of how she had married Clark in return for his promise to help her find the gold and get her daughter back. Cameron probably saw her as an opportunistic harlot ready to offer her body to any man who might help her get what she wanted. He must think her no better than the fallen angels swarming around every brothel and cantina on the border, little better than the shapely young blonde at the boarding house in Contention City, whom Marina had seen enter Cameron’s room late that Sunday morning.
Every time she thought of Cameron—and she’d found herself thinking of him more and more—she thought of that girl. The memory of her entering Cameron’s room was annoying, but she wasn’t sure why. She guessed she must be jealous, but that would mean she felt something for Cameron, and that could not be.
She hadn’t felt an attraction for any man since she had been fourteen and fallen in love with a handsome, young vaquero who’d worked for her father. He’d been too shy, and too afraid of her father, to approach her. She’d never felt anything more than mild disdain for any man she’d met since the Apaches had attacked her family’s rancho. She’d been sixteen then.
Four years later, here she was, riding in search of gold and freedom for her daughter. That was all that mattered to her … Wasn’t it?
Cameron and Going were scouting ahead. Hotchkiss and Jimmy Bronco rode point while Clark paced Marina at a steady walk, every hour or so taking a pull from one of his brandy bottles.
Clouds were building in the west, and the breeze smelled faintly of wet sage and rain. They would have a damp night, Marina feared. But the water basins upon which they relied would be fresh, making tomorrow’s travel easier on the horses and mules.
She was staring thoughtfully at three hawks or vultures—it was hard to tell from this distance—circling off the right side of the trail when she heard horses approaching. Cameron and Going were returning from up the trail, their lathered horses blowing, heads sagging.
Going’s horse was favoring its right front hoof. When the Mexican had brought the mount to a halt, he climbed down and lifted the hoof in question.
“Shoe’s shot,” he said to Cameron. “I’ll have to hammer it back on until I can get another one forged.”
Cameron nodded. “There’s a cave about two miles northeast, up a little canyon,” he told the group. “Why don’t you rest while I go take a look?”
“Can I ride with you, Mr. Cameron?” Marina asked.
She wanted only to leave the trail for a while, to do a little exploring like she’d done back on her father’s rancho. Adrian looked at her and wrinkled his brow disapprovingly, but before her husband could say anything, Cameron replied, “As long as you stay close.”
Not casting another glance at her husband, for fear of what he might see in her eyes, Marina spurred the black and followed Cameron up the trail.
They rode single file, not saying anything. Cameron swung his buckskin toward the northeast, following a shallow cut through chalky buttes spiked with several different types of cactus and low-growing juniper. A few gnarled post oaks and willows lined the trail, growing in number as the riders wound through the cut and into a ravine opening between two granite monoliths.
A quarter mile up
the ravine, a cave opened on their right—a large crescent worn away by millennia of wind and rain. Large slabs of orange sandstone hooded the entrance.
A freshening wind, heavy with the odor of desert rain, blew down the ravine, giving Marina a chill and a sudden sense of the antiquity of the place. It was the kind of poignant feeling—raw, innocent, and breathtaking in its fleeting power—she hadn’t felt since she was a child.
Cameron dismounted, handed her his reins, and told her to wait. She watched him climb the sandy embankment to the cave, where he peered cautiously around—looking for what, Marina wasn’t sure. But it was obvious he knew this wild country in all its moods, had identified many of its dangers.
He was a strong, powerful man—half-wild, like his desert-born mustang—and Marina felt unsure of herself around him. At the same time he made her feel safe. Even out here, in this wild no-man’s-land, he made her feel safer than she’d felt in years.
He walked beyond the cave, then turned and started back. As he walked toward her, stepping around boulders and avoiding cacti, he caught her staring at him. She did not turn away. Something would not let her turn away.
He came on, glancing at the ground occasionally to consider the trail, but mostly keeping his eyes on hers. His face was expressionless but his eyes were grave.
He approached her and stopped, his sweaty buckskin tunic sticking to his broad, muscled chest which rose and fell as he breathed. Small lines spoked around the greenness of his eyes. Dropping her gaze, she stared at the Colt pistol on his hip and the big, horn-handled bowie in a broad, sun-faded leather sheath.
He poked his hat back, revealing a clean sweep of tan forehead, and reached out to her with his right hand.
She offered him his horse’s reins but he took her hand instead, tugging gently. Her heart quickened and her breath grew shallow. Her knees weakened as she threw her right leg over the horn of her saddle and slid slowly down, his hand holding hers for balance.
Standing there before him, smelling the sweat-and-horse-and-leather smell of him, her head coming up to just below his chin, she could not look up. Her ears were ringing and she felt suddenly deathly afraid of this man. But then she realized that the fear was not of him so much as of herself, of the passion she felt stirring deep within her, threatening to bubble to the surface.
Casually, with both sun-darkened, thick-callused hands, he swept her hair back from her face. With the index finger of his right hand he gently lifted her chin until their eyes met.
He bent down and kissed her, softly at first. Then, as he wrapped his heavy, sweat-damp arms around her, pulling her roughly to him, his mouth opened as it pressed against hers.
She felt as though she’d been struck by lightning. Reacting to the passion she felt, she threw her arms around him and returned his kiss with equal fervor, running her hands over his shoulders and down his back.
Then, breathlessly, she struggled out of his grip and pushed him away. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, her mind swirling, her ears still ringing, heart pounding.
Marina turned quickly and mounted her horse. Not waiting for Cameron, she spurred the black down the trail, toward her waiting husband. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her heart was breaking and she did not know why. All she knew was that she suddenly felt afraid, sad, and very confused.
She needed to be alone.
She turned off the trail, into a slight cleft in the hills, and dismounted. She sat on the talus-scarred hillside, reins in her hands, and put her head down on her knees and cried.
* * *
Cameron stood frozen, watching Marina gallop away.
“You goddamn moron,” he said to himself.
He kicked a rock and cursed again. What the hell was he doing, anyway, kissing another man’s wife? Scared the hell out of her too, it looked like. She probably thought he was going to rape her.
But he hadn’t been able to help it. When he’d seen the way she was looking at him—her smoky dark eyes, her black hair hanging across her shoulders—he’d felt possessed, driven to her as though he were a piece of driftwood in a raging rapids.
He hadn’t been able to help himself.
Well, now he’d better help himself. When she got back to the group and told her husband what he’d done, Clark would probably try to shoot him, and Cameron could not blame the man.
So here’s what your damn life has led to, he thought. Getting shot by an angry husband whose wife you tried to maul.
There wasn’t much he could do but face the music, so he cussed again, mounted his horse, and started off down the trail, feeling as guilty as a schoolboy on his way home to his parents with an angry note from his teacher.
But when he rejoined the others, who were resting their horses and mules in some brush, Marina wasn’t there.
“Where’s your wife?” he asked Clark, a little sheepishly.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Clark said, rising from where he’d been sitting, half a piece of jerky in his hand.
Cameron jerked his horse around and was about to spur the buckskin back up the trail when Marina appeared, cantering around a butte. Cameron exhaled slowly with relief, squinting at her. She rode up and stopped, looking a little pale but forcing a smile.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had to take a side trip … to answer a call of nature.”
Clark erupted in a fit of coughing. When it subsided he swallowed several times and rasped, “Good God, I almost had a stroke,” he said, grabbing and uncorking his bottle. “I thought Indians had gotten you.”
“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten anyone,” Marina said, sliding her gaze from him to Cameron, then turning sharply away.
“The cave looks good,” Cameron said to the group. “Let’s head out.”
He glanced at Hotchkiss, who grinned knowingly. Cameron turned away from him and headed up the trail.
Marina fell in beside him. “I am sorry,” she said softly.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her. “I was out of line.”
“No, you were not.”
Behind them, just out of earshot, Clark watched them closely.
He had suspected that some feeling, a mutual attraction, was growing between his wife and Cameron, but he couldn’t explain why. He couldn’t pin his hunch on anything conclusive—maybe it was just the way Cameron had been trying so hard to ignore her, or the way Marina turned shy whenever Cameron was in the vicinity. He’d tried to ignore it, because he knew he was prone to irrational jealousy and that Cameron was just the sort of man who brought it out in him.
But when Cameron had ridden up, Clark had seen something wrong in his eyes. Something had happened between them. Something emotional. He could see it now in Marina, as well. It was no call of nature that had waylaid her.
Or was it? Maybe that’s really all it was, and Clark was just feeling those old defensive feelings he’d grown up with, the sense that he did not quite measure up to others, the sense that, because his father had always paved his way and made things as easy as he could for his only son, that others saw the weakness in Adrian’s eyes and did not respect him.
That’s why he had wanted Marina. A woman like that—strong, intelligent, beautiful—might bring him the respect and admiration he so craved. Winning a woman like that—never mind that he’d won her in poker, something no one need ever know—was akin to winning a war.
Now he saw in Marina’s eyes what he’d been wanting to see since he’d first laid eyes on her; only, the warmth in her gaze was not for him. It was for Cameron.
And the powerful, passionate feelings he’d sensed in Cameron were the feelings Clark wanted to feel for Marina, but didn’t. He’d never been able to give himself, heart and mind, to a woman. He suspected that this, too, had something to do with his father’s own relentless wariness of others.
Perversely, Clark didn’t want anyone else loving Marina, either. He wished now they’d never met Jack Cameron. Because no matter how much the thought app
alled him, Clark was going to have to kill the man.
CHAPTER 22
PERRO LOCO WAS alive and well and riding hell-for-leather toward Contention City.
He knew that’s where Cameron was heading, and he wanted—needed—to kill the frontiersman who had shamed him. Killing Cameron was the only way the Apache could get his honor back—and get it back he would, or die.
Vengeful purpose fairly boiled in his blood. He ground his heels into the sides of one of the mules he’d stolen from two miners he’d run into two days after he’d regained consciousness in the gorge where Cameron had left him for dead. The other mule was tied to the tail of the first, following the Apache across the scorching, undulating desert.
The fall into the gorge had fractured Perro Loco’s skull, cracked several of his ribs, and broken his front teeth. After a desperate struggle under the baking sun, the Apache had found a cave where the body of an old Indian moldered. The man had broken his leg so that the bones had split the skin and drained his blood. Fortunately for Perro Loco, the old one had died before he’d eaten all the dried mule meat in the elkskin sack around his neck.
Loco slept in the cave for two days and a night. Then he wrapped his ribs in a strip of elkskin he’d cut from the dead one’s tunic. The hide collected his own body’s moisture and dried, tightening to hold his ribs in place. He relied on his own stubborn will and overpowering sense of purpose to kill the pain in his head and jaw.
Three hours after he’d left the miners’ bodies for nature to dispose of, the first mule stumbled onto its knees and rolled to its side, its breath shallow, its eyes rolling up into its head. Its mouth and nose were covered with blood-flecked foam.
The Apache removed the mule’s blanket and threw it over the second one, a hammerheaded dun with spindly legs. Then he mounted up and continued the breakneck pace until that animal, too, suddenly halted in spite of Loco’s fierce kicks to its ribs.
Its head went up with a sigh as it teetered. Cursing, the Indian dismounted and removed the blanket from the mule’s back as the dun slowly toppled like an ancient wickiup in the wind.
Dakota Kill and the Romantics Page 42