“Well, certainly,” Otis said, reaching into his case. “But do you know how to shoot?”
“Yes, I do. My—father taught me about weapons when I was just a girl. He operated a trading post, though not as well stocked as your establishment.”
Pleased at the compliment, Otis withdrew several models, describing the merits of each. Macky selected a small derringer that would serve her purposes without alarming the townsfolk. She slid both the pistol and bullets into her coat pocket and left the store promising that she’d be very careful with her new weapon.
Macky strode down the sidewalk to the saloon. Though it was approaching mid-morning, it was still far too early to expect to see Lorraine. She walked to the marshal’s office. Maybe she’d wait for him to return. If the sheriff came, at least she’d have a chance to be heard privately.
When Todd was alive, she and the sheriff had crossed swords over her brother’s behavior several times. Though she’d changed, Macky was afraid that he’d recognize her. Convincing him that she was innocent of the bank holdup might be hard to do. But by returning the money and leading him to Pratt, she’d hopefully absolve Bran of any wrongdoing.
The door wasn’t locked and she pushed her way inside. Someone had attempted to tidy up the place. A thick layer of dust had been partially wiped away and the bunk inside the cell had a mattress and blanket. Macky walked over to the potbellied stove. Its door was standing open as if the marshal were about to start a fire. The wood was laid and some crumpled paper peeked out between the dry sticks.
A fire would make her wait more pleasant. The temperature was still chilly, and the street acted like a funnel, whipping the wind straight through the cracks in the wall. All she needed were the matches she carried in her pocket.
Quickly she lit the stove, fanning the small red licks of flame into a full fire before adding more limbs.
Soon there was a warm glow inside the office. Macky glanced at the barred cell at the end of the room with its hard bunk and small boarded-up window and shivered. Spending time in a place like this would be awful. She liked her freedom, the open fields and blue sky. She didn’t even want to think what the law did to murderers.
Worried now, she sat down on the barrel behind the desk, pressing her hands to her temples. She’d had little sleep, though the cause had been worth the headache she was brewing. The pain wasn’t as bad as it had been after drinking Harriet Smith’s sherry-laced tea back at the way station, but it was getting there.
Macky opened the desk, pulled out the posters and began to flip through them. There was Pratt, wanted for robbing a bank in Missouri and another in Texas. He was younger in the sketch, with an untamed bushy beard that looked out of place on a man that young. But the wild-eyed look was there, even then.
As Macky stared at the posters she wondered why the marshal hadn’t recognized Pratt in the crowd that first day the stage arrived. Of course the churchgoers were thronging around their new preacher, and Pratt had shaved his beard, but he’d made no attempt to hide himself. Either he was the most brazen outlaw Macky had ever seen, or he knew he had no reason to fear the marshal.
Still, the bank robbery in Promise was too close for Pratt to take that kind of chance. It was more likely that the marshal never saw Pratt. She’d have to think about that.
And then, at the bottom of the stack, she came to the sheet that stopped her cold. It was a sketch of John Lee, wanted for the murder of an army sergeant in Oklahoma. If she hadn’t known Bran, she might never have recognized him. The sketch was smeared and poorly drawn.
The young Bran was thin, his hair hung dark and stringy, cut Indian style, and his wounded eye looked like a pucker in his face.
Bran was right to fear the marshal. He was still wanted, and if Macky was any judge at reading people, the marshal had seen this poster, too. Did he know it was Bran? Larkin didn’t seem like a slow-thinking man. Sooner or later he’d recognize Bran and arrest him, no matter what Macky did. If he’d known who Bran was all along, what was he waiting for? Whatever it was, she’d better rethink her original plans to confess her crime. For now, she needed to warn Bran.
Macky folded Pratt’s wanted posters and slid them into her pocket. She fed Bran’s poster into the fire, then headed for the stable to claim Solomon. After she told Bran what she’d discovered, they’d both leave together. There had to be someplace where they’d be safe.
But she never got the chance. As she stepped into the street, Bran rode up, firing his pistol. Reining the horse to a stop, he dismounted, calling out, “Hank, round up the men in town. Rachel Pendley’s little girl is lost in the woods. We need to make up a search party.”
He didn’t speak to Macky, but she felt his displeasure and took a step back. She knew he’d demand an explanation for her presence but there was no time now. Finding the lost child had to come first.
Moments later, Otis Gooden, Preston Cribbs, and Hank Clay were ready to ride.
“Don’t know why they’re so worried about that child,” one of the townswomen said with a sniff. “Like mother, like daughter. If she don’t get lost in the woods, she’ll end up at a place like Lorraine’s sooner or later.”
Macky didn’t allow herself to speak. To say that about a child was unforgivable. The glare of anger she focused on the woman was more than enough to dry up any further comment.
“Shame on you, Eva, that child is one of God’s children,” Clara said. “And I remember a passage where he said that we should look after the least of them.”
Somehow that didn’t sound exactly right to Macky. But Clara’s comment brought a smile from two others who’d been on their way inside the store.
Macky let the men leave before she climbed up on Solomon and rode behind them. She didn’t know how she could help, but Macky knew that she had to try. Even if it meant letting the sheriff and the marshal meet up and compare information before Macky found a way out.
Macky gave Solomon a kick in his side and forced him into a reluctant gallop. She saw dark clouds gathering in the sky. More rain, she thought. And the child was out there, alone, unprotected. Macky shivered. She knew how that felt.
“Solomon,” she said, as she leaned close to his ear, “we need a miracle. And you and me have to make one.” There was a lump in her throat the size of a hailstone.
Resting her head against the mule’s large neck, she whispered, “Lord, if it’s not too much to ask, give Solomon angel wings so that he can lead us to Gingerbelle.”
But there was no trumpet from on high sending an answer.
Chapter Twenty-One
Larkin crested the hill and stopped to check out the cabin. A plume of smoke sketched an S in the sky. He let out a deep breath and urged the horse forward. Once the message had arrived last night that Sheriff Dover was on his way to Heaven from Promise, Larkin began to worry.
Dover planned to talk to Mrs. Mainwearing about the recent troubles she’d had in shipping her gold back East. Larkin could handle the sheriff, but there were too many people asking questions. Larkin had to work fast to get rid of anybody who could connect him to the trouble. He still intended to have the mine, but he could wait.
The gunfighter had to be eliminated. Then Pratt would die and be blamed for all of the holdups. Using criminals, then eliminating them had worked well for Larkin in the past. He could see no reason why it wouldn’t work again, so long as he didn’t wait too long. First there was Pratt to deal with.
“Ahoy, the cabin. Pratt!”
Larkin! Inside the shack, Pratt pulled the rag tighter on his finger and winced. Who’d have thought that losing the tip of a finger could hurt so bad? He made his way out the door. Damn the man, he was still sitting up there on that horse like some kind of lord looking down on his slave. He was tired of all this.
“What happened to you?” Larkin asked.
“Nothing. Just a little accident with my knife. What do you want?”
“The sheriff from Promise is coming in. I want you to get rid of that pr
eacher now and get out of town for a while.”
“Funny,” Pratt said, studying Larkin shrewdly, “I had the same thing in mind. Maybe I’ll just pick up my pay and ride over to Boulder City.”
Larkin gave a laugh of disbelief. “Pay? You expect to be paid after you fouled up the bank job in Promise and shot the banker? You’ll be lucky if I don’t decide to hang you for murder. Or let you have an accident right now. That would take care of everything, wouldn’t it?”
“You still need me to do your dirty work, Larkin.” Pratt’s voice wavered just a bit, though he didn’t want Larkin to know he was worried.
Pratt wasn’t fooled. He knew that Larkin would kill him. He’d claim that he’d tried to arrest Pratt for the bank holdup and Pratt had resisted. Too bad he’d been killed. His association with the gunfighter was just as risky, but Night Eyes had never murdered a man in cold blood.
“All right. I’ll do this one last job, then I’m heading for Alaska. Somebody said that there’s gold up there and I have a hankering for snow.”
He untied the bandage and it floated to the ground. “Don’t suppose you’d help me with this, would you?” he asked and knelt to pick it up, putting the horse’s head between him and Larkin, for just a moment. That was all the time he needed. But Pratt missed, causing the horse to shy. The marshal got off one good shot and Pratt fell.
Larkin gave a cynical laugh. Pratt was dead before the marshal dragged him into the rocks beyond the trail. Larkin retrieved the stolen gold and Pratt’s silver-trimmed saddle from the cabin.
Pratt was a fool. Larkin hadn’t intended to kill him yet, not until after he’d gotten rid of the preacher. Now Larkin would have to do it himself. That was no problem. He’d used gunfighters as fall guys before, but he didn’t like it when things went wrong.
Farther up the trail, Sylvia closed the ledger she’d been writing in and leaned back in her chair. She was tired; her eyes were strained from the squinting as she entered the tiny figures into the columns.
Her losses were growing. Even hiring men to work in the mine was becoming a problem. Since the explosion, workers had gradually drifted away, whispering that the Sylvia was jinxed.
She’d hired that gunfighter to stop the trouble and he was making no progress in doing so. Though she’d promised to hold off revealing his true identity, she wasn’t certain if that was smart. Nobody knew how dire her situation was. Nobody knew that, in the explosion, she’d lost the main vein.
The truth was, the gold had shifted when the explosion occurred and so far nobody had found it. Even after shoring up the tunnel and clearing away the debris, nothing seemed to be in the same place. It had to be there. A vein of gold didn’t just vanish. But this one had.
Sylvia closed her eyes.
“Moose, you old fool, why’d you marry me in the first place? You could have had any of those fancy women back East. Why me?”
But she knew the answer. She knew how to please a man. In spite of her airs, underneath it all, Sylvia Mainwearing was a former saloon girl who’d struck it rich. She bit back a smile as she thought about all the women in Heaven who’d bought her act. Nobody knew that she and Moose were two of a kind. And she’d loved him, even with his loud voice and tendency to drink too much.
And somebody had killed him.
She’d refused to believe it at the time, refused to think that anybody had deliberately pushed him into that ravine and left him there to die. An accident, the marshal had called it, and she’d had no reason not to believe him. Until the other trouble started.
At first it was just little things: timbers that fell and injured miners, mules that spooked, ore spilling down the canyon. Then came the fires and stolen gold shipments, followed by the explosion and murder. And finally someone had taken a shot at her.
Somebody wanted to frighten her and they had. Sylvia was scared to death. She could marry again, and she might. She had to laugh at a former saloon girl being courted by a judge and a U.S. Marshal. The marshal was younger, but Sylvia didn’t delude herself about his sincerity. The judge was an old teddy bear and she was comfortable with him, but he was about as much protection as an old shoe.
Still, something was wrong, and Sylvia had learned long ago to take care of herself first.
And she might have found a way. One of the workers had just come from town with two pieces of news. First, a child had gotten lost and everybody had gone looking for her. Sylvia had sent some of her men over to help. It never hurt to keep up a good image with the townspeople.
It was the second announcement that caught her fancy. The preacher was going to hold a revival meeting on Wednesday evening, in the saloon. Sylvia glanced up at the painting of her crest with the S and smiled. That would work very well for her purposes. She’d attend his revival. It was time for Sylvia to confess her sins and let the town know that she was out for blood.
They needed to know that their preacher wasn’t a man of God after all.
When the search party for Rebekah Pendley rode out of Heaven, Bran knew that Macky was behind them. One part of him wanted to climb off his horse and turn her over his knee, the other was just glad to know that she wasn’t with Pratt.
But why had she gone to town?
The sorry little cabin where Lars Pendley’s family lived was barely more than a lean-to, built in the side of a hill. The back walls were dirt and the main house was poorly insulated from the wind and cold.
But he could see Rachel’s pitiful attempts to make the place into a home. There were small trees and shrubs planted across the front of the house and a flower box had been nailed beneath a shuttered window.
Rachel, baby on her hip, stood in the doorway, face pinched and anxious as she watched Bran organize the search. Macky rode in, dismounted and stood behind Rachel, listening as the men were directed to ride away from the cabin like the spokes of a wagon. They would go forward and zigzag back and forth until they heard a single gunshot. Then they were to move to their right fifty paces and move back to the cabin. If anyone spotted the child two shots were to be fired as a signal.
Macky glanced at the sky in concern. Heavy gray clouds hung over the mountains, ominously concealing the snow-covered tips. Macky had a bad feeling about this. A child following a mischievous puppy could cover a great deal of territory.
After what seemed like forever, Macky heard a single gunshot. The signal to turn back.
Rachel gasped. “They aren’t stopping, are they?” she asked.
“Of course not. They’ll just return, reset their directions, and move out again. We’ll find her, don’t you worry.”
But Macky was worried, and she began to pace back and forth. Even Solomon seemed to sense the tension. He moved about in agitation, shaking his shoulders and slinging his head. Finally Macky walked over to the big animal.
“What’s wrong, boy? Do you know something we don’t?”
For a moment Solomon only looked at her, his big brown eyes piercing and stubborn. He pulled against his reins, stomped his feet and pulled again.
Following a hunch, Macky untied Solomon’s reins and climbed on his back. “Let’s me and you have a little look,” she said, allowing the mule to go his own way.
Macky didn’t know how much time passed. Nor did she know exactly where she was, as the mule wandered down the draw, away from the mountains into the thick brush. Branches dug into her bare skin, and slapped her face, leaving red splotches. But the animal seemed to know exactly where he was going and wasted no time in doing so.
“Rebekah! Rebekah!” Macky called from time to time, but there was no answer. In fact the woods were curiously silent, not even a bird calling out to another.
Finally the sound of running water broke the silence. Solomon burst through the brush and stopped at the edge of a swift-running creek. Something about the scene looked familiar. Solomon reached down and took a long drink from the cold stream.
“Solomon, you old fool. Did you bring me all this way just so that you could get a dri
nk of water? How dare you, you selfish, ornery old thing?”
And then she heard a whimper, not of a child, but an animal. “The puppy.” Macky slid from Solomon’s back and made her way down the bank. “Here, puppy! Here, puppy!”
The whimpering grew louder. And then she saw them. Rebekah and the puppy were caught by a pile of brush midway across the stream. Macky fired her new pistol twice, then stepped into the icy water and waded out to Rebekah and the puppy, grateful that the water only reached her thighs.
The little girl had a gash on her forehead and she was cold as ice, but she was breathing. The puppy seemed fine, but afraid of the current. Moments later, with the squirming puppy under one arm and the child in the other, Macky managed to mount Solomon and head back to the cabin.
“After the trouble you’ve caused me, you’d better get us there quick, Solomon, or you’re going to have to live on snow and creek stones forever!”
The mule must have believed her, for a short time later, they reached the shack where the searchers were waiting anxiously.
“We heard your shot,” Otis said. “Where’d you find her?”
Lars Pendley took his stepdaughter inside by the fire. Rachel began to remove her wet clothes and wrapped her in tattered warm blankets.
“She must have fallen into the creek and been washed downstream. She was caught in a pile of brush,” Macky answered.
“How’d you know where to look?” Hank Clay asked curiously.
“I didn’t. Solomon found her.”
The men shook their heads then started back to town.
“Odd,” one man said, “the marshal never showed up.”
“Wonder where he is?” another asked.
“Maybe he had a lead on Sylvia’s trouble at the mine,” Hank said.
Bran rode beside Macky. He didn’t speak. He didn’t even say goodbye to the men he’d organized into a search party. Instead he turned his mount toward their cabin, paused and waited for Macky to do the same. Macky hadn’t known what to expect, but being ignored was making her feel very uneasy.
The Redhead and the Preacher: A Loveswept Historical Romance Page 26