Trevor’s face turned almost purple with rage. “You bastard!” he fumed. It was then he saw a movement. Someone was quietly walking toward Wayne Trapp, his moccasins moving through a blanket of snow and freshly turned earth from the avalanche.
Trapp chuckled, his fat face glowing with sweet victory, unaware that Ethan was approaching him from behind. “You should have realized how it would be, Trevor. Roy Holliday is a smart man. He’s not about to leave somebody like you, who used to hate his guts, alive to tell the truth.” He cocked the gun. Much as Trevor had hated Ethan Temple, for the moment he had to be grateful the man wasn’t dead. Before Wayne could fire the six-gun, Ethan plowed into him from behind, sending him sprawling to the ground. The gun went off, and Trevor ducked, then scrambled to try to help Ethan as he and Wayne wrestled in the snow for the weapon.
Allyson watched in terror, shivering with the cold, her feet frozen, her mind whirling. Suddenly Wayne Trapp’s gun went off again, and Ethan went limp. “God, no! No!” she whimpered. She watched in sickening terror as Wayne got up. “Ethaaaan!” Allyson screamed. In that moment she knew for certain that Ethan Temple was all that mattered to her in life. He was worth more than all the millions her bonanza might yield, but she had lost him, too, just like everything else she had ever loved.
It had all happened so quickly. Trapp turned and fired at Trevor Gale, who cried out and fell, grasping at his thigh and cursing Trapp. By then Allyson had run out from behind the boulder, wanting to get to Ethan. She stopped when Trapp turned on her, pointing the pistol. “Well, little bitch, I guess it’s just you and me now, ain’t it?”
28
Allyson was not even aware that her feet were still bare. She watched Wayne Trapp come toward her, while Ethan lay curled and writhing, and the other man Trapp had shot was still rolling on the ground yelling that the bullet in his thigh had broken the bone. Wayne Trapp seemed oblivious to all of it. His puffy eyes gleamed with something Allyson well understood. Inside she was screaming at the thought that Ethan could be dying, and a new determination overcame her, this time not to protect herself or her fortune, but to protect the baby growing inside of her. It might be all she had of Ethan before this was over, and Wayne Trapp was not going to make her lose it.
He still waved his gun at her. “This whole thing has been messed up, little girl,” he growled. “Wasn’t any of this supposed to happen this way, but as long as it has, I might as well get what I’ve got comin’ from you before I kill you, too, and get the hell out of Cripple Creek. I’ll just leave the dead bodies and let everybody else try to figure out what happened.” He grinned. “Come on, now. It won’t be so bad.” He came closer, and Allyson kept backing away, looking around for something to use as a weapon. “Maybe you’ll even like it. Maybe I’ll take you along when I leave here.”
Allyson had never known such anger and hatred. He’d shot Ethan! Ethan! How was she going to live without Ethan? Why had she even come up here again, and made Ethan come with her? Why hadn’t she just gone to Wyoming with him like he’d wanted?
“You’ll have to kill me, Wayne Trapp,” she spit at the man, “because I’d rather be dead than to go off with a fat, ugly, coward of a man like you!” She turned to run then, her feet numb from the cold, her mind full of thoughts about how she could hurt or kill this man so he couldn’t go back and put a bullet in Ethan’s head. She didn’t even care what he intended to do to her. She could bear all of it if Ethan would live.
The blanket slid away as she ran. She could feel Wayne Trapp’s lumbering body close behind her, but she was sure he could never catch her because of his age and weight. She was more frightened of what the cold and the running might do to the baby than she was of Trapp catching her. Suddenly her foot caught on a fallen branch hidden by the snow, and she cried out as she plummeted forward, trying to brace herself with her arms. She had already been in such a fast-forward motion that there was little she could do to cushion her fall. In a split second she saw a rock in front of her face and closed her eyes feeling her head hit it.
Everything became hazy and unreal. Someone jerked her up, lifted her, carried her somewhere, and literally dropped her into a snowbank. “Snow’s as good a bed as any,” a man’s voice said. She felt her gown being pushed to her waist and heard a comment about the fact that she wore no bloomers. “Keep yourself naked for your Indian buck, I see,” came a voice near her ear. “If you can let an Indian between these legs, you can let anybody between them, you little whore!”
Allyson opened her eyes, trying to see the huge figure hovering over her more clearly, but he was a blur. She felt around for something to hit him with, but now her whole body was going numb from the cold, her fingers, her legs, mostly her feet and toes. She thought for a moment that maybe if she was half frozen, she at least wouldn’t feel the horror of Wayne Trapp raping her.
She tried to scream, but nothing would come out of her mouth. She felt hands prying her legs apart, felt something wet run down past her eye. Blood? Then she thought she saw another figure loom over them, but still she could not see clearly. Suddenly Wayne Trapp grunted, as someone wrapped an arm around under his chin and literally lifted him off of her. Allyson sat up slightly and blinked. A big man with long, dark hair was choking Trapp so that the fat man was quickly losing consciousness.
“Ethan,” Allyson muttered. Her vision cleared more, and she wiped at the blood on her face with her hand, then pulled her flannel gown down over her knees, bending her legs so she could also wrap it over her feet. Ethan had gotten such a grip that Wayne Trapp had quickly lost his breath and couldn’t even get his gun from its holster. Ethan did that for him, ripping it out and letting the breathless Trapp fall backward into the snow.
“You fat, stinking rapist!” Ethan growled. He kicked the man viciously between the legs, and Trapp groaned and curled up. Allyson was surprised at Ethan’s strength, for blood covered the front of his shirt and was beginning to also stain his pants. He pulled Trapp to his knees, then shoved the gun up under his double chin. “I ought to blow your fat head off,” he growled. “I need to blow your head off, but I’m going to save you, Trapp, for the miners down in Cripple Creek! I’m going to save you and Trevor Gale both, so you can tell everybody down there what happened here—tell them how Roy Holliday paid the both of you to come up here and murder us—how he paid you to turn around and kill Trevor so he could be blamed for all of it!”
Trapp’s eyes were wider than Allyson had ever seen them, filled with fear. “You goddamn redskin,” he said, the words coming weakly from a coward trying to act brave. “Why don’t you just…scalp me…skin me alive. That’s what your kind does, ain’t it?”
Ethan cocked the six-gun and jabbed it even harder against the man’s chin; Trapp gasped and began to shake, looking down cross-eyed at the weapon. “That isn’t the half of what I’d do to you if I didn’t need you to talk when we get to Cripple Creek,” he growled. “If I had my way you’d be chewing on your own balls right now!” He pistol-whipped the man, sending him sprawling motionless. He shoved the gun into his belt, then turned and half stumbled over to Allyson. She could see he was losing blood, realized he must still have a bullet in him. In the distance Trevor Gale was actually weeping from his own miserable pain.
Ethan reached Allyson and began removing his shirt.
“Ethan, no! You’ll freeze!”
“Don’t worry about me. You’re carrying. Put this on. I’m going to get something to put around your feet.” He reached down and put the shirt around her shoulders, watched her a moment, touched the blood on her face. “What did he do to you?”
“I’m all right, Ethan. It’s you who’s hurt the worst. My God, you’ve been shot! What are we going to do?”
His breath came in pants, and in spite of his dark complexion, Allyson could tell he was growing paler. “I don’t think…the bullet hit anything vital. It just took the breath out of me for a minute. When I saw him bending over you…” He drew in his breath. “I’ve got to
hang on…get you and both of them to Cripple Creek…let the law take care of this.” His dark eyes burned with rage. “Or the miners themselves. There just might be a hanging in Cripple Creek before this day is over!”
“Ethan, you can’t get all the way to town in your condition!”
“We have to try. There’s no shelter up here now, and…this time of year a storm could hit at any time. Besides…what else are we going to do with Trapp and Gale?”
“You know that other man?”
“It’s a long story. You sit tight. I’m going to find something…to wrap around my middle…something to put on your feet. I’ve got to figure out a way…to get you and both of them down this mountain.” He touched her face again. “What about the baby?”
Allyson put a hand to her belly. This was not the time to tell him that cramps were beginning to stab at her insides. He would have enough on his hands getting them all into town. He didn’t need something else to worry about. “I think I’m all right. If I could just…get warm.”
Ethan nodded. “You just stay right there and let me do everything.”
“Ethan, you can’t—”
“I’ll manage…if it means getting you to a doctor in town.” He watched her eyes, a rather pleading look in his. “We have a lot to talk about, Ally. I should have told you…about the gold.”
“Why, Ethan? Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me?”
He just shook his head, then managed to get to his feet. He walked to where the two men’s horses stood packed with supplies. He untied a blanket, rummaged through a saddle bag, and pulled out a knife. Then he cut a length of rawhide from one of the horse’s reins and carried everything over to the smokehouse, which had been undamaged by the landslide. He took the antelope skin from where it was laid out to dry on top of the smokehouse, then managed to rip the knife through it to cut it in half. He came back over to Allyson.
“I’ve got to use some of your gown to tie around my middle…help stop the bleeding.” He glanced over at Trapp and then to Trevor Gale. It was obvious neither man was going anywhere for the moment. He took the knife and ripped off some of Allyson’s gown, then tossed the material aside while he wrapped the fresh blanket around her. “Put out your feet,” he ordered.
Allyson obeyed, and Ethan wrapped a piece of the antelope skin around each foot, then tied each one snugly with the rawhide to fashion a crude kind of shoe. “I knew this antelope skin would be good for something,” he said. “See how handy it is to be Indian? We can make just about anything out of an animal skin.” He looked at her sadly, and Allyson realized he probably heard Wayne Trapp’s remark that if she slept with an Indian, she must be a whore.
“Ethan—”
“No time to talk now. You just wrap up in that blanket and wait until I get things situated. Do you think you can ride Blackfoot down the mountain?”
“I think so.”
Ethan rose and pulled up the shirt of his longjohns. Allyson grimaced at the ugly hole in his lower left side. It looked like it was not bleeding so badly now, but she realized Ethan had to be in terrible pain. He began wrapping the flannel material around the wound. “I don’t like the idea of you having to walk any of the way down,” he was saying, “but on the really steep parts, we’ll have no choice.”
“Ethan, I’m afraid for you. You could be hurt worse than you know.”
He winced as he tied the cloth tightly. “There are times when you just have to keep going,” he answered. “Hell…you know that as much as anybody.” He pulled his shirt back down. “We’ll make it.” He left her then, and Allyson forced back a need to groan at the pain that moved through her belly. She closed her eyes and said a quick prayer that she would not lose her baby. Not now. What if Ethan died? If she lost the baby, too, what would she have left? Her gold? Gold couldn’t hold her in the night. Gold couldn’t feed at her breast, or give her hugs. Gold couldn’t love her, or give her the joys of being a wife and mother. She had never realized more clearly how much she wanted those things.
Ethan took the gun from where he had shoved it into the waist of his pants and walked back over to Wayne Trapp, who was groaning as he regained consciousness. He grasped the man by the neck of his jacket. “Get up, Trapp! We’ve got a little trip to make! You can either cooperate and walk down, or I can tie you by the ankles and drag you over the rocks and brush and through the cold snow like a sack of potatoes. Makes no difference to me.”
Trapp seemed to be in a daze. There was a gaping cut across the right side of his head where Ethan had ripped across it with the barrel of the man’s own pistol. Ethan quickly jerked off Trapp’s fur coat before the man even realized what was happening. “You’ve got enough fat on you to keep you plenty warm,” Ethan sneered. “I need this.”
Trapp began rubbing at his arms. “Hey, you can’t take my coat. I’ll freeze.” The words were spoken slowly and somewhat slurred.
“Right now I can do whatever I want, including cutting you open from your balls to your throat,” Ethan growled. “That’s what I would prefer!” He gave Trapp a shove. “Get over there by the horses!”
Allyson tried to rise, thinking she should help, but the cramps deep in her belly made her sit back down. She glanced at the cabin; rather, at where the cabin used to be. It had been flattened by boulders, and she realized that if not for Ethan’s tunnel, they would both be dead, which had apparently been Roy Holliday’s original plan. She shivered even more at the realization that someone had tried to murder her and Ethan today, but thanks to Ethan’s keen hearing and sense of trouble, and his quick action once the explosion occurred, they were still alive to tell about it.
“Ethan! Ethan, please…help me,” the one called Trevor Gale was yelling. “My leg! I can’t stand the pain!” The man had managed to crawl a little closer to where Ethan and Trapp and Allyson were.
“You’ll get your turn,” Ethan grumbled. He gave Trapp a kick in the rear. “Get moving, you fat scum!” He shoved the man over near Allyson, then handed her the six-gun. “Keep that on him. I’ll only be a few seconds. He makes one wrong move, blow his guts out! We’ve still got the other man to testify.”
Allyson took the gun, cocking it and pointing it straight at Trapp. “I’ll gladly pull the trigger,” she answered. “Please do give me a reason, Mr. Trapp,” she added.
Trapp stood still, fully convinced she would kill him if he gave her the slightest excuse. At the level at which she held the gun, the bullet would go right into his belly, and every man knew there was no more painful way to die than being gut shot. He wished the bullet he’d put into Ethan had been just a little higher. Apparently it had not done near enough damage. Still, maybe it was enough that the damn Indian would pass out before they reached Cripple Creek. Then he could still find a way to get the hell out of this mess. Roy Holliday was going to be furious when he learned how he had botched this.
Ethan went to get something more from the gear on the horses, and Trapp went to his knees again, still in pain from being kicked in the groin, and dizzy from the blow to his head. He glowered at Allyson. “How in hell did you two…escape bein’ hurt?”
Allyson refused to show any sign of her pain. “Ethan had dug a tunnel behind the cabin to the privy. As soon as we heard the explosion, we ran in there. It held up enough for us to escape through it.”
Trapp leaned over and groaned. “Goddamn Indian. I told Mr. Holliday…he never should have hired him to begin with.”
Ethan returned with a length of thin rope. “You two brought along some handy supplies,” he told Trapp. He grabbed one of Trapp’s arms and jerked it behind his back, quickly wrapping some of the rope around his wrist.
“What are you gonna do?” Trapp asked, grunting with pain.
“Make you wish you’d never tried this,” Ethan answered.
Allyson noticed Ethan was beginning to perspire in spite of the cold. She knew it was from the bullet wound.
“Get on your feet,” Ethan ordered as he finished tying Trapp’s
wrists together.
“I ain’t goin’ nowhere. I’m in too much pain.”
Ethan took his knife and cut the remaining length of rope. “You’ll cooperate or I’ll tie you by the ankles to the back of one of those horses and drag you all the way to town! We don’t have a lot of time! I want to get Ally down to a doctor!”
Trapp managed to get up and half-stumble over to the horses. Allyson watched as Ethan tied more of the rope around the man’s neck. Trapp protested with a string of curses when Ethan tightened it just enough to cut off a little of his air. Then he tied the other end around a saddlehorn. “You’ll have to keep up or choke to death,” he told Trapp. He left the man standing there practically crying, walked over to where Trevor Gale lay nearly unconscious. He bent over to check his leg, and Trevor groaned when he touched it.
“It’s broken, all right,” Ethan mumbled, wondering if he would make it all the way to town without passing out himself. The only thing that kept him going was knowing he had to get Ally down from the mountain to a place where she could be warm and where a doctor could tend to her. He prayed the ordeal wouldn’t make her lose the baby.
He stumbled over to the fallen cabin and dug through the debris to find a wide piece of wood that had once been part of a wall. Two more pieces of wood were still nailed crosswise to it. He pulled what would be a makeshift sled over to where Trevor Gale lay with what strength he had left, he managed to scoot the man’s body onto the wider board. Gale opened his eyes wide and watched him. “You…going to kill me…Indian?”
“I’ll get more pleasure out of letting the whole town know the kind of man Roy Holliday is,” Ethan answered. “Lie still. I’ll tie you on this thing so your leg doesn’t get moved around. The crossboards should keep it from tipping. I can tie some rope around the crossboards and then to one of the horses. These boards will have to act like a kind of travois to get you down to town where a doctor can look at your leg.” Ethan started to rise to go get more rope, and Trevor grabbed his arm.
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