“Ta a fhios agam,” Shawn answered.
After Shawn turned the team and drove away, Ellis said, “What the hell was that all about, Buck?”
“I used the old Irish tongue to tell him he was a crazy man.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘I know.’”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Maria Cantrell had been walking since the young cowboy driving the buckboard had dropped her off and pointed the way to the stage station.
“It’s a ways, Miss, maybe a five mile,” he’d said. “I wish you’d change your mind and come back to the ranch. Mr. and Mrs. Cornton will make you right welcome, especially Miz Flossie. She don’t get many lady visitors at the Rafter-C and none as pretty as you.”
But Maria was determined to put as much git between her and Big Buck as she could. She politely declined the puncher’s request but did kiss his freckled cheek, a tender gesture he would recount and embellish for the rest of his life.
She walked steadily north across the brush flats in the general direction of the distant piney woods. The day was hot and cactus snagged at her skirt and sweat trickled down her back and between her breasts. She had enough money left to take a stage to the back of beyond and figured she’d end up in some mining town where she might prosper as a saloon singer and dancer, entertaining horny tin pans willing to overlook her lack of talent for her more obvious charms. Of course, she had to reach the stage station first and the walk seemed endless, especially in knee-high boots and a corset.
After an hour, Maria saw two towheaded children riding bareback on a massive draft horse. She could make out a boy with a mop of unruly hair and a girl in pigtails. They looked like twins no older than seven or eight. The boy kicked the horse into motion and the huge animal plodded slowly toward her.
“Hi,” Maria said. “I’m looking for the stage station.”
The boy pointed. “That way just over the rise.”
“My daddy runs the station.” The girl had wide brown eyes.
“I bet he runs it very well,” Maria said.
The girl nodded. “My name is Arabella. What’s yours?”
“Maria.”
“Mine is Byron, Byron Holding,” the boy said. “My pa said he named me for a poet. Would you like to ride with us on Hercules?”
Maria shook her head. “I don’t think I could get onto him. He’s very tall.”
“Then I’ll take your bag. It’s not a far walk to the station.”
In fact, it was another half mile, but relieved of her heavy carpetbag, she covered the distance without difficulty.
* * *
Comanche Station was a long, adobe building with a shingle roof. It had three doors but only a single window illuminated the passengers’ dining room. That room, the largest, also had a stone fireplace and a couple rough-cut tables and benches. A curtained-off sitting area at the rear was provided for ladies who sought privacy. A pole corral held a spare team of rawboned Missouri mules and close by was a two-holer outhouse, a rare luxury.
The man who welcomed Maria and introduced himself as Cooley Holding was a tall, rangy young man with thick brown hair and hazel eyes. He had wide shoulders, big, work-worn hands and the sensitive face of a scholar. “I’m real sorry, ma’am, but it will be three days before the next stage gets here. The schedules have been cut because of competition from the railroad.” He smiled. “We live in a steam-powered age.
“I’m sorry to hear about the stage,” Maria said. “Does that mean I have to impose upon your hospitality for three days?”
“Not if you got somewhere else to go.”
“I don’t.”
“Then I guess you’re stuck with me and my younguns.” He hesitated as though thinking over his next words, then said, “I fixed up a parlor for my wife, but she died before she could use it. I recently put a bed in there for guests and I’ll get you clean sheets.” He shifted his feet. “You’ll be comfortable in the parlor and you can eat there. And I have books. Do you like to read?”
Maria shrugged. “I’ve never had time before. Can I read a book in three days?”
“Well, probably not, but I have works by Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. I’m sure you can find something to interest you.”
“I’m sure I will. I’d like to have my meals with the family. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. The children and me would like that.” His smile was shy. “Byron and Arabella don’t remember the other pretty woman who used to sit with them at table.” He again was hesitant, like a man about to take a giant leap into the void. “I . . . I bought Ellie, my wife, a dress for wearing to dances and the like. She never got to wear it. If you’d like—”
“I’m sure it will be more comfortable than what I’m wearing. Boned corsets and high boots are for show, not for relaxing in.”
He was suddenly embarrassed. “I didn’t mean . . . I mean you look real nice . . . I just . . .” He shook his head. “Hell, ma’am, I don’t know what I mean. When I look at you, I get kinda tongue-tied and . . . talk silly.”
Maria smiled. “Well, after you get used to me being here that will pass. Now I think I’ll lie down for a while and take a nap. The walking I’ve done has tired me.”
“I’ll show you to your room.”
The children brought Maria’s bag and Byron said in a loud, boy’s voice, “Pa says we’re having fried chicken for dinner. He only does that for special folks. That means he really likes you.”
Maria smiled, shooed Byron outside, and gently closed the door on Cooley Holding’s blushes.
For a while, she lay on her back and stared at the wood ceiling. It had been a long time since a woman had lived in the house and it had an empty, lonely feeling as though it awaited Ellie Holding’s return to come to life again. Spiderwebs hung in the corners and the room itself was dank and dreary though outside the sun shone brightly and birds sang and chirped in the trees.
Maria blinked her drooping eyelids awake. She thought about Cooley Holding. The tall man had no claim to handsomeness. He had none of Shawn O’Brien’s masculine beauty and flashing vitality, none of his well-traveled sophistication and confidence that comes from being born a rich man’s son. Cooley might have first seen his first light of day in the stage station and had never left it since. In every sense of the word, he was a rube, a bumpkin tongue-tied in the presence of a woman who fully understood her sexual attraction and the effect it had on males. Men like Shawn who’d slept with many beautiful women could handle it. Poor, bumbling Cooley could not.
Yet she sensed a serene stillness in the man, an inward beauty like a lake in moonlight. He was gentle with the children and seemed caring. When he’d first looked at her, he did not undress her with his eyes but seemed to stare into her soul as though trying to uncover her essential being and solve the mystery of the woman named Maria Cantrell.
Could she love such a man?
Maria fell asleep before she could answer that question.
* * *
When Cooley Holding tapped on Maria’s door to tell her dinner was about to be put on the table, she was already wearing Ellie’s dress. She looked at herself in the mirror and shook her head in wonder. Instead of a laced and buckled corset and split skirt that revealed more than it covered, she wore a demure black gown buttoned to the neck with white collar and cuffs and no bustle. She had forsaken her high-heeled boots and was barefoot. Along with her corsets, the boots lay at the bottom of a planed timber armoire. She had kept only her skeleton watch that hung around her neck. Her transformation from Spanish lady was complete and Maria thought she looked like a schoolmarm . . . or a prairie wife.
Her arrival at the table was greeted by oohs and ahs from the children and Cooley’s wide-eyed admiration.
She dropped a little curtsey. “Well, do I pass muster?”
“You look like a princess,” Arabella said.
“Indeed you do, ma’am,” Cooley agreed. “That dress suits you very well.”<
br />
“Please call me Maria.”
“Then Maria it is.” He pulled out the chair and Maria sat at the rough wood table.
“My word, that’s a lot of chicken and biscuits,” she said.
“And there’s plenty of buttermilk too,” Byron said.
“Before we say grace, I’d like to ask you a question, Maria,” Cooley said.
“Is it about the stage when it comes or about my past?”
“No. Just about the stage.”
“I can’t answer that question right now, Cooley. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
The family bowed their heads as Cooley said grace. When it was over he looked up and said, “Please pass the biscuits, Maria.”
For the first time in her life, Doña Maria Elena Cantrell felt that she’d found a home.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The fire ax crashed into the foreman’s skull with tremendous force and spit him open to the chin. The troll, a stocky Mexican peon, levered the weapon free and looked around for another victim. Behind him six other men, all similarly armed, fanned out across the foundry floor and began killing. Blood-maddened, they murdered their own kind, anyone who got in their way. Already two furnace stokers lay sprawled on the ground. One of them, missing an arm, shrieked in pain, but the axmen ignored him and shuffled toward the foundry door.
A foreman wearing a bowler hat and goggles came at a fast run, a Colt in his hand. Disoriented by the terrible cries of the wounded man and blinded by the sudden roar and dazzling scarlet light of a blast furnace disgorging molten steel, he ran headlong into the trolls . . . and paid the price.
Before Jacob O’Brien’s horrified eyes the man was chopped to the ground and his writhing body was hacked to pieces. Blood formed a pool under him and spread across the floor.
Up on the gantry, a man fired. Above the constant roar of the machines, Jacob heard men yell and boots pound on concrete.
The trolls, driven wild by their violent rage and urge to destroy their slave masters, saw Jacob and advanced on him slowly. Eyes burned with hatred in swarthy faces and blood, red as a danger signal, tricked from the honed blades of the axes.
“No!” Jacob yelled. “Throw down your weapons and get back.” But he talked to the wind.
The trolls came at him in a rush and instantly, his Colt bucked in his hand. One . . . two . . . three trolls went down, but the rest came on, showing their teeth, growling like wolves.
Sudden as a lightning strike the thought flashed through Jacob’s head that he could drop two more and then was a dead man. He steeled himself for what was to come.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
The shots came from behind the trolls. A group of foremen opened up on the four Mexicans who were still standing. Their axes clanged to the bloody concrete as the trolls dropped together in a heap.
Valentine Kilcoyn, his butt strangely bulky from the bandage under his pants, stepped around the dead and dying men without a glance. “Buck, are you all right? Damn savages.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” But he wasn’t fine, not by a long shot. He’d killed three men driven to the edge of madness by the inhuman conditions under which they slaved. They were not savages, they were martyrs, and Jacob grieved that he’d had a hand in their martyrdom.
“Damn good shooting, Buck,” Kilcoyn said as a foremen finished off the wounded Mexicans. “You did good. Stood your ground like a man.”
“You came just in time, Val. Thanks.” Jacob played his role to the hilt because he needed time. He needed tomorrow.
* * *
Caleb Perry conducted the witch hunt that followed and appointed himself lord high executioner. Three guilty parties who’d joined the revolt but had found no weapon and thus held back from the attack on the foremen were to die by the ax, a method he described as, “a sharp example of poetic justice.”
Because of the recruitment of extra workers for the steam frigate venture, around a hundred and fifty men, armed foremen as well as trolls, gathered on the foundry floor to witness the heavy hand of Perry’s retribution. Jacob, dying a little inside with every passing moment, was posted with Kilcoyn to guard the surly trolls from the construction bay. Later, when he thought about it, Jacob remembered that the atmosphere was tense, but the overriding emotion was fear, that and an air of helplessness. Naked, unarmed trolls were no match for Colts, Winchesters, and Greener scatterguns in the hands of hard-eyed men who knew how to use them.
Perry made a speech from the steel gantry where the executions were to take place. He went on at some length about treachery, lack of loyalty, and the murderous ways of the brown and black races. The man was an orator of great power and despite his reservations, Jacob found himself listening to Perry’s hate-filled talk. His message was wrapped up in rhetoric designed to make the white men present feel good about themselves and reinforce their notions concerning the superiority of the white race and its rightful place in the world. The trolls stood sullen and silent. Perry’s speech was not intended to make them feel good but to terrify and remind them that they were subhuman slaves, obedient to his will.
During the Middle Ages, the headsman’s trade was passed on from father to son and apprentices learned the executioner’s art by chopping off the heads of pigs. Cleanly decapitating the condemned—the ax was reserved only for those of noble birth—took years to learn and like any other trade it had its closely guarded secrets.
Caleb Perry had no such training. The block was a blacksmith’s anvil and he took so many swipes at the necks of his victims, he blunted three axes that, slippery with blood, clanged metal on metal.
By Jacob’s horrified accounting, it took Perry eleven strokes of the ax to behead three men. The faces of the heads that bounced on the steel gantry floor were openmouthed from the sudden shock of the pain they’d suffered. Hidden in his pocket, Jacob’s rosary beads slipped through his fingers as he prayed for the deceased Mexicans. Each time Perry grabbed a head by its shock of black hair, the foremen below cheered. But Val Kilcoyn did not and neither did Jacob.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“I’m very impressed by the way you handled yourself this morning,” Caleb Perry said. “Three of the damn rogues fell to your gun, Mr. Ross. I couldn’t have done much better myself.”
“Thank you,” Jacob O’Brien said.
“Coffee? Something stronger?”
“Not at the moment.”
“I insist. You’re a hero, Mr. Ross, and a hero deserves a drink.” Perry stepped from behind his desk and lifted a crystal decanter from the drinks table. “I think you’ll enjoy this. It’s a champagne cognac from the Frapin distillery in France, fruity and very smooth. Quite acceptable for even the most discerning palate.”
Jacob declined again. “I don’t care for any.”
Perry’s eyes hardened. “I said, I insist.”
The thought of drinking with this monster curdled Jacob’s stomach, but Perry would not be denied in anything, even something as trivial as a drink, and Jacob was forced to step back. He smiled. “Well, I guess it’s not too early in the day.”
Perry accepted that and returned Jacob’s smile. “Mr. Ross, it’s never too early for a good cognac.” He sat behind his desk and watched intently until Jacob tried his drink. “Well?”
“Excellent. It’s fruity and smooth, just as you said.”
“A little too fruity, perhaps?” Perry said.
Jacob shook his head. “Not for my taste.”
Perry sat back in his chair and beamed. “Then we agree on that.” He offered a cigar box. “Cuban.”
Jacob didn’t make the same mistake twice. He took a cigar, forced a smile, and said, “Thank you.”
“So how did you enjoy the show, Mr. Ross?” Perry said after he’d lit Jacob’s cigar. “The greasers surely squealed when the ax hit them, did they not?”
“They most certainly did,” Jacob said. Dear God, just let me get through this day. I’ll kill this crazy evil man
for you tomorrow.
Perry kept at it. “I’d say they paid for their crime, wouldn’t you?”
Jacob nodded. “They paid all right. They were long in the dying.”
“Why do you never call me Mr. Perry?”
“I wasn’t raised right, I guess.” Hating himself, Jacob added, “I’ll make sure I call you that in the future.”
“It’s a small thing, but a mark of respect, you understand?”
“Yes, Mr. Perry, of course it is.”
Perry spoke from behind a blue haze of cigar smoke. “I have a job for you, Mr. Ross. I want you to seek out Shawn O’Brien, the self-appointed sheriff of this town, and kill him. And I want you to kill anyone you find with him. It will probably be a harlot, so don’t hesitate.”
Jacob tried to keep his face impassive. It wasn’t easy. “When do you want this done, Mr. Perry?”
“Why, the day is still young. If O’Brien is dead by nightfall, I’ll be quite satisfied. And of course the reward will be yours. Normally, I would have given this job to Mr. Kilcoyn, but I don’t think he can handle the rogue. And besides, Mr. Kilcoyn’s shot-up ass is slowing him. You can’t give a shootist like O’Brien that much of an edge.”
“No you can’t. He’s fast on the draw.” Hurriedly, Jacob added, “Or so I’ve been told.”
“Well, will you do it?”
Jacob crawled out on a limb. “Of course, Mr. Perry. Shawn O’Brien will be dead by tonight.”
“Good, I’ll take your word on that. Now, one last thing. We must discuss the test of the small frigate’s guns tomorrow. Egbert Killick assures me the weather will be ideal with bright sunshine and little or no breeze. How he knows these things I have no idea, but he does generally get it right. More brandy?”
Jacob really did need a drink and held out his glass.
Perry poured from the decanter. “Remember, you will head south along Main Street at treetop level, deliver a broadside, turn and cut loose with the other.”
“And then drop the bomb. Or so Killick told me.”
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