Lloyd grinned and dismounted. “Yeah, well, we’re both unavailable, Dixie,” he told her. “I got married a little over a month ago.”
“Don’t tell me!” She pressed a hand to Jake’s stomach. “I’ll bet she’s beautiful.”
“She sure is.”
“Well, it’s not fair that you two came here just to make us miserable havin’ to look and not touch.”
Jake laughed and crooked an arm around her neck, pulling her around to see Jeff. “That kid there is Jeff Trubridge, Dixie. He’s from Chicago and he’s writing a book about me. Maybe you’ll even be in it. What do you think of that?”
Dixie wrapped her arms around Jake’s middle as she looked Jeff over. “Well now, that depends if he makes me out to be a lady or somethin’ less than a lady,” she answered with a wink.
“And his opinion might depend on your hospitality tonight. The three of us are staying the night here, Dixie. We’re on our way to Hell’s Nest. Lloyd and I just need a room to ourselves, but Jeff there, I think he ought to have someone to sleep with, don’t you?”
“I’m sure we can work somethin’ out.”
Jeff reddened. “I’m fine with my own room, ma’am.”
“Oh, I think Dixie is too full up,” Jake teased, giving Dixie a wink. “I think you’ll have to share a room with somebody.”
“Jake—”
“You’ll live, Jeff. Get our gear and let’s go inside. Dixie makes great steaks. You can meet some of the other girls.”
“Jake—”
“Just get your gear, Jeff. You have a lot of things to write down after our visit to the Buckley place.”
Jeff gave up arguing. All three of them unloaded weapons and personals, and Dixie ordered a Mexican man who came from the house to take care of their horses. The man greeted Jake.
“¿Jake, me imagino que es las primera vez para este niño, ah?”
“Sí, Dominic. Necesita la experiencia para cuando tenga esposa.”
Dominic laughed and took the horses, and Jeff just shook his head, pretty sure the remarks were about him. He understood enough to recognize “necessary” and “experience” and “wife.” He followed Jake and Lloyd inside, where three younger women greeted them, one of them not much to look at, the other two decent but with painted faces and low-cut dresses that displayed plenty of bosom.
Dixie led them all to the kitchen, where two other men sat eating steaks and drinking beer. They both looked at Lloyd and Jake warily.
“Boys, this here is Marshal Jake Harkner and Deputy Marshal Lloyd Harkner—his kid, as if you couldn’t tell. Jake, this is Hal and Clay. Don’t know their last names and don’t care. They’re new in the territory—fresh in from the last land rush.”
Lloyd urged Jeff to sit down at the table, but Jake remained standing. “How new?” he asked, eyeing them carefully.
“New enough, but a person don’t have to be from around here to know who you are, Marshal,” the one called Hal answered. He was a medium-built man with sandy hair and several missing teeth. Jake noticed neither man wore a gun. Because Hash Bryant was gathering men, who apparently were still scattered throughout the area, he had trouble trusting any stranger he came across.
“How’s that?” he asked Hal.
The man shrugged. “Hell, you’ve been in newspaper headlines and dime novels.” The man put out his hand. “I never expected to meet you. This is a real pleasure.”
Jake didn’t shake his hand. “A pleasure?”
“Sure. Hell, you’re famous.” His hand was still out. Jake shook it warily.
“Whatever you think,” he answered. He looked over at Dixie. “While your girls serve Lloyd and Jeff, I want to talk to you, Dixie—in your room.”
“Pa—”
“I’m all right, Lloyd.” Jake lit a cigarette. “Bring me some coffee, will you?” he asked Dixie. “I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure, honey. You know where my room is.”
Jeff looked at Lloyd.
“Don’t ask,” Lloyd told him. He glanced at Jake. “Just don’t drink, Pa.”
“Just coffee. I need to talk to someone who’s not close to your mother.” Jake sobered, eyeing the other two men again. “Either one of you ever heard of a man named Hash Bryant? Or Marty Bryant?” He could tell by their reaction that they hadn’t. One thing he’d learned over the years was how to read a man’s eyes.
“Don’t know him,” the one called Clay told him.
“Me neither,” Hal added.
Jake glanced at Lloyd. “I’ll eat later.” He turned to Jeff then. “Kid, this is your chance to learn something. Take advantage of it.”
Jake walked out of the room, and Dixie set a steak in front of Lloyd. “What’s wrong with your father? He looks thinner than when he was here last time.”
“He got hit in a shoot-out in Guthrie. Lost a ton of blood and came close to losing his life.”
“Damn,” Dixie muttered. “Is there more?”
“Yeah. My mother might have cancer. It’s eating him up something awful, Dixie. He’s pretending he’s okay with it, but you’ve got your hands full once you get him alone.”
Dixie sighed, walking over to pour some coffee. “That’s terrible. Just terrible. Your mother is a kind, beautiful woman. It’s not fair. I’ll see if I can calm him down.”
She started out and Lloyd called to her. “Dixie.”
“Yeah?”
“Be good, will you?”
She grinned. “Ain’t I always?”
“You know what I mean. He’s hurting. Don’t let him drink. And don’t let him think he needs to prove he can handle it if my mother…doesn’t make it. He’s in a really bad state right now. My mother is on her way to Oklahoma City for surgery, and he can’t be with her. It’s killing him.”
Dixie sobered. “I’ve been a shoulder to cry on more than once, kid. I’ll be good.” She looked him over. “But I gotta say, it’s too damn bad you got married. You’re too easy on the eyes.”
Lloyd just grinned and turned to Jeff, then nodded toward a pretty young woman of perhaps twenty or twenty-five. “That dark-haired beauty there, she’s real sweet. You ought to get to know her, Jeff. Her name is Rosie O’Toole. You could have a pretty enjoyable night with that one.”
“You should know, Lloyd Harkner,” the woman answered suggestively. She cast him a fetching smile and brought a beer over for Jeff.
“Really, Lloyd, I don’t want to do this,” Jeff objected.
Lloyd shook his head. “You’ll change your mind.”
Jeff drank a little beer. “You sure your mother won’t be upset with Jake alone in that woman’s room?”
Lloyd cut some of his steak. “It’s all part of being married to somebody like Jake, Jeff. He was brought up by women like that. They’re the only mother figure he ever had after his own mother was killed. When he needs to talk to somebody like a man might talk to his ma, that’s the kind he talks to. I just don’t like the state he’s in, that’s all.”
He ate more steak but noticed Jeff only picked at his. “Jeff, we’re all a product of how we’re raised,” Lloyd told him when he was nearly finished eating. “You are the way you are because you grew up loved and educated and probably a bit sheltered. I am a lot like my pa because his blood is in me, but I’ll never be completely like him because of my mother. I’ve got some of her softness, and I was privileged to always have a mother—and a father who taught me strength, and taught me how fathers are supposed to raise their sons.”
He lit a cigarette. “And Jake is the way he is because of how he was raised—no mother for most of his younger years, a father from hell who beat the idea into him that he was worthless, and surrounded by outlaws and prostitutes. I’m guessing there were times when some prostitute, maybe more than one, took him in and protected him from his father. So don’t judge him by some of
the things he does now. It’s all he knows…and my mother understands that.” He met Jeff’s eyes. “She also knows he’d step in front of her and take a bullet in the gut if it meant saving her life. And if he could take her cancer away by putting it into himself, he’d do it without hesitation. He’ll never do anything that would hurt her, her body or her heart.”
Jeff slowly nodded.
“That Jake, he’s a good man,” Rosie said. She sat down near Jeff and pulled off his glasses. “Do you really need these?”
Jeff shrugged. “If I want to see, I do.”
“Well, you look cuter without them.” She smiled, leaning closer and kissing him. “Sometimes touching is better than seeing, Jeff.” She laughed then and tousled his hair.
Lloyd just grinned and got up, walking outside to smoke. Damn it, Pa, don’t do anything stupid.
* * *
Jake removed his boots and weapons belt and guns, hanging the belts over a bedpost where his duster and hat already hung. He sat down on the bed and put his feet up, leaning against the head of the bed.
Dixie walked in with his coffee, bringing it over and setting it on a stand beside the bed. She folded her arms and stood there looking at him. “Lloyd told me about your wife. I’m goddamn sorry, Jake.”
Jake looked away, lighting a cigarette. “Dixie, a man like me never deserved her in the first place. I guess I should consider myself lucky to have actually had that woman for twenty-six years.”
Dixie walked to her dressing table. She picked up a handkerchief and began wiping the color off her face, revealing an aging woman who’d seen far too much of her own share of hard living.
“I saw her once in Guthrie.”
Jake looked at her in surprise. “How did you know who she was?”
Dixie smiled. “Well, I’d gone into town to stock up on supplies. I was buying some material, and she walked in.” She undid her hair and began brushing it out, then faced Jake. “My very first thought was ‘Damn, she’s one beautiful woman.’”
Jake stared at his cigarette. “That she is.”
“She was actually kind to me—nodded to me and greeted me. I’m sure she suspected what I was, because we all have that look about us. I know that. But she was nice to me anyway. Then the store clerk called her by name. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Harkner,’ he says.” She continued brushing her hair. “Well, my jaw about dropped to the floor. ‘So, there she is,’ I thought. ‘That’s Jake Harkner’s wife, and ain’t she just the most beautiful, most gracious thing that ever walked. She’s just like Jake described her.’ And I kind of put two and two together, her bein’ nice to me and all. I think she was nice to me because she knew women like me were once a part of your life and you would expect her to be nice to me. And I thought, ‘How in hell did Jake Harkner find a woman like that—her bein’ so tiny and gorgeous—him bein’ so big and mean?’ ’Course, when it comes to looks, there ain’t nothin’ bad about you. No wonder that son of yours is even better lookin’—havin’ you for a pa and that beautiful woman for a mother. I didn’t tell her I knew you, because…well, that’s obvious. But I have to wonder if she would have just smiled and asked me to the house or something. That’s just how she struck me—as bein’ that gracious.”
Jake grinned and shook his head. “She probably would have invited you over, but I would have had to answer a whole lot of questions afterward.”
Dixie smiled. “That’s why I never said anything. But I’m tellin’ you this because I think it’s damn wrong for a woman like that to die too young, when women like me are still walkin’ around free and easy.” She set down the brush and walked over to the bed, climbing onto it from the other side. She moved close to him and touched his arm. “Is there any hope?”
Jake didn’t answer right away. He finished his cigarette and put it out in an ashtray on the stand. The coffee still sat there, getting cold. “It could just be cysts.” He told her all of it, his try for a reduced sentence, Peter, the surgery. “Goddamn it, Dixie, I should be with her and I can’t be.”
“Well, you must really trust this Peter Brown if you let him take your wife to Oklahoma City and look after her.”
Jake took her hand, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. “I have to trust him, because he’s all I’ve got. Because this job is a sentence and not by choice, I have to take care of business, and Randy can’t wait for that surgery. They said the sooner, the better, because if it is cancer, they might be able to catch it in time.”
“Then that’s what you have to hope for, Jake.”
He closed his eyes. “With my luck?”
She squeezed his hand. “You have two beautiful children and two grandsons, and you’ve had Randy for a lot of years. I’d say that’s pretty damn good luck for a man with your background.”
He smiled sadly, leaning his head back.
“She’ll need holding, Dixie, and he’ll be the one holding her when she’s afraid or hurting. And I’m scared to death she’ll die down there without me. I couldn’t live with that. Grandkids or not, I couldn’t live with that.”
“Yes, you could—for her. She’d never want you to do something crazy and not be there for your family, who will need you more than ever, if it’s the worst.”
“But she’d still be gone.”
Dixie didn’t answer him. She just sat there beside him and waited. For several minutes he said nothing. Finally he leaned over, wrapping his arms around her middle and resting his head in her lap. He held her tight…and wept.
Twenty-seven
Jake tied his gear onto his horse. “Did Jeff stay the night with that cute little Rosie?”
Lloyd shoved his shotgun into its boot. “He sure did,” he answered with a grin. “And if you’d come to the room we were supposed to share last night, you would have known about it already. I don’t want to think the worst, Pa, but I never saw you the rest of the night. And you were awful quiet at breakfast.”
Jake rubbed at his eyes. “Don’t worry about it, Lloyd. You don’t honestly think I’d do anything to hurt your mother, do you—especially now that she’s sick? Dixie and I just talked. That’s all. You ought to know me better than that.”
“I do know you, and sometimes you get kind of crazy when you’re worried about Mom. I’m not stupid. I know you’ve done crazy things before when you thought you needed to prove you could live without her.”
Jake sighed. “Didn’t you notice at breakfast this morning that Dixie was wearing the same damn dress she wore last night?”
“I never thought about that.”
“Well, that’s because she never took it off. Nothing happened, all right? Dixie’s a good woman. We talked…a lot. I fell asleep and she let me lay there because she knew I needed to sleep. That’s all there was to it.” He mounted up and rode Prince around the house, calling for Jeff. “Time to go, Jeff, if you can tear yourself away from the cute little gal in your bed!” he shouted.
“Oh my gosh!” The words were heard through an open window of an upstairs bedroom. “Don’t leave without me!”
Lloyd laughed and mounted his horse.
“You have no more than ten minutes, Jeff,” Jake shouted up to him. “You’d better be down here or we will leave without you. We need to make time getting to Hell’s Nest!” He rode Prince a few yards from the house to calm the restless horse.
“I’m coming! I’m coming!” Jeff yelled from upstairs.
Dixie came out carrying a burlap bag. She handed it up to Lloyd. “Fresh-baked bread. You make sure your father eats plenty. He never ate last night and not enough this morning.”
“Thanks, Dixie. Go tie it onto the packhorse, will you?”
“Sure.”
“Dixie. Is he okay?”
“I’m not sure. He did a lot of crying last night, Lloyd, and don’t you dare let him know I told you. He needed somebody to talk to, and he knows you’re too clos
e to it. So he came to me.” She walked over to the packhorse and began tying on the sack of bread.
Jeff came flying out of the house then, still buttoning his shirt and carrying his leather jacket and gun belt on his arm. Rosie came running after him with his hat. She plopped it on his head and leaned in to kiss him. “You come back, sweet boy,” she told him.
Jake returned and rode up beside them. “Can you ride, or are you too worn-out?” he teased.
Jeff pulled on his jacket and frowned as he strapped on his gun belt. “I can ride just fine,” he answered. He kissed Rosie once more and mounted up. “And if you and Lloyd are going to rub it in all the way till we make camp, I’d just as soon stay behind the two of you.”
Jake laughed. “Welcome to my world, Jeff Trubridge.” He turned his horse and rode off.
Lloyd rode up beside Jeff and handed him the reins to the packhorse. “You look like you still need some sleep, Jeff.” He grinned and followed after Jake.
Jeff looked down at Rosie. “Thank you. You were very…accommodating.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Get going, Jeff. Jake isn’t the kind of man who waits around for anybody. But I hope you come back some time.”
“I just might do that.” Jeff turned his horse and rode off, deciding Jake had been right about learning what to do with a woman. It was definitely enjoyable. In fact, he’d not done any of the writing he’d planned to do. The next time they made camp, he’d have to try to catch up a little with his notes. He kicked his horse into a faster gait to catch up with Lloyd, thinking how he was getting some aches and pains in all the wrong places from so much riding. He’d never in his life been on a horse more than a few hours a month, and this trip was going to last a good eight or ten days, maybe longer. He was determined, however, not to complain. For him, this was a dream come true—actually traveling with Jake Harkner, of all people, and winning his friendship. The man’s friendship meant more to him than writing his story. If he never got to publish this book, it didn’t matter. He could brag that he once rode with the famous outlaw turned lawman.
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