“What are you yammering about? I know you fellows get your brains all shook up. You’re not seeing ghosts or having double vision or anything like that, are you? I can give you some laudanum if your head hurts.”
“Save it for the town whores.” Luke’s bitterness boiled over. He stood and flexed his muscles. Everything that didn’t outright hurt ached horribly.
“No need to get snippy, sir. Why don’t you just leave me twenty dollars and go on your way?”
Luke haggled a bit with the doctor over the price of fixing him up. They settled on half that. Finding his money was harder than he expected since all he had in his vest pockets was worse for wear and tear. Piecing together some scrip like some burned puzzle let him pay the doctor without having to open a seam in his coat and squeeze out a few grains of gold dust.
He stepped outside into the sultry late afternoon. The sun was setting and bugs buzzed around, taking special glee in finding the bandages soaked with his blood for an evening feast. Swatting them did no good. For every one he crushed, two more landed. Walking briskly helped keep off the worst of the swarm by creating a small breeze around his body. He tired fast at this pace, but his mind turned over all that had happened—or that he remembered.
As the sun sank under the horizon, he pressed into shadows to avoid being seen by the marshal. The lawman patrolled with a deputy at his side. Luke wondered what the marshal thought about the explosion. Benedict had found Geoff Nelson. Explaining everything that had happened would only land him in jail again.
Making his way to the stables, he saw that his horse was being taken care of properly. Digging in his saddlebags replenished his cash. He looked at the stack of gold coins and considered going to one of those fine-looking hotels for the night. When he heard the stableman approaching, he clenched down hard on the coins and turned.
“You satisfied with how we’re tendin’ your animal?” The question could have been belligerent. Somehow the giant of man delivered it in a soft enough tone to make it sound like he really cared about the answer.
“You’ve done a good job, but I intend to hit the trail real early in the morning. So, do you mind if I . . .” Luke’s voice trailed off as he let the man finish the question.
“Ain’t supposed to let nobody sleep in the stables, but if you clear out before sunup when the boss gets here, I don’t see why you can’t roll up in your blanket in the stall next to your horse.”
Luke piled extra straw on the floor and used his saddle as a pillow. The blanket came up to his neck, so he was cozy enough, though the night was warm. His brain turned over and over everything he had learned and kept him from sleeping, but when he finally drifted off he knew what had to be done.
* * *
• • •
FOUR DAYS,” LUKE raged. He sat astride his horse and stared into the hill country dotted with trees and meandering creeks filled with runoff from the frequent showers. Travel was easy enough. His horse never went hungry, plenty of game fell to his hunting and water was clean and sweet. And it was nothing but a maze of winding hills and shallow valleys where he got lost more than once.
He dismounted and dropped to one knee. A rider had passed by recently. It took him only seconds to identify the trail he followed. These were his own tracks. Luke tugged on his horse’s bridle and walked along, trying to remember the terrain. It all looked the same to him. He had spent his life as a farmer, not a tracker. If there hadn’t been plenty of rabbits and other small critters, he would have starved on this trail.
It would have been better if he had gone hungry early on. That might have forced him to hire a guide. After all, the Rhoades gang had become expert at hiding their trail from posses. His own overconfidence had wasted the better part of a week. For all he knew, the bank had already been robbed and the gang was in Montana or the far side of the moon or even farther out of his grasp.
The sun sank fast. The few clouds provided no sunset artistry. The glumness he felt had transferred to the very heavens. Crushed under his continuing failure, he slogged along until he found a spot for a decent campsite. For a brief instant his spirits rose. An old firepit showed someone had been here recently.
His spirits crashed again.
“Me. It’s one of my old camps.” He kicked at the ashes in the firepit and even found a couple lengths of dried wood he had gathered days before but had never used. His eagerness to get on the trail had sent him along his way without breakfast that morning.
It took him only a few minutes to pitch camp. The firepit was ringed with rocks already. The spot where he had scooped out dirt for his shoulders and hip while he slept hadn’t had time to fill in due to wind or rain. And not twenty yards away a small stream ran fast and furious. If he bothered, a few fish might make a decent supper.
After hobbling his horse near a patch of succulent grass it had missed before, he stretched out, hands under his head, and watched the stars pop out in the fierce black sky. Patterns emerged and vanished as his imagination worked to turn randomness into order. His mind slipped out of gear, and he began thinking about the future. What would he do after he rescued Audrey? He had money left from the sale of his farm to the railroad. They could go to a big city and start over.
St. Louis? Kansas City? He wasn’t sure what job a sodbuster could find there, but with Audrey by his side, it hardly mattered. He was a quick learner, even if he was too old to be taken on as an apprentice.
But freeing her after so long meant they’d have to adjust again to each other. He hadn’t known her all that long, but everything about her was perfect. She was loving and understanding. More than this, she put up with his moods. Not once had she balked when his fiery temper flared. She was a peach.
The stars whirled about and eventually put him to sleep.
The insane shriek that cut through the still night brought him upright, six-shooter in hand. At first he thought he had been dreaming, but what horrible nightmare caused such a ringing in his ears? The shriek came again, only this time another, more curious sound sneaked along with it, twisting about, lilting and even melodious.
Singing. A woman was singing.
He pulled on his boots, wiped sweat from his face and slowly homed in on the music. The half-moon cast enough light for him to proceed cautiously and not make too much noise, but the volume of the song drowned out his clumsiest steps. Turning a stone or stepping on a dried limb was smothered by the strains of “Lorena.”
As he neared, he found himself humming along until the singing abruptly stopped and another scream cut through the night. Not knowing what he got himself into, he turned cautiously. As much as he wanted to rush ahead, he carefully put down each step and remained alert for a trap. Luke came out by the stream and for a moment thought a mermaid had washed up on the bank.
Glowing a pale silver in the moonlight, a woman stretched across a large rock, her head thrown back and one hand waving in the air to direct an unseen orchestra. As she shifted, he got a better look at her. What he thought was glowing skin—scales!—proved to be a wedding dress. Tatters of lace dangled into the water and ripped patches showed bare skin below the cloth.
“Audrey?” He rubbed his eyes. But it wasn’t his missing wife.
She turned her face to the moon and let out a heartfelt howl like a wolf. Then she screamed again. Luke clapped his hands to his ears. “Soul-ripping” was the only way to describe the sound. Before his ears stopped ringing, she returned to the familiar lyrics.
Stepping back a couple paces let him watch and listen from deep shadows. Try as he might he couldn’t make head nor tail out of what happened in front of him. She serenaded the sky like a lovelorn wolf and then burst into song. The quality of her singing left much to be desired. Her voice cracked now and then. At worst it sounded as if too much whiskey had seared her throat and brain. Her best notes carried a plaintive quality that made Luke feel even more alone in the world.
As he started to retrace his way to his camp, she stopped singing again and called out, “Please, please don’t go. Please! I need you so!”
He froze. How had she seen him? It had been impossible for her to hear him rustling through the bushes as she sang so loudly. All he could think was his camouflage skills, like his tracking ones, were fine for a farmer. To sneak up on anyone without being spotted he had a lot more to learn.
“Come, come sit beside me.” She beckoned to him.
Luke stepped forward into a brighter-lit stretch along the stream. If this had been a trap designed to kill or capture him it would have been sprung now. She came to her knees on the rock and motioned for him to approach. He touched the butt of his six-shooter to reassure himself that this wasn’t entirely stupid on his part. He stood a decent chance in any cross fire.
Walking carefully, he looked around. The woman had not picked this spot for an ambush. If she knew he camped nearby, shooting him while he slept made more sense than singing and screeching and sounding crazy to lure him.
“Who are you?” He stopped a few yards from the waterside. She had few options to attack if this was a trick. Splashing around in the water to get to the other side gave Luke a chance to retreat. Or if she ran either way along the stream she would be exposed to his gunfire.
“You know me! Don’t tease me, Lucas.”
He tried to make sense of her answer.
“My name’s Luke, not Lucas.”
“My Lucas, my dear, darling Lucas. You’ve come back!” She stood. He got his first good close-up look at her.
She was almost as tall as he was, but razor thin. Her face looked like the blade of a hatchet and her deep-sunk eyes turned into shadowy black pits. Only occasional lunar reflections showed she wasn’t blind. Moonlight gleamed off eyes turned silver and intense with emotion. The wedding dress had seen better days—better years. It hung from her emaciated body like tinsel from a Christmas tree. When she moved, the streamers floated, making her into a ghost.
“Who are you? What are you doing out here?”
“Out here? Why, you’re right, my dear. I must get you something to drink. Food! It’s been so long I’ve forgotten my manners. You must be exhausted from your trip.”
“What’s your name?”
She laughed. An undercurrent of madness made Luke even uneasier. She came to him, her feet hardly touching the ground. She floated like some ethereal being and took his arm. The touch was featherlight and yet insistent. He let her steer him away. As she linked arms with him he caught her scent. It both repelled and attracted him. Sweat and dirt mingled with sweet smells of cooking and the flowers she wore in her ratty, tangled brown hair.
“You silly billy, you know my name.” She pulled him close and laid her head on his shoulder. In a voice almost too soft to hear: “I’m your loving Sarah. You haven’t been away so long that you’ve forgotten me. I’ve waited for you, Lucas. How I’ve longed for you to come home.”
“I’m not Lucas. Not your Lucas.”
“I told you not to go traipsing off with your musket to kill some of them Johnny Rebs. I told you, but you wouldn’t. Listen, that is. You told me it was your moral duty, and I didn’t have any choice but to let you go off to war. But you’re home now. You’re home!”
“You know I’m not your husband.”
“You’re joshing me. That’s new, Lucas, and I don’t like it. You never had much of a sense of humor. Don’t you go now and pull my leg about such a thing.” She steered him to a game path. After a few minutes of her cooing and Luke remaining silent, they reached a cabin almost overgrown in the forest.
Luke wondered if she was completely daft or enough in touch with reality to know he wasn’t her husband. She had been singing “Lorena,” which made him think she understood she was a widow.
Life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.
. . .
’Tis dust to dust beneath the sod.
“If I’d a-knowed you were coming I’d have fixed you your favorite.”
“What’s that, Sarah?”
“You’re kidding me again, Lucas. A pot roast! With greens and carrots. I’ve got the carrots, but the rest . . .” Her voice trailed off. Luke saw the carrots were almost all she had in her pantry. She lived off what she scavenged in the forest. That explained her thinness.
“I ate before I heard you singing by the stream,” he said. Taking even a carrot from her seemed a crime he had no desire to commit. “Do you hunt? There are plenty of rabbits in the woods. And squirrels.”
“You took the musket, Lucas. I gather what I can.”
“You should have gone into town. There’s Crossroads not that far away. And Preston. Or you could have gone to Kansas City after the war.”
“The war is over. You’ve come home. You’re a hero, my darling Lucas. I know you are. Now let’s celebrate with a toast.”
All she had was water in a china pitcher. That suited Luke. It gave her something to do, getting out bone-china cups and saucers and acting as if this was a real homecoming. The war had ended seven years back. From the look of the cabin, she had waited the whole time for a man to return who never did. Maybe he had been killed. Maybe he chose to drift on after the war. Or had there been another woman he had come to love more? Whatever the truth, Lucas was not coming to rejoin Sarah now or anytime in the future.
Luke had no idea what to do. He had a wife of his own to find and outlaws to bring to justice for their terrible crimes.
“You looked so glum there for a minute, Lucas. Are you feeling well?”
“No, not too good,” he said. “I need to rest. It’s been a long way—a long time since I was here.”
“Our bed,” she said proudly. She pointed to a crude bed with a straw-filled mattress on it. The expression as she looked from it to Luke told him how she wanted to use that bed. For her, it was a homecoming.
“Let’s rest for now, Sarah,” he said. “In the morning we can . . . we can head into town. Crossroads is only a day or two off.”
“I don’t like being around people. They aren’t nice to me when I go there to ask after you. The boys throw rocks at me and the old people say terrible things about me. But I never gave up trusting that you’d find your way back to me. And you did! That shows them. Every last one of them! You’re a hero, Lucas, a real hero to me.”
“Lie down, Sarah, lie down and sing to me. A lullaby. Can you do that?” He sipped at the water in the fancy china cup. Coming up with a way to get her to sleep so he could sneak off proved harder than he expected.
“I will, Lucas, if you hold my hand.”
He saw no way around it. If he tried just walking away, she would follow to the ends of the earth. This way he had a chance of getting a head start. Where he rode when he got back to his horse was a bridge to cross. He might even return to Crossroads to see if the marshal had heard any rumors about Benedict or others in the gang, though that was a faint hope. After Benedict blew up Geoff Nelson, he wasn’t likely to show his face around town again.
That he had killed Nelson told Luke that the robbery was imminent. By now it might have happened and any chance of tracking the outlaws was gone.
Sarah settled down. She looked up at him with adoring brown eyes.
“I love you, Mister Youngblood.”
“So you’re Sarah Youngblood,” he said softly.
“Forever and ever.” She began singing and grasped his hand fervently. After a while her grip eased.
Luke laid her hand on the bed and quietly stood. He backed away, then stopped when she began muttering to herself. He waited to be sure she wasn’t coming awake.
The words sank into a low hum. He reached the door and froze when she said plainly, “We can start a stud farm. With those horses all penned up, we can have
the best horse farm in all of Kansas.”
Luke stared at her. The only horses likely to be corralled around here were the ones Rhoades had taken from the way station. Another possibility existed. What ghosts haunted her mind? Lost husbands and phantom horses?
“Those horses?” he asked. “When did you see them?”
“Not a week back. Are the men watching over them your partners? They are such a rude bunch. You should fire them, fire them so we can be alone.”
Luke wanted to believe that Sarah Youngblood had stumbled on where the outlaws kept their spare horses intended to speed their getaway. There was too little else to keep him hunting for his wife.
He returned and sat on the low stool beside the bed. He hated to do it, but he put his hand on her bony shoulder and shook her awake.
“Tell me about the horses, Miz Youngblood. Tell me everything about them.”
CHAPTER NINE
WERE YOU GOING out to look at the horses, Lucas? They’ll make fine breeding stock.” Sarah Youngblood stirred and rubbed sleep from her eyes. Her nap had been only a minute or two long. “You weren’t leaving me again, were you, Lucas? I couldn’t stand it if you did.”
Luke came back to the small table and sat, staring across it to where the frantic woman fluttered about on the bed. She tried to move left, then went right and finally threw her hands up in the air as if surrendering. Then she began to sing. Thinking her lost husband had returned did nothing to restore her sanity. Luke was beside himself knowing what to do. He hated to keep on deluding her, but she knew things he had to find out.
“They’re just waiting there, all tied up and all. Not like mustangs running free. These have brands. I saw the brands.”
He had no idea how the stage line’s horses had been branded. Many way stations bought animals from several nearby breeders. A few horses were added to the remuda by swapping stagecoach rides for the horseflesh. Although it hadn’t sounded like it with the Tomlinsons, some stationmasters weren’t above horse stealing and running a brand. It was a dog-eat-dog business and cutting corners by adding a few “free” horses to the corral enhanced profits. Some stage companies even encouraged such behavior by their employees.
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