But Rudolph Kroll might be able to call on a dozen or more other hardcases to ride with him if he set out to rescue his brother from the law. That might be too much for Rakestraw’s posse to handle.
What they really needed, Luke decided, was a whole cavalry patrol. He wasn’t sure the army would go along with that, however, even for an outlaw as notorious as Mordecai Kroll. Besides, there was no telegraph office here, so contacting the military authorities wouldn’t be easy.
Their best bet would be to hustle Mordecai to St. Johns as quickly as possible, before Rudolph Kroll found out what was going on.
“I think we should move the prisoner tonight,” he told the sheriff.
Rakestraw raised an eyebrow and repeated, “We?”
“I’m coming with you,” Luke said.
“I don’t figure that’s necessary. I can put in the reward claims for you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“No offense, sheriff, but I’d rather handle that myself.”
Rakestraw’s weathered face tightened. Despite what Luke had said, he was offended. Luke didn’t mean to question the sheriff’s honesty, but he was accustomed to handling his own business.
“Suit yourself,” Rakestraw said, “but we’re not starting back to the county seat until tomorrow morning. You’re welcome to ride along with us then if you want to.”
Luke nodded. He supposed that would have to do. If nothing else, the jail here would be much better guarded than it had been the night before.
Rakestraw turned to his deputies and ordered, “Dismount and get set up, men. Tom, take the wagon down to the livery stable and see to the team.”
The deputies responded crisply. Several of them, each packing two revolvers and carrying a Winchester, went into the jail to watch over the prisoner. The others began positioning themselves around town where they commanded a field of fire all around the jail. If anybody tried to get in there who wasn’t supposed to, somebody would be in position to pick him off.
There didn’t seem to be anything left for Luke to do here, so he nodded to Dunlap and walked away. He had put up his horse in the livery stable the previous evening, before he stepped in the café to get some supper, and he hadn’t had a chance to check on the ugly, hammerheaded dun since then. That was where he headed now.
When he reached the stable he found a middle-aged man and a teenage boy unhitching the team of blacks from the jail wagon. He said to the youngster, “You’d be Benji, wouldn’t you? You followed the sheriff and his men back here after fetching them.”
“That’s right, mister,” the boy said. “And you’re that bounty hunter. I heard all about you.”
“Did you happen to say anything to folks in St. Johns about Mordecai Kroll being in jail here? Other than Sheriff Rakestraw, I mean?”
The liveryman said, “Now hold on a minute. Don’t make out like my boy did anything wrong, Mr. Jensen. The marshal didn’t tell Benji not to say anything. You can’t expect a boy to keep quiet about something this excitin’.”
Luke shook his head and smiled.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you’d done anything wrong, Benji,” he said. “I’m just curious how many people know about Kroll being captured.”
“Well, I reckon I did tell a few people about it . . . and you know how things get around. . . .”
Luke nodded and kept the smile on his face, although not without effort.
“That’s fine, Benji. I appreciate you being honest with me.” He took a silver dollar from his pocket and tossed it to the boy, who caught it deftly. “That’s for the fast ride you made today. That was good work.”
The youngster beamed and said, “Thanks, Mr. Jensen!”
Benji’s father seemed mollified now. He said, “That dun of yours is a good horse, Mr. Jensen. Not much to look at, but I can tell he’s got sand. You gonna be leavin’ him here another night?”
“Yes, it appears that I will be,” Luke said, not bothering to add that he would have preferred to leave for the county seat immediately with the prisoner and the sheriff’s posse. From what he had seen, the road between the two towns was good enough to follow in the dark.
The decision was out of his hands, though. He lingered at the stable for a few more minutes and reached into the stall to scratch the dun’s head, then left. He hadn’t gotten a hotel room before he ate supper the night before, and after that he hadn’t had a chance to do so, spending the night in the marshal’s office instead. So finding a place to sleep tonight was the next order of business, he supposed.
He was on his way along the boardwalk in search of a better hotel than the Sullivan House when a voice called from behind him, “Mr. Jensen! Mr. Jensen, if I could speak to you for a moment, please!”
Luke stopped and turned. He was curious because the voice that had hailed him belonged to a woman.
But he wasn’t expecting her to be a woman beautiful enough to take a man’s breath away.
Chapter 5
She was almost as tall as he was, so she didn’t have to tip her head back much for her eyes to meet his. Those eyes were a rich, deep brown, he noted, almost as dark as the thick, dark brown hair pulled into a bun at the back of her neck.
The woman wore a gray hat with a little brown-and-white feather attached to it. Her traveling outfit was the same shade of gray and had a thin layer of dust on it, so Luke knew she had been on the trail. That traveling outfit was snug enough to reveal an intriguingly curved shape.
Her skin had a golden tint to it, and her exotic good looks made her even more striking. Luke wouldn’t have been surprised to see a woman like her in the finest restaurant or hotel in San Francisco, but here in this little Arizona Territory settlement, she definitely looked out of place.
At the same time, she had such poise as she smiled faintly at him that he realized she could make any place belong to her, instead of the other way around.
“Do we know each other, ma’am?” he asked, even though he was sure he had never laid eyes on this woman until this minute. He would remember if he had.
“No, we’ve never met,” she said. “And it’s miss, not ma’am. Miss Darcy Garnett.”
Luke touched a finger to the brim of his hat and said, “Pleased to meet you, Miss Garnett. I’m Luke Jensen. But then, you seem to know that already.”
“Of course. You’re Luke Jensen, the famous bounty hunter. The man who captured the notorious Mordecai Kroll. Everyone in St. Johns is talking about you today.”
Luke managed not to grimace. In his business, having a reputation sometimes came in handy, but most of the time it didn’t.
“You came here from St. Johns?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Darcy Garnett replied.
“Followed the sheriff and his posse all that way?”
“I certainly did.”
“Why?”
“To talk to you, of course,” she responded without hesitation.
“Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time,” he told her. “I’m about the most uninteresting hombre you’ll ever run across.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said. “And I’m sure my readers will agree with me.”
Again Luke had to control the impulse to make a face. As they talked, he had started to have a sneaking suspicion that Darcy Garnett might be a journalist. He had run into inquisitive newspaper reporters before and sometimes could recognize them before they started asking their questions. Usually he told them he wasn’t interested in talking and stalked off, not caring whether or not he was rude.
That would be harder to do with a lady.
“You work for the newspaper in St. Johns, do you?”
For the first time Luke saw a faint crack in the cool, reserved façade Darcy Garnett put up. She said, “Actually, no. The publisher there doesn’t believe in female reporters. I told him that back in Pittsburgh, a woman who signs herself Nellie Bly is writing regularly for one of the papers there, but that didn’t change his opinion. I’m hoping to sell a piece ab
out the infamous Kroll brothers to Harper’s Weekly, and your stirring capture of Mordecai Kroll is just what the story needs to cap it off.”
“So you want me to tell you all about it.”
“If I could get a firsthand account from the man who brought Mordecai Kroll to justice, no editor would turn down the story. Especially if you could tell me about the tragic death of the unfortunate young woman who was killed, too.”
Luke felt a flash of anger go through him. He hadn’t known Sheila, but she was dead and this woman regarded her death as nothing more than something that would help her sell a story to Harper’s Weekly.
“I don’t think I have anything to say, Miss Garnett,” he told her with a shake of his head. The words came out a little harsher than he intended them to, but he didn’t really care.
“Please, Mr. Jensen,” she persisted. “The people deserve to know—”
“Most people know more than they really want to about the bad things in the world. And those bad things sure include men like Mordecai Kroll.”
“Then you won’t give me an interview?”
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”
Anger sparked in her eyes. Her mouth tightened into a line and she said coolly, “All right. If that’s the way you feel about it, I won’t argue with you. Anyway, Sheriff Rakestraw has already promised me his full cooperation.”
For some reason, that rubbed Luke the wrong way. He hadn’t particularly liked the sheriff. Rakestraw seemed a mite too full of himself, and his confidence when he talked about how he and his men could handle the Kroll gang if need be had bordered on arrogance. Reckless arrogance, in fact.
Even though he didn’t really know the sheriff, Luke figured it would be just like Rakestraw to give Darcy an interview that made it sound like he was the one responsible for capturing Mordecai Kroll. Luke didn’t much care what people thought about him; if a high public opinion was important to him, he never would have become a bounty hunter.
But he didn’t want anybody making any claims that might damage his chances of collecting those bounties. Say Darcy Garnett did sell a story about the affair to Harper’s Weekly or some other magazine or newspaper, and it made Sheriff Rakestraw out to be the hero. The men in charge of the banks and railroads and stagecoach lines that had put out those rewards for Mordecai might use that as an excuse to drag their feet about paying him.
Luke wasn’t going to put up with that, not if all it took to prevent it was talking to an attractive young woman for a while.
“Hold on a minute,” he said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to answer a few questions for you.”
She smiled, and this time he thought he saw a flash of triumph in those brown eyes. She had tricked him into going along with what she wanted by bringing up Rakestraw, he realized. Somehow she had guessed that he wouldn’t want the sheriff trying to hog all the credit. And he had to admit that she’d been right.
“Excellent,” she said. “Were you on your way to the hotel to get a room?”
“I was,” Luke said.
“So was I. Why don’t we have supper tonight in their dining room? That’ll give us a chance to talk.”
He nodded and said, “All right.” He supposed he ought to clean up a little first, even though he was really too old to worry about trying to impress a woman like Darcy Garnett.
“We’ll meet in the lobby at . . . six-thirty?” she asked.
“I’ll be there,” Luke said.
He had misjudged her. She was really a charming, intelligent young woman with a passionate interest in justice. That was the only reason she wanted to see Mordecai Kroll and the rest of the gang get what was coming to them. It didn’t have anything to do with helping her career as a reporter.
Or maybe that was what she wanted him to think, Luke warned himself as she smiled across the table at him.
Regardless of her motives, he found himself enjoying the time they spent together. He liked having dinner with a beautiful woman as much as the next man, even when he knew it wouldn’t go beyond that.
And Darcy was beautiful, no doubt about that. She had changed into a dark green gown that came up fairly high but left the elegant curve of her throat uncovered. She wore a choker with a tiny gem set in it that went well with her flawless skin. Her hair had been let down, brushed until it shone, and then put back up again in an appealing arrangement of curls.
She far outclassed him, he thought, but at least he had washed up and shaved, changed into a clean black shirt, and even put on a string tie made of braided rawhide with decorative silver tips. That was about as fancy as he could get when he was out on the trail like this, hunting for badmen.
The Talmadge Hotel—a definite step up from the Sullivan House—had bottles of wine available with dinner, and Luke had ordered one. He wasn’t really a fancier of fine wines, but one every now and then was nice. He’d had a couple of glasses as they ate, and that gave him a warm glow, even though he was far from being drunk.
“You really don’t speak like I’d expect a bounty hunter to speak,” Darcy said. “You seem like an educated, cultured man.”
“Don’t give me too much credit,” Luke told her. “My education has come largely from books. As for culture . . . I get to Denver or San Francisco from time to time. I like to take in a play when I’m there.”
“What about the opera?”
To Luke, the opera was just a bunch of caterwauling, but he had been acquainted with some young ladies who seemed to enjoy it, so he’d learned to tolerate it.
“That depends on the company,” he answered Darcy’s question diplomatically.
“The opera company, you mean.”
Luke took another sip of wine and shrugged. Let her draw her own conclusions.
“I’d like to visit San Francisco with you sometime,” she said. “I think it would prove interesting.”
Luke thought so, too. He was starting to wonder if maybe he wasn’t too old for her after all.
“We still have to talk about Mordecai Kroll, though,” she went on.
“That’s not nearly as pleasant a topic.”
“No, but it’s what my readers will want to know about.”
After he had enjoyed her company all through dinner, he knew he couldn’t back out of the interview now. He downed the rest of the wine that was in his glass and told her about the trap Mordecai had set for him. He didn’t try to make himself look better as he explained what had happened. She stopped him a few times to ask a question, and he answered them as honestly as he could.
“That’s terrible,” Darcy said when he was finished. “That poor young woman.”
“I reckon I’m partially to blame for what happened to her,” Luke said. “I walked right into that trap Kroll set for me. Kicked my way into it, rather.”
“But he’s the one who tried to murder you. As far as I’m concerned, her death was his fault, and that’s the way I’m going to write the story.”
“Well, I appreciate that,” Luke said. He poured more wine for them, then mused, “Any man who makes his living with a gun has to deal with things like this sooner or later, I suppose. I know Smoke carries around a lot of old ghosts with him—”
He stopped short as he realized he had said more than he intended to say. He hoped Darcy hadn’t noticed, or if she had, that she wouldn’t recognize the name.
That hope was dashed right away. Darcy leaned forward with an excited look on her face and said, “Smoke? You have to tell me, Luke. Are you related to the famous gunfighter Smoke Jensen?”
Chapter 6
Luke hadn’t meant to reveal that. Even though he was using the Jensen name again, after many years of calling himself Luke Smith, he didn’t particularly want to publicize the fact that he and Smoke were brothers. Not for his sake, but for Smoke’s.
Although, Smoke probably would be the last person to be bothered by being related to a bounty hunter. He had been an outlaw himself at one point in his life, long before he settled down to become a resp
ectable rancher.
While Darcy Garnett smiled expectantly across the table at him, Luke mentally cursed himself for his slip of the tongue. He would have liked to blame the wine he’d drunk for that moment of carelessness, but he knew that wasn’t the case. Darcy had a way of relaxing a man just by her sheer presence and making him more inclined to talk.
It wouldn’t do any good to deny the relationship now. Most people on the frontier had heard of Smoke Jensen, even if Luke Jensen was unknown to them. Darcy probably wouldn’t believe him if he tried to say that he and Smoke were friends and that was all.
He nodded slowly and said, “Smoke is my brother.” “I didn’t know he had any brothers other than Matt,” Darcy said.
Luke could have pointed out that Matt Jensen was an adopted brother, not a blood relation, but that might have sounded petty. He hadn’t met Matt yet, but Smoke had told him all about the young man. Smoke had taken Matt under his wing when Matt was an orphaned boy, and he and the old mountain man Preacher had raised him into a fine frontiersman who was making a name for himself as a scout, gunfighter, and all-around adventurer. One of these days they would all get together, Smoke had said, but so far that hadn’t happened yet.
“Smoke and I didn’t see each other for a long time,” Luke said carefully. “I wasn’t able to go home right after the war, so I sort of got separated from my family for a while.”
“Something happened during the war to keep you from going home?” Darcy asked.
Something had happened, all right.... Betrayal, murder, a fortune in stolen Confederate gold . . . For a moment Luke’s thoughts went back to those dark days at the very end of the war, but he dragged them into the present again and told Darcy, “You go through all that killing and it changes a man. I figured I’d drift around for a while, and before I knew it that turned into fifteen years.”
“Amazing,” she murmured. “I think you have quite a story, Luke Jensen. I could talk to you for hours. And you said you weren’t interesting!”
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