Joe stuck both hands on his hips. His eyes narrowed to slits. “So-o-o, either Sharpe or one of his rustlers tried to kill me.”
“Looks that way to me.” They had reached the porch of the ranch house. Mike checked to see no one was around and pushed open the door. “Come on, let’s get us some evidence.”
“Say, I got a grudge against Sharpe, but how come you’re so het up to get him?” Joe demanded when their search turned up nothing.
“Keep your lip buttoned, but I own the Circle 5.”
The dumbfounded cowboy stared then shoved back his hat and sadly shook his head. “Aw, now I know you’re loco.”
“I’m not.” Mike laughed at Joe’s expression. “My real name is Carmichael Carey Blake-Jones—isn’t that a monicker?”
“But the owner’s a Mr. Prentice,” Joe argued.
“Prentice is my mother’s maiden name.” Mike hadn’t dreamed how much fun he’d get in unmasking himself to Joe.
“One of us is crazy, and it shore ain’t me,” Joe solemnly announced.
“Neither of us is crazy, and as soon as we get this mess cleared up, how would you like to be the new Circle 5 foreman?” Mike told the dazed cowhand. He couldn’t help but wickedly add, “Nice steady job, foreman. A man could think about getting married. Especially when the way I see it is, a foreman needs his privacy. I plan to build a brand-new home in the spring, and there’s bound to be logs and window glass enough left for a sung three-or-four-room cabin over there.” He waved toward a pretty knoll maybe a quarter mile from the ranch house.
“Have I died an’ gone to heaven already?” Joe gasped. His mighty hand shot out and gripped Mike’s. “Put her there, pard. Now how’re we gonna trip up Sharpe? By the time we can get into that little hidden valley you know he will have moved those cattle on.”
“I know and I’ve been thinking. First thing I’m going to do is pick a fight with our present boss when he gets back.” The plan sprang full blown while he talked. “Then I’m riding into Rock Springs. I’ll get myself men who are getting pretty fed up with some of his doings—”
“How do you know that?” The pupils of Joe’s eyes turned to steel points.
“Overheard them last night while Sharpe was holding Rose Birchfield captive.”
“Wh-at?” Rage filled Joe’s face and he leaped for the door.
“Hold it, she’s home safe. The men wanted no part of it. What I thought I’d do was let word get around I’m for hire and not particular about what I do.”
“You’ll be walkin’ a narrow trail,” Joe warned. “Why not let me do it?” His eyes glistened.
Mike hesitated, tempted. Joe had far better skills than he. No, he wouldn’t ask another man to kill his snakes.
“You lay low right here on the Circle 5 and protect my—our—interests,” he ordered. “Joe, I don’t have to tell you what this means to you and me and the Wyoming range.”
A second strong grip of hands and they slipped out of the ranch house. Not a moment too soon, either. Joe’s keen vision observed a dot in the distance and he softly laughed. “‘Pears to me, our boss is ridin’ in a big hurry.” He laughed again without mirth. “Reckon your chance to pick an argument’s comin’ quicker than you thought.”
“Good.” Mike’s blood leaped high. “Back me, no matter what I do, all right?”
Joe only nodded but Mike had the feeling the lithe body beside him was poised to spring should it be necessary. They lounged against the corral fence until Sharpe galloped in, his face dark with anger.
“Why aren’t you working?” he yelled. “I don’t pay no-good hands to stand around with their hands in their pockets. Either get busy or get your time.”
Mike sprang erect. “I’m taking my time, Sharpe. We’ve worked like slaves, and you know it. Well, no more. Are you coming with me, Joe?” He shot a secret glance of warning toward Joe who glanced down and drew circles in the ground with his boot. “Well, are you?”
“Uh, sorry, but I reckon I’ll stick.” Apology shone in the blue eyes, and Mike had to look back toward Sharpe to conceal his gleam of triumph.
“Of all the—I thought we were pards.” Mike worked himself into a simulated rage. He took off his sombrero and threw it on the ground. “This Circle 5’s one fine place!”
“That’s enough,” Sharpe barked. His face fairly shouted his glee over finally getting rid of the cowboy who had been a burr under his saddle ever since he rode in. “Pack your gear and get out, Carey. You’ll have what’s coming to you ready by the time you are.” He dismounted and tossed his buckskin’s reins to Joe. “Rub him down, Perkins.”
“I don’t know if I can stick it,” Joe burst out the moment Sharpe got out of hearing distance. “With you gone, the boss will treat me lower than Wyomin’ dirt.” He sighed. “Just don’t make it too long, pard. I mean, boss.”
“Just pard,” Mike told him and noticed how Joe smiled in relief. “One other thing. If we meet in town, don’t act too friendly and be sure and drop some hints here and there on how funny I’ve been acting. Wonder out loud if I’m guilty of something nobody knows and that’s why I’ve gone back on you.”
“Aw, Mike, I can’t do that!” Joe protested. “At least, not to the Birchfields.”
“You have to or we’ll never get Sharpe.” Mike walked toward the bunkhouse and softly reminded, “Everything will work out but a lot rides on how well you play your part.” An hour later he rode into Antelope and acted out the disgruntled jobless cowboy to perfection. After staying overnight, he headed for Rock Springs, thankful for the continuing fair weather that had followed the snowstorm.
A week later he returned, properly deputized and eager to put Sharpe back behind bars. From the frosty glares he received Mike knew Joe had done his work well. Word reached Mike that Sharpe had boldly ridden to the Double B and called on Desert Rose, blandly assuring the Browns and Nate he had found the girl injured from a fall and so delirious she thought she was being abducted. Sharpe even offered to bring in his men to verify the story and only shrugged when Rose turned on him and said he lied but refused to allow her parents to take action against him. Mike realized she must be protecting him, and he prayed for self-control to carry out his work.
Chapter 14
One winter afternoon shortly before Christmas, Rose sought out Nate and led him to a quiet room away from the Browns. “Nate, I’ve heard rumors about Mike Carey. What do you know?” She watched him with eyes made keen by torment.
Nate started to speak then closed his lips in a straight line. When he finally opened them again he only said, “What have you heard?”
Cold fear settled in Rose’s heart. “That time he rescued me, I’ve never been able to figure out why he happened to be there.” She restlessly pleated the fine blue wool of her gown. “Now range gossip has it that Mike’s quit the Circle 5, is drifting and—”
“I can’t talk about it,” Nate cut in, looking like a thunder-head. “Say, what do you hear from your traveling friend?”
Rose looked down at her nervous fingers. “I—we won’t be writing again. Things were getting out of hand so I told him it would be best to break off our correspondence.”
She didn’t add as she could have done that the decision came after tears and prayers. If she relinquished something fine and wonderful, yet the God who had helped her so many times sent the courage to tell the truth. A few days after she came back to the Double B, she wrote to Carmichael Blake-Jones and told him she had married and wouldn’t be writing again. She thanked him for his many pleasant letters and said how much she appreciated them. She didn’t tell him that if what she suspected were true, her shadowy husband wasn’t the Christian cowboy she thought him but in all probability a rustler.
“Is that the letter you gave me to mail?” Nate asked in a choked voice and hid his face in his hands.
“Yes, I know you admire him a lot and I do—did too.”
“But I remember bringing you a letter from him after that,” Nate protested,
his head still down.
Rose almost blurted out the whole story but bit her tongue. She simply couldn’t explain without telling about her marriage. Rose fervently hoped Michael wouldn’t mention it in a letter to Nate! She replied, “Yes, he wrote once.”
“What did he say?” Nate appeared to be holding his breath.
Tired of deceit, Rose went as far as she could. “He said I had broken his heart. That he fell in love with me when he saw my picture.” She glared at her cousin. “See what you started? That’s not all. Do you know who Mr. Carmichael Blake-Jones is?” She didn’t wait for Nate’s answer but excitedly went on. “He’s also Mr. Prentice, the new owner of the Circle 5, and he expected to take over and run the ranch. Probably in the spring. Oh dear, what am I going to do?” A hated tear fell and she angrily brushed it away.
A curious blend of amusement, concern, and pity made Nate’s face a closed book, and he patted her arm. “I have a feeling that in time everything will work out just fine, Rosy. Wish I could be here to see it.” Disappointment vanished when he squared his shoulders and smiled. “Oh well, the sooner I go and learn what I must the quicker I can come back and serve the Lord.”
Rose put away her own troubles. Yet when Nate left her depression came. She had to tell her parents of the hasty marriage and before Carmichael Prentice or whatever his name really was came, but how could she, now that Mike might have turned to rustling? Had he? She couldn’t believe it. Range rumors had to be wrong and this aching sense of loss merely a test of her loyalty. The last thing she needed was Michael’s arrival to complicate things even more.
Christmas passed. Nate swung aboard the eastbound train, leaving Rose desolate. Without her cousin or Michael’s letters she fell prey to her own thoughts. Columbine and Sam offered companionship when they weren’t in school, but long winter hours stretched and lengthened into January and February. Rose alternated between excitement when Nate’s scrawled letters came, filled with boyish admiration for a girl named Mercy Curtis, to melancholy. Her infrequent glimpses of Mike Carey helped little.
Mike seldom came to church and Dan Sharpe seldom missed. Sharpe seemed impervious to slanted stares and whispers from other ranchhands. Hardwick, Nate Thomas Brown, and the others who had gone to the little valley found trampled ground when the snows lifted but no evidence. Sharpe continued his way unhampered. Sometimes Rose, who had chosen to spend most of the winter on the Double B, saw a biding-my-time look in Grandpa Brown’s eyes when Sharpe’s name came up. At least the winter wasn’t one of the worst. Rose and Mesquite could get out at times into the snow-hardened paths and clear, cold days.
“Whatever happened to that nice Mike Carey who used to come over?” Grandma innocently asked one morning at breakfast.
Rose steadied her fork with shaking fingers. “He doesn’t work for the Circle 5 anymore.”
“Land sakes, how young folks do hop around!” Grandma’s keen eyes sparkled. “I’m sorry to hear it. He seemed such a nice, steady young man, not at all like some of our good-hearted but rough boys.”
Grandpa cut in with an irrelevant remark, and Rose wondered how much or what he had heard but didn’t dare ask. Yet she couldn’t avoid overhearing the growing whispers concerning Mike Carey, now viewed by much of the range as a man of mystery.
Finally spring arrived and bestowed a mixed blessing. April’s mercurial outlook reflected Rose’s own up-and-down moods. Memory of her marriage ceremony dimmed until at times she felt it had happened to someone else. Now and then she saw Mike at a distance when she went out riding, but he never approached her. “Probably ashamed to,” she told Mesquite after one such occurrence. The thought plummeted her spirits even further, and it took a mile of galloping with the wind in her face to regain her composure.
Driven by doubt and a growing love for the absent husband that Rose at last could deny no longer, she decided she must know for sure Mike Carey’s true character. He had risked danger, saved Columbine and then herself. Still, he had been right there with Sharpe and his rustlers, and if the latest rumors could be believed Mike had actually been seen riding with some of the worst ruffians in Wyoming just a few weeks before.
Rose had consistently resisted riding near the Circle 5, but one bright morning when Columbine and Sam clamored for her to go with them she consented.
“You won’t believe the gorgeous house going up over there,” Columbine told her. “A second house, actually a big log cabin, is being built just a little way off.” Red streaked her fair skin. “Last time Sam and I went the workers were just putting in huge windows. You can see the mountains and hills and valley. What a wonderful place to live.”
Sam drawled in his own comical way, “Reckon it could be arranged. Someone said Sharpe’s getting ready to leave. If you can charm the new owner, Columbine, the house and view go with him.”
A rush of emotion made Rose hastily bend down to check her stirrup. I hope Columbine has better luck with men than I. First, I have too many in my life and now no one. Mike must have changed his mind, and of course I couldn’t keep on writing to Michael. The thought hurt and made her lash out, “I hope you haven’t been over here running after Joe Perkins, Columbine.”
Her sister’s pretty chin tilted up. “I don’t have to run after Joe or any man. He isn’t even here when we ride over. He’s out with the cattle.” Tears burned her eyes at the unjust accusation. “Just because you’ve moped ever since Nate left doesn’t mean you have to act so mean to me.” She touched her horse’s flanks with her heels and shot ahead.
Sam gave her a look of reproach that clearly told how Rose’s own hopes for a close relationship between him and Columbine had come to pass. “She’s right, you know.” He loped ahead as well.
Rose felt sick and disgusted with herself. “Wait,” she called and goaded Mesquite into a gallop. “I’m sorry, Columbine.” Even though her sister promptly forgave her, Rose couldn’t forget the stricken look in her eyes or the way Sam had responded. Things simply couldn’t go on this way. Better to set off an explosion than to keep all her misery bottled up inside.
Three days later the terrible feeling of waiting ended. Rose overheard her grandfather, Hardwick, and several other ranchers discussing a cattle raid planned for that night. Someone had leaked the news, perhaps in the Pronghorn or Silver saloon or to a friend who promptly reported it to the sheriff. “This is our chance to get the whole gang,” Hardwick snapped and closed his big hand in a significant gesture. “If the report is true, the rustlers are going for every head of cattle they can get away with then move out of Wyoming pronto.”
“Call in every decent man you can get,” Thomas Brown ordered. “Leave only enough hands with the herds so the rustlers won’t get suspicious, and tell them not to resist. We don’t want dead cowboys. The cattle aren’t worth that. Pass the word that we’ll meet here at ten o’clock tonight.”
Rose slipped away, her heart frozen. An inner sense told her Mike Carey would be in the midst of the rustler gang tonight. “He must not,” she whispered under her breath and at the same moment flung herself outdoors and to the corral. Her fingers made short work of saddling up, and a few minutes later she and Mesquite began their quest to find and stop Mike while time remained.
All during the long winter and early spring Mike’s conscience warred with duty. He had sworn to uphold the right, but could God approve of the way he had chosen? A dozen times he considered abandoning the entire scheme, heartily sick of deception and ashamed of the final letter he impulsively wrote to Rose. Not that every word wasn’t true. He realized his first sight of her in the photograph had intrigued him and the clear eyes innocently beckoned him. Would she ever forgive him! Nate said yes when they had a long talk. Outside of the justice of the peace, only Nate knew of the marriage one snowy December night. Mike had gone back and further insured the man’s silence with a large sum of money. Whether he could be trusted remained to be seen. The gathering storm was bound to break soon and sweep away the need for secrecy. After that�
��At this point Mike refused to consider the future.
His role of disgruntled cowboy, sore at Sharpe, brought in rich dividends. Once after griping how Sharpe had ridden him so hard he couldn’t stomach working for the Circle 5 foreman, a disreputable, slouching cowboy approached him. Moffatt, the man who had balked over Sharpe’s forced elopement, hinted broadly that he knew a way to get even with Sharpe. A few sessions later Mike learned Moffatt and the others had never been paid for the cattle they rustled from Hardwick.
“Can’t understand it,” Moffatt confessed. “He always paid up before. This time he keeps sayin’ it’s too dangerous.” He barked a short laugh. “Why’s one time dangerouser than another?” He leaned close and confidentially whispered, “I think he’s hooked on that Birchfield gal and getting’ even. He won’t even let us move those critters from where’s he’s hid them. Says we’ll make one more grand raid and clear out.” His eyes gleamed. “I figure he’s goin’ to doublecross us, so we’re aimin’ to get to the cattle first. Hardwick and Brown and some of the other ranchers are on spring roundup right now. We’ll let them get the cows all collected for us then mosey out and start movin’ them, the night before Sharpe’s big raid.”
Mike almost choked in an effort to hide his exultation.
“Are you with us?” Moffatt demanded.
“I’ll be there.” Mike emphatically shook on it. Under the cloak of darkness, Mike dispatched a note to the sheriff warning him of the raid. Being discovered now had not part in his plan.
Only one flaw appeared in the carefully set up trap: Dan Sharpe’s absence. Mike thought about it then smiled and wrote a second note.
YORE BEING DOUBLED XED. RAID TOMORROW NIGHT.
He signed it, A friend, then rode out and found Joe Perkins and told him to get the message to Sharpe but not let him know who delivered it. Joe’s eyes gleamed with the prospect of action. “I reckon there’s goin’ to be some mighty surprised fellers,” he said.
Wildflower Harvest: Includes Bonus Story of Desert Rose Page 28