by Adam Brady
Halliday opened his eyes, gave her a blank stare and sucked in a ragged breath.
The woman smiled and moved him a little closer to the bed.
“Just a little further now,” she said. “You were shot, but it’s not too bad.”
Halliday felt his sight dimming again. He saw the bedpost and reached out for it. He was aware of the stuffiness in the room and the subtle scent of the woman herself. He pitched forward and hit the bed, and the woman rolled him onto his back.
Halliday lay there, looked up at the ceiling and mumbled;
“Hurts like hell.”
“You’ll be all right,” Donna promised him. “Just stay quiet.”
Halliday groaned. His whole body felt weak, but the pain in his head was the worst of it.
The last thing he remembered was the sting of warm water and the touch of gentle fingers.
When the horses had been turned into the corral and fed, Kip came back into the kitchen and found his sister washing herself in a basin of steaming water. She had her shirtwaist down around her hips, and as she held up her arms to cover herself, her brother noticed that she was using a tiny cake of special pink soap.
“Just cain’t wait, can you?” Kip said bitterly.
For a brief moment, the woman’s dark eyes blazed with anger. Then she tossed her head defiantly and pulled up her shirtwaist.
“He saved our lives,” she asserted. “We both saw that he’s good with a gun, and he’s a real fighter. We need his help, Kip, and I’ll do anything I can to make him stay.”
“Dammit, we’ve been holdin’ our own without anybody’s help, haven’t we?” Kip muttered.
“Yes, we have. But it’s different now. It looks to me like we’ve only succeeded in making Dean even more mad at us. He swore all along that he would get us out one way or another, and now we’ve left only one way open to him ...”
“That feller in your bed might not want to stay,” Kip said. “He don’t strike me as a fool.”
“He’ll stay,” the woman said with a knowing smile. “He’ll want to stay—just see if he doesn’t.”
Kip’s lips tightened, and he said moodily;
“Damned if I like it, though.”
“You don’t have to like it, Kip. Just get up on that hill and keep an eye out for those men. If they don’t come back by sundown, they won’t come at all. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to convince our friend that we’re downtrodden, put-upon and hard done by.”
Kip snorted and grabbed at the door knob.
“Sometimes you just about make me wanna puke,” he said, and he went out and slammed the door behind him.
Donna shrugged and smoothed down her black hair. She put the bar across the back door and went along the hall to bolt the front door.
Then she went quietly to the bedroom at the end of the hall and took a look inside.
The big man was resting quietly.
She stood there watching him for awhile, and then something changed in her dark eyes and she moved silently into the room and began to undress.
The noonday heat was washing over her naked body as she stepped in front of the mirror on the dresser, turning in a slow circle to admire the body that Sam Rushton had killed three men to possess.
She walked quietly to the bed on bare feet and gently pulled back the sheet. Very slowly, she began to undress the man in her bed. Halliday did not stir, and his passiveness seemed to excite her all the more.
As she exposed more and more of his muscled body, a rosy flush came over her face and neck and full, round breasts.
When he was stark naked, she sat on the edge of the bed and admired his rippling strength for several minutes, like a little girl who had been given a new toy to play with.
Finally, it was more than she could bear, and she lay down very carefully beside him and began to tenderly stroke his flat stomach, her fingers feeling the scars and calluses and hard muscles that made up such a tempting body.
Halliday groaned and she rested her hand on his forehead.
“Everything’s all right now,” she said. “We’re home where no one can hurt us.”
Halliday was conscious now, but he kept his eyes closed while he attempted to sort through the jumble of thoughts and memories that whirled through his throbbing head. His head was swathed in bandages, he was naked in a soft bed with a clean sheet under him and a warm, soft woman pressing against his side. The air in the room was hot and still, and there was daylight coming through the closed shades.
He remembered parts of the gunfight—a girl rushing at him, men going down under his bullets.
Finally, he opened his eyes and rasped;
“Wh-who are you?”
“Donna. You saved my life.”
She raised herself on one elbow, her soft hair falling over his face, obscuring everything else in the room except her nakedness.
Slowly, she began to move her hand down to his groin, and his battered body began to respond.
She clung to him, rocking back and forth.
Halliday tried once more to figure out how and why he was in this woman’s bed. He remembered how peaceful the morning had been—but which morning? He remembered the youth swinging the rifle and being caught in the crossfire, and the woman skidding down the slope, trying to fill him full of holes.
Then her lips were caressing his neck and ear.
Halliday tried to push her away, but she locked her arms around him.
“Please,” she whispered. “Lie still!”
Halliday settled back on the pillow and began to caress her neck and then her back. He wrapped his arms around her and heard her gasp. For a long time they moved together with one heartbeat and one pleasure that built and built until there could be no more.
Finally, the woman rolled away from him, stretching herself like a contented cat.
“You said you’re name’s Donna?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“Well, I’m Buck, ma’am, and I’d sure be grateful if you’d tell me where I am ...”
Two – In The Family
Buck Halliday found his shirt hanging over the back of a chair, washed and neatly pressed. He slung it over his shoulder and walked out of Donna’s room.
The hallway was empty and dim, lit only by the late afternoon sun coming through the small window above the front door. The parlor was empty, too.
He opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, stretching and yawning and feeling damn good despite his aches and pains.
There was no one in the clearing, so he went into the yard and found the sorrel gamboling in the corral.
He went to the pump and splashed his face with the cold, clear water after taking a long drink from the tin cup that hung by a rawhide thong. Feeling refreshed, he put on the fresh shirt, noticing that the collar had been lightly starched.
He was near the house when he saw Donna and her brother riding in with the sun behind their backs.
Kip slowed his mount, but the young woman came galloping right up to him with her rifle resting across the saddle in front of her.
“You feel better?” Donna asked.
“Yeah,” Halliday said with a lift of his eyebrow. “I’m fine, just fine.”
“I’m glad,” Donna said as her brother rode up and glared sourly at Halliday, making no attempt to hide his displeasure.
His sister nodded in Halliday’s direction and said;
“This is my brother, Kip, and if you don’t remember, I’m Donna.”
“How could I forget?”
With a sly wink at him, she said;
“I’ve got supper in the oven—I figure you must be hungry.”
“Sure am, Donna,” Halliday nodded.
Donna’s eyes were saying a lot more than her words ever could, and she gave him another sly look as she walked the horse around the side of the house where it could not be seen by anyone coming up the trail. Kip followed her, scowling at Halliday as he passed him by.
Halliday leaned one sh
oulder against the wall of the house and made himself a cigarette. By the time he had smoked it down, Donna was busy in the kitchen.
Halliday went in by the back door and pulled a chair away from the table where Kip was seated.
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, broken only by the rattle of the plates which Donna set to warm on the rack above the stove.
Halliday glanced at the woman from time to time, but his real interest now was in her younger brother.
“What was it all about?” Halliday asked finally, watching the scowl on Kip’s face grow more intense.
“What was what all about?” Kip threw back.
“All that shooting.”
Donna turned suddenly from the stove and gave her brother a warning look.
“Wait till we have our supper,” she said to Halliday. “For now, Buck, you need to relax.”
“I killed three men out there,” Halliday reminded her, “and there was a whole lot more of them, by the look.”
“The only one that mattered was Joe Finn!” Kip snapped. “The others were no-account, but Joe had two brothers, and they’re about the meanest sons of bitches you’re ever likely to come across. When they catch up with you, they’ll likely wanna cut out your liver. If I was in your boots, the last thing I’d try to do was put my feet up and relax.”
“I’ll worry about that when the times comes,” Halliday said mildly. “Meantime, I’m not gonna let anythin’ get in the way of this fine meal Donna’s cooked for us.”
“They’ll come after you,” Kip insisted. “That bunch sticks so close together they barely throw more’n one shadow.”
Halliday shrugged and looked toward Donna.
“You feel like tellin’ me what’s goin’ on then, Donna?”
Donna stirred the gravy on the stove and bit at her bottom lip. Finally, she turned to him, and Halliday noticed that she had put on fresh clothes and that the dress looked like the kind a woman saves for a special occasion. She had also taken the trouble to put on a pair of dainty earrings, and a gold locket nestled in the cleavage of her firm breasts.
She stepped away from the stove and looked down at Halliday.
“The men you killed ride for Nathan Dean,” she said gravely. “Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Then you really must be a stranger to these parts.”
“Just passin’ through.”
Donna nodded and darted a glance at her brother, but Kip had settled back in his chair and was paring at his nails with a knife.
“Nathan Dean thinks he has the right to own every bit of this range,” Donna said. “He told us plain that we would just have to pack up and get out.”
Halliday’s eyebrows lifted.
“That all there is to it, Donna?”
“He wants all this land for himself,” she said. “Nathan Dean is a cruel, hard man, and he’s hired the roughest bunch of riders he could get to do his dirty work for him—but I guess you know that already. Hardly a day goes by that some of his men don’t ride past and throw a couple of shots in our direction.”
She patted her hair back into place, and added;
“Up until recently, they’ve just been trying to scare us off, but that’s all changed now. That’s why we were waiting for them on the ridge when you happened by. That’s really about all I can tell you—other than that your supper’s ready.”
Donna returned to the stove and began to serve up their meal. She brought the warm plates to the table and motioned for Halliday and Kip to pull up their chairs.
Halliday drove his fork into a succulent piece of meat and nodded his appreciation when he had tasted it. Then he busied himself with mashing the potatoes into the thick, brown gravy.
“Do you have a deed to this place, Donna?” Halliday asked unexpectedly.
He noticed the quick flush that colored her cheeks, and he saw that Kip stopped with a laden fork halfway to his lips.
“Of course we do,” Donna said. “We’re not nesters. Our father came here a long time ago and built this place into what it is now. We own it legally, and we won’t be letting the likes of Nathan Dean chase us away.”
Halliday nodded and returned his attention to his meal.
Donna looked unsure of herself for a moment, but then she passed Halliday the plate of vegetables and gave him a slow smile.
“It’s been terribly hard for us, Buck,” she said. “There’s scarcely been a day when I haven’t been sick with worry. Dean drove all our neighbors away, one by one. We’re on our own now, Buck.”
Kip crammed the last morsel of food into his mouth and pushed his plate away. Doing his best to ignore Halliday’s presence, he said;
“I’m gonna see to the horses now, sis. Don’t reckon we’ll need ’em tonight.”
“Come back when you’re finished,” Donna told him. “We’ll be having coffee and cake, and it’s time you and Buck got to know each other.”
Kip muttered something under his breath and slammed the door as he left.
His sister sighed and toyed with the salt shaker for a moment, then she said;
“Kip has so much to do, and as you can see, he’s hardly a grown man yet. He’s stubborn and wild, but he has courage. He can handle himself in a fight ... perhaps too well.”
“The two of you might be bitin’ off more than you can chew,” Halliday said.
Donna’s eyes filled with anger.
“Nobody is going to force us off this land, Buck,” she said defiantly. “This place belongs to us. We’ll die here before we give it up.”
“There’s always the law.”
Donna laughed shortly.
“What law? All there is around here is Nathan Dean’s law. He owns just about everything and everyone, and if he can’t buy someone, he just scares them into submission.”
Tears formed in her eyes and she stood up suddenly, pulling her apron off and dropping it on the table. Then she wiped her eyes and hurried back to the stove, fussing with the fire and keeping her face turned away from him.
“From what I saw of that bunch, they’re not unbeatable, Donna,” Halliday said slowly. “There was only three of us, and we gave them something to think about. Maybe they’ll think twice before they try anything again—maybe this Nathan Dean will decide it’s more trouble than it’s worth to get rid of you.”
Donna came slowly toward him, and Halliday had a sudden urge to take her in his arms. She looked on the point of giving up, despite her words to the contrary.
“It’s been so awfully hard, Buck,” she said. “And it’s so lonesome with no one but Kip around ... he’s always sour and sulking, wanting to ride after that crowd and finish them off. I’m almost out of my mind with worry about what he might do next. What can we do?”
“Sit and wait,” he said.
“For what? To be driven off?”
“I’m not goin’ anywhere in particular, Donna,” Halliday told her. “It wouldn’t hurt for me to stick around and see what Dean’s outfit intends to do once they finish lickin’ their wounds.”
Donna bent and kissed him full on the mouth.
“Do you really mean that? I’d be so grateful ...”
She stepped back quickly when Kip burst into the kitchen.
“Oh, Kip,” Donna beamed, “I have the best news! Buck says he’s going to stay awhile and help us! Maybe Dean’s men will leave us alone when they know that—”
Her brother gave Halliday a hostile sneer.
“Don’t reckon we need any help,” Kip said. “We’ve been doin’ all right so far, ain’t we, sis?”
“No, we haven’t, and you know it,” Donna said firmly. “On our own, we’re no match for Nathan Dean. Now sit down so we can talk this out.”
Kip set his rifle down beside the back door and slumped wearily into a chair.
“You aim to kill a few more of them no-accounts, Halliday?” Kip asked finally.
“If I’m pushed to do it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like bein’ shot at,” Halliday said quietly. “By anybody. You made an innocent mistake, but those other jokers were out to get me on purpose.”
“Cully and Luden Finn’ll be gunnin’ for you, that’s for sure,” Kip said. “Cully, he’s as fast as they come and mean as a rattler. Luden ain’t no slouch, either, and he don’t mind shootin’ a man in the back.”
“That business up on the ridge,” Halliday said slowly, “was that the first time it’s come to gunplay?”
So far, he only had Donna’s version of events to guide him, and he was well aware that the change from hate-filled wildcat to warm and willing bed partner had been damned sudden.
“Hell, no!” Kip barked. “We been at it for weeks now. Once when I was in town, Red Barrett had two men hold me down so he could beat the tar outta me. They was out here two days after that, tellin’ us we had twenty-four hours to git ... or else. I told ’em to go jump, and Donna chased ’em off with a scattergun. They came back, though, and shot the place up. That was the time they killed two of our best horses and ran our cattle off.”
“And they were trying to set fire to the barn when I ran them off the next time,” Donna put in as she returned to her chair. “The very next day, Nathan Dean came by with Red Barrett and another rough customer by the name of Ben Wright. Dean gave us until yesterday to leave, and he threatened to run us off if we didn’t listen. That was why we were ready for them ... as ready as we can be.”
With that, she went to get the hot water from the stove and started to wash the dishes.
An uneasy silence settled between the two men at the table, until Kip finally got to his feet and went to his sister. He whispered something to her, and Halliday saw her frown. Then she nodded, and Kip left the room by the back door.
A few minutes passed. Donna shook out the dish towel and hung it carefully on the rack at the side of the stove.
“I think I’ll go get some air,” Halliday said, and went out to the back steps.
He saw Kip heading toward the stables, and then Donna was behind him with her arms wrapped around his waist and her head pressed against his back.