A disembodied voice rang out from below. “Tanner! Tanner!”
Distracted, Amos turned his head to his boss. “I’m fine. Dealing with this one up here. I need cover.”
His boss gave a thumbs-up and moved to the huddle of agents. When Amos refocused, Luke jammed his head into his chin. Stunned, he stepped back and loosened his grip on Luke.
The prisoner made a dash for his horse. “Stop!” Amos shouted. The prisoner stopped, and slowly turned. The smile on his lips and the pistol in his hand told him that the crazed man was going to use it. “Don’t point a gun unless you are going to use it,” he said, patting his side.
“Your gun, Amos. All those years of pickpocketing comes in handy. Turn around.”
Amos growled and flared his nostrils. “You would shoot a man in his back, coward. You would shoot an unarmed man.”
“Damn right. You sold us out.” Luke chuckled. “Prison is one hell I don’t want to experience again. I never should have trusted you.”
True, Amos thought. “Shoot me and you will die like the other two down there.”
“Death will be sweeter than living in a cell. I’m prepared for that. I don’t get on my knees for any man. I won’t die like a coward, but you will.”
Shots rang out in the dark. Too close for comfort. Bullets were coming and going. One skirted him. Another hit, tearing through the flesh, bone, and sinew of his abdomen. Instinct girded his hand up to the wound. Pulling it back he saw the blood covering his hand. All these years he had been saved. Now he knew he was a dead man. He closed his eyes and prayed, wished and hoped as the breath wheezed out of his body. He was going and his last promise to her would never be fulfilled. He was going to expire here. Alone. In the dark. It was hardly the life he’d imagined or the end he’d thought about.
“He’s over here! And find that son of a bitch Luke. He’s going to pay hell for this.” He heard the voice. His eyes fluttered open to see Bart looming over him.
The faces changed to colors dancing before his eyes.
Life was leaving his body with each painful breath. Death is hardly pretty. And then every noise dimmed. He slipped out of consciousness, with Tamar as his last remembered thought.
Chapter Fourteen
He didn’t come back the next night.
Or the night after.
Or the night following that.
After the lonesome nights, she stopped counting the days that had passed since they’d made reckless love in her study. She stopped going into that room, and although she fought it, the memory of that night receded. She longed for his touch and his kisses, and nothing could sate her. The edge of spring passed into the thick of the summer, and the answer never came. The notice never arrived. It had been weeks since she’d heard from him, but Tamar clung to hope and the words he’d whispered to her. Her heart was full of belief that this love could come true and continually warred with her mind that began to doubt.
As the season shifted, she grew cantankerous and restless. Her clothes didn’t fit correctly. She felt odd cravings. She was easily winded and irritated.
Today was no different. She spent her morning fussing at Old Bertha, shooing Charles out of her hair and office, and wrote a small yet scalding opinion piece. The bell above the door rang, and she looked up to see Priscilla.
“Good afternoon, lovelies,” her sister said as she strolled into the office. Delilah said hello back, but all Tamar could do was grunt.
“How long has she been like this?” Priscilla asked in a whisper loud enough for all ears to hear.
“She was unpleasant to Charles again,” Delilah answered, shuffling some papers.
Priscilla giggled. “That’s not unusual. It would be unusual if she hadn’t barked at him today.”
“This time, she cursed him.” Delilah repeated the blue streak of words Tamar used.
Priscilla’s eyes widened, and she pressed her handkerchief to her mouth as if the words came off her own tongue. “What’s the cause of this?”
Tamar could not bear this sisterly gossiping about her anymore. “I can hear the both of you,” she said, looking up from the stack of advertisements and snarling at Delilah and Priscilla. “Unless your chatter is helping to print the paper, cease with this foolish talk. I’m the same as I was before.”
“You have a habit of protesting too much.”
Tamar slammed the papers onto the table and rested her hands next to the pile. “I do not.”
Priscilla’s eyes darted down and held. Tamar followed her sister’s gaze and quickly twisted the band off her finger and into a spare pocket.
Priscilla caught and pulled her hand out of the pocket. “No, don’t hide that. I want to see it.”
“It isn’t anything, Priscilla. Don’t you have some knitting to do or something? Whatever you ladies of leisure do.” Tamar snatched her hand out of Priscilla’s grip and waved her away. “Go and annoy your husband.”
A hearty chortle exploded from Delilah and Priscilla. “You can’t get rid of me that easy,” her prissy middle sister said, chasing her sister around the desk. Catching up with her, she grabbed the apron and stuck her hand deep inside. “You are going to get ink all over—”
“I am washable.” Priscilla withdrew the ring and held it in the sunlight beaming through the windows. “Aha! Explain this, miss.”
“It’s a ring,” Tamar said, moving to grab it from Priscilla’s grip.
“Short Stack, you can’t get that from her,” Delilah said with a laugh. “You need a step stool.”
Priscilla huffed as she continued her examination of the ring. “You have jewelry that I have given you but refuse to wear. You haven’t worn a ring on any finger ever.”
Priscilla sometimes forgot the tartness of her own tongue, but Tamar forgave her. “It is a gift from a friend,” she whispered, dropping her eyes and shifting her gaze to the floor, the desk, her chair, Old Bertha—anywhere but her sisters’ surprised faces.
Delilah spoke first. “I’m befuddled. You don’t have friends.”
Priscilla shushed her younger sister. “Yes, she does. Is it the same friend who visited you—”
Tamar clamped her lips and continued to file the responses to the classified advertisements the Advocate ran.
“Sister, I tell you everything, and you are keeping me in the dark about this man.”
“It was nothing.” It was everything. Tamar hated to deny.
“Nothing doesn’t come with a ring. Tell me, Tamar.“
“He was with me, and it was pleasant.”
Priscilla wrinkled her nose. “Did you use the French letter?” At her sister’s puzzled response, she searched for another term. “A sheath? Or did he withdraw?”
Tamar bit the inside of her cheek. “Neither.”
Priscilla clucked her tongue. Delilah’s eyes narrowed to mere slits. Tamar could hear the whirring of the minds.
“You’re wrong.”
They both spoke at once. “You may be with—”
Tamar shook her head as she crossed her hands over her stomach. “I’m too old to have a child.” She could count the number of thirty-seven-year-old women carrying babies on two hands, but all of them had a passel of little ones running about. “I’m positive,” Tamar said, shaking her head. “I am not with a child.”
“And if you’re wrong, Tamar are you prepared for that?” Delilah asked.
“It could be a trap. A way to swindle you out of hearth and our family home.” Priscilla paused for dramatic effect, smoothing the imaginary wrinkles out of her dress before she continued her rant. “My future home is at stake, and we can’t have that. Men like him are like that, preying on the bewilderment of spinsters.”
Tamar raised her head, her eyes flashing anger and fury. She leveled her gaze at her sister. Priscilla took a few steps away from her, knowing that look which she gave a few times in her life meant she was past her poking and prodding point. “You don’t know him.”
“Neither do you,” countered Pris
cilla as she exited the building.
“He wouldn’t hurt me,” Tamar said to the closed door and to Delilah. More so the words were a comfort to her. Tamar rubbed her hands over the front of her dress, pressing her palms against her stomach. A place that would never have a baby inside of it. “He wouldn’t do that. He’ll be back. I know it.”
Chapter Fifteen
Tamar was at her desk, editing the last bit of copy for the latest edition when Delilah rushed into the office with tears streaming down her face. Before she could ask what was wrong, Delilah spoke shakily. “He is dead.”
Tamar stopped, her blood chilling at the words. “Who is dead?”
Delilah cleared her throat and read from the telegram in her trembling hands. “The Deadwood Dick gang held up a train on the outskirts of Denver. Four dead. Killed in a shootout.” She passed the telegram over to Tamar. “We have to write the story, even if it is weeks old. This is huge news.”
Another man she loved was dead. Gone too soon.
Tamar twisted the ring on her finger. The one he’d slipped on her finger as he promised to love her and return to her.
And then everything went black.
• • •
At the same time Tamar and the Kansas City Advocate staff of two learned of Deadwood Dick’s death, a man limped across a wide, unpaved street. He was careful to avoid the bustle of traffic, which meant doing his errands earlier in the day. Catching a look of himself in the window, he almost didn’t recognize himself. The bushy beard and haphazard hair of the lawless man … gone. The dust and grime of days on the trail had been carried away. As soon as he crossed the border back into his territorial home, he headed for the nearest river and jumped in to cleanse himself in the purification ritual his ancestors did after battle.
That had been two weeks ago. Three weeks, maybe? The time was mushing together. The days didn’t make sense. For weeks he had been in a drug-induced haze, recovering from his injuries.
He barely scanned the headlines while he recovered in that Omaha hospital. Bart buried the story about the shootout until Amos could escape safely back to Oklahoma. The gang was busted. The heist and all future heists were foiled. Several men met their god or were going to meet their maker during long sentences or in the hangman’s gallows. He wasn’t needed for the trials of those men or the alderman who masterminded the heists based on his knowledge of the rail schedules. Deadwood Dick was done and buried, through with that part of his life.
And he was free. Years of on-and-off undercover work were finished. His scars on his body and in his heart were the only things left over from that time.
Free to do what? He had everything he wanted here: his land, his family, and his heritage. All except the woman he loved and left. The woman who thought he was dead.
His fingers tightened around the cane, a now necessary device after being shot in the gut. He thought the feelings would have died gradually over time.
Foolish man. They only grew deeper. How could she trust him if he hadn’t told her?
He needed to know. He needed to tell her. He owed her that modicum of truth.
Instead of going into the bank, he zigzagged across the street to the telegraph office.
The clerk collected the notes and his eyes bugged at the amount of money passed to him. “Sir, this is more than enough for a hundred telegrams.”
“Make sure they get there at the times I want, son.”
“Yes, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Amos stopped, pausing to let the cane absorb the pain and the weight of his body. “You’re married, aren’t you?” He couldn’t remember the young man’s name but he remembered his face—pale and doughy like a dinner roll with jolly green eyes under bushy eyebrows.
“Edwin. It’s Edwin Marshall, and I’m about to be if your niece Iris agrees.”
“Iris,” Amos said, stroking his chin. She was the oldest of his nieces. He missed most of her childhood because he was running around for and from the law. “The teacher, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Be a teller?”
“No, I would like to own the mercantile in town.”
Amos smiled. A businessman in the family. He liked the sound of that. “You need capital for that. Let’s sit down and talk about a loan to make that a reality so you can provide for my niece and your eventual family.”
“Oh thank you!” the young man blubbered. “This is so generous, and so—Oh my goodness, this is wonderful.”
Amos raised his hand. “This will require some work. I have high expectations.”
“Loving your niece is worth the work and expectations,” Edwin blurted out.
Amos nodded. Love was worth the work and risk. It was good that the young man realized this early instead of getting the lesson too late. The way he had with Tamar. He shook the thought of her from his head. He had business to attend to and getting caught up thinking about her wasn’t going to do him any good. “Come over later this week and we can discuss some favorable circumstances for your future,” he said, rapping three times on the wood counter. At least some time this week he wouldn’t be caught up in his own daydreams about the one he left behind. His business meeting gave him something to look forward to.
Chapter Sixteen
A week after the fainting spell, Tamar attempted to go back to work, but she couldn’t summon the motivation to work. Lethargy consumed her body, and every morning her stomach rumbled until she gagged into the nearest bowl.
Something was wrong.
Her body was changing, and she hadn’t bled at her appointed time. Her grandmother taught all the girls to watch the moon to know when their cycles would come. After four new moons, she was certain.
Priscilla and Delilah had been correct.
For once in her life, she was willing to admit that she was wrong.
Priscilla and Delilah sat on the edge of the bed and stared at their sister. “You fainted. You missed your courses.” Tamar added all these things up in her head. She was with a baby.
Priscilla grabbed her hand. “We can make this go away,” she said, her voice barely above a hoarse whisper. “There are women who can help us … ”
“Us?” Tamar asked, propping herself up in the bed.
“You. Help you if you wanted to—”
“You don’t have much time if you wanted to dispose of the—” Delilah searched for the words. “If you wanted to not be with the baby.”
“I can’t make a decision like that without—” Tamar’s voice cracked as the tears filled her eyes. “Without seeing him one last time.”
Delilah and Priscilla spoke in unison, their words jumbled. “Do we know him? Is he in town? I’ll kill him.”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Priscilla gasped. “You’re carrying the baby of a man named Deadwood Dick? Sister, I know you are sophisticated with all your women’s suffrage but a baby outside of the boundaries of marriage and with a man with that nickname. Deadwood Dick, seriously?”
Delilah beamed as she squealed with delight. “A baby with an outlaw. How romantic!”
Priscilla shot a steely and withering glare at her youngest sister. “Freeman women don’t have children outside of holy matrimony and the marital bed. We must do something about this.”
Tamar sighed. Her sisters, bless their hearts, wanted the best for her, and she wanted them off her bed and away from her. “I am going to do something.”
“Good,” Priscilla said, patting the quilt stretched across the bed. “I will call on Miss Eliza and ask her discreetly for the herbs to make the vile concoction—”
A scowl crept across Tamar’s face. “Do nothing of that sort.”
“You cannot be serious, Tamar. This baby isn’t—”
“This baby is mine, and this baby is his.” Tamar crossed her arms over her midsection. “I didn’t plan on the baby or falling in love with him.”
Delilah sighed again. Tamar was going to have to speak with her about her overly romantic sighing before she left for Howard in the coming year. She had to toughen up the girl. “I think it’s beautiful. Unconquerable love across life and death. Romeo and Juliet have nothing on this.”
“She isn’t wed. How are we going to explain this? What will this do to Charles?” Priscilla whined.
Tamar didn’t need the reminder about the constant nagging male presence in her life. “Charles is your concern, not mine. And I can make do. I will find a way or make one.”
“You have my support,” Delilah volunteered. “I will work as hard as I can to make this work.”
Priscilla reluctantly clasped her sister’s hand. “I am here for you, but Charles … I will work on him.”
“What can we do?”
“I need to know where he is.” Tamar’s words stained the air, and the sisters looked away, wishing the words would die. “I need to know,” she said again, clutching her sisters’ hands.
Delilah broke the silence. “He’s dead. Burial place unknown. They didn’t say much about him.”
“I know where he would be buried.” If his family got the body, if he had family, he would be with them in his beloved homeland.
“You loved him. More than you loved any other man.”
Tamar nodded, unable to form words and fiddling with the ring on her hand. “He loved me briefly, and I thank him for that. I have to visit him one last time. Delilah, you mentioned that you knew where?” she asked, wiping the tears from her eyes.
Delilah bounced off the bed and raced out of the room, returning with a clutter of telegrams in her hands. “It’s in this pile. All of these have come for you].” She glanced at the notes and made a face. “Odd. Most are all from the same place.”
Tamar sifted through the Advocate telegrams and letters that she neglected, separating them into piles. One stack she passed to Delilah for stories and editorials, who jotted down her commentary.
Priscilla thumbed through the last series on the bed, her face scrunched up in curiosity. “These don’t make sense. There are just Bible verses,” she said, thrusting the bunch of paper to her sister before launching off the bed. “I am headed out. I will be back later. And if you change your mind about—”
Loving the Lawmen Page 67