The Outlaw and the Runaway

by Tatiana March

  Again, Mr. Smith’s office was shrouded in shadows, the shutters firmly closed, but enough daylight spilled in to remove the necessity of a lamp. An armed guard stood in the corner, blending against the wall. Celia did not bother with a greeting. She merely gave a curt nod and held up the sheet of paper in her hand.

  “I wish to send a letter to my father, but I have no envelope. I was hoping you might be able to furnish me with one.” She placed the letter on the desk in front of Mr. Smith. “It is only a single page. A small envelope would suffice.”

  The disguise of a heavy beard and spectacles, combined with the hat pulled low, made it difficult to interpret the man’s expression, however Celia thought she saw a flash of respect in his eyes. Without a word, he pulled a desk drawer open, took out an envelope and laid it on the desk.

  “Thank you.” Celia reached over and picked up the envelope. “I shall go and write the address. I’ll only be a few minutes. I understand Dale Hunter is riding out for supplies today. Perhaps you could ask him to post the letter for me?”

  “I’ll do that,” Mr. Smith replied, and Celia caught a hint of a smile.

  So they understood each other. Common sense told her that Mr. Smith—a man engaged in criminal deceit—would be worried about a letter addressed to Yuma prison. This way, she was letting him see the contents and be reassured that the message going to her father revealed no secrets, an action which removed the need for him to intercept the letter.

  She went back to the cabin, carefully addressed the envelope.

  Prisoner Joseph Courtwood

  Yuma Territorial Prison

  Yuma

  Arizona Territory

  After delivering the finished product to Mr. Smith in his shadowed lair, she drifted down to the corrals, skirting around the camp to avoid the cook shack, where a rowdy group of men was already engaged in a game of cards.

  Four outlaws stood leaning against the corral fence. Edging closer, Celia positioned herself slightly apart from them. Like animals moving in a herd, they all turned to look at her and touched their hat brims. She curbed her fear and gave a stiff nod.

  “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  In a chorus, they returned her greeting. In their thirties or forties, they looked hardened by the lifestyle. Each wore a double rig of pistols. Celia kept her distance and directed her attention to Roy. He was in the corral with three horses, a pair of sorrels and a gleaming black. The sorrels were tethered to a post by their bridle reins. The black had no bridle, not even a halter, but his front legs were hobbled.

  Roy glanced over at her, sent her a smile. She smiled back and waved. He lifted a saddle from the corral fence and put it on one of the sorrels, then moved aside. The horse sidestepped, bucked a little, calmed down again.

  “Will you ride him?” she called out.

  “Came expecting a rodeo, did you?”

  When she didn’t reply, Roy picked up a saddle blanket and settled it on the other sorrel. The horse swung its neck, managed to grip a corner of the blanket in its teeth and pull down the offending object. Roy plucked the blanket from the dust and replaced it on the sorrel’s back, all the while talking in a calm tone.

  “There’s little to see here today. No bronc riding. I’m just getting them used to a saddle. Letting them know it is nothing to fear. That I am nothing to fear. The black is just watching today. He’s more suspicious than the other two, but he trusts them. If they accept the saddle today, he’ll do the same tomorrow.”

  Celia watched Roy and felt her chest tighten. Even if she hadn’t known how gentle he could be when he touched her in the night, his patience with the horses would have revealed his caring nature. It seemed wrong to have a man like him trapped in the outlaw life, but there was nothing she could do about it.

  Nothing anybody could do about it.

  Except perhaps Roy himself.

  * * *

  Their existence acquired a pattern. After breakfast, Celia watched Roy work on the mustangs. In the afternoon, she stayed in the cabin, cleaning and mending. Wishing to preserve her good clothing, she borrowed a wide skirt and an embroidered Mexican blouse from the chest in the cabin. Far too large for her, she wore them with a rope belt tied around her waist, gathering the excess material into folds. Roy told her she looked like a gypsy, with her wild curls tumbling down her back. Pleased by the remark, she unraveled her upsweep in the evenings, knowing he preferred her hair unbound.

  Contrary to her fears, the outlaws, perhaps twenty in number, had not bothered her. Most of them seemed reticent, ill at ease in her presence. They darted curious glances in her direction when she passed, but made no attempt to talk to her.

  The only two who alarmed her were Grittenden, the man who had stood guard with a rifle at the head of the gorge on the day she arrived, and another outlaw called Franklin. A small man with sharp, surly features, he appeared to have nothing to occupy his time but to sit on a stone by the path, whittling on a piece of wood, waiting for her to come out of the cabin so he could stare at her. She had asked Roy about him and discovered he was a safecracker, expert at using explosives to break into bank vaults.

  Although Celia was aware there was another woman in the camp, Miss Gabriela might as well have been a ghost. She kept to her cabin. Andersen, a big, quiet, fair-haired man around thirty, whom the others called Swede, watched over her like a guard dog, fetching food and water for her, emptying chamber pots, even hanging her clothes to dry.

  Once or twice, Celia had caught sight of a timid-looking woman in the open doorway of the neighboring adobe cabin. Medium height, slender to the point of appearing frail, she stood with her face tilted up toward the sun, a lace mantilla covering her glossy black hair. One arm in a sling, her complexion pale, she looked breathtakingly lovely, but an aura of sadness surrounded her, hinting at some past tragedy.

  “Could I visit her?” Celia asked Roy.

  “Leave it. She’ll come to see you when she is ready.”

  “Why is she so withdrawn?”

  Roy hesitated. “I told you. This is a dangerous place for a woman.”

  He offered her no further comment, and it occurred to Celia that whatever violence had caused Miss Gabriela to withdraw into herself could befall any woman living in an outlaw camp. She wanted to ask about the woman the men referred to as Big Kate, if she had been equally solitary, but her courage failed. For a while longer, she wanted to cling to the sense of peace and security she knew to be false, to gather up memories no future calamity could take away from her.

  * * *

  Dale Hunter set off on another supply run, but neither Celia nor Roy raised the prospect that she ought to leave. Every night, they lay in bed together, wrapped in each other’s arms, whispering in the darkness, every minute too precious to be wasted on sleep. And yet, they never allowed themselves to break the boundaries they had agreed to and avoided the final step of intimacy, which might have resulted in pregnancy, altering the course of their lives.

  To Celia’s surprise, she made friends with Davies, the shy, bumbling man in his thirties who guarded the ranch house. He waylaid her on the path one morning, his hat in his hands. “Miss Celia, you wrote to your pa...would you help me write a letter to my ma...? I never learned how, and I’ve learned she’s taken poorly...”

  “If you can’t read, how do you know she has taken poorly?”

  A flush darkened the man’s face. “She wrote me, and Halloran read it for me.”

  “Why can’t Halloran help you write a letter?”

  Davies squirmed, his blush deepening. “The sort of thing a man wants to say to his dying ma...I don’t want the men to think that I’m a sissy.”

  “I see.” Celia swallowed. She had no desire to fraternize with the outlaws, but something about Davies appealed to her compassion. Perhaps it was the man’s lack of intelligence that had made him a target of cruel pranks by th
e others. Perhaps it was the common bond of having an ailing parent to worry about.

  Irresolute, Celia glanced down the slope toward the corrals, where Roy was busy working with the mustangs. Allowing Davies inside the cabin was out of the question, but she did not have the heart to refuse his request.

  “If you wait a moment, I’ll unpack my ink and notepaper. Then you can walk over and stand outside my window while you dictate the letter.”

  She hurried into the cabin and set out her writing tools. Feeling a twinge of guilt at being uncharitable, she examined the thinness of her writing tablet. Hopefully one page would suffice. She sat down, uncapped the bottle of ink and waited, pen poised above the sheet of paper.

  Footsteps thudded outside, and then faded away as Davies came to a halt by the window, his burly shoulders blocking out part of the daylight.

  “I’m ready,” Celia said. “Tell me what you want me to write.”

  “Well...” The outlaw cleared his throat, shifted on his feet, so that the light through the window altered again. Celia heard a rasping sound. She craned her neck to glance out and saw that Davies was scratching his head beneath his hat, looking miserable.

  “I dunno...what to put in the letter...”

  Celia spoke softly. “When I wrote to my father, I told him that I loved him, and that he had always been a good father to me. I told him that even if I couldn’t visit him, my thoughts were with him. Would you like me to say the same?”

  “That’s good. Write it just like that...you know...what you said.”

  With a sigh, Celia dipped her pen in the bottle of ink and began to capture the words on paper. Why did men find it so difficult to express their emotions? Even as the thought flashed through her mind, empathy stirred within her. There was something decent and sincere about Davies. Once again, it occurred to Celia that Roy might not be the only man in the camp who had fallen into the outlaw life by accident, and was a good person at heart.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The scent of rosewater alerted Celia before she noticed the woman standing in the open doorway. Just like a ghost, Celia thought with a shiver of alarm. Miss Gabriela seemed to have materialized without a sound, as if conjured out of the crisp autumn air.

  Still and silent, dressed in a threadbare black gown, a lace mantilla partly obscuring her features, the woman had the quality of a marble statue. And then she moved. The way she glided into the room, like a shadow shifting, made Celia suspect Miss Gabriela had learned to blend into the background, remain invisible.

  The lace mantilla fell aside, revealing a face of astonishing beauty. Skin of alabaster, lips of crimson, symmetrical features with a rounded chin and a small, straight nose. Large, dark eyes, which were now filled with fear. The tension about her felt like a palpable force, the way a telegraph wire hums when one stands close enough to feel the vibration.

  For a moment, they studied each other. Then Miss Gabriela spoke. Her voice was low and breathless, no more than a whisper. The voice of someone living in constant fear.

  “You must leave, Miss Celia. Leave immediately. I sense danger.”

  A chill seemed to settle over the room. Celia wanted to protest, but the words refused to form on her tongue. In truth, she had sensed it, too. The atmosphere at the hideout had thickened, growing oppressive. The men were drinking hard, and the gambling had gained a wild, reckless edge. Yesterday, an argument had erupted into a brawl. Anytime she went outside, she could see the men skulking about, restless and brooding. The whole place felt like a keg of gunpowder waiting for someone to toss in a match.

  “I can’t leave... I have nowhere to go.”

  “You have to go...I have seen how he looks at you...Franklin...I watch out of the window of my cabin and I see him sitting on the stone by the path, whittling with his knife, waiting for you to walk by. Before, I have seen that look in a man’s eyes...three times I have seen it, and it brings disaster...bad things will happen...you must go.”

  “I wish to remain here with Roy.”

  Miss Gabriela hunched her shoulders, as if preparing to receive a blow. Her eyes darted over Celia’s face. “You love him? You love Roy Hagan?”

  She hesitated putting such a simple label on her feelings. “Yes.”

  “Then go. I loved once, too. Felipe...he worked at my father’s hacienda. He was poor, my parents did not approve, so we eloped. My father’s guards chased us, and Felipe shot one of them. My father called it murder, and we came here to hide. Felipe was not a robber. I brought money with me and we could pay for our food and shelter. But a man looked at me the way Franklin looks at you now. He walked out of the camp with Felipe and he came back alone. I was claimed, like a stray animal can be claimed. I became a prize. And every time there was a killing, the man who claimed me was capable of greater cruelty than the one before. With Lom Curtis, many times I would have ended my life but my religion forbids it. Only now...”

  Miss Gabriela glanced back to where the big, fair-haired Swede stood a dozen paces away, watching over her. “Only now I have hope again. Go, while you still have hope.”

  “I...” Celia made a small, helpless gesture with her hand. She didn’t know what to say, how to reply. The horror painted by Miss Gabriela’s words felt all too real. The barrier she had built around her thoughts to keep her anxieties at bay cracked, allowing her fears to spill out. She opened her mouth to speak, but by the time she found her voice Miss Gabriela had turned around and melted away on soundless steps.

  * * *

  Roy returned to the cabin at suppertime to find Celia in a state of agitation. She rushed up to him, her frantic words gushing out in a torrent. “Miss Gabriela came to see me...she urged me leave the valley...almost as if she has a premonition...of course, no one can see into the future...and yet I know what she means...the air feels thick with danger...that man, Franklin...he has such mean, reptile eyes...he reminds me of the rattlesnake that bit me...”

  “Calm down.” Roy deposited the crock of stew on the table and swept Celia into his arms. His heart beat in slow thuds, already heavy from the pain of parting. He’d known all along it was wrong to let Celia stay at the hideout, but he had wanted a taste of happiness, even if just for a short while.

  He didn’t kiss her, for this was not the time to let passion cloud their thinking. He merely cradled her to his chest, gently rocking her to and fro, until her frightened trembling eased. Leaning back, he raked his fingers into her tumbling curls and met her worried eyes.

  “Miss Gabriela is right. You need to leave. I’ll speak to Dale Hunter. He is going on another supply run tomorrow. I’ve been at fault, not to make the arrangements sooner. I’ll see him after supper tonight and make sure he takes you with him in the morning.”

  Celia swallowed. When she spoke, her voice was low. “Chicago. I need to make my way to Chicago. Get settled in a boardinghouse and start studying the market. Including your money, I’ll have three thousand dollars. That’s a good starting stake.”

  Roy eased their bodies apart, as if touching her made him too vulnerable, eroded his resolve to let her go. “I’m sorry it’s not more. I made some money on another raid, but one of the men in my previous outfit left a widow, and Dale and I sent our share to her.”

  Celia hesitated. “How can I get a message to you...keep you informed of your investments and send your share of gains to you?”

  Roy hardened himself. “It will be safer if you don’t contact me.” He gritted his teeth. An ache settled in his gut, as painful as a gunshot wound. He let his eyes skim over Celia’s features. She was a beautiful woman. Her scar had faded, and without the crazy prejudice she would attract suitors. Perhaps he was better off not knowing, better off not hearing how she was making a life for herself, perhaps a life that included some other man. He felt the cabin walls close around him, felt as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs. “I need to go and see Dale Hunter, mak
e the arrangements.”

  As he stalked out of the cabin, his body was shaking. How could he have been so irresponsible, to let things get this far? How could he have believed he could enjoy a few days of her warmth, and then go on living as before, as if nothing had happened? He should have known better, should have known that to let her go would hurt more than tearing out a piece of his own flesh, plunging him into a fog of misery that might never lift.

  And yet he must.

  Must let her go.

  * * *

  Roy found Dale Hunter standing by the cook shack, drinking coffee, one shoulder propped against a canopy post. A few paces away, the men were clearing the table after supper, ready to resume their gambling. Twilight was thickening. Someone was lighting the lanterns while another man was teasing a mournful tune out of a harmonica.

  Roy handed the empty stew pot to Jarvis, the aging cook, and sidled up to Dale. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Hagan. I been waitin’ for you.” Dale spoke loudly, as if he hadn’t heard Roy’s comment. “My horse is favorin’ his right front leg. I was hopin’ you’d take look.” He took another sip of coffee, his eyes sending Roy a message over the rim of the cup.

  “Sure.” Roy shrugged, hiding his unease. “There’s just enough daylight left.”

  They made their way to the corrals in silence. Dale caught his horse, a showy, high-stepping bay gelding with four white socks. Roy crouched beside the animal, ran his hands over each front leg in turn. As he’d expected, there was nothing wrong with the horse. He spoke in a low murmur.

  “I need you to take Celia with you when you ride out of here tomorrow.”

  “Why now, amigo?”

  “There’s trouble brewing. Don’t pretend you don’t feel it. The men are like a pack of lobo wolves, snapping and circling. For weeks, they’ve been stuck in the valley, going crazier by the hour. With Big Kate gone, they can’t even use a quick tumble in a whore’s bed to ease their frustration. It’s getting too dangerous for Celia to stay around.”