A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  Maddie didn’t comment.

  “I know you spent the night tending the Perkins woman, and you look all done-in,” Oralee said. “You ought to lie down awhile.”

  Maddie must have looked confounded, because Oralee laughed.

  “Lordy,” she said, “I think you’re half again as stubborn as I am, and that’s saying something. How’s the Perkins woman faring this morning? Hittie, isn’t it? And how’s that poor little kid of hers?”

  “They’re in a desperate way,” Maddie said, conscious of Oralee’s gaze as she reached for the broom, but unable to look at the other woman until she’d blinked a few times. She wondered if anyone else would ask about Violet and Hittie over the course of the day, and feared they wouldn’t. Mostly, folks just pretended the Perkins family didn’t exist.

  “I’ll send a couple of my girls over there with some vittles,” Oralee announced.

  Maddie stopped sweeping.

  “What’re you starin’ at me for?” Oralee demanded too loudly and too cheerfully. “Ain’t you never heard of a whore with a heart of gold?”

  “I will thank you to watch your language, Oralee Pringle,” Maddie heard herself say. But she was smiling.

  “If we wait for them ‘good Christians’ over to the church to do something, those folks’ll starve. Too afraid of gettin’ sick themselves, I reckon. And probably tellin’ each other this is what comes of bein’ a Perkins.”

  “There are a lot of kind people in this town,” Maddie had to say. “They’re just scared, that’s all.”

  Oralee huffed out a scoffish breath. “Might as well believe what suits you,” she allowed.

  Just then two of Maddie’s regular customers paused on the sidewalk out front, peering in through the display window. Seeing Oralee, they recoiled, fanned themselves industriously and rushed on by.

  “Guess I’m not good for business, on Sunday or any other day,” Oralee remarked, and though the words were stoutly uttered, Maddie heard some sorrow in them. “Best I get back to the Rattlesnake, anyhow. I’ll send somebody by with my grocery order tomorrow. No sense shoppin’ in Tucson anymore, now that I’ve got a stake in your fortunes.”

  Before Maddie could respond, Oralee opened the door and trundled out into the crisp morning sunlight.

  * * *

  “NEVER MIND WHO came in on that stage,” Sam said impatiently when Vierra put the same question to him for what must have been the hundredth time since they’d left the railroad car to saddle up and go after the Donaghers and the rest of the outlaw gang. They’d started right away, but it was hard, tracking at night, and now that the sun was up, Sam was beginning to wonder if they’d flat-out lost the trail.

  They’d come to an abandoned adobe, walls still standing, roof caved in, and Vierra dismounted to squat, lift the wooden lid off a cistern and peer in. His grin flashed up at Sam, bright as a new watch case in a splash of sun. “She’s pretty, whoever she is,” he said.

  Sam resettled his hat, exasperated about many things besides Vierra’s hectoring and the hard travel. “Is there any water in that hole?” he rasped, scowling.

  Vierra scooped out a hatful as an answer and poured it over his head. His horse took a step forward and nuzzled his back, wanting a drink.

  Sam swung down from the saddle. He wondered what Abigail was up to, back in Haven, and what Maddie thought of her coming to town and moving right into his quarters like a common-law wife. It took him a few moments more to get beyond that tangle to consider, once again, where the outlaws might be.

  Vierra straightened, found a pair of wooden buckets alongside the old house, probably no sturdier than the roof, and filled them from the cistern. Set one down for each of the horses. They drank with sloppy thirst.

  “We’ll find them,” Vierra told Sam, hooking his thumbs in the back of his gun belt and standing there on the tilt, with one hip cocked.

  “I didn’t say we wouldn’t,” Sam said, snappish from the frustration and the long night.

  Vierra gave a low whistle through his teeth. The grin didn’t waver. “But you’re fretting about it, just the same.” He scanned the landscape, barren and hilly, with a scrub of a tree here and there, clinging to the sandy soil for its life.

  “There must be a thousand places to hide out here,” Sam muttered.

  “We’ll look in every one of them, if we have to,” Vierra said. He crouched next to the cistern again, his dark hair still dripping from the first dousing, dipped his hat in a second time and drank from it. “In the meantime, we ought to do what they’re probably doing. Lay up and let the horses rest. I’m hungry enough to eat the north end of a southbound rabbit.”

  Sam went to the cistern at last and knelt, tossing his hat aside. He splashed his face with both hands, then drank cautiously. The water was lukewarm and woody tasting with debris, but it was wet and he’d drained his canteen a couple of hours back. “You hunt down that rabbit,” he told Vierra, “and I’ll see what I can rustle up for the horses.”

  “At least tell me her name,” Vierra said. He surely was a persistent bastard, which boded well for rounding up the outlaws and not so well for Sam’s overtaxed patience.

  “Abigail,” Sam spat. “Abigail Blackstone.”

  Vierra’s grin broadened, bright as a signal from a pocket mirror. “I’d have sworn you’d taken a fancy to Maddie Chancelor,” he said.

  Sam scowled, got to his feet. “If you’re not going to find us some breakfast, maybe I’d better do it.”

  The Mexican laughed. He rose with more ease and languor than Sam had managed, saddle-sore as he was. “Perhaps,” Vierra said, laying splayed fingers to his chest, “I will court Maddie myself.”

  “What about Pilar?” Sam asked, a little quicker and more sharply than he’d have liked.

  Vierra sighed eloquently, turned his dark gaze to the horizon. “Yes,” he said. “What about Pilar?”

  “Go get the goddamned rabbit,” Sam said.

  Vierra laughed again, put on his wet hat, checked the cylinder of his pistol and set out on his mission. Sam found a patch of sparse grass behind the adobe and staked the horses there. He refilled the water buckets, put them within range of the lead lines and, shading his eyes with one hand, looked out over the landscape for any sign of smoke from a campfire. A new and prickly feeling, just beneath the hide on the back of his neck, told him the gentleman outlaw, the Donagher brothers and the fourth man were closer than common sense would dictate.

  The first shot didn’t worry him. Vierra had picked off a rabbit. The second made him bolt for his exhausted horse, but before he got the cinch tightened, the Mexican was back, carrying a couple of quail in one hand.

  “No rabbit this morning,” he said.

  Sam unbuckled the cinch and pulled the saddle and blanket off the gelding’s back. The animal quivered at the reprieve and went back to snuffling up dry grass.

  While Vierra cleaned the birds, Sam built a low fire. They ate without speaking, then spread their bedrolls in the shade on the western side of the adobe and stretched out.

  “Lonely place to live,” Vierra said.

  Sam hoped his companion wasn’t fixing to chat. Now that he’d appeased his raging stomach and laid himself down on the cool ground, he felt a need to sleep. He didn’t offer a response, hoping that would be the end of the conversation. An hour or two looking at the backs of his eyelids and he’d be ready to ride.

  “What do you suppose happened to them?” Vierra mused.

  Sam covered his eyes with his hat. He said nothing, not because he was optimistic that Vierra would shut up, but because he was already going under.

  “The people who settled out here, I mean,” Vierra said, just as if Sam had asked. “It’s a lot of work, putting up an adobe, the kind of thing a man wouldn’t do just for himself, so there must have been a woman. Maybe even some kids.”

  “Christ,” Sam growled.

  Vierra made settling sounds, shifting around on his bedroll, and Sam knew without looking that he’d
cupped his hands behind his head and was grinning up at the hard blue sky like the damn fool he was. “I’m still hungry,” he confided.

  “Vierra?”

  “What?”

  “Shut up before I stuff both your boots down your throat.”

  Vierra laughed.

  The report of a rifle brought them both upright, surging to their feet, scrambling for their horses. They left their bedrolls behind, along with most of their gear, and rode bent low over the animals’ necks, racing in the direction of the shot.

  The rider lay sprawled facedown in the brush, arms wide of his body, blood already seeping through the dusty canvas of his coat. Sam jumped down off his horse without reining it in and cursed when Vierra charged on without him.

  He drew his .45, just in case, and bent to roll the man onto his back.

  Landry Donagher stared upward, vacant eyes still bulging with shocked effrontery. His last thought was etched so plainly on his face that it might have been written in India ink. Christ Almighty, I’ve been shot.

  “Hell,” Sam said. He didn’t like leaving a dead man for the buzzards, even if that dead man happened to be a murdering waste of air like Donagher, but as before, on the riverbank, there was no other choice. He mounted up again and heeled the gelding into a full run, after Vierra.

  Dust billowed all around him, from Vierra’s horse and the men ahead of him, and Sam pulled his bandanna up over his mouth and ducked his head slightly to keep his eyes clear. He was only a few lengths behind when another shot ripped through the mud-thick atmosphere and Vierra spun backward off his mount and rolled twice, head over heels, before coming to a hard stop. Sam managed to rein the gelding to one side moments before it would have trampled Vierra into a gruesome mash of blood and bone.

  Sam swore and landed running, for the second time in five minutes. Vierra was shot through the right shoulder, and he grinned up at Sam with a strange, happy regret, like some idiot who’d just slid down the greased pole at a carnival before gaining the prize on top. “I’m all right,” he said. “Go after them—the gold—”

  With that, Vierra passed out. Probably a mercy, if the injury was as bad as Sam feared it was.

  He crouched, cursing under his breath, and tore Vierra’s shirt so he could get a good look at the wound.

  It was deep, all right, and bleeding like a son of a bitch.

  Sam used Vierra’s bandanna to stuff the hole, caught the man’s terrified horse and settled it down with a few gruff words. Then he hoisted Vierra off the ground, draped him over the saddle he’d just been shot out of, and held on to the reins of the horse while he mounted the gelding again.

  While the outlaws rode in one direction—there must have been a dozen of them now, from the dust they were raising—Sam and Vierra headed in the other, back to the adobe.

  Sam laid Vierra on his bedroll, letting the horses wander, still saddled and fitful, reins trailing.

  Vierra came to long enough to grin again. “You should have gone after them,” he said.

  “You’re damn right I should have,” Sam retorted grimly, pulling the blood-soaked bandanna out of the hole in Vierra’s shoulder, rinsing it out in one of the horse buckets and pushing it back in again.

  Vierra gasped at the pain. His eyes rolled back into his head and closed.

  “Goddamn you, Vierra,” Sam said.

  Vierra broke out in a clammy sweat, but at least the bleeding had slowed.

  Sam watched him for a while, then decided he’d better do something useful. He gathered sticks and sagebrush and bits of wood left from an old shed, long-since collapsed, and built a second fire. After digging around inside the adobe for a few minutes, he found a battered cast-iron kettle, filthy with mice leavings and almost rusted through on the bottom. He washed the pot in the cistern, filled it with water and set it at the edge of the flames to heat.

  Vierra was still unconscious, but he’d taken to shuddering, as if a man taken with a fever, and Sam braced himself for the hard reality of the situation. They were two days’ ride from Haven, the outlaws were getting away, and he wouldn’t have bet a solitary nickel that Vierra would make it till morning.

  When the water in the kettle was good and hot, Sam dunked the bandanna again and cleaned Vierra’s wound as thoroughly as he could. He took a flask of rye and a spare shirt from his saddlebags, ripped the shirt into strips for a bandage, and hunkered down to pour two fingers of good whiskey into the other man’s gaping flesh.

  Vierra came up screaming Spanish curses, and Sam pushed him back down, so the whiskey wouldn’t spill out before it could do any good.

  “Lie still,” Sam ordered. “You go thrashing around like that and there’s no telling what you’ll do to your insides.”

  Vierra blinked. His skin was pale and slick with sweat, his lips drawn tight across his teeth. “What happened?” he choked out.

  “Well, that’s a stupid question if I’ve ever heard one,” Sam said. “You got shot, that’s what happened.”

  “¡Madre de Dios!” Vierra groaned, and tried to cross himself. His arm fell to his side in the attempt. “My shoulder feels like it’s on fire.”

  “That’s the whiskey,” Sam said.

  “You poured it in the wrong hole,” Vierra complained, gasping out the words.

  Sam chuckled, in spite of their predicament, which was not promising, and would become less so when night fell. He reached for the flask, unscrewed the stopper and handed the rye over to Vierra, who took a couple of gulps, gave a violent shudder and gave it back.

  Sam bandaged the wound, spread his own bedroll over Vierra and stood.

  “Are you planning on going somewhere?” Vierra asked, squinting up at him with a peculiar combination of accusation and hope.

  “I saw a shovel inside the adobe,” he said. “I’m heading out there to bury Landry Donagher before the coyotes and the wild pigs get to him. Like I couldn’t do for those others, by the river.” He leaned down, placed Vierra’s pistol in his hand, atop the blanket. “If you need help, fire a shot.”

  “Where’s that whiskey?” Vierra wanted to know.

  Sam laid the flask on Vierra’s chest, checked the fire to make sure it wasn’t about to jump the circle of stones containing it and start a wildfire, and caught his horse. He carried the shovel in his hands as he rode.

  Donagher was right where he’d left him, of course, and the critters hadn’t discovered him yet. Sam got down off his horse, left it to graze on the sparse desert grass, and started digging. The ground was hard, and he hit a thin layer of bedrock three feet down, but he kept on, sweat-drenched and aching in every muscle. The sun was dipping low when he rolled the dead man into his grave, said a few distracted words meant to pass for a prayer and covered him over with dirt and a mound of stones.

  When he got back to camp, he half expected to set right to work on another grave—he’d seen a lot of men die of lesser wounds than Vierra’s—but the Mexican was sitting up in his blankets, with his back resting against the wall of the adobe, smoking a roll-your-own and finishing off the whiskey. Watching Sam approach, he dragged a blood-streaked forearm across his mouth.

  “There’s a village half a day’s ride over that ridge,” Vierra said, pointing to the northeast.

  Sam tossed the shovel aside, got down off the horse and filled buckets at the cistern to water both animals. “I guess you must have some reason for telling me that,” he said when he damn well felt like saying something.

  Vierra shook his head, disgusted. He moved as though he meant to stand but failed in the attempt. Sam thought briefly of Tom Singleton, the former schoolmaster, trying to get to his feet after the well-dangling incident at the school. “I could die out here, you know,” Vierra said.

  “I reckon you’d have done that already, if you were fixing to,” Sam said. He wasn’t going out hunting, so they’d have to make a supper of hard tack and jerky, scrounged from the bottom of their saddlebags. Sam wished heartily for a cup of coffee, hot enough to sear his tong
ue and strong enough to float a horseshoe. Could have done with a creek bath and a book, too, but except for the cistern, there probably wasn’t a watering hole within twenty miles.

  Vierra looked aggrieved, then lodged another complaint. “We’re out of whiskey, too.”

  Sam pulled a second flask from inside his shirt, half full of cantina rotgut, almost guaranteed to make a man go blind. It was the only thing he’d found on Landry Donagher before he buried him. If Donagher had held on to his share of that gold, the others had relieved him of it, along with his horse and gun.

  He wondered if Rex had tried to defend his brother, or if he’d turned on him, in the end, like a slat-ribbed wolf. Wondered if Mungo would grieve for a second dead son, once word got back to him.

  Vierra’s gaze tracked the whiskey. “Give me that,” he said. “I’m in pain.”

  Sam sniffed the contents of the flask, reminded himself that he might have need of his eyesight for some time to come, and carried it over to Vierra, who snatched it from his hand, took a gulp and practically choked to death. Sputtering and spitting, he looked up at Sam as if he’d given him kerosene, and done it on purpose, too.

  “Bad stuff,” Sam said. “Don’t pour it out, though. We’ll need it to disinfect that wound of yours.”

  “I’d sooner let you cauterize it with a hot poker,” Vierra countered, his eyes red with fury and rotgut.

  “I could do that,” Sam offered mildly.

  The hard tack and the jerky, served up a few minutes later, didn’t fill him up, but he consoled himself with the negligible belief that it was better than nothing.

  * * *

  MADDIE SPENT the rest of the day dusting and rearranging stock. She was untying her apron when Terran spoke from just behind her, nearly startling her out of her skin.

  “You planning to make supper?” he asked.

  Maddie moved to touch his shoulder, but he stepped back, out of reach.

  “Are you?” he persisted.

  “There’s bread and cheese in the pantry,” Maddie said. “You and Ben can help yourselves. I’m going over to the Perkinses’ place to look in on Violet and her mother.”