A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  Rhodes simmered as he went on about his coffee-brewing. It was a complicated task, Vierra reflected, with as many steps as shoeing a horse or hitching up a wagon.

  Whiskey was a lot less trouble.

  “What’s your real name?” he inquired.

  The other man left the stove, rubbing his palms down his thighs in clear vexation, then hauled a crate from against the wall, upended it and sat. “What’s yours?” he countered.

  “I told you. Vierra.”

  Rhodes looked skeptical. The dog leaned against his right leg and he stroked its back with long, slow motions of his gun hand. Vierra always kept an eye on another man’s gun hand, especially when he’d put it to some ordinary, innocent task.

  “So you say,” said the lawman. “All I know for sure is, my prisoner is gone and you surely had a part in it.”

  “Where you from?” Vierra asked, and thought to himself, with some amusement, that he was getting the knack of sounding like a gringo. If it weren’t for his dark hair and eyes and his Mexican hide, he probably could have passed. Not that he wanted to. He’d have to spend too much time brewing coffee.

  “Montana,” Rhodes answered after a long, stubborn silence.

  “You’re a long way from home,” Vierra observed. Where the hell was O’Ballivan? If the Ranger didn’t turn up soon, he’d have to assume he’d found some trouble and go looking for him.

  Rhodes shrugged, but there was a challenge in his blue eyes when he looked squarely at Vierra. “So are you,” he said.

  Vierra indicated a southerly direction with his pistol. “Just across the river,” he answered. He thought of Pilar, living outside Refugio with her papa. Wherever Pilar was, was home.

  “Handy,” Rhodes observed. “You break somebody out of jail, and all you have to do is cross that wide stream they call a river. Up home, that would be a creek.”

  Vierra raised an eyebrow.

  “You ever seen the Missouri?” Rhodes pressed. “That’s a river.”

  Just then Sam came through the door, which was standing open to the tense and quiet night, looking irritated. Rhodes made a sudden move and Vierra almost shot him before he realized Rhodes was reaching for the damn coffeepot.

  “You got another cup?” the Ranger asked.

  Inwardly, Vierra sighed. Then he cocked the pistol and spoke to Rhodes. “Don’t get any ideas about throwing that boiling coffee on anybody.”

  Rhodes looked horrified, even as the pot boiled over and sizzled on the hot stove. “And take a chance on hitting the dog?” he asked.

  “Ah, yes,” Vierra said, lowering the .45 again. “The dog.” That was another thing about gringos. They were sentimental about critters Indians and Mexicans boiled up with beans when game was scarce. He turned his gaze on O’Ballivan. “Did you send the wires?”

  “Yes,” the Ranger replied, still exasperated. “Waited for the replies, too. That was what took so long.”

  “Are they coming?” Vierra asked, referring to the Tucson and Tombstone marshals, who would, hopefully, bring sizable posses along with them—provided they were willing to make the ride to Haven, that is.

  “Yes,” O’Ballivan answered after a troubled glance at Rhodes. No doubt he was wondering how much Vierra had told the other man.

  “Nada,” Vierra said without being asked.

  Disgruntled, Rhodes scouted up two mugs and filled them, handing off the first one to O’Ballivan, who took it with both hands. “I sure wish somebody would tell me what the hell’s going on around here,” the cowpoke grumbled.

  The Ranger savored his coffee for a few moments, though Vierra figured it must have been hot enough to strip a layer of skin off his tongue, coming right off the boil like that. “We’ve got reason to believe there might be a raid on this place, around midnight,” he said after a couple of hard swallows. “Some folks are of a mind to spring Mungo from the hoosegow.”

  “Imagine that,” Rhodes said, and made his gringo eyes go wide.

  O’Ballivan laughed.

  “Guess there could be some shooting,” decided Rhodes.

  “Imagine that,” Vierra said.

  * * *

  BEN FOLLOWED THE RIVER, though he stayed well clear of it, three miles to where it took a southerly bend. From that point, it was maybe another hour of hard trudging to where he’d buried his Christmas and birthday money. He’d need it to get him and Neptune up north, on the stagecoach, to where the old man lived.

  He took to the road, figuring to make better time, and that was his mistake. The riders must have come overland, traveling alongside the river, where the ground was soft enough to muffle the sound of horses’ hooves. They were on him before he could dive for the brush.

  “If it ain’t my little brother,” taunted a familiar voice. Rex. Ben didn’t hate him or Landry near as much as he had Garrett, which was probably why they were still alive.

  Rex leaned in the saddle, caught Ben by the back of his shirt and yanked him right up onto the pommel. The horn jabbed hard into his tailbone, but Ben didn’t flinch.

  “What are you doin’ out here, anyhow?” Rex gave him a hard shake and, not for the first time, Ben wished he wasn’t so small for his age. Folks usually thought he was eight or nine, instead of twelve, like he was.

  “Pa’s in jail,” Ben said instead of answering Rex’s question. “They’re gonna hang him, on account of he shot Garrett in the back of his head.”

  Rex was filthy. His breath stank and he’d grown a beard. In the time he’d been gone, he’d gotten meaner, which was hard to credit, given that Ben had known desert rats with a better temperament.

  “That ain’t the half of it,” Rex growled, as though he knew the whole thing was Ben’s doing. He’d as good as murdered Garrett, and Pa, too, for all practical intents and purposes, he’d hated them so hard and so long. “Landry’s dead, too. And you know why it happened?”

  Ben did know, of course, but he wasn’t fool enough to say so. Rex and Landry had been close, like a pair of idiot twins with their heads stuck together, Pa said. Claimed you could drop one of them in China and one of them in New York City, and they’d find each other.

  “No, sir,” Ben lied, barely able to get the words out, he was so scared of that look in Rex’s eyes. “I don’t.”

  “Because of that so-called schoolmaster and his Mexican sidekick, that’s why. One of them shot off half Landry’s foot, and the time came when we had to put him down like a dog!”

  “Rex,” a familiar voice put in, “shut up.”

  Ben blinked, let out his breath and methodically counted the other riders in his head as a way to calm himself. They’d had time to pull their bandannas up, covering the lower halves of their faces, but he recognized most of them, just the same. They rode for the Donagher brand. But the one who’d spoken…

  “We can’t take him with us,” one of the other men said.

  Ben reckoned the insides of his ears must have swollen almost shut, for some reason. The riders were bunched close in, like cattle trying to weather a blizzard, yet the voices seemed to come from some far place.

  “I’d as soon break his neck as look at him,” Rex said.

  Ben believed that.

  “No,” said another voice, and that one he knew.

  He tracked it to a slender rider, off to his left. “Undine?”

  “Let him go, Rex,” Undine said. Her words echoed queerly, like those of the others, but she nudged her horse right in close, and Ben would have catapulted into her arms if his brother hadn’t had a fierce grip on the back of his neck, fixing to snap it right in two, no doubt.

  “We can’t,” Rex argued. “He’ll hightail it straight for town, spout off to Maddie or that schoolmaster how he’s seen us, and that’ll be the end of it!”

  “You wouldn’t tell on us, would you, Ben?” Undine asked, and the sweetness of her tone scared him more than anything Rex had said.

  “No, ma’am,” Ben said.

  “Because we’re going to get your daddy out
of that awful jail.” Undine’s gaze glittered in the night, just like that glass cat’s eye Garrett had put on his pillow to scare him. “You wouldn’t want to ruin that. I know you wouldn’t.”

  “No, ma’am,” Ben repeated, because he seemed to have forgotten how to form any words but those two.

  Rex’s hand tightened on the back of Ben’s neck. “‘No, ma’am, no, ma’am,’” Rex mocked, his breath hot and stinking on Ben’s cheek. “You weasely little bastard! You’d say anything to save your worthless hide. Then, first chance you got, you’d have the law on us. Kin don’t mean nothin’ to you!”

  “Undine,” said the man Ben thought he ought to know, “if you want the kid to live, you’ll have to stay back and keep an eye on him. Until we finish off O’Ballivan and Vierra, we’ll not know a peaceful moment, no matter where we may wander.”

  Ben’s eyes widened. Except for Mr. O’Ballivan, he didn’t know another man who talked fancy like that. Not even Banker James, who’d been to college back east someplace.

  “You said we were going to get Mungo out of jail!” Undine shrieked. “What’s this about killing Sam? I won’t let you—”

  “You can’t stop us,” Mr. Thomas P. Singleton broke in, having uncovered his face to speak.

  Ben gaped.

  “There’s a lot of gold involved here,” Singleton went on mildly. “You get in our way, Undine, and we’ll have to kill you, too.”

  “You’d murder your own sister?” Undine retorted.

  Sister? Ben thought, dazed. How could Undine be Mr. Singleton’s sister? Her name hadn’t been Singleton before she married Pa.

  Mr. Singleton doffed his hat, pressed it to his heart. His wild red hair was ruffled and seemed to move on its own, rising off his narrow head like threads of flame. “Only if she made it necessary,” he said. “And, remember, you’re only my half sister.”

  Undine hooked an arm around Ben’s waist and pulled him off Rex’s horse and onto hers, with a strength he wouldn’t have imagined she had. She slackened her hold just as quickly, though, and Ben scrambled to keep from tumbling to the stony road. They’d have trampled him for sure if he did, or shot him so he couldn’t run away.

  “You’d better have Mungo with you when you get back!” she warned.

  “Why, Sister,” Mr. Singleton purred, “I’d swear you’d developed an unseemly fondness for that old fool.”

  “There are papers only he can sign, and you know it!” Undine retorted, nearly unsettling Ben in her agitation. “And don’t you dare try to leave me behind, Tom, because if you do, I’ll tell every lawman I can find who you are and where you mean to go with all that Mexican gold!”

  Ben’s hands sweated, where he clung to the saddle horn. Undine shifted back a little, and he let go long enough to swing a leg over her horse’s neck. There were only two thoughts in his head; the rest had scattered like hens with a fox in their midst.

  The first one was, he was glad he hadn’t brought Neptune.

  The second, he didn’t want them to kill Sam O’Ballivan.

  “He’s just a schoolteacher!” Ben blurted. “Like you! You’ve got no call to hurt him!”

  Mr. Singleton leaned in so close that all Ben could see of his face was his big, watery-blue eyes. “He’s not a schoolteacher,” Singleton said, almost breathing the words instead of saying them. “He’s an Arizona Ranger. Now, you be a good boy, Benjamin, and mind your stepmother. If you do, I might not have to turn you over to your brother here. Let him do whatever he wants.”

  Ben went as cold as if he’d been laid out for burial.

  Singleton’s threat was not an idle one. He knew that for sure. And he knew Rex had gone crazy. He’d kill him, all right, if given the chance, and take his time doing it.

  “I’ll mind Undine,” Ben choked out. “I swear I will!”

  “See that you do,” Singleton crooned in that voice that made you want to go to sleep. The one he’d used to talk about Romans and arithmetic and proper grammar, when he was teaching school. Ben had nodded off more than once, back then, and gotten his knuckles rapped for it. They’d smarted something fierce from that ruler.

  It seemed a tame punishment now.

  “Take the boy back to camp, Undine,” Singleton told his sister. “I know you’d prefer the comforts of your dear husband’s ranch house, but if something happens to go wrong in town, that’s the first place they’ll look for you.”

  Ben turned his head, saw Undine bite down on her lower lip, then nod.

  “If he’s foolish enough to try anything,” Singleton added, reining his horse away, toward town, “you kill him.”

  Undine hesitated, then nodded again.

  Rex lingered a moment, even as the others rode off. He took Ben by the hair and jerked his head back. “You be good,” he said, pressing the words between his teeth.

  The letting go hurt almost as much as the taking hold.

  Ben gulped down a cry of pain, watched with relief and hatred as his last remaining brother spurred his horse to catch up with the rest of the gang.

  Ben had counted thirteen men.

  What chance would Mr. O’Ballivan have against so many?

  “This better not end up costing me my share of the gold,” Undine said. “I’ve got plans for it.”

  Ben knew he could take her, strong as she was, but she’d yell for sure, before he got a hand over her mouth, and Singleton and the others would surely hear.

  No, he’d have to wait, whether he wanted to or not, until they’d reached the camp, wherever it was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MADDIE TRIED TO SLEEP, but there was an oppressive sense of—what was it?—great and ominous forces, converging, sweeping into Haven, huddled fearfully on the banks of the river, from all the vastness of the four directions. Though her room was warm, even stuffy, she shivered.

  She sat up in bed, groped for the lamp on her bedside table and struck a match to the wick. It was still early. Perhaps she would read awhile, and if that failed, she might put on her wrapper, go downstairs, brew a soothing pot of tea. If she became truly desperate, there was always the account book. The very dullness of adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing all those carefully entered figures was almost guaranteed to weight her eyelids and set her to yawning.

  She reached for her book, a worn volume of John Donne’s poetry, plumped her pillows and settled back to open to the page she’d marked with the colorful band from a cigar, carelessly discarded by a customer. Maddie was not one to waste any useful item, especially one that was pleasing to the eye.

  She sighed and attempted to focus her attention on the singular music of Mr. Donne’s offering, each word a note in a silent sonata. But Maddie’s heart was playing another tune and her mind remained uneasy.

  She closed the book and set it aside, listening not just with her ears, but the whole of her being. Was it the weather? Maybe that was what she felt humming in the air, that inexplicable charge that always heralded a rare storm, the kind that brought ground-shaking thunder and flashes of lightning fit to rally the four horses of the Apocalypse. The grass around Haven was frightfully dry; there hadn’t been a good rain in months.

  Oh, God, she prayed silently, let that be it.

  But Maddie heard nothing, save her own shallow, rapid breathing and the spritely, audacious music spilling through the doorway of the Rattlesnake Saloon.

  The clink of Oralee’s badly tuned piano, catching her ear in unguarded moments, invariably stirred yearnings she couldn’t hope to fulfill. A spinet of her own, to play whenever she felt the inclination. A man to caress her body in the night and challenge her mind during the day.

  Sam O’Ballivan.

  Her throat ached with the poignancy of what she felt.

  Sam O’Ballivan.

  The man had never kissed her, never bared her flesh to his hands and his mouth. In point of fact, he had never touched her, except in the most innocuous ways, helping her down from a horse. Gripping her shoulders to steady her.<
br />
  When had she come to love him?

  For she did love him, though it was her own despairing secret, nestled safe in her soul, and while there might be some who had guessed, she had never confessed the truth to anyone. She was only now admitting it to herself.

  When, though? When had it happened?

  Perhaps that very first day when he’d come into the store to collect the package mailed from Stone Creek. He’d seemed to fill the whole place with the quiet power of his presence.

  Tears burned behind Maddie’s eyes. Tears of frustration and sorrow.

  She might as well love one of the flickering figures from those moving-picture boxes she’d seen once in a Tombstone ice-cream parlor. She’d dropped a penny into a slot and watched a brief melodrama, marveling at the jerky way the images moved. A handsome cowboy, with a kerchief at his throat, saving a woman from a stagecoach robbery. Sweeping her up onto his horse and carrying her off into a sunset etched in shades of gray.

  She’d been fascinated, especially by the kiss at the end, and shamed by her extravagance. If Terran hadn’t demanded the ice cream she’d promised, she might have watched the whole silly thing over again. Wasted another perfectly good penny.

  “Way of the future,” the man behind the counter had claimed, his huge black mustache quivering as he scooped the frozen vanilla concoction into a bowl for an eager Terran. “You just wait and see.”

  Maddie shook off the memory. Moving pictures were a passing novelty, and Sam O’Ballivan might just as well have been a character in one of them. He’d be gone that quick and, besides, he still belonged to Abigail, even if she was dead. He’d loved her enough to risk all kinds of scandal, or he wouldn’t have let her move into his room in back of the schoolhouse.

  “Stop it!” she scolded herself, and was grateful for the strange scratching that sounded at her bedroom door.

  She got up, donned her wrapper.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  The scratching came again.

  Terran or Ben would have knocked.

  Maddie opened the door and looked down to see Neptune sitting there, looking up at her with plaintive brown eyes. She smiled wanly at her fanciful interpretation. Neptune always looked plaintive.