A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  She crouched to ruffle his ears. “What is it, boy? Do you need to go outside?”

  Neptune whimpered.

  Maddie straightened, frowning. She’d had a brief respite, thinking about moving pictures, but now her uneasiness was back. She went back for the lantern on her bedside table and hurried through the small sitting room to Terran’s door.

  The latch hadn’t caught properly and Neptune had pushed it open. That, she was sure, was why it stood ajar.

  She peeked inside, holding the lantern aloft.

  “Terran?”

  “Hmm-mmm?” Her brother stirred in his narrow bed, but didn’t awaken.

  Maddie’s gaze slid to the cot where Ben slept. It was empty, and the window above it was raised. The flour-sack curtains shifted, almost imperceptibly, in the slow, heavy breeze.

  “Terran!” Maddie cried.

  Neptune, all but tangled in the hem of her wrapper, gave a soft, earnest whine.

  “Terran!” Maddie repeated. She set the lantern on the wide windowsill and bent to shake him by one shoulder.

  He opened his eyes, partly at least, and regarded Maddie with that baffled irritation common to those who’ve had their slumbers interrupted. “What?” he asked, stretching the word even as he stretched his body.

  “It’s Ben. He’s gone.”

  Terran groaned and tugged the pillow over his face. “Not again.”

  Maddie pulled the pillow off and tossed it aside. “Get up. We’ve got to find him.”

  Another groan from Terran. “Why? He’ll come back on his own. He always does.”

  “Terran, get up!”

  He raised himself as far as his elbows, hair tousled, eyes narrowed to skeptical slits. He shook his head once, from side to side, as though throwing off the effects of sleep. “All right,” he said. “All right. But you’ve got to give me some privacy, Maddie. I’m not decent.”

  Maddie looked down at her wrapper and bare feet. She wasn’t “decent,” either, not for the street, anyway. “Hurry!” she urged, and then turned, on the fly, to head back to her own room.

  Five minutes later she was downstairs, fully dressed and waiting impatiently for Terran.

  She went to the bottom of the steps and shouted his name.

  “I’m coming!” he yelled back.

  Neptune stood on his hind legs to scrabble anxiously at Maddie’s skirts with his forepaws.

  “You’ll have to stay here,” Maddie told him with some regret. He might be handy, finding Ben, but it was dark out and he could so easily get lost. Too, there were the coyotes and the big dogs that sometimes got loose and ranged the town. Neptune would be easy prey to them.

  The dog cried.

  Maddie’s heart twisted. She leaned down to pat his head. “I’ll find him,” she said. “I promise.”

  Terran thundered down the stairs just then, his shirt misbuttoned and his hair atangle. Under any other circumstances, Maddie would have admonished her brother, sent him back to his room to attend to his appearance, but Ben’s absence, coupled with the eerie niggling of her intuition, lent an urgency to the situation that she couldn’t ignore.

  “If we just wait,” Terran reasoned pettishly, “he’ll come back.”

  Maddie ignored the protest, already opening the back door. “You fetch Mr. O’Ballivan. I’ll start at the other end of town and walk every street if that’s what I have to do.”

  Terran sighed. “All right,” he agreed.

  They stepped outside and Maddie shut the door on poor Neptune before he could dash out to join them. As she headed in one direction, Terran went toward the schoolhouse.

  Neptune’s yelps made Maddie want to cover her ears with both hands, but she quickened her pace instead of going back for him.

  * * *

  BEN RECOGNIZED the camp right off, even though it was dark. It was tucked away in a little arroyo, a mile or so from the ranch house. Ben knew the place because he’d gone there so often, when he was just a kid, to hide from his brothers and, sometimes, his pa. Once, he’d made a fire and passed the whole night there, and when he got back in the morning, expecting a beating, nobody but Anna even knew he’d been gone.

  Anna hadn’t said a word to betray him. She’d just put a little extra on his breakfast plate, because she’d known nothing would have brought him back save the kind of hunger that eats up the belly and then gnaws at the backbone for good measure.

  “Mr. Singleton called you his half sister,” he said to Undine as they dismounted in the middle of the camp, next to the dead fire. He wanted to keep her mind busy—it wouldn’t do at all if she figured out that he meant to escape first chance he got.

  Undine sighed. She was wearing trousers, like a man, and boots. Suspenders, too, and a loose cotton shirt. Ben knew the whole getup for his own. They were things he’d outgrown, two summers ago, and Anna had put them away in a box. Said somebody might need them one day.

  “That’s right, Ben,” she said. “We had the same mother but different fathers.” She didn’t look him in the eye; just stood there, with her hands on her curvy hips, surveying the countryside. Most of which was invisible, because the moon was still scant and the stars seemed to have receded, as though they wanted to distance themselves from earth and from all the people who lived there.

  “You’re part of that outlaw gang,” Ben said. “The one Pa’s been talking about.” There had been accounts of the raids in the papers for months; his pa got the Epitaph sent over from Tombstone and the Gazette from Tucson. He liked to compare the two; said if a man only read one newspaper, he was likely to get slanted accounts of what was going on in the world. Now, Ben remembered how Undine’s mouth used to tighten whenever his pa read out loud about cattle prices or something the politicians were up to back in Washington City. She’d especially disliked accounts of the robberies and murders that had been so common of late.

  “You’ll have to promise not to tell anybody what you know,” Undine said. “Otherwise—well, Tom’s right—you’ll be a real problem.”

  Ben was already a problem, and he knew it. Singleton might have said he could stay alive, but like as not, he’d only been appeasing Undine, so he and Rex and the others could get on with all they meant to do in town.

  Kill Mr. O’Ballivan, for a start.

  Ben’s stomach growled, just like it did when he was real hungry, but he wasn’t hungry. He was afraid—for himself, yes, but more for Mr. O’Ballivan and that Mexican he rode with, the one with the good boots. For Maddie and Terran and the whole town of Haven, come to that. He’d seen the look in Rex’s eyes; his brother wanted folks to be sorry for what had happened to Landry, and Garrett, too, and he’d see that they were.

  “They’ll kill me when they get back here,” he told Undine calmly. “And maybe you, too.”

  Undine took a few moments to think, then nodded once, briskly and with decision. “What we’ve got to do is move that gold,” she said.

  “What gold?” Ben asked, stalling. He could make it to Undine’s horse, but she was carrying a pistol, stuck in the waistband of her pants. Something about the angle of it made Ben believe she’d be fast on the draw, even if she was a woman.

  “Never mind what gold,” Undine snapped. “What we’ll do is, we’ll help ourselves to as much as we can carry, and then we’ll move on. By the time they get back, we’ll be down the road. Might even have time to stop at the barn and get you a horse of your own. You’ll slow me down too much if we ride double.”

  Ben merely nodded, waiting.

  Undine paused, as though she was listening for something on the wind, then started riffling through the bedrolls and saddlebags scattered on the ground. When she tossed the first bag to Ben, it proved so heavy as to almost knock him over. She found another and hurled that one at him, too, but this time he was ready and caught it easily.

  She took four more bags, besides the pair she’d entrusted to Ben, and headed for the horse.

  “Come on,” she said, stashing the clinking sacks in her s
addlebags and putting out one hand for what Ben was carrying. “We haven’t got any time to waste.”

  Ben paused, biting his lower lip. “I gotta make water first,” he said.

  Undine’s whole body tightened with exasperation. “Well, hurry up about it,” she said. “And give me that gold before you make for the brush.” She stopped, watching him intently. “Don’t get any fancy ideas about running away, either. I’ve got a fast horse here and I’ll be on you before you’ve gone a hundred yards.”

  Ben nodded, handed over the gold and slipped into the bushes. There, he relieved himself, both because he urgently needed to, had since Rex had grabbed him, and because he knew Undine would listen for the sound. Then, after he’d buttoned his pants, he bent, picked up a flat stone and tucked it into the back of his shirt. It felt cold and hard against his bare skin.

  Undine had already mounted up when he got back to her. She didn’t say anything, just shifted one foot out of the stirrup on the left-hand side so Ben could climb up behind her.

  “It’s hard to believe a woman would be part of an outlaw gang,” he said when they’d ridden a little way. Meanwhile, he was fidgeting to pull out his shirt tail in back and get hold of the rock before it fell to the ground.

  Undine laughed. “Is it?” she teased in a mean voice, talking loud so he’d hear her over the beat of the horse’s hooves. “Well, land sakes, Ben Donagher, there’s more to life than a twelve-year-old-boy can imagine.”

  “I’ll be thirteen in seven months,” he said.

  She turned far enough in the saddle to look square into his face. “Quit that squirming around,” she said. “That gold is deep in those saddlebags, and if you try to get to it, I’ll know.”

  Ben made himself look meek. He even swallowed, so she’d see. He had the rock in his right hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to whack her in the face with it. She might be kin to a killer, and part of a robber gang, but she was pretty, and she’d been kind to him sometimes, in her calculating way.

  “I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” he assured her, keeping his fist, with the rock tightly clasped in it, back of his thigh. “Steal, I mean.”

  “Holier than thou,” Undine said in the kind of voice St. Peter might call up to turn somebody back at the Pearly Gates. “That’s what comes of spending so much time with a prude like Maddie Chancelor.”

  Ben kept his face still until she turned around. Then he hit her square in the back of the head, not as hard as he could have done, but hard enough.

  Undine sagged in the saddle and blood gushed through the back of her hair, which was pinned up just above her nape. After he’d reached around to catch the reins in his left hand, he steered for softer ground and then shoved her off.

  She lay moaning in the dirt, face turned to the sky.

  “Don’t you die,” Ben told her. Then he reined the horse around and rode for town.

  * * *

  THERE WERE LANTERNS burning inside the jailhouse and the door was wide open. Terran stopped on the wooden sidewalk, thinking Ben might have come to pay a visit to his pa. Sure, it was practically the middle of the night, but Ben did crazy things like that sometimes. Hadn’t he tried to cross the river, walking a slippery log, and nearly drowned himself, along with Miss Blackstone? Hadn’t he made a habit of running off whenever the mood took him?

  Terran felt a certain relief. If Ben was here, at the jailhouse, he’d take him back to the mercantile. Get him by the ear, if he had to. Then he’d give a yell for Maddie, to let her know all was well, and quick as you could say “Jack Robinson,” he’d be in his own bed again, sound asleep.

  He was growing. Maddie said that all the time. And a boy that was growing needed his rest.

  He stepped up to the threshold.

  Mr. O’Ballivan was there, and Rhodes and Vierra. The big old yellow dog, too. No sign of Ben, though, or Mungo, either.

  Mr. O’Ballivan frowned. “What are you doing, roaming the street at this hour?”

  If he’d had a father, Terran figured he would have said something just like that. It pleased him a little, hearing it from Sam, and made him sad at the same time. “Maddie sent me to tell you Ben’s gone again.”

  Mr. O’Ballivan set his mug of coffee aside and approached, still frowning. “Where do you reckon he’s gotten off to this time?”

  “I thought maybe here,” Terran answered glumly. The way things were going, he’d be lucky if he saw his bed again before morning. Maddie would make him go to school, too, no matter what. “Where’s Mr. Donagher?”

  Sam laid a hand on Terran’s shoulder. Sometimes, when he felt the need, Terran liked to call Mr. O’Ballivan by his first name, inside his head. “Never mind that. You go and tell Maddie that the two of you ought to stay inside the mercantile and keep to the back.”

  “But what about Ben?”

  “I’ll find him,” Sam said. A look passed between him and Vierra, who was seated behind the desk Terran still thought of as belonging to Warren, but it was a look he couldn’t make sense of.

  “Maddie said—”

  Sam’s grasp tightened on Terran’s shoulder, not painfully but hard enough to hold his attention. “I don’t care what Maddie said. Just do as I told you, Terran.”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “I’m not concerned about that, either. Go.”

  Terran went. He walked along the sidewalk first, then he darted onto the road and ran right down the center.

  If Mr. O’Ballivan said they were to go back to the mercantile and keep themselves away from the front, where there were windows, that meant there would be shooting.

  * * *

  TOM SINGLETON RODE at the front, like always, and drew rein when the band reached the little rise overlooking Haven. Rex tried to ride past him, eager to get to his pa, but Tom reached out and grabbed hold of the bridle strap, fair tripping Rex’s horse.

  He was little, Tom was, but he was strong, and he was mean. Rex looked forward to shooting him in the back one day soon, but it wasn’t likely the other men would take Rex’s part in a gunfight, should one break out then and there, so he had to bide his time and mind his manners.

  Tom had drawn his pistol, and he shoved the barrel tip hard into Rex’s temple. There’d be a bruise by sunup—if he lived long enough to greet the light of a new day.

  “Hold up,” Tom said, though it was clear to everybody that Rex had already done that. “I know you want to call your daddy to account for what he did to Garrett, but only fools go plunging into a situation where they don’t know what’s waiting for them.”

  Rex put down a suicidal urge to spit in Tom Singleton’s prissy-assed, womanly face. He swallowed instead, but a charge went through him, just like he’d gripped a lightning bolt with both hands. His throat went tight and dry as the Mexican desert, and he couldn’t get a word past it.

  “You’re not a fool, are you, Rex?” Tom asked in that croony way he had that made a man’s skin crawl up his back like a whole army of ants.

  Rex couldn’t get the answer out, but it pounded inside his head. No, damn it, he wasn’t a fool. Furthest thing from it.

  He had his share of the gold, and plans to hightail it north, all the way to Canada, where he’d make up a new name for himself and start over fresh. He planned to sleep, drink and chase women for a while, but in time, he reckoned he’d buy some land and a few cattle and take himself a wife.

  No, sir, he wasn’t a fool.

  “Maybe you ought to wait right here,” Tom said, thoughtful-like, and before Rex had a chance to catch his breath, Tom had cocked a bullet into the chamber of that pistol, and the tip of the barrel bit deeper into Rex’s temple. “You’re a hothead, Rex, just like that brother of yours.”

  Rex tensed. Every time he remembered what happened to Landry, down there in the badlands on the other side of the border, it hit him fresh. Landry was gone. By rights, he should have been riding with the outfit right now, with a share of the gold to show for all he’d suffered. Making plans to
head up to Canada, his horse traveling alongside Rex’s.

  But it wasn’t to be, and Tom Singleton was the main reason. Oh, they’d shot off half Landry’s foot, the Ranger and that Mexican he was riding with, but it was Tom who’d put Landry down like a crippled cow. Rex knew that for sure, even though the others had made sure he wasn’t there to see.

  “I got to go with you, Tom,” Rex choked out. Tom and the others were set on killing O’Ballivan and the other man so they could enjoy the fruits of their labors in peace, and Rex wanted to see those two dead more than anybody did, but he had something else in mind, too. He had to tell his pa about Landry, and once he’d done that, he’d put a bullet square between the old man’s eyes.

  He owed that much to Garrett.

  “I don’t like that idea,” Tom said pleasantly. “O’Ballivan and Vierra aren’t the sort to give up. Track a man to the end of his days, just for the sheer orneriness of it. I mean to see that they stay put for good, and I can’t do that if you’re going to do something crazy.”

  “I won’t do nothin’ crazy,” Rex promised, his heart hunkered in his throat and expanding so as to burst.

  “No,” Tom said quietly, “you won’t.”

  Rex felt hopeful. Especially when Tom lowered the gun, though a glance downward showed his finger was still on the trigger. In the next instant, though, Tom flipped that pistol end over end and the butt of it came at Rex’s face.

  A burst of pain blinded him.

  His last conscious thought, as he toppled to the ground, was that Tom Singleton had split his skull wide open, like a melon at a summer picnic.

  * * *

  SAM WALKED the river’s edge, picking his way along in the darkness, reminded of Abigail at every step. He called Ben’s name, over and over, but there was no response. He checked the schoolhouse, for the second time, and it proved fruitless, as before.

  He paused at the door of the shed, where Mungo Donagher lay bound on the floor. “Old man,” he said, “I’m looking for your youngest boy. He lit out from Maddie’s place sometime tonight. If you know where he might go, you’d better tell me.”