The Last Outlaw

by Rosanne Bittner

  “Thank you for your help.” Randy wanted to scream for Jake. She’d never been afraid of everything and everyone like this. She hated the constant panic, hated confining Jake the way she’d been doing, wanting him constantly with her. The only place she felt safe was in his arms. What if that could no longer be? Her whole life wrapped around Jake Harkner. No other man knew her like Jake did—physically, mentally, emotionally, intimately. No man loved her or ever would love her like Jake did. They were like one person. If she lost him, she, too, would be lost. She stood there a moment, trying to think straight, trying to get her bearings.

  “Someone…please send a runner to the J&L. I need my son,” she told James Bird. “As soon as we get to Jake, please go get a messenger—someone who can ride hard and fast and get Lloyd here in five days instead of six. I mean…” Think! She felt so confused. “I mean, it will take someone two or three days to get to the ranch and another two or three to get back here.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll send someone.” James and Susan helped her walk to the doctor’s office.

  Yes, it would help having Lloyd here. Her loyal, loving son would know what to do. He would at least be someone to lean on. He’d helped her, too…last winter…when those men…

  Lloyd was so much like his father…strong and dependable. And having her daddy here would help little Tricia not be afraid. Maybe Lloyd would bring Evie, who loved her father beyond measure. She would want to be with Jake. Evie was such a faithful Christian woman. Her prayers were strong. She could pray for her father. She’d helped Jake through the awful ordeal back in Denver last summer, sitting with Lloyd when they thought he was dying. It was Evie who’d help bring Jake out of that awful darkness.

  “I’ve never seen shooting like that,” James told her. “Never in all my born years.”

  “I don’t know how he could be so accurate and fast when he was already wounded,” Susan added. “I saw blood at his side when he stepped out from behind that wagon.” She shook her head. “I saw those guns, and I thought my life was over. I felt that bullet whiz right over my head. It nearly parted my scalp!” She squeezed Randy’s arm. “He’s one heck of a man, Mrs. Harkner.”

  Randy wanted to smile but couldn’t. “Yes, he is. He’s more wonderful than anybody knows. Most only think about the bad. Few see the good.”

  Flash powder exploded as a man with a camera stepped in front of them and took a picture of Randy. She gasped and turned away. “Go away! Go away!” she screamed.

  James and Susan glanced at each other uneasily. They didn’t understand like Jake would.

  “I have to get to Jake,” she told them, starting to sob. “I have to get to…my husband.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we’re almost there,” James told her.

  They reached the steps to the doctor’s office, where people milled about outside. Randy hesitated.

  “I…I left a hat box. I think it’s by the Silver Saddle. That’s where Jake was standing when…when…”

  “I’ll go look for it,” Susan told her.

  “Take it to the Gold Dust Hotel. Give it to my housekeeper, Teresa.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Someone brought Jake’s jacket to Randy. “Ma’am, he dropped this when he went runnin’ to the bank,” a nameless man told her. “A bunch of peppermint spilled out. I picked it all up and put it back in the bag and into the pocket of the jacket.” He held it out.

  Peppermint! Jake had remembered the peppermint. She took the jacket and held it close to her heart, bending her head and breathing in her husband’s familiar scent. How many times had they shared a stick of peppermint in the morning, biting each end of the candy until their lips met? She raised her head and just stared at the door. “I’m afraid to go inside.”

  “We’ll help you,” James told her. “Might be your husband is awake and needs you, so you ought to go in.”

  Randy nodded. “Yes.” She took a deep breath. “Just go find the hat box and take it to the hotel, please. And send someone to the J&L. Thank you for helping me. I’ll be fine now.” She had to be brave. She had to.

  The elderly couple looked at each other, James shaking his head. They waited while Randy walked inside on her own.

  James took his wife’s arm. “We’d better go get a rider to head for the J&L.”

  Susan shook her head. “Such a little thing. Her arm felt so thin.”

  “I noticed,” James agreed. “The woman has been through so much, married to a man like that.”

  Susan nodded. “I’ve read the book.”

  James took a deep breath. “Well, that’s a lot for a woman to take, and think of all those headlines last summer. It looks like Harkner will make headlines again. But this time he’s quite the hero, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose. But take it from a woman—this might be something his wife can’t handle. A person can take only so much.”

  They headed for the train depot, where messengers for distant ranches could usually be found looking for work. Someone had to ride to the J&L.

  Six

  Randy managed to move her legs to walk inside the doctor’s office. Jake lay on a long table with just a sheet under him. Randy’s first thought was how hard and uncomfortable it had to be compared to their huge, specially built bed made of black walnut…back home on the J&L…in their loft bedroom…where she could lie in his arms at night and feel so safe…where they’d made love too many times to count. Jake always knew how to make it beautiful…knew how to make her feel beautiful. People didn’t understand why he was so protective, how he could be friends with prostitutes without being untrue to the woman he loved far and above all the others. It all came from his childhood, how women of the night had risked their lives to protect him from his devil of a father.

  Why did that fill her thoughts now, of all times? Two nurses and the doctor were working frantically getting Jake’s clothes off. He was a big man, six feet four inches, and not easy to work with. Through it all, one of the nurses pressed gauze tight against the wound in his side.

  “Oh my! What happened to his back?” one of the nurses commented.

  Randy spoke up. “His father did that to him, with the buckle end of a belt.”

  The doctor glanced her way. “I saw you out in the street. Are you his wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “He asked for you.”

  Randy held the jacket closer, taking heart in the comment. “He’s conscious?”

  “Randy?” It was Jake!

  Randy laid the jacket aside and rushed to stand near him, touching his face. “Jake, I’m here!”

  A nurse pulled a sheet up to cover him to just below the hip bones, leaving the wound in his left side exposed. The nurse who held gauze against the wound grabbed even more gauze and pressed tightly to stave the continued bleeding. Randy cringed at all the blood, noticing the skin around the outside of the gauze patch was a deep purple. Internal bleeding? The purple was spreading fast. The deep gash across the left side of Jake’s head had finally stopped bleeding, but his eyes remained closed.

  “Jake, I’m here. I’m here,” Randy told him again. “Are you still awake? When I saw you unconscious in the street—”

  Jake actually opened his eyes again and managed to reach up and grasp her hand, squinting from pain. “Button?”

  “She’s fine. She’s with Teresa at the hotel.”

  “That…other lady…”

  “She wasn’t hurt. She and her husband are so grateful to you.”

  He noticed the bruise on her cheek. “You’re…hurt!”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s just a bruise.” Randy squeezed his hand. “Jake, you have to hang on. Don’t you die on me! You can’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”

  He closed his eyes again. “Lloyd always says…I’m too mean to die…remember?”

  Randy smiled through tears and l
eaned down to kiss him lightly. “I can’t do this without you, Jake,” she said in a near whisper. “Don’t leave me!”

  He kept hold of her hand. “I’m…right here. Don’t be scared.”

  “Mrs. Harkner, you’ll have to move out of the way,” the doctor told her. “I’ve got to get the bullet out and make sure there isn’t some serious internal damage. I have to find out where all the bleeding is coming from.”

  “But I have to be with him.”

  “Then move around to stand at his head. If you’ve got the stomach for it, you can stay while I take out the bullet and sew him up.”

  Randy found some of her old strength at the man’s remark. “I’ve got the stomach for it,” she answered curtly. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve got the stomach for, the things I’ve been through or the things my husband has been through. He’s a strong, tough man—probably the toughest you’ve ever worked on.”

  “His age?”

  “Almost sixty-two but going on forty—that’s how tough he is.”

  “Most folks know about Jake Harkner, ma’am. You don’t need to explain to me. But I need to stop this bleeding.” He looked at one of the nurses. “Give him some chloroform.” The doctor removed the blood-soaked wad of gauze from the wound, touching around it with his hands.

  Jake grimaced and stiffened from pain. “Jesus, Doc, that hurts like hell!”

  Randy ached for him, keeping her hands on either side of his face.

  “You telling me where it hurts helps me know about where the bullet is,” the doctor told Jake.

  One of the nurses gently pulled Randy’s hands away from Jake and laid a damp white cloth over Jake’s nose and mouth. In moments, he went limp again.

  “Don’t give him too much,” the doctor told her. “He’s a tough man and can take some of the pain. Too much of that stuff can affect the heart, especially for an older man.”

  Randy’s stomach tightened. Could the chloroform kill him? Not Jake! How many old bullet wounds did he already have? His father’s beatings didn’t kill him. The awful shooting back in Guthrie, where he nearly bled to death from a leg wound, didn’t kill him. The wound he’d suffered in the shoot-out back in California didn’t kill him. My God, how long ago was that? Lloyd had only been a baby. Acute pneumonia in prison didn’t kill him. He was the toughest man she’d ever known…and yet the gentlest…with his little granddaughters…with Evie…with her…in the night…

  The doctor went to work, and at first, Jake didn’t seem to feel anything. Randy thought about that first time they met…Jake barging into a dry goods store where she’d been shopping. He was a gruff, bearded, wanted man then, an outlaw who’d ended up in a shoot-out right in front of her. She’d been so afraid of him that she shot him herself with a little handgun, and he just looked at her—so surprised. He could have killed her then, but he just ran out.

  He’d lived through that wound, too.

  “I took a bullet out of Jake myself once,” she told the doctor rather absently. “He was only thirty then. It’s a long story—how it happened.” And later, he saved my life. I was hurt and he was so good to me, so gentle with me, and we knew we were in love.

  Jake groaned, and she leaned down and kissed his forehead, terrified he’d wake up too soon and feel the awful pain. “Jake, I’m here.”

  “Yo te amo…”

  “I love you, too. Don’t you die on me, Jake.” She leaned close to his ear. “Remember that night in the wagon—that first time we made love? We didn’t even know where we were, and you were so scared to love someone. A big, brave, wild outlaw, running from the law and running from love. I was the one thing you couldn’t fight and you couldn’t run from, Jake Harkner.”

  Randy felt more of her old self struggling to come back. Most of their life it had been Jake who’d needed her, Jake who drew his strength from her. She’d been his only barrier from going over the edge into darkness. But the last few months, she’d been the one who needed him to keep her from falling. She wasn’t sure she could ever find the woman she used to be, but now she needed to be the strong one. She’d lost some of that strength when Lloyd was shot and she thought she’d lost her son…more when she sat through a hearing that could have resulted in her husband being hanged…and she lost the rest of it last winter…

  She shook away the ugly memory. She must not think about it or she wouldn’t be strong enough for Jake right now. She had to find a way to put it all behind her and find the old Randy, the one Jake loved most.

  He groaned again, this time louder. Randy noticed him clenching his fists.

  “Jake, I’m right here! I’m right here!”

  How many times had he told her that very thing over the last few months?

  The doctor ordered a little more chloroform. For nearly an hour, he probed and stitched on the inside, then stitched up the outside, dousing everything with alcohol and iodine. Finally, he wrapped the wound, ordering men to come in and carry Jake to a bed in another room. Randy felt sick at his cries of pain.

  Through a fog of loneliness and fear, she heard the doctor tell her he thought Jake would be fine, that he just needed to rest now…to sleep. She could stay with him. Everything happened in a shroud of disbelief and uncertainty…strangers…all strangers. All she wanted and needed was Jake.

  The doctor walked out and closed the door. Randy realized she didn’t even know his name. She took off her hat, then looked down to realize she still had blood on the skirt of her dress. She should go back to the hotel, wash and change, and see about Tricia, but not yet. Not yet. She had to stay with Jake. He had to wake up and hold her first so she knew he’d be all right.

  She removed her shoes, unpinned her hair, and let it fall. Jake liked it long and loose. She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Jake always told her how beautiful she was. Brad Buckley couldn’t change the way Jake Harkner touched her or made love to her or looked at her with those dark eyes and that melting smile.

  A nurse brought his jacket into the room, as well as Randy’s reticule.

  Shivering from shock, Randy set her handbag aside and picked up the jacket to pull it on, right over the jacket she already wore against the morning’s chill. Putting on Jake’s jacket made it feel like his arms were around her.

  She lay down on his good side and nestled herself against him. “Don’t leave me, Jake,” she said softly near his ear.

  “Mi esposa,” he muttered from somewhere in his own semi-consciousness. “Tu eres…mi vida.”

  Seven

  Attorney Peter Brown opened the newspaper, settling in behind his large oak desk in his home in north Chicago. The headlines stunned him.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he muttered. “Jake did it again.”

  He smiled and shook his head as he read the stunning, bold print.

  JAKE HARKNER FOILS BANK ROBBERY IN BOULDER, COLORADO!

  From outlaw to lawman to hero, Jake Harkner, the notorious outlaw turned U.S. Marshal, reprised his lawman instincts on June twelfth in Boulder, Colorado, when he shot it out with nine men who intended to rob the Boulder City Bank. The robbers were led by George Callahan, the nemesis of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The robbers killed bank teller John Drake and Boulder’s Sheriff Mike Billings. Harkner himself was seriously wounded, but is expected to recover. He single-handedly killed five of the nine men and wounded the other four. Callahan was among those killed.

  “Of course he was,” Peter said softly. “The man seldom shoots to wound.”

  Witnesses claim Harkner not only foiled the robbery, but also saved four hostages, his own wife and granddaughter among them. The other two hostages were a Mexican woman named Teresa Ramon and a retired school teacher, Mrs. Susan Bird, a resident of Boulder.

  The article was by Jeff Truebridge, the same reporter who had gotten famous off that book about Jake three years ago. The man had news connections everywhere. Someone
must have phoned him or wired him the news for the Chicago papers as soon as it happened.

  Jeff lived in Chicago now, but had remained good friends with Jake and his family, and with Peter himself, who had his own fond but sometimes painful memories of Jake Harkner…and his wife. The article went on about the incident and about highlights from Jake’s past.

  Peter didn’t have to read most of that. He already knew it all. He’d lived the wild story of Jake Harkner, U.S. Marshal, when he’d practiced law in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

  He took a moment to reminisce. “My God, what a life that man has led,” he muttered. He reread the first part of the article.

  …hostages…Jake’s own wife and granddaughter…

  “Randy,” he said softly, “how much more will you suffer?” Peter had loved his first wife, still missed her since she’d died. And he loved Treena now. They were both getting older, he fifty-two and Treena forty-seven, and had been friends well before they married. When her husband passed, he and Treena had just seemed to fall in together as though it was only natural.

  But she knew. Treena knew. He’d talked about Randy and how much he loved her before he and Treena had even thought about marriage. Truth be known, if he could have his way, Randy would be running his mansion even now, ordering the servants around, accompanying him to the opera and concerts and business gatherings. And oh, how beautiful she’d be! Not many women possessed that kind of beauty, especially as they aged. He’d met her back in Guthrie, when she worked for him during the times when Jake was off in No Man’s Land chasing the worst of humanity. He’d watched her quietly worry, never knowing if her husband would make it back alive.

  She’d been through so much—running from the law, gun battles, Jake spending time in prison, lonely years when Jake would leave because he thought she’d be better off without him. God only knew what he’d done during those missing years. Some of his best friends were prostitutes, for heaven’s sake. But Randy took him back. She always took him back. There was no way she would ever leave her husband—no way she would ever love or give herself to another man. God knew he’d tried to reason with her. He’d offered her the world, but she’d turned him down for Jake.