She had never gotten that slicker out, so she had been soaked to the skin within a minute of the storm starting. She wouldn’t have thought it was possible to get even wetter, but somehow she did during that long ride through day-turned-night.
She tried to twist her wrists back and forth to see if there was any play in the rope around them, but Mustache had done a good job of tying her. She might be able to work her way loose—in two or three days.
She didn’t think she had that much time to spare.
Although she couldn’t tell which direction they were going or how far they had traveled, she knew when their path sloped upward. She could feel that in the horse underneath her. The ground was muddy and the footing was tricky. Her captors had to slow down.
The rain wasn’t falling as hard now, Denny realized. The thunder and lightning were still present but not constant. The storm was weakening. It might even break up completely or move on.
The trail leveled off again. The rain abruptly stopped hitting her, even though Denny could still hear it falling.
That was because they had entered a cavelike area underneath a huge outcropping of rock, she realized as she lifted her head again and looked around. The space was forty feet long and twenty feet deep, with the roof sloping down almost to the floor in the back. The gloom was thick in here, although Denny could tell that the sky was lighter outside now as the storm lessened in intensity.
The two men dismounted. Big Boy held Denny’s horse while Mustache cut the rope between her wrists and ankles. She started to slide off headfirst, but Mustache caught her belt and stopped her from falling.
“Can’t have you busting your head open,” he said. He pulled her the other way and helped her down from the horse. Then he lowered her to the ground, which seemed to have a thin layer of dirt over solid rock.
Denny was all too aware of how her soaked clothes were plastered to her body, revealing every feminine curve. So far, though, they hadn’t shown any real interest in molesting her, despite an occasional admiring glance that seemed almost involuntary.
How long that would continue to be true, she didn’t know.
Big Boy put his hands on his hips and grinned down at her as he loomed over her.
“Sorry we can’t make you more comfortable,” he said. “Got to make sure you don’t try to pull no tricks on us.”
Muffled grunts came from Denny, a string of curses that were decidedly unladylike, although with the gag they were also indecipherable.
“Don’t you worry, we’re gonna take good care of you,” Big Boy went on. “And as long as you behave, we ain’t a-gonna hurt you. You’re a mighty important gal, Miss Jensen. Worth a heap of money to us.”
That was it, Denny thought. Confirmation that they had kidnapped her in order to demand ransom from her parents. That was why they didn’t want to hurt her right now.
But she had seen their faces. No matter what her captors said, they couldn’t afford to leave her alive to identify them. Once they got the payoff they were after, the only value she would have for them would be—as a corpse.
Unless somebody realized she was missing and found her first.
Big Rock
For two days, replies had been filtering in from Brice’s telegrams to the other lawmen between Big Rock and the Wyoming border. None of them reported having seen the gang of bank robbers Marshal Long had wired about, but Brice hadn’t heard from all of them yet, either.
A storm was lurking to the northwest, with dark clouds, rumbles of thunder, and occasional flashes of distant lightning. The air in Big Rock, though, remained still and oppressive at this point. Brice stood on the boardwalk in front of Hukill’s Barbershop with Monte Carson, whom he had run into a few minutes earlier.
The sheriff took off his hat and rubbed his sleeve across his forehead. Then as he replaced the hat, he said, “When the air gets so heavy like this, I wish it’d just go ahead and rain to break things up.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty uncomfortable,” Brice agreed. His hat was thumbed to the back of his head. “You know what they say, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Monte chuckled. “That’s sure enough true. Sometimes I wish—”
Whatever it was that Monte wished, it went unspoken, because at the moment, a woman’s voice said rather tentatively, “Marshal? Could I talk to you for a minute?”
Brice and Monte looked over to the end of this section of boardwalk, where two steps led down to an alley before the walk resumed again on the other side in front of Tompkins’s Apothecary and Yates’s Variety Store. Brice thought at first that he hadn’t ever seen the woman who stood there, but then he changed his mind and decided that she was vaguely familiar for some reason.
“You want to talk to Marshal Rogers, not me?” Monte asked with a frown.
“Yes, sir, Sheriff, that’s right,” she said. “If . . . if that’s not a problem.”
Monte shrugged and said, “Sure, if you want to. It’s a free country, and you’ve got a right to talk to whoever you like.”
“Thank you, Sheriff.”
Brice tugged his hat down, figuring this had to be official business, and asked, “What can I do for you, ma’am?”
The woman hesitated, and Monte said, “See you later, Brice.” He walked off as another peal of thunder rolled over the mountains in the distance.
Brice moved closer to the woman and smiled reassuringly. She was pretty, although a mite on the mousy side in a grayish-brown dress and a matching hat pushed down on her chestnut curls. As she gave him a weak smile in return, he remembered where he had seen her before.
“You work at the Brown Dirt Cowboy Saloon,” he said, then immediately regretted the surprised exclamation as she winced.
“That . . . that’s right,” she said. “Does it make a difference?”
“Not a bit,” he hastened to say. “What can I do for you?”
“There’s a man . . . He’s been bothering me . . . I mean, I know it’s my job . . . to associate with men, but this one . . . he scares me—”
Brice held a hand up to stop her.
“This really sounds like something you ought to talk to Sheriff Carson about. I’m a federal deputy marshal. There are only certain crimes that fall under my jurisdiction.”
“I know that. But this man, he talked about how the federal law wanted him. He bragged about it. He . . . he even said he shot a deputy U.S. marshal over in Kansas.”
Brice’s heart rate kicked up a notch. “He killed a marshal?”
“Well . . . he didn’t actually say he killed him, just that he shot him. But that’s pretty bad, too, isn’t it, even if it wasn’t fatal?”
“Plenty bad enough,” Brice replied grimly. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He was talking about leaving town.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know that, either. I’m sorry.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was big . . . well, broad-shouldered, anyway . . . maybe forty years old. Brown hair getting thin.”
That description could fit a lot of men, Brice thought.
“And he had a scar, here,” the girl went on, tracing a path from her right cheek down over her jawline. “And another one above his left eye.”
Brice nodded. That was more to go on. He could take that description and ask around town. He could also look through the wanted posters in Monte’s office and even wire the chief marshal’s office in Denver. If this varmint had gunned down a federal star packer, Brice wanted to get on his trail.
“All right,” he told the girl. “I’ll take care of it. Thank you for looking me up and telling me about it, Miss . . . ?”
“Sutton,” she said. “Rosemarie Sutton.”
“I’m obliged to you, Miss Sutton. If I find the man, or find out anything else about him, would you like for me to come to the Brown Dirt Cowboy and let
you know, so you don’t have to worry?”
“That would be wonderful, Marshal. Thank you.” She reached out, rested the fingertips of a gloved hand on his forearm, just as Denny had done a few days earlier, and added, “You can come see me anytime you like.”
CHAPTER 35
The cave
The rain stopped and the clouds broke up enough for sunlight to slant through here and there, but that occurred so late in the afternoon that it wasn’t long before night fell and darkness closed in again. The shadows were thick as mud in the cavelike area under the rock.
It was crowded under there, too, with three people and three horses. Big Boy tied all three animals together with a lead rope and then anchored that rope with a large rock he hauled in from outside.
Mustache went to the back of the space and built a fire small enough that it would be difficult to spot from outside unless someone just happened to be in exactly the right spot to do so. He broke out a coffeepot, a frying pan, and a bag of supplies, then started rustling up a meal.
Denny couldn’t do anything except lie on her side, watching with a limited field of view as her two captors went about their chores. The only bit of relief came when Big Boy walked over to her once he was finished with the horses and knelt beside her to remove the gag.
“Don’t go to yellin’,” he warned her. “I’ll just put it back in there if you do.”
Denny opened and closed her mouth and worked her jaw back and forth to get the stiffness out of it. The gag had left a foul taste in her mouth, but she couldn’t do anything about that.
“I won’t yell,” she said when she trusted herself to speak again. “Out here in the middle of nowhere like this, what good would it do?”
“That’s right,” Big Boy agreed, unwittingly confirming that they were a long way from anywhere—but Denny had already had a pretty good idea that was true.
She knew that by now, her parents would have noticed she hadn’t returned from the line camp. Smoke, Cal, Pearlie, and the other members of the ranch crew would soon be out searching for her, if they weren’t already.
Since she hadn’t been able to tell exactly where they were going, she wasn’t sure they were still on Sugarloaf range. She didn’t recall ever being in this particular spot before, but she didn’t know every inch of the ranch. She was familiar with most of it, to be sure, but it was possible this location was still on her parents’ land and she wouldn’t know it.
Not that it mattered. Smoke would go anywhere, all the way to the ends of the earth if he had to, in order to find her.
The problem was, that downpour would have wiped out any trail the horses left. Smoke and the others would be searching blind.
Mustache had even picked up her carbine and hat before they rode off, not leaving behind any clue to indicate the spot where she had been taken captive.
Denny’s stomach clenched as the smells of coffee, bacon, and biscuits began to fill the air, along with the smoke from the fire. Despite the various aches and pains she had accumulated during the fight with the two men, she was hungry and there was no denying it. Her resentment grew stronger as she lay there and watched them hunkering on their heels beside the fire, filling their bellies and slurping coffee from tin cups.
After a while, her irritation got the best of her. She said, “Hey! If either of you had even a shred of human decency, you’d feed your poor prisoner.”
“Dadgum it, she’s right, Dave,” Big Boy said. “We been chowin’ down and didn’t even think about the lady.”
Mustache—or Dave—winced as his partner said his name. But it was too late to call it back. He swallowed the last of the coffee in his cup, then picked up the empty tin plate he had just set aside. After placing a biscuit and a couple of strips of bacon on it, he poured more coffee into the cup.
“We don’t have any fancy china or crystal, but I reckon you can make do,” he said as he stood up and came toward Denny. The faint firelight made his shadow huge and grotesque as it fell over her. He told Big Boy, “Go stand on the other side of her.”
Big Boy moved around so Denny couldn’t see him anymore. Dave knelt in front of her, set the plate and cup on the ground, and took hold of her shoulders so he could lift her into a sitting position. She could have lashed out with her bound legs and kicked him, but she didn’t see what good it would do at this point.
“Untie her hands.”
Denny felt Big Boy’s fingers working clumsily at the knots. The man swore under his breath, then said, “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am. I’m tryin’ back here, but my friend tied you up mighty good.”
“Cut the rope if you have to,” Dave said. “We’ve got plenty more.”
“No need to waste perfectly good rope. I’ll get it . . . There, I think it’s startin’ to come loose.”
The job of untying her required another couple of minutes, but finally the rope fell away from Denny’s wrists. As it did, she felt the back of one of Big Boy’s hands brush across the small of her back. It might have been an accident, or he might have enjoyed feeling her body, even through her damp shirt. He didn’t pursue it beyond that, however, so she didn’t waste any time or energy taking offense.
She already had plenty to be offended about, where these two were concerned.
She didn’t realize how numb her hands had gotten while her wrists were tied until blood started flowing back into them and a million pins and needles jabbed into her flesh. She pulled her arms around in front of her and flexed her fingers to get the feeling back sooner.
Dave left the plate and cup within her reach as he stood up and backed off a couple of steps.
“Don’t try anything,” he warned her. “Benjy’s standing behind you, and if you go to throw hot coffee in my face or anything like that, he’ll clout you one. We don’t aim to hurt you, but we’re not going to let you hurt us, either.”
“Hey, you said my name!” Big Boy—Benjy—exclaimed.
“Well, you said mine earlier.”
“It ain’t easy not to, is it? I mean, when we’re used to callin’ each other by name all the time.”
Denny ignored their yammering and picked up the cup of coffee. The wet clothes and the high-country wind had settled a chill into her bones. The warmth that came through the tin cup as she wrapped her hands around it was mighty welcome. She sipped the strong black brew to get some of that warmth inside her.
She picked up a strip of bacon. It took some self-control not to shove the whole thing into her mouth. She nibbled on it instead, tore off a piece of biscuit and ate it, washing it down with more coffee. She felt strength seeping back into her from the food and drink.
After a few minutes, she looked up at Dave, gestured with the half-full tin cup, and said, “You know what would make this even better? A shot of whiskey.”
“Whoo-hoo!” Benjy chortled. “I didn’t expect her to come out with that, did you, Dave?” Obviously, they weren’t going to worry about names anymore. “We figured you’d be some dainty little rich gal, ma’am.”
“You can be rich without being dainty,” Denny said. “Nobody ever accused me of being dainty. Now, how about that whiskey?”
Dave gave her a suspicious frown, pointed a finger at her, and said, “You stay right there. If she moves, you know what to do.”
“Yep,” Benjy said.
Dave went over to his horse, reached into a saddlebag, and took out a silver flask. He came back to Denny, unscrewed the cap, and splashed a little whiskey into the cup she held out. She swirled around the mixture, sipped it, and sighed.
“Just like I said, that’s a lot better.” She took another drink. “You ought to try it. Just what is it you boys want with me, anyway?”
“Now, that’s none of your business,” Dave said.
“Well, then, whose business is it?” Denny demanded. “I’m the one who’s the prisoner here. If you want money, I can arrange for you to get plenty of it. You obviously know who my father is.”
“Yeah,” Dave said, frown
ing worriedly. “Smoke Jensen.”
“That’s right. You know what sort of reputation he has, too.”
Benjy said, “He’s supposed to be a ring-tailed devil with a gun. But he’s got to be gettin’ kinda old by now. He must’ve slowed down some.”
Denny laughed and then said, “Yeah. You just go on believing that.”
“We don’t want to tangle with Smoke Jensen,” Dave said. “That’s not what this is about.”
“Then here’s what you should do. Leave me here . . . Shoot, leave my ankles tied if you want, just toss a knife down outside where I can crawl to it. Take my horse with you, leave it a mile from here, and ride away. Just ride away. You’ll have a good start, and chances are, you’ll get away.”
“Not interested,” Dave said as he shook his head. “Your pa could still try to track us down.”
“Then how about this? Do what I told you, with the knife and the horse, and then I’ll stay the rest of the night right here. I won’t ride back home until tomorrow, and when I do, I’ll tell my folks I got lost and had to seek shelter from the storm. My father will never even know what you’ve done.”
“Why would you do that for us?” Benjy asked.
Denny shrugged and said, “Well, other than knocking me around some, you haven’t treated me as badly as you could have.”
“That’s right,” Dave said. “You need to be sure and tell your pa that.”
“I’d rather not tell him anything, and that’s what’ll happen if you boys take the deal I’m offering you. I mean, no matter how much ransom you ask for, is it going to be worth it if you have to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder for Smoke Jensen? And if that’s not enough, I have a couple of uncles and some cousins who aren’t going to be happy to hear about this, either.”
Benjy still stood behind her, but she heard him swallow hard. He said, “I’m startin’ to think maybe we bit off a mite more than we oughta be chewin’, Dave. Maybe we should—”
“No!” Dave said. “She’s just trying to mix us up and get us to do something stupid.”
Rising Fire Page 22