Chance and Emily both shouted questions from inside the coach. Ace ignored them. He had to concentrate on his driving. He hadn’t had the team going anywhere near as fast. He hauled on the reins to force them to one side of the road, then veered back the other way, to make it more difficult for the rifleman to draw a bead on them. The wind plucked his hat off his head and it dangled at the back of his neck, hanging by its chin strap.
He spotted a muzzle flash in a clump of pine trees just to the right of the road about fifty yards ahead. “Chance!” he yelled. “Bushwhacker in the trees to the right up ahead!”
“I’ll get him!” Chance called back.
Ace felt the coach shift as his brother leaned out the window.
Chance’s Lightning barked as he peppered the trees with bullets.
It would be pure luck if one of those slugs found the bushwhacker, but Ace was more interested in forcing the hidden gunman to keep his head down. He had no way of knowing whether Chance’s shots were accomplishing that, other than the fact that he was still alive.
As the coach flashed past the pines, Emily’s coach gun boomed from inside the vehicle. She was at the other window on the same side, joining in the fight.
That came as no surprise to Ace, but he was a little taken aback when Bess hauled the old revolver from the holster at her waist, twisted around on the seat so she could aim behind his back, and opened fire on the trees as well.
With that much lead coming his way, the bushwhacker must have hunted some cover as Ace didn’t hear any more shots come from the pines, although it was hard to be sure. The horses’ hooves were thundering loudly on the hard-packed road.
The hammer of Bess’s gun fell on an empty chamber. She said, “Do you think we got him?”
“I don’t know, but the important thing is that he didn’t get us!” Ace hoped that was true. “Better check on Emily and Chance!”
Bess twisted the other way on the seat and leaned over to call through the windows on the coach’s left side, “Are you two all right in there?”
“We’re fine!” Emily shouted in reply. “Were either of you hit?”
“No, we’re all right.” Bess looked at the road ahead of them and asked Ace, “Do you think there are any more?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to keep the coach moving pretty fast until we get back to town, though, if that’s all right.”
She nodded. “The team can handle the pace. I’ll keep an eye out for any more bushwhackers.” She reloaded the revolver.
As fast as they were going, it didn’t take long to reach the outskirts of Palisade. Ace slowed the stagecoach as they entered the settlement. Quite a few people were standing on the boardwalks, looking curiously in the coach’s direction. They had either heard the shots or seen the big cloud of dust boiling up from the stagecoach’s wheels and knew that something was wrong.
Ace headed straight for the stage line’s barn. As he drew to a halt in front of it, Brian Corcoran and the old hostler Nate emerged from the barn.
“You been runnin’ these horses,” Nate said in an accusatory tone. He frowned at the sight of the foamy sweat flecking the animals’ flanks.
“It’s all right, Nate,” Bess said. “Ace didn’t have any choice. Somebody was shooting at us.”
“Shooting!” her father echoed. “Good Lord! Are you and your sister all right?”
“We’re fine, Pa,” Emily said as she swung one of the coach doors open and stepped down to the ground. “The varmint took a few potshots at us, but he missed.”
Emily didn’t know how close that first bullet had come, Ace thought as he climbed down from the driver’s box. He had a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach from being aware of just how near death he had come.
“I don’t want either of you girls leaving town until this is over,” Corcoran said. “It’s just too dangerous.”
“How is it going to be over?” Emily wanted to know. “Do you really think Eagleton will give up? This won’t stop until he gets what he wants—or he’s dead.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Corcoran snapped. “The answer isn’t killing.”
Eagleton obviously believed it was, Ace thought. He had no doubt that the mine owner was behind this latest ambush attempt. Despite Corcoran hoping for a peaceful solution, Ace knew sometimes that just wasn’t possible.
Sometimes there was just one answer to hot lead, and that was bullets of your own.
Buckhorn didn’t stop cursing to himself until he got back to Palisade later that afternoon. He had ridden a long way around because he hadn’t wanted to show up in town right after the failed ambush attempt on the stagecoach.
That Jensen boy who’d been driving the coach was the luckiest son of a gun Buckhorn had ever seen. He had drawn a good, steady bead on the kid’s head with his Winchester and squeezed off the shot so smoothly that a miss was virtually impossible.
At least it would have been if the blasted coach hadn’t rocked just then.
Even at that, Buckhorn knew he hadn’t missed by more than a couple inches. Unfortunately, those inches were as good as a yard.
He cursed as he rode. The bullet burn on his cheek stung like blazes. The slug hadn’t broken the skin, just scraped along his cheek and left a welt, but it was irritating. Not just from the pain, but also from the knowledge that one of the shots fired at him from the coach had come even closer to killing him than he had to killing Jensen!
It was an insult to his professionalism.
He came to the livery stable where he kept his horse, dismounted, and turned the animal over to the kid who worked there.
“What happened to your face, Mr. Buckhorn?” the youngster asked.
Buckhorn thought about telling him it was none of his damn business, but then he growled, “Ran into a low-hanging branch while I was riding.”
The kid nodded in acceptance of that explanation. “That’s too bad.”
Buckhorn just grunted and stalked out of the barn.
Reaching the hotel, he went into the lobby. The pair of gunmen he’d left there stood up from their chairs.
Buckhorn asked, “Any trouble while I was gone?”
“Not a bit, Joe,” one of them answered. “Well, there was some commotion in town earlier when the stage came in, but I don’t really know what it was about.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Buckhorn commented curtly. He went upstairs and knocked on the door of Eagleton’s suite.
Eagleton called to him to come in. He was standing in front of a mirror tying a string tie around his thick neck. Looking in the glass at his gunman, he asked, “Is it taken care of?”
“No,” Buckhorn answered bluntly. He was a plainspoken man when he was angry, even when it was at his own expense. “I missed.”
Eagleton turned slowly to look at him and raised one eyebrow. “I don’t pay you to miss,” he said coldly.
“I know that, boss. That’s why it won’t happen again.”
It wasn’t just about his job anymore, Buckhorn thought. Now he had a personal reason for wanting those Jensen boys dead.
And he wasn’t going to stop until they were.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I still wish I was going with you,” Bess said worriedly the next morning as Ace and Chance hitched up the team under the watchful eye of old Nate.
“We’ll be fine,” Ace assured her.
“Unless somebody ambushes us again,” Chance added, ignoring Ace’s frown. “The way things have been going, you can’t rule it out.”
“One way or another, that mail pouch has to get to the railroad station in Bleak Creek today,” Ace said. “So there’s no point in worrying about it.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Emily said. “I think you should take your rifle as well as the shotgun, Chance. If you see anything that looks the least bit suspicious, blaze away at it.”
Chance grinned. “No wonder you’re a girl after my own heart.”
“You can keep your heart,” Emily said with a s
nort. “I’m more interested in your shooting eye.”
“Let’s just hope nobody has to do any shooting,” Ace suggested, but he was going to be very surprised if the run turned out that way.
Brian Corcoran entered the barn, carrying the mail pouch he had collected from the post office inside the general store. He placed the pouch in the box mounted underneath the driver’s seat. “You wouldn’t know from the weight of it how important that pouch is to the line’s survival, boys. Take good care of it between here and Bleak Creek.”
“We will,” Ace promised. “The team’s ready, and so are we.” He looked at his brother. “Right, Chance?”
He nodded. “Right.” He took his Winchester from their gear and slid it onto the floorboard where it would be handy but not in the way.
The brothers climbed onto the stagecoach and Ace took up the reins. He gave the three members of the Corcoran family a smile and slapped the lines against the horses to get them moving. The coach rolled out of the barn and into Palisade’s main street.
Chance took off his hat and waved farewell to Bess, Emily, Corcoran, and Nate. He kept waving to the people on the boardwalks. Quite a few of the citizens were watching the stagecoach pull out. Some waved back, and a few even gave discreet cheers.
Most folks in Palisade didn’t openly support Brian Corcoran against Samuel Eagleton because the mine owner wielded too much power, but the stage line was important to them, too. The mail carried by the coach was their only line of communication with the rest of the world.
As Ace drove past the hotel, he glanced up and thought he saw a curtain flick back over one of the windows. He wondered if that was Eagleton watching them leave. He had no way of knowing which windows went with the mine owner’s suite, but somehow his gut told him he was right.
“We’re going to run into trouble on the way, aren’t we?” Chance asked as they left the settlement behind and rolled toward Timberline Pass. “Either there or in Bleak Creek.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Ace agreed. “But we’ll be ready for it.”
“You hope.”
“I’m counting on it. And so are the Corcorans.”
Eagleton growled a curse as he turned away from the window after watching the stagecoach pass.
Buckhorn knew his boss didn’t like being awake so early, but for some reason had wanted to watch the stagecoach leave town. “You’re sure you don’t want me to go after them?”
“You had your chance yesterday,” Eagleton snapped. “I sent a rider to Bleak Creek last night. Those damn Jensens will have a warm welcome waiting for them when they get there.”
Buckhorn shrugged. “Whatever you want, boss.” Anger bubbled inside him. He didn’t like being talked to that way . . . but Eagleton paid his wages, so he could talk any way he wanted to.
“I’m going back to bed,” Eagleton said as he started to untie the belt of his dressing gown. “I won’t need you for a while.”
Buckhorn nodded and left the suite. When he reached the lobby, he thought about getting his horse and going after the stagecoach on his own. If he caught up to it, killed the Jensen brothers, and wrecked the coach, the boss wouldn’t have any choice but to admit he was still the best. Buckhorn knew that shouldn’t matter to him, but it did.
He looked through the window, saw Rose Demarcus on the opposite boardwalk, and forgot about the blasted stagecoach and Eagleton’s troubles. He stepped out and crossed the street with long-legged strides, angling so that his path would intersect Rose’s. He didn’t look directly at her. Watched her out of the corner of his eye, instead. He wanted it to appear as if their meeting was accidental.
That seemed to work. As he stepped up onto the boardwalk, Rose said from his left, “Good morning, Joseph.”
Buckhorn stopped and turned his head toward her. “Morning, ma’am.” He touched a finger to the brim of his bowler hat and smiled, even though he knew that didn’t make his craggy face any less ugly. It was impossible to look at Rose Demarcus and not smile, he thought.
“Oh, my goodness.” She reached up to touch a fingertip to the bullet burn on his cheek. “What happened?”
Just that mere touch sent a jolt through him. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened the day before—he certainly didn’t want to admit to her that he had failed in a task given to him by his boss—so he fell back on the same fiction he had used when he was talking to the stable boy. “Nothing important. Just got scraped by a low-hanging branch while I was riding.” Then he changed the subject by adding, “You’re out and about sort of early today.”
Rose smiled. “Or very late, if I haven’t been to bed yet.”
“Yeah, I reckon that’s true.”
“But as a matter of fact, I am up early. I take a morning constitutional like this now and then. I enjoy destroying people’s illusions of me as strictly a nocturnal creature, like an owl.”
“I don’t figure anybody would ever mistake you for an owl, Miss Demarcus.”
“Rose,” she insisted.
“Well . . . all right, Rose.” He fell in beside her and they strolled along the boardwalk.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Samuel this morning.” Rose asked.
“Actually, he was up early, too, but he’s gone back to bed, I think.”
“Really? What made him stir from the sheets before the crack of noon?”
Buckhorn had to laugh but grew serious again. “He wanted to watch the stagecoach pull out. Those Jensen boys have taken over the Bleak Creek run from the Corcoran sisters.”
“I’ve heard some gossip around town about that. Samuel still wants to take over Mr. Corcoran’s stagecoach line, doesn’t he?”
Buckhorn had no idea how much Rose knew about Eagleton’s plans and schemes. Generally, the boss was a closemouthed man, but when it came to pillow talk, plenty of fellas had spilled more than they intended to, more than they would have in any other circumstance.
It seemed safe enough to nod and say, “Yeah, I reckon he’s still got his eye on it.”
“He won’t be satisfied until he owns everything in Palisade, will he?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Buckhorn replied cautiously.
Rose stopped, so he did, too. She looked over at him. “You know, Samuel doesn’t own my house or my business.”
Buckhorn figured he must have looked surprised because she went on.
“You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t,” he admitted. “I just thought—”
“And he doesn’t own me, either,” Rose said sharply. “Sometimes I think he’s forgotten that. But you should remember it, Joseph.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Buckhorn had no idea what she meant by the sudden, vehement declaration.
She relaxed and smiled again. “I should be getting back now, I suppose. There’s always work to do when you own a business.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“See, you’ve already forgotten that you’re supposed to call me Rose, not ma’am.”
“I’m sorry, Rose. I can walk you back to your place . . .”
“That’s not necessary. I’m sure I’ll see you later, Joseph.”
“I’ll be around,” he promised.
“Yes, you will. I’ve grown to count on that.”
An uneasy feeling stirred inside him as he watched her walk away. It was like standing on a cliff and looking down into a deep mountain lake and wondering what might be waiting under the surface . . . and just how deep a man might go if he ever dared to dive into it.
Ace was tense as the stagecoach started down the road from the pass, He concentrated, remembering everything Bess had told him the day before as well as the experience he had gained from handling the coach then. He had no trouble with the first turn.
Beside him, riding easily with a foot propped on the front of the box, Chance said, “Well, I’ll admit, I was a mite worried, but you seem to know what you’re doing.”
“You just keep an eye out for bu
shwhackers and I’ll handle the driving.”
Chance chuckled. “Gladly. You’re the sober, serious one, after all.”
As they rounded each of the turns, Ace’s confidence grew. He became more comfortable using the brake. After a while he said, “You know, I’ll bet we could get jobs working on another stagecoach line if we needed to. Temporarily, I mean.”
“We never take any other kind of jobs, do we?” Chance asked. “A permanent job would be mean settling down, and I don’t reckon either of us are cut out for that.” He glanced over at his brother. “Unless you’re thinking that maybe you and Bess might want to get hitched one of these days.”
“I never said that! Shoot, we barely know each other. She’s mighty nice and all, but I don’t think either of us are ready to get married—”
Chance laughed again. “Take it easy, brother. I’m just joshing you.”
“Fine,” Ace groused. “I’d say you’re more likely to marry Emily than I am to marry Bess.”
“That’ll be the day!”
They reached the valley without incident and started across it toward Shoshone Gap, which was already visible in the distance. Both brothers were alert, their gazes constantly roving over the landscape around them as they searched for any potential dangers. From the looks of things, though, the trip was going to be a peaceful one.
“Who do you reckon put in this stage road?” Ace asked at one point.
“What? I don’t know. I suppose Mr. Corcoran built it. Or else Eagleton put it in so he could get his ore wagons out to the spur line in Bleak Creek. What does it matter?”
“I don’t know that it does,” Ace said, but stray thoughts kept roaming around in his mind. He hadn’t made any sense out of them yet, but he was starting to get the feeling that they might come together and form an interesting picture if he kept prodding at them.
At midday, they stopped to rest the horses and eat the biscuit and bacon sandwiches Emily had packed for them, washing the food down with water from canteens. Chance stretched out on the grass under some trees, slanted his hat brim down over his face, and dozed off while Ace hunkered on his heels and used a stick to draw lines in the softer dirt at the edge of the road. Every so often, he nodded as if some bit of understanding had come to him.
Those Jensen Boys! Page 12