Emily frowned. “What are you doing? We need to get out of here!”
Ace found a handkerchief, balled it up, and thrust it into the bullet wound in Buckhorn’s shoulder. “We can’t leave him here unconscious without doing something to slow down the bleeding from that wound. Otherwise, he might die before anybody finds him. And I don’t want him being able to tell the posse which way we went, so I had to knock him out.”
“Well, I guess that makes sense, but when you get right down to it, there’s only one way for us to go.” She pointed. “Up.”
“I’ll get the horses.” Chance headed in their direction.
She took off her bandanna and handed it to Ace. “Here, use this to tie that bandage in place. If we’re going to save his life, we might as well do a decent job of it. But if it was up to me, after the way he stuck that gun in my side . . . I might’ve let him bleed to death.”
“Don’t think I didn’t consider it,” Ace said under his breath as he knotted the bandanna around Buckhorn’s shoulder.
A moment later, the fugitives were all mounted and the brothers were following Emily up another of the twisting mountain trails. Soon they were in such a barren, rocky wasteland it might as well have been the surface of the moon.
Ace turned in the saddle and looked down the mountainside, but couldn’t see where the pursuit was. That was a good thing, he told himself. It meant the posse couldn’t see them, either. He and Chance had to trust Emily’s instincts and her knowledge of the terrain. She hadn’t let them down so far.
“We’re higher than the entrance to the Golden Dome now,” Emily told them when they stopped to rest the mounts from the hard climb. “Do you really think it’s about to play out, Ace?”
“That’s just a guess on my part,” he admitted, “but I’m confident I’m right about Eagleton wanting the right-of-way the stage road would give him to extend the spur line across the valley from Bleak Creek and Shoshone Gap.” Ace leveled an arm and pointed out across the landscape far below them. “Look how perfectly it lines up. You can see it from here.”
“Yeah, you can,” Chance said. “I think you’re right about the valley being good ranching land, too . . . although that’s not something I’m really all that familiar with.”
“Not many cattle inside saloons, are there?” Emily asked him with a smile.
“That’s true.”
She turned back to Ace. “Even if you’re right about everything, what good does it do us to figure that out? What Eagleton’s doing isn’t any more illegal than it already was. The only difference is that now we know why he’s been trying to take over the stage line. We still can’t do anything to stop him.”
“Tanner’s bosses at the railroad might not like it if they knew he was scheming with Eagleton to ruin your father’s business in order to take over that right-of-way. Sharp business is one thing, attempted murder is another. He’s tried to have you and Bess killed more than once.”
“So how do we let them know about it?” Chance asked.
“There’s a telegraph office in Bleak Creek,” Ace said. “I saw the poles and the wires. We can send a telegram to the home office of the railroad and tell them about what’s going on here.”
Emily said skeptically, “Do you really think they’d believe some stranger over what Tanner tells them? He’s a trusted employee, after all, and a successful one, to boot. Would they even care if he’s crooked?”
“I don’t know,” Ace replied honestly. “But I can’t think of anything else we can do.”
Chance scratched his jaw. “There’s another problem. You’d have to go into Bleak Creek to send that wire. They don’t like us there, remember?”
Emily shook her head. “No, Bess could do it.”
Ace nodded slowly. “Yeah, if we could write the message and get it to Bess somehow, she could send it when she rides over there to get the mail in a couple days.”
“Oh!” Emily ran her fingers through her hair in exasperation. “I forgot. We were going with her to make sure she got there and back safely. Kaiser’s bound to think of that. He’ll be watching Bess to make sure we don’t meet up with her between Palisade and Bleak Creek.”
“That’s good,” Chance said quickly. “Eagleton’s men can’t make any moves against her if she’s got the law watching over her. Our problem will be getting the message to her so she can send it over the telegraph.”
“I’ll take it to her,” Emily declared. “I’m the best one to do it. I know the back trails and you boys don’t.”
“You’d be the one running the risk of being arrested if Kaiser nabbed you,” Chance said with a frown. “I don’t like that idea.”
“Well, that’s too bad. It’s not your decision to make.” Emily nodded so vehemently it made her hair give a defiant toss. “We’ll find a good place for the two of you to hide, then I’ll head back down to Palisade tonight with the message for Bess.”
“What if you’re arrested?” Chance asked. “How will we know?”
“If I don’t come back, you’ll know,” Emily said, adding grimly, “Either that or I’ll be dead.”
Buckhorn came to slowly. Before moving, he listened carefully. Hearing nothing, he opened his eyes and looked around, and then sat up and propped his back against one of the rocks. His wounded shoulder hurt like blazes. He’d lost enough blood that his head spun like one of the tops he had made, back when he was a kid.
He didn’t think he’d been unconscious for very long, probably just a few minutes, but it was long enough for Emily Corcoran and those damn Jensen boys to have gotten away from him. He didn’t know which way they had gone, although he figured he might be able to pick up their trail again.
He glared and cursed under his breath. He didn’t need to be thinking about his miserable childhood. The only thing on his mind ought to be Ace and Chance Jensen and how he was going to kill them when he found them again.
He turned his head and looked down at his shoulder. His own handkerchief was stuffed into the bullet wound to stop the bleeding, he realized, and it had been tied in place with Emily Corcoran’s bandanna. A frown creased his forehead. He might well have bled to death if the three fugitives had just left him lying there unconscious. Instead, they had taken the time to bind up his wound and possibly save his life.
His frown deepened. Why the hell had they done that?
A better question was why hadn’t he killed the Jensen brothers as Eagleton told him to do? It might have been tricky, but he was confident he could have done it. Those two could be lying right where he was, dead, and Emily would be his prisoner.
Instead, he had allowed his resentment over Eagleton’s high-handed ways and his jealousy of the man over Rose Demarcus to cloud his judgment. He had decided to capture Ace and Chance and turn them over to the law, knowing it would annoy Eagleton. In the end, that had been his undoing, along with his own momentary carelessness.
That was quite some yarn the kid had spun, Buckhorn thought. Was there any truth to it? He didn’t know. Eagleton was cunning enough to have struck a secret deal with Jacob Tanner to bring a railroad spur across the valley to a new town at the foot of the mountain. Palisade existed in its current location simply because it was convenient to the mine—no other real reason for it to be where it was. If indeed the mine was played out, it might make sense to Eagleton to abandon Palisade and start over down in the valley, basing the new settlement around the cattle industry.
None of that mattered to Buckhorn. He wasn’t a rancher any more than he was a miner. He was a hired gun. That was all.
It really was galling, though, to think about Samuel Eagleton sailing through life, always getting what he wanted. A lucrative gold mine, a new town when he didn’t need the old one anymore, the most beautiful woman Joe Buckhorn had ever seen . . .
The sound of horses’ hooves and men calling to each other broke into his bitter thoughts. He couldn’t tell how far away the riders were, but if he could hear them, they could hear him. He lifted his h
ead and bellowed, “Hey! Over here!”
The noises got louder. A couple minutes later, several men rode into sight along the twisting trail through the rocks. Buckhorn recognized the two marshals, Jed Kaiser from Bleak Creek and Claude Wheeler from Palisade. They had three posse members with them.
“Buckhorn!” Wheeler exclaimed as they rode up to him. “What are you doing here?”
“Doing your job for you,” Buckhorn snapped. “I found the Jensen brothers and Emily Corcoran.”
“Is that so?” Kaiser asked with his usual superior sneer. “I don’t see them.”
“Ace Jensen shot me and they got away, damn it,” Buckhorn said. “But I had them. That’s more than any of you can say.”
Kaiser refuted it. “That’s not true. Ace Jensen was locked up in my jail—”
“He’s not now.”
“Both of you take it easy,” Wheeler said. “The important thing now is finding them. Did you see which way they went, Buckhorn?”
“Only one way they could have gone.” The gunfighter started to lift his right arm so he could jerk his thumb over his shoulder, then paused and winced at the pain that caused. He lowered the arm carefully and used the other arm to complete the gesture, pointing up.
Wheeler frowned. “On up the mountain, you mean?”
Sarcastically, Buckhorn said, “You didn’t meet them coming down, did you?”
“All right. We’ll keep searching. How bad are you hurt?”
“Bad enough.” Buckhorn didn’t like to admit it, but he wasn’t a big enough fool to deny the truth. “I need a sawbones.”
Wheeler turned to the men behind him. “A couple of you boys find Buckhorn’s horse and take him back down to town.”
“Those are my posse men,” Kaiser snapped. “You can’t give them orders.”
“Well, we’re a lot closer to my town than to yours, so if anybody’s got jurisdiction here, it’s me,” Wheeler said in a patient tone as if he were explaining something to a child. “I don’t want to have to tell Samuel Eagleton that we left one of his most trusted men here on the mountainside to die.”
“I’m not gonna die,” Buckhorn muttered. “Just need some patching up.”
“Oh, all right.” Kaiser jerked his head at the men Wheeler had picked out. “Go ahead and help him.”
“It’s liable to be a mighty long chase,” Wheeler said with a sigh. “All the way to the top of this damn mountain.”
It seemed to Ace like they had climbed halfway to heaven. The snow that capped the top of the mountain didn’t seem to be very far off, although he knew it was still several hundred feet above them. The wind was stronger and the air was colder, too. Chance wore a coat, but Ace had just his buckskin shirt over his denim trousers.
“I shot a bighorn sheep up here last fall. I have a coat lined with its hide back home.” Emily shivered a little. “Wouldn’t mind having it with me right now.”
Chance said, “I’m not sure freezing to death is a lot better than taking our chances with that posse.”
“You’re not going to freeze to death,” Emily told him. “It won’t get that cold up here tonight. You’ll just be a mite chilly, is all.”
“I’m already a mite chilly.”
“Do you have a place in mind for us to go?” Ace asked. “Or are we just looking for a good spot?”
“I have a place,” she said. “I camped there before, too. It won’t be much longer.”
She was as good as her word.
A short time later, they followed a slanting trail up to a broad ledge with a great brow of rock looming above it. The overhang formed a cave-like area with plenty of room for several people and horses. A ring of stones had been arranged to form a fire circle, and a pile of dry branches and brush sat against the rear wall of the area.
Ace dismounted and looked around.
Emily slid off her horse, giving it a quick rest. “You can build a fire tonight without worrying about it being seen. There’s nobody up high enough to see it for fifty or sixty miles, at least. So you ought to be warm enough, anyway.”
“But hungry.” Chance followed suit. They had been in such a hurry to get out of Palisade before the posse caught them that they hadn’t had time to gather any supplies. He and Ace had a few strips of jerky they carried in their saddlebags, but that was all.
“You won’t starve to death in one night,” Emily said. “You have canteens, so you don’t have to worry about water. I’ll try to get back up here tomorrow with some provisions, since there’s no telling how long you’ll have to hide out here.”
“What if you get caught in Palisade?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “Then I guess you and your brother will have to figure out which one of you is turning cannibal.”
Chance grunted. “Very funny.”
“You need to be careful getting that message to Bess,” Ace told her. “I have some paper and a pencil in my saddlebags. We can go ahead and write it out before you start back down.”
Emily nodded. “That’s a good idea. It’s your theory, Ace, so you ought to be the one to put it on paper.”
Ace retrieved paper and pencil and sat on the ledge. For the next half hour, he struggled to boil down the whole story into a telegraph message short enough to send quickly. When he finished, he folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket to give to Emily before she left.
It was a long shot, he thought, so the odds were against it working, but as far as he could see, it was the only shot they had.
It all depended on Emily dodging the posse searching on the mountain for them.
He stood and rejoined his fellow fugitives.
“I’ll wait until it starts to get dark,” she said. “I can find my way around on this mountain at night better than that blasted posse can.”
“I hope you’re right,” Chance said. “There’s an awful lot riding on you.”
Sensing that his brother wanted a little more privacy to talk to her, Ace walked over to the edge of the cave-like area under the overhanging rock and peered out at the spectacular landscape stretching from horizon to horizon in front of him. Wyoming was a mighty big place, he thought as he heard their voices murmuring behind him.
He wondered what Bess was doing. She had to be worried sick over her sister, and their father probably felt that way, too. The whole thing hadn’t had to come to this, he thought angrily. If Eagleton had simply gone to Brian Corcoran and made him a fair offer for the stage line, Corcoran might have taken it, especially if the mine owner had explained that he was going to build a railroad spur across the valley. That would have rendered stagecoach service obsolete. Corcoran could have taken the money, gone somewhere else, and started over. He wouldn’t have had to give up his dream of owning a stagecoach line.
Instead, Eagleton had tried bullying tactics to get what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he’d moved on to outright harassment and finally violence, even to the point of causing a stagecoach wreck that likely would have killed the Corcoran sisters. The man’s lust for wealth and power ruled him until he couldn’t think of anything else.
Shadows began to reach out from the mountains and spread across the landscape in front of Ace. He hadn’t realized so much time had passed since they fled Palisade just ahead of the posse. Night would be falling soon and Emily would be heading back down the mountain to the settlement. It would be a dangerous trip in the dark under the best of circumstances.
With a bunch of trigger-happy posse men in her way, anything could happen.
Ace reached up and touched the pocket where he had put the message, feeling the paper crinkle as he pressed on it. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Chance and Emily standing with their heads close together, talking quietly. He didn’t know what they were talking about, but it was none of his business anyway.
However, his brother’s happiness was, and he knew that Chance would take it mighty hard if anything were to happen to her.
Ace made up his mind, and turned to his horse.
As he put his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle, Chance called out from the other side of the cave, “Ace, what are you doing?”
He turned the horse. “Taking that message to Bess. I kept my eyes open while we were coming up here. I can find my way back down the mountain.”
Emily took a step toward him and exclaimed, “That’s crazy! I’m going to—”
“You’re going to stay here with Chance,” Ace told her. “Chance, take good care of her.”
“Ace, you don’t have to do this,” Chance said. “I’ve been trying to talk her into letting me go—”
“You’re both crazy!” Emily lunged toward Ace’s horse and reached out to grab the reins, but Chance caught hold of her and pulled her back. As Ace started down the trail, she cried, “You’re going to get yourself killed!”
“Maybe not,” Ace called as he half-turned in the saddle to wave at his brother and Emily. “I’ve got the luck of the Jensens, after all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Eagleton scowled at his bodyguard and said in a harsh voice, “Do you want to explain to me again why you didn’t just go ahead and kill them when you had the chance? This is the third time you’ve let the Jensens get away, Buckhorn. What the hell am I paying you for?”
“You’re paying me to keep you alive,” Buckhorn answered bluntly. “You’re still breathing.”
His shoulder hurt like hell, and he was in no mood to put up with Eagleton browbeating him. The doctor had cleaned and bandaged the wound, which was a simple one—in and out of the shoulder without breaking any bones—and rigged a black silk sling for that arm.
He’d also given Buckhorn a small dose of laudanum, which dulled the pain slightly without making it go away and also made his brain feel fuzzy. Maybe he wasn’t as careful as he should have been while talking to the boss.
“Nobody’s tried to kill me,” Eagleton said coldly. “It seems to me like you’re not earning your money.”
“Maybe they haven’t tried to kill you because they know they’d have to get past me, and nobody wants to risk that.” Buckhorn took a deep breath and told himself to stop being so combative, since it wasn’t going to do any good. “Look, boss, the way it worked out, I probably couldn’t have killed the Jensens without killing Emily Corcoran, too. You told me to bring her back here to you.”
Those Jensen Boys! Page 19