by P. Creeden
Laughter remained in their wake as the horse continued past the Long Shot Cabins. Both of the women were young and lovely—just at the age where marriage is both an ideal and a dream. Something in Jeremiah’s heart broke a little at the thought. When he was younger, he’d always had the dream of an ideal marriage too. Of making a home with a woman he would love and protect. Of having children and raising them to be God-fearing, hard-working, and fun-loving. Having a house and a home. But he always thought he’d do it later. Later. After the next cattle drive. After the next auction season. After the next job. Timing never seemed right. And now that he was thirty-two, it felt that he was too late. Those young girls sitting in the seat of the carriage that was becoming little more than a jingle in the distance wouldn’t even dream of him becoming their suitor. He was dark skinned, wrinkled and worn like old leather. He didn’t own a home, and until the marshal had offered him this job, he’d been without work. Hardly marrying material.
Matchmaker’s Ball.
Seemed like a young girl’s dream, but something in even Jeremiah’s old heart stirred at the thought of what kind of magic an event like that could hold for him. He remembered watching Angel in her green dress going to the event with Henry. It had been a sight. And Jeremiah, who’d known Angel since she was just a wee girl, had been as proud as any uncle. As proud as he could be to help make up for the loss of the girl’s father at their wedding.
But there couldn’t possibly be enough magic in that ball for Jeremiah. He pulled off his hat and ran a hand through his thinning hair. Most times, he looked even older than the years God had given him. And he just couldn’t think of making a girl saddle up with the likes of him. Maybe it was best that he’d do something like this anyway. Risking life and limb in order to protect good people as a deputy marshal didn’t sound so bad. He frowned though. All his time in the sun had made it hard for him to see long distance any more. That might be something that could become a problem for him in the job. He chewed his lip as he hoped the problem wouldn’t come up.
The front door to the house opened and light spilled out into the darkness of the front yard. “We’re ready for you, Deputy Marshal Washington. May as well get used to the title,” Marshal Keeley said as he waved him over.
Each morning as Penelope placed a hand on the door handle of her grandfather’s room to return to his bedside, she battled the sinking feeling in her chest with constant prayer. She prayed as hard as she could that God would somehow make her grandfather live a bit longer—no, a lot longer. The last thing she wanted was to be alone in this world, and she felt that if he died, that was exactly what she would be. Alone. Utterly. Without a soul to care for or to care for her. As much as she loved Mr. and Mrs. Honeycutt like family, she knew that if she was unable to pay them, they would have to seek other employment. They would leave her. Just like everyone else did.
But this morning as she entered the room, she immediately felt a chill. An absence of something. She stood in the doorway of her grandfather’s bedchamber and listened. Silence. No wheezing, no coughing. Her hands fisted at her sides as a sob rose up to her throat and lodged there. She refused to let it rise farther. Her fingernails dug into her palms deep enough to bite and cause pain. No. It couldn’t be. She tried to take a step further in, tried to make it so that she could see her grandfather’s face, to find him just turned away from the door so she couldn’t hear him. Hope, like a whisper of smoke, made promises. But she knew if she reached out and grabbed it, it would slip through her fingers like vapor. In truth, she had no hope. Instead of stepping forward as she commanded her feet to, they stepped backward. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d started running for the stairs.
“Mrs. Honeycutt!” she screamed as she ran. ”Mrs. Honeycutt!”
How had she made it down the stairs without stumbling? How had she kept from breaking her neck or twisting her ankle? She hardly remembered touching the banister. Hardly remembered a single step she’d taken, but suddenly, she stood before the kitchen door just as Mrs. Honeycutt stepped out of it, wiping her hands on the front of her apron. “What is it child?” she asked with wide eyes, brows raised.
Suddenly, the sob returned again and blocked Penelope’s throat. She shook her head and pointed back toward the stairs.
Wrinkles formed on the housekeeper’s brow. “Is it Mr. Warner? Is there something wrong?”
Penelope shook her head and tried to speak, but instead, tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. The sob escaped finally, freeing up her throat and letting a few words past. “He’s... I can’t... I think he’s...”
Even though she was incoherent, Mrs. Honeycutt nodded, getting a determined look in her eyes as she started for the stairwell. Penelope followed, wanting to say more but sobbing instead while wringing her hands. She hated that she was so weak. She hated that her emotions always expressed themselves with tears. If she were a stronger person, a person like her memory said her mother was, she wouldn’t need Mrs. Honeycutt to lead her to her grandfather’s bedchamber. Why couldn’t Penelope be strong enough to do things on her own? Her jaw tightened as the twosome reached the doorway. Without hesitation, Mrs. Honeycutt walked right in and strode over to Grandfather’s bedside. Meanwhile, Penelope stopped again at the doorway, her heart squeezing in her chest. Part of her wanted to ask if he was okay. Part of her wanted to see for herself. But that lump had formed in her throat again and the tears made her eyesight blurry. She couldn’t speak and she couldn’t see anything for herself. So she waited.
Mrs. Honeycutt clucked her tongue and pulled Grandfather’s bed cover up over his face. She shook her head and said softly. “You poor, poor old man. May you finally rest in peace.”
At those words, Penelope’s heart sank toward her stomach. No. He’d left her after all. No matter how many times she’d prayed that he wouldn’t, he did, in the end. Her hands clasped together as more sobs shook her body. Then bright light suddenly filled her scope of vision and she gasped. Blinking away the tears, Penelope finally saw clearly and she stumbled backward into the protective shadow of the hallway.
“What are you doing?” she screeched in horror.
The light from the window Mrs. Honeycutt had opened in her grandfather’s bedroom cut a rectangle in the hallway. The light was brighter and even more horrifying than Penelope had remembered. Pins and needles raked their way across her skin. Had it touched her? Had the sunlight touched her? She shivered in fear as her core quivered. Mrs. Honeycutt’s round body finally blocked the horrifying light. She stepped out of the bedchamber and over the threshold. “Come now, child. You are fine. Come into the sunlight and see that it doesn’t hurt you.”
Fear gripped Penelope’s heart as she stood slowly and shook her head. Then anger overcame the fear. “Close those curtains immediately! Are you trying to kill me?”
The older woman tilted her head at her. “No, child. The sunlight won’t kill you. Come and see. You’re so pale and sickly. If your grandfather had just listened to reason, he probably would have been in better health and it would have helped you so much to have had friends your age, perhaps even meet a husband or get married. To be holed up in this house is beyond imagining.”
“How dare you!” Every part of Penelope’s body shook in both rage and fear. “How dare you defy my grandfather when he is not even cold with death? Close those curtains immediately and do not make me dispose of both you and your husband. You will continue to obey the wishes of my grandfather as though he were still alive, do you understand?”
For a long moment, the woman just stared at Penelope with something akin to pity in her eyes. Then finally the woman shook her head, her lips growing thinner. “Yes, ma’am. I understand,” she said as she started back into the bedroom.
Penelope’s heart continued to race as she saw the rectangle of light grow smaller and the sound of the drapes scraping the curtain rod over the window came to her. She breathed a sigh of relief as her shoulders sagged. Where had that anger come from? In he
r mind’s eye, she saw herself having fiery eyes like her grandfather always did when he commanded the servants to do what they didn’t want to. Perhaps that was how she’d need to draw her strength. She was his granddaughter after all. His blood coursed through Penelope’s veins too. Maybe what she needed to do was call upon his strength, even when she felt she had no strength of her own.
That was what she would do.
As she smoothed her skirt, she pushed off the wall and stiffened her spine. After swiping at her eyes and smoothing down her hair, she made a determination. She would no longer allow her weakness to overcome her grandfather’s strength inside her. Instead, she would be strong. Strong enough to do what needed to be done. With a nod to punctuate her resolve, she turned and stepped over the threshold.
Chapter 3
After hours of long riding in the saddle, Jeremiah leaned forward over the horn and his horse’s neck. He stood up and let his legs go straight, allowing his backside to have a rest so that his seat bones didn’t press against the same spot in the saddle for the whole ride. It was something he often did when he was driving cattle as well.
“I don’t understand why we’re not going south and taking the train through Albuquerque. Wouldn’t it make sense to stick to the bigger towns and then we wouldn’t be in the middle of god-knows-where?” one of the other deputy marshals, Chris Thompson, complained as he spat his chewing tobacco to the side. “I mean, it sure as Sam Hill would be better than spending all day in the saddle and all night suffering on stones and getting the grit out from our teeth.”
“If you wanted to be comfortable,” Marshal Keeley said with his gruff voice. “You should have stayed home. No one said you had to come on this mission. You volunteered.”
Under his breath, the deputy huffed, “it’s been nearly a week since then. And that was when I thought this was going to be all about a train ride, not a trail ride.”
Slowly, Jeremiah lowered himself back down in the saddle. The other deputies and the marshal were all suffering from saddle sores. None of the others were cowboys. The men they were taking along with them were tied to the saddle and their horses were attached to each other as well as the marshal, himself. To each side of the three prisoners, two deputies rode along, keeping an eye on them as well as the territory, to make sure they were going the right way as well as to keep a look out for hostiles. On the back of each lawman’s saddle, a rifle sat, and each man had a side arm holstered to his hip. Though Jeremiah was used to the rifle on the back, riding with a sidearm had been a different prospect, and one he had a little trouble getting used to at first. But now that they were on the second day of this journey and nearly out of the state of Colorado, he rarely remembered the heaviness of the pistol on his side anymore.
Earl Cody, the criminal who sat alongside Jeremiah, gave him a sideways glance. “You’re new, right? You weren’t with us on the way from Canon City.”
Jeremiah lifted a brow but didn’t say anything in response. Marshal Keeley had already warned him that sometimes the criminals would try to make friends with deputies on the trail and it was one of the reasons he’d had to send a deputy back home to Canon City after they’d started the journey. The deputy was getting a little too friendly and worried the marshal that he was getting manipulated. They wandered through territory that most wouldn’t recognize, avoiding towns where they could. If Jeremiah didn’t know the lay of the land already, he’d have been as lost as the other deputies. He’d been boss of the cattle drives for Wilson Farm for nearly ten years, but when Angel had taken over for her dad, he’d played up his vision issues so that she would take over the position of boss. It helped her confidence and it gave him the opportunity to sit back and relax a bit as she learned to see the signs to know direction on her own.
The map in Jeremiah’s head said that they were very close to hostile territory. Both the Hopi and the Navajo had tribes just to the south of the trail they were taking. If they continued along the way they went, they might get away with skirting the area and staying out of harm’s way, but if they adjusted their course even a little bit to the south they’d be in trouble. In the distance, gunfire echoed. Everyone shot glances that direction, which was just a little way behind them and in the direction Jeremiah wanted to avoid. He swallowed hard against his dry throat.
Marshal Keeley tsked. “I suggest we pick up the pace a bit. We need to cover a lot of ground before nightfall and it’s best to get some distance between us and those shots.”
Sunny, the youngest deputy in the group, asked, “What do you think that was?”
“Probably just a hunter or something,” Marshal Keeley said as he urged his horse into a lope. The horses on the line behind him also picked up a lope following the tug of their leader.
Jeremiah didn’t mind the idea of putting distance between himself and what they’d just heard. Chances were that Keeley was right and it was just a hunter, but the nature of the hunter was the question that bothered Jeremiah. If those hunters knew how close they were to a party of white men, they may decide to change their prey. And that wouldn’t work out well for their party. If they were spotted by a hostile Indian party, they’d face a great deal of trouble. Eight white men on horses would be quite an unusual spectacle for them, for certain.
The sound of the horses’ hooves gently beating against the red clay started to lull Jeremiah into a sense of peace. His heart seemed to beat in time with the same rhythm. That was something that Jeremiah always felt on the trail. Peace like a blanket, like a cloud, like flowing water. All those things that the bible said that peace should be, Jeremiah felt them when on the back of a horse, loping along with wind blowing against his skin. The smallest measure of tension remained in him as he kept an eye on the three prisoners tied in a line. Instead of keeping a herd of cattle or horses in order and intact, his job this time was to keep a much smaller number of men. He preferred the animals. At least they were predictable. Horses and cattle, by nature, behaved in certain ways depending on weather conditions, herd morale, and the conditions of their grazing land. As they moved along the trail it was usually fairly easy to figure out what an animal was going to do next. They didn’t calculate or plot or manipulate. They only followed their stomachs and natural instincts. Jeremiah could appreciate that about the cattle.
They loped along a good twenty minutes, putting a solid four miles or more distance between them and where they’d been when they’d heard the gunshot. At about the same time as Jeremiah could feel his horse’s sides becoming a bit too labored as it took in breaths, Marshal Keeley pulled his horse up and the horses on the line slowed down at the same pace. The marshal peered back at the men on the line as well has his deputies. “It’ll be dark in about an hour. We’ll continue to travel until then since the weather’s good.”
As they walked, the horses would cover about another four or five miles before dark. The whole trip was going to be slow going if the plan was to ride from Colorado to Arizona around Indian Territory the whole way. Jeremiah did the math in his head. If they traveled at the same speed they’d been going the past six days, they were going to be two more weeks before making it to the Territorial Prison. His lips thinned at the thought. Could they really keep the prisoners tied for that long?
“I need to relieve myself,” Earl Cody said after a few minutes.
“You’ll wait until we make camp, just like everyone else.”
“If I take care of my needs here in the saddle, you’ll all have to deal with the smell and the mess. Is that what you’d rather?” the man asked with a roll of his eyes.
The marshal pulled up and stopped. “Fine. Does anyone else need to alleviate themselves?”
Nearly everyone mumbled something in the affirmative.
Pulling the rifle off the back of his saddle, he motioned for Jeremiah to help Earl off the horse. Then Marshall Keeley said, “Keep your hand on your side arm. Don’t let the prisoner out of your site. I want a deputy on each prisoner until he’s finished. Then the pr
isoners all need to be mounted before the deputies take care of their own needs. Understood? No one walks more than twenty feet from the horses. Everyone stays visible.”
Again mumbles to the affirmative were the only response.
Jeremiah stood to the side and rear of Earl Cody, his hand on his side arm and his gaze fixed on the man.
Earl eyed him. “You’re really not going to give me any peace then?”
“Peace is for common folk. You’re not common,” Jeremiah said quietly.
The man huffed a laugh. “You got that much right.”
And without any more talk, the man took care of his needs. The rest of the party did the same, but in the amount of time it took to get everyone taken care of, a full half hour had passed. The sun had begun to paint streaks of orange across the sky, showing that nightfall wasn’t far off. The marshal’s patience had worn thin. “We’re still going to cover at least two miles before dark. Let’s get it done.”
But just as they started traveling on the trail again, another gunshot rang in the distance, closer this time. One of the deputies cried out just before he fell from his horse.
“Mortgage? My grandfather had a mortgage? But he built this house himself on land he got from the claim agency. How on earth could he possibly have a mortgage?” Penelope asked, her voice ticking upward.
“I’m afraid to say that your grandfather lived a bit more extravagantly than most. Since he did not have the income to live at the level he did, he’d mortgaged his home and spent it on his living. It was a rather large sum in the beginning.” The banker who’d come to visit soon after her grandfather’s memorial service shook his head and also looked at her with pity.
Penelope was really beginning to hate that look. “Are you saying that my grandfather has no savings now?”