Outlaw Hearts

by Rosanne Bittner

  About five men, Jake thought. He had seen three outside, figured there were at least a couple more inside the buildings. There were no wagon trains or visible travelers present at the moment. In the distance a small herd of cattle grazed. He rode closer to the supply store, glad to see there were no wanted posters tacked up anywhere. He started to dismount when he spotted something familiar sitting outside the small sod house next to the supply post. It was a trunk, a gold trunk with brass trim and a faded flower design painted on the top. His heartbeat quickened and he rode a little closer, studying the trunk thoughtfully, searching his memory. He had seen that trunk before, in Randy’s bedroom!

  Surely this was just coincidence. What on earth would Randy’s trunk be doing here? Maybe it just happened to look the same. Maybe there were a lot of trunks like this one, with the same gold background and brass trim, the same faded flower design on the lid. Still, they wouldn’t all have the same gouge in the front. For some reason he had remembered that long dent in the front of Randy’s trunk. No two trunks could have exactly the same damage.

  What the hell was going on here? He told himself to be careful. Something smelled here, and it was more than the chickens. His dark eyes moved then to a bearded man who came out of the small house, carrying a pitcher of water. Jake was instantly wary. He had long ago learned to read a man by his eyes. That was why he was still alive and free, why he never lost when a man drew on him, why he seldom lost at poker. A man’s eyes could tell a lot, and this man was hiding something. The man hastily closed the door, and Jake did not miss the quick look of worry and guilt on his face.

  “Hello there! Can I help you with something?” the man asked, putting on a smile.

  Jake glanced at the trunk again. If it was Miranda’s, how had it gotten here? Where were the Jennings wagons? “Just need some supplies.”

  “Well, then come on over to my store and I’ll fix you up.” The man was stocky and looked dirty like the others. He scratched at a beard and then smoothed back his greasy hair as he headed toward the building next door, seeming to Jake to be much too eager to get him away from the sod house. “This whole post is my own setup,” the man bragged. “I do pretty good here.”

  The man was grinning too much, as far as Jake was concerned. Jake led Outlaw to a hitching post and dismounted, tying the horse. The packhorse, already tied to Outlaw’s saddle, halted wearily behind.

  “Name’s Nemus, Jack Nemus,” the owner was telling him.

  Jake studied the man as he came closer, wondering when he had washed last. He wore soiled cotton pants, and long johns instead of a shirt. There were sweat stains under the arms of the underwear, and some of the buttons were undone, revealing thick chest hair. He put out his hand to Jake, looking him over and appearing a little awed by Jake’s height and size.

  “Well, now, you’re a pretty big man. Hope you ain’t lookin’ for clothes!” The man laughed, and Jake studied teeth stained brown from too much chewing tobacco. He shook the man’s hand, forcing himself to be friendly. He put on a smile.

  “Just food and such, tobacco.”

  “Well, we have plenty of that. Come on in! What’s your name, anyway?”

  Jake followed the man inside. “Jake Turner,” he answered, deciding to stick to his new name.

  “Well, Jake, you wear those guns like you know how to use them.” The man walked behind a counter and laughed nervously. “’Course, it makes no difference to me why you wear them. Men come through here from all walks of life, I don’t ask questions. I just sell them what they need and mind my own business.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Jake answered. He looked around inside the stuffy building, seeing no wanted posters there either. He picked up a can of tobacco and set it on the counter, telling himself to stay alert. There were two more men inside the post, probably friends of Nemus. That makes six, he told himself. “Actually, I’m looking for some travelers,” he said aloud, “friends of mine that I’m trying to catch up with. They’re a preacher-family, name of Jennings.” Again he spotted the quick look of guilt and worry in Nemus’s eyes, a look he quickly covered with one of curious thought. “They’re traveling with a trader named Hap Dearing. Did they pass through here?”

  Nemus rubbed his chin. “Well, let me think. I don’t always pay attention to names, you know. But some preacher-family did pass through here, four, five days ago. I couldn’t tell you their name was Jennings, but I do remember the trader they traveled with, and it seems his name was Dearing. He had three big wagons loaded down with supplies for Virginia City.”

  Jake picked out a box of thin cigars. “That’s the one. Four or five days, you say?”

  “Yes. You just might be able to catch up with them, since you’re traveling with just horses. That bunch has wagons, and those supply wagons especially won’t be moving too fast. I pity them when they get to the mountains.”

  Jake turned to take inventory of where the other two men were standing. He looked back at Nemus, who was rearranging some items under the counter that Jake figured didn’t need rearranging. He had a feeling the man was nervously trying to keep busy, wanted to keep from having to look directly at Jake.

  “How about flour, sugar?” Nemus was asking. “I know anyone traveling who stops by here around noon like you have are usually in a hurry to get in some more miles before sunset. I’ll get your supplies together right fast. Just tell me what you need.”

  Jake moved to a wall of shelves where boxes of ammunition were kept, turning so that he could see all three men. “You seem in a big hurry to get me out of here, Nemus,” he told the trader.

  He watched the other two men straighten to an alert position. Nemus himself slowly lowered his hand from where he had reached up to take down a sack of flour. The man turned to face Jake. Again came the nervous smile. “Well, it’s like I said. Most travelers this time of day are in a hurry. I’m just trying to get you what you need, Mr. Turner. Hell, if you want to stay and rest a while, that’s fine too. The men outside are cooking up a hindquarter of beef. You’re welcome to stay and eat with us.”

  Jake eyed all three of them, taking a cheroot from his shirt pocket and lighting it. He smoked quietly for a moment. “There’s one lady in particular I’m looking for,” he finally spoke up. “A widow woman, named Miranda Hayes.” Again Nemus looked away. The other two men glanced at each other, and Jake knew something was terribly wrong. Was Randy here? Why? And why were these men hiding her? “Any of you remember if she was with the Jennings group?”

  One of the other two men cleared his throat. “Don’t rightly remember, mister.”

  Jake studied the man a moment, taking a drag on the cheroot. “Oh, I think you’d remember. Men out in a lonely place like this don’t soon forget a single woman as pretty as this one.”

  “Lots of women come through here, single and married,” Nemus put in, his friendly, nervous attitude now changing to one of hostility. “Hell, hundreds of people come through here, probably thousands. How are we supposed to remember one in particular?”

  “You remembered the Jennings party. If you remembered them, you’d remember Mrs. Hayes.” Jake kept the cheroot between his teeth, and a look of dark fury came into his eyes. “You were right, Nemus. I do know how to use these guns,” he said, his voice low and threatening. “And believe me, you don’t want to test me out. Why don’t you just tell me the truth about what you know about Mrs. Hayes?” All three men eyed each other, none of them looking willing to talk. Jake threw down the cheroot, stepping it out. “One of you is going to get his goddamn kneecaps shot out if somebody doesn’t tell me what the hell is going on here,” he seethed. “That’s Mrs. Hayes’s trunk sitting out there by that sod hut, isn’t it?”

  “She’s dead,” Nemus spoke up quickly. “She got snakebit, and Jennings didn’t know what to do with her. They left her off here and we tried to help her, but she died on us.”

  The first
words brought a wrenching pain to Jake’s chest, and it felt like knives were moving through his blood. Dead! Why did it bother him so to think that could be true? He had known Randy for such a little while.

  The thought stabbed at him only for a moment. Something in Nemus’s eyes and the quick way he had answered told him the man was lying. He had to be lying! For some reason, he felt like he didn’t even want to live himself if Randy was really dead. “Show me the grave,” he told Nemus.

  Before any of the three men could even blink, Jake had drawn one of his revolvers and was aiming it at Nemus. The movement had been sleek and instant, the click of the gun as he cocked it, the determined look in his eyes…it gave all three men the shivers. He moved his arm to point the gun at the other two men.

  “Wait a minute,” one of them spoke up, backing away. “I don’t want no part of this, Nemus. I ain’t dyin’ for no woman just because you want to keep her for yourself!”

  “Shut up, Stanton!”

  “She’s over in Nemus’s shack next door,” the one called Stanton told Jake. “She really did get snakebit, and she’s awful sick. Nemus, he’s been takin’ care of her.”

  Jake held the gun steady, moving it back to Nemus. “I’ll just bet you have. What have you done to her, Nemus?”

  The man’s eyes widened, and he swallowed. “Nothin’! All I’ve done is keep her cooled down. You know the fever a person gets when they’re snakebit. She’s lucky she’s even alive. Hell, I offered to take care of her. Those people she was with just wanted to dump her off like a sick animal. I…I helped her. What’s she to you, anyway?”

  “She’s my woman,” Jake answered without even thinking. The words had come out so easily that he was hardly aware of what he had said.

  “Then what’s she doin’ travelin’ with somebody else?”

  “That’s my business. You take me next door.”

  Nemus looked helplessly at the other two men, who both put up their hands. “We don’t want nothin’ to do with this, Turner,” they told Jake.

  “You bastards,” Nemus growled. “You wanted to keep her around as much as I did. You did your share of lookin’!”

  Jake felt such rage he wondered if his head would explode. Looking? Had they all taken advantage of Randy’s condition to ogle her naked body? What else had they done?

  “We never touched her though,” one of them protested to Jake. “Honest to God, mister.”

  Jake backed to the doorway. “Let’s go, Nemus.” When the man hesitated, Jake fired, the bullet skimming across Nemus’s cheek.

  Nemus cried out and jolted back against some shelves. Several sacks of flour fell, one landing on his head and spilling white powder through his hair and over his face. “Jesus Christ!” the man swore as he got to his feet. He coughed and brushed flour from himself, then grabbed a rag and pressed it to his bleeding face. “What the hell is wrong with you, Turner! You could have killed me!”

  “That’s right,” Jake warned, still pointing the gun. “I could have. You give me any trouble and the next one goes right between your eyes! Now let’s go next door, and I’ll decide whether or not you live or die!”

  “Shit,” one of the others whispered. Both men backed farther away. Nemus came out from behind the counter, his hair still full of flour. “You’re a goddamn crazy man,” he grumbled, leading Jake outside. Others were heading toward the post, and Nemus shouted to them. “Stay back! This sonofabitch will kill me if you make trouble!”

  Jake turned his gun on them, watching them carefully as he followed Nemus next door. “All of you stay out of this and mind your own business and you’ll live,” he told them. “I’ve got no quarrel with you.”

  Only one of them was armed. Jake looked back at Nemus, but his side vision did not miss the armed man’s movement as he went for his gun. Instantly Jake turned and fired before the man had a chance to pull his own weapon. The loud crack of his gun made Nemus jump with fright, thinking at first he must have been plugged in the back. Jake’s victim made no sound as his body lurched backward. A hole in his chest spurted blood for a few seconds, before his body stopped twitching.

  “I’m gettin’ out of here,” one of the others yelled. He turned and ran for his horse. The two men from inside the trading post hurried over to see to the one who had been shot, and Jake followed Nemus into the sod hut. He immediately curled his nose at the smell of smoke and filth and urine, and he felt as though someone were tearing his heart from his chest when he heard a whimpering sound come from a small cot in the corner.

  He herded Nemus to a chair, making the man sit down and remove a rawhide string belt from his pants. Jake used the belt to tie the man’s wrists tightly behind him and to one of the back rungs of the chair. The towel Nemus had held to his wounded cheek fell to the floor. “I’ll bleed to death,” the man protested.

  “You break my heart,” Jake answered, jerking the rawhide as tightly as possible. He holstered his revolver then and went to the cot, bending over Miranda, drawing in his breath in a gasp at the sight of her. If not for the honey-blond hair, he would hardly know it was her. Even the hair looked different, it was so stringy from sweat and filth.

  “Randy?” She whispered something, but he couldn’t understand her. A tear slipped out of one eye, and he wiped at it gently. “It’s me, Jake. I’m right here, and I won’t leave you.”

  “Jake?” she whimpered. She opened her eyes, but he had a feeling she couldn’t really see him. Her tears came harder then. “It’s…not true. Leave me…alone…don’t…touch me.”

  Jake frowned, pulling the blanket away from her to see that the cot was soiled and she was naked. She had urinated, and Nemus had not cleaned her up. “No,” she whimpered. “Please…don’t…”

  In all the horror he had seen his father inflict on others, Jake had never known such fury, except during the incident between his father and Santana. There was no damn reason for her to be lying here naked other than to allow Nemus and the others to get a good look at her whenever they wanted, probably more than a look. He spotted dirty fingerprints around her breasts, and his anger was so intense that he thought he might black out. He covered her again and pulled the blanket away from her feet to see that her left foot was badly swollen and discolored. A cut in the form of an X was scabbed over, and he could still see fang marks near the cut. He touched the foot lightly, and Miranda groaned and shuddered.

  Jake looked at Nemus and the fury in his eyes made the man begin to sweat. “Who lanced the bite?”

  “One of them traders with Jennings. He sucked out the venom, enough that she lived, anyway.”

  “It’s infected. Have you done anything to try to stop the infection?”

  The man shrugged, blood still running down his jaw and neck from where Jake’s bullet had grazed him. “What the hell can you do?”

  Jake left her and walked over to Nemus, whipping out his revolver and setting it against the man’s throat. “You sonofabitch! There’s plenty you could do! But all you found time for was giving her a good feel! What the hell else did you do, Nemus?”

  The man swallowed and trembled. “N…n…nothin’. I swear. I ain’t that bad, mister. But, hell, she was burnin’ up with fever. I had to get her clothes off, don’t you know?”

  Jake stood up. Unable to control his rage a moment longer, he brought the barrel of the gun down hard across the unwounded side of the Nemus’s face, opening another deep gash. Nemus’s body tumbled backward from the blow, chair and all, and the man cried out when the back of the chair smashed into his arms. The awkward position made the fall even more painful.

  “Goddamn it, untie me, Turner! Let me up from here!”

  Jake cocked his gun and placed the end of the barrel against the man’s ear. “You’re fucking lucky I don’t blow your brains out, Nemus, but I can promise you I will if that woman dies! I’m taking her out of here and I’m going to try to save her.
If she dies on me, I’ll be coming back! You can bet on it! I’ve killed enough men that it won’t bother me in the least to let you die slowly, the way you’re letting that poor woman die!” He raised a booted foot and brought it down hard between Nemus’s legs. The man screamed, but because he was tied to the chair he could do little to help his position or find any comfort.

  Jake moved to a window to check on the other three men. They stood just outside the cabin with rifles in their hands. He broke out a window and cocked his revolver. “Put those guns down or they’ll just go down with you when you fall from my bullets,” he warned. “One of you has already died. Why add any more to the list?”

  “What did you do to Jack?” one of them asked.

  “He’ll live. The rest of you get me that buckboard over there by the corral. Hitch it up to my two horses and put all the supplies from the horses into the wagon, along with Mrs. Hayes’s trunk. Who owns the wagon and harness?”

  They looked at each other. One started to raise his rifle, and Jake fired. The man grunted and fell, a hole in his head. Before he hit the ground and before the other two could react, Jake had fired again, deliberately grazing the arm of the second man, just enough to frighten him but not do much damage. The man yelled and dropped his rifle, grabbing his arm.

  “Don’t either of you move!” Jake commanded, “or you’re dead! Now drop that other rifle,” he ordered the third man. “I don’t aim to kill either of you if you do what I say. Now, I asked you a minute ago who owns that wagon out there?”

  “Nemus owns the wagon,” the wounded one answered.

  “Good. In that case I don’t have to pay for it. If he gets out of this with nothing more than a good beating and sacrificing a wagon, he’ll be goddamn lucky! Now go hitch my horses to the wagon like I said in the first place!” He left the window and quickly went to the door, opening it and stepping out, still pointing the revolver. “Do what I ask and you’ll live. Get going!”