“I’ll wait till tomorrow to shave,” he told her. “We’ve lost a lot of time this morning. I was thinking of staying here all day, but that would be foolish. Every day is precious when you’ve still got mountains to cross.” He picked up one of two plates Miranda had set near the fire and he spooned some beans and bacon onto it. “I didn’t know what else to fix. We’re getting low on food. We can stock up at Fort Laramie. From there maybe we’d better see about joining up with a wagon train or supply train for the rest of the trip. I doubt I’d be recognized way out here, and they say the trip over the Rockies is pretty rough. I don’t think we should try it alone. We’re lucky we’ve come this far without Indian trouble. I know a lot of Indians down in Indian Territory, lived with some Cherokee and Osage when I was hiding out sometimes. But these Plains Indians, that’s a different matter.”
Miranda thought how his talk rambled more than usual for a man normally of few words. He was avoiding the subject they really should be discussing. She scooped up a spoonful of beans for herself, not really very hungry. “There are probably plenty more travelers only a few days behind us.” She sat down on an overturned bucket he had set out for a chair.
“Probably.” Jake finished eating and set his plate down, pouring himself a cup of stiff coffee heated from the day before. He rose and walked a few feet away. “I told you about my father being a drunk and a wanderer,” he said.
Miranda waited, knowing it was wiser to say nothing.
“He was born in Connecticut, did I tell you that? He ran away from home and wandered all the way down to Mexico, ended up with the troops at San Jacinto. It was during that time he bought my mother off a drunken Mexican. I guess I already told you that too. He liked them young. She was only fourteen, fifteen when she had me. As I grew older and began to understand things, I realized it broke her heart never to have been legally married. I know now that her first night with my father must have been nothing more than rape. After that she felt obligated to stay with him, or maybe she was just too damned ashamed and too damned scared of him to try to run away. She used to cry a lot, used to pray with those beads a lot. My pa’s name was John Harkner, and he was big like me. My mother was small, like you.”
He took another swallow of coffee, then turned, staring at the fire. “From what I told you back at your cabin, you can guess what life was like with my father. Sometimes I think he was just plain crazy, and it scares me to think I could turn out like him, scares me when I lose my temper. I was eight when he killed my mother and my little brother. He beat me for crying about it. By the time I was ten he had me stealing for him so he could buy whiskey and women. I did whatever he told me, because I knew what he would do to me if I didn’t. I was scared he’d find me and kill me if I tried to run away, and I was too small to fight back. Fear can make you do a lot of things you wouldn’t ordinarily do.”
“Like when I shot you that day in the store,” Miranda said quietly.
He finally looked at her, and a trace of a smile passed across his lips. “Yeah. Kind of like that.” Miranda saw the pain in his eyes, and she knew the moment was delicate. She looked back at the fire, waiting for him to continue. He walked away for a few minutes, returning with a smoke. He poured himself another cup of coffee. “This stuff isn’t much better than mud, but I hated to throw it out yesterday. Bad coffee is better than none at all.”
He swallowed some and made a face, then puffed on his cheroot for a few quiet seconds. The wind began to pick up, and it blew his dark hair around his face. “Over the years after my mother died, there were lots of other women, mostly all young Mexican girls my pa bought off banditos who stole them from nice families. Many nights I had to try to sleep while I heard young girls crying and begging my father not to rape them, heard the blows when he would beat them. Sometimes I even threw up, wishing I could stop him. When I was fifteen, I befriended this homeless Mexican girl…Santana. She was only twelve, but she looked sixteen. There was nothing physical between us, but I knew that someday there would be. I never let Pa know about her. I used to take food to her, steal money and clothes for her. She lived in an abandoned shack in a worthless little town full of poor Mexicans just south of San Antonio, where Pa and I lived. He had moved up there after killing my mother and brother.”
He drank a little more coffee, walking a little farther away again and watching the horizon. “Somehow Pa found out about Santana. I don’t know how. I only know I came home one day and there she was, in our house, him standing there holding her wrist so tight I could tell it hurt. She was naked, her face all bruised and wet with tears. I could even see blood…on her thighs.” His voice nearly broke with the words. “Pa just grinned at me, told me I was learning to pick them good, just like him. ‘She’s tight, boy,’ he said, sneering. ‘I couldn’t hardly get into her, but I did.’”
Miranda felt sick, and she put her head in her hands.
“I loved her.” Jake nearly groaned the words. “As much as a fifteen-year-old boy who’s been kicked around all his life knows how to love anyway. He took her, took what belonged to me, what I was going to take someday in a nice way. I was going to make her my wife, show her it didn’t have to be ugly and painful. I felt crazy knowing what he’d done to her. He dragged her back into that bedroom and started having at it with her again while I was standing right there in the house. I just…I don’t know. It was like that was the last of it. I had taken all I could take. I went in there and started beating on him, screaming at him to stop. I was a lot bigger by then, but still not as big and strong as he was. He landed me a good one, sent me flying against the wall, and almost knocked me out. Then he got on top of her again.”
He tossed his cup out in front of him in anger, and what coffee was left in it splattered against sand and rock. “I knew there was only one way to stop him. All reason left me. I told myself he was hurting Santana; but it wasn’t just for her. It was for my mother, my little brother, all the young girls he had hurt; mostly maybe it was for me. I don’t know. I only know I went and got his pistols. He had two of them, and I wanted to be sure I did the job right, because I knew what he’d do to me if I missed. I brought the guns back into that room and I shot him in the back with one of them. He fell away from Santana onto the floor. I walked around the bed to where he lay, and I put the second pistol to his forehead and I shot him again. I’ll always remember standing there looking at him with that hole in his head and not feeling a damn thing.”
His voice broke on the last words, and Miranda’s heart ached for him. She wanted to go to him, but she waited, sensing he did not want her pity, did not want to be touched. Not yet. He turned to face her, and the agony in his eyes tore at her insides. “It wasn’t until I turned to Santana that I realized the first shot had gone through his neck, not his back, right through him and into Santana’s throat.”
Miranda’s eyes widened in horror. She saw the tears in Jake’s eyes before he turned away again. “She just lay there staring at me, unable to speak. I went to her, held her. There was blood…everywhere. I told her how sorry I was, and I could tell by her eyes she understood it was an accident. Within a minute or two she was dead too.”
He stopped and cleared his throat and wiped at his eyes. “At first I was too scared even to cry. Hell, I had killed my own father, killed Santana. I just grabbed a few things and ran, took Pa’s guns and horse and rode north. It wasn’t long before Texas Rangers were after me. I rode into a camp of banditos my father had done business with, and they protected me. They shot it out with the Rangers, and I helped, killed a couple of them myself.”
He drew in his breath and let out a sigh of a man in pain. “I guess that’s when it all began. I hated everybody because I had lost Santana, felt the pain of knowing I was the one who had killed her. I knew I was no good because I had killed my own father. The banditos didn’t care. He was nothing to them, and I was young blood and was learning how to shoot. I fell in with them easy enough,
and from then on that’s all I ever knew—raiding and killing and stealing. After a while I went off on my own, landed in Indian Territory and took up with whiskey traders and gunrunners.” He shrugged. “You can figure out the rest. Word spread among others of my kind that I had killed my own father. Somehow that made me even more notorious. Some men taunted me about it and I shut them up with my guns. I got to be real good with guns of all kinds, and men began challenging me. Once you get a reputation like that, there is always someone who wants to prove he’s better.”
He came closer and stirred the fire. “Anyway, it all just kind of got away from me. My life was out of control, and I didn’t know how to change it. When I was young I used to think about having a wife and being good to her, figured maybe some way I could make up for how my pa was, prove to myself I wasn’t going to be like him. But then I’ve got that mean streak, got it beat into me, I guess. For most of the past few years I just made up my mind I was meant to be bad and to never have a normal life, so I just let go and raised hell and did all the things people expected Jake Harkner to do, took out my hate and anger on anybody who even looked like they were going to get in my way. The last couple of years, though, I don’t know…”
He stuck the cheroot between his teeth. “Maybe age does something to a man. I’m getting tired of the way I live. I just don’t know how to change it.”
He faced her then, taking the cheroot from his mouth. “You’ve got no obligation to stay with me, Randy. I’ll understand if you don’t want to. I’m not even sure if I know how to love anymore. You’re right in what you told me once. The thought of having feelings about anything scares me to death; but from what I can figure, the way I feel about you has to be love, or as close as a man can get. I just don’t know which is worse, living with you and seeing you hurt because of me, or taking you to Nevada and going on from there without you. You’d forget about me soon enough.”
Miranda rose, studying the ruggedly handsome face, seeing both the little boy and the man who needed her in his eyes. “Never,” she answered. “I could never forget you, Jake. I’d rather die than live without you now.”
His eyes moved over her, and she felt flushed and warm at the memory of the things she had let him do to her the night before.
To Jake, she looked like an angel, standing there in that yellow dress he liked, her hair brushed out over her shoulders, her blue-gray eyes softly glowing with love. Was it possible something this good could come into his life? “You just might die sooner than you should if you stay with me.”
“Then so be it.”
He sighed, rubbing at his eyes. “Randy, you’re a beautiful, respectable woman, intelligent, probably well-schooled. Hell, I can’t even read good. You could marry a banker or a doctor, live a normal, peaceful life—”
“Is that a proposal, Jake?”
He met her eyes and he just watched her for several seconds before answering. “I guess maybe it is.”
“Then I accept.”
He frowned. “Randy, you’d better give it some thought.”
“I don’t need to. I want to be your wife, Jake, no matter what the danger. We’ll go to Nevada, maybe to California, someplace where no one knows you. You can start over, Jake. You’re capable of loving and worthy of being loved in return. We’ll just take one day at a time and enjoy that day’s freedom to love and be loved.” She stepped closer. “Your pa was wrong to tell you you were a bastard and no good. It isn’t your fault that he bought your mother and never married her. It isn’t your fault that a man like that fathered you. You might have his build, but you’re nothing like him, Jake, not in any other way, do you understand? You’ve got to quit believing the things he told you, because he was just being mean. I can see right through you, and you are good, or you wouldn’t be talking to me like this now. You wouldn’t have ridden Outlaw half to death trying to find me, and you wouldn’t have helped me like you did. You know now that you can’t stay away from me any more than I can stay away from you.” She wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head against his chest. “I’m not afraid of it, Jake. I’m only afraid when I’m not with you. I want to be your wife and know that you’ll never ride out of my life again.”
He embraced her, pressing her close, wondering if he had completely lost his mind. What the hell was it this woman did to him? Ever since meeting her it seemed like he hardly knew himself anymore, or maybe he was just beginning to find the real Jake Harkner. Whatever it was she did to him, he didn’t seem to be able to fight it. He bent his head and kissed her hair.
“Maybe we can find a preacher or somebody at Fort Laramie who can marry us,” he told her.
“I’d like that.” He hugged her even tighter, and she felt him trembling. “It’s all right to let that young boy cry, Jake. He’s been holding things inside for a lot of years.” He grasped her hair, and she felt his body jerk in a sob.
“I love you, Randy Hayes,” he wept.
“And I love you, Jake Harkner. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see. God means for us to be together.”
Part Two
Woman with the golden hair,
You are my sunlight.
You are my joy.
You are my comfort in the night.
Now we walk together as one;
So much love I have never known.
We have laughed and cried and learned together.
You have brought me up from the darkness
Of despair and loneliness.
Woman with the golden hair,
You are my peace.
Eleven
Bill Kennedy threw in his cards and finished his drink. He picked up another five-dollar bill and added it to the pot at the center of the table for the next game. “I don’t like this paper money,” he grumbled. “A man don’t hardly see gold or silver coins ever since the war.”
“Banks got ’em,” Juan Hidalgo answered, a hinting smile added to the words.
Kennedy stuck a new wad of tobacco into his mouth, saying nothing, but giving Juan a knowing look. After the bank robbery in St. Louis a few months back, money was running low again. Fancy guns, prime horses, women, and whiskey could cost a man a lot. Part of the money he played cards with now had come from a settler family in northern Kansas that he and his men had attacked and robbed a week ago. They all had had a good time with the struggling, begging wife of the farmer before Juan had silenced her with his knife.
Juan dealt another round of cards, and Kennedy thought how the Mexican was damn near “artistic” with that big bowie he wore strapped to his belt. The ugly scar that ran from the man’s left eye across his nose and lips and on down his chin was clear evidence he had lived by that knife for a long time. He was a dark, ugly, evil-looking man that Kennedy himself would be afraid of if he didn’t know him better.
“Lotta banks out west,” Juan spoke up, adding to the ante. “Lotta gold and silver.”
Kennedy gave him a warning look. He and his gang of eight men had taken a chance coming back into civilization as wanted men. They were holed up in an abandoned shack outside of Omaha, had come into town to gamble and spend their winnings on whores and whiskey. For over two months they had searched for Jake Harkner down in Indian Territory, where many Creek and Cherokee knew him. None had seen him. Kennedy didn’t believe Jake was dead. A bullet from a little derringer like the one he’d been told the woman back in Kansas City had used wasn’t generally powerful enough to kill a man as big as Jake.
Besides, Jake was too mean to die from being shot by a woman. He chuckled to himself at the thought as he picked up his cards. Jake Harkner, shot by a woman! How he would have loved to have seen that, and to have been there to finish the man off. Now the fact remained that Jake was likely still alive somewhere, and he was not going to rest easy until he found him and let Juan use his knife on him for stealing that pretty young girl away from them before they were
through with her.
One of the strangers he was playing cards with opened a bid with two dollars. Kennedy turned and spit toward a spittoon, the brown saliva missing and sliding down the side of the brass container. He shrugged and picked up his two new cards, thinking maybe it was time to move on. Juan and the other men had been itching to head west, where they would be less likely to be recognized and where there was no law.
They had all agreed that west was the best place to be now that the war was over and the law would try harder to find them; but they had lingered too long in Indian Territory, and now it was too late in the summer to try to get all the way to California or even to Nevada. They would leave in the spring, but he didn’t like the idea of going without finding Jake first. The sonofabitch was good with those guns of his. In the shoot-out over that girl, Jake had killed Kennedy’s own stepbrother and Juan’s best friend, along with four other gang members. He still suffered pain from a bullet Jake had left in his right thigh, and several of the other men with him had been wounded. Jake was good, all right, but if he could be found and surprised, things wouldn’t turn out the same. Jake Harkner would be begging for his life.
God only knew where the bastard had gone, let alone what had gotten into him in the first place, taking that girl out from under their noses and returning her to her family. Hell, Harkner was handsome enough that he could have fucked the girl without her even protesting; but what did he do? Drew those damn guns of his and blew away half his men to get her out of there. Damn sonofabitch! He thought he knew the man. Hell, Jake had ridden with them for quite a while, robbed banks and trains with them, drunk and whored it up with the best of them.
He was pissed at himself for not realizing a man as good with those guns as Jake was would eventually decide to be his own boss. That was probably it. He might be gathering up a gang of his own right now. Whether he was or not, he had to be found. A man like Jake didn’t stay low for long. Those guns of his were bound to get him into trouble.
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