Brubaker swung the wagon onto the southern trail and announced, “We’ll head south to the Red River. There’s a good crossing there above Gainesville. Once we’re in Texas we’ll cut back east to Dallas and then Tyler. Be there in about a week ... if folks stop shootin’ at us and slowin’ us down.”
Bo wasn’t going to count on having that much luck, and neither was Scratch.
The trail angled to the southwest. Brubaker followed it for a couple of miles and then called a halt for the day.
After they had made camp and eaten supper, Brubaker opened the door of the wagon to feed the prisoners. Lowe asked, “Are you gonna move our chains back to the front again?”
“Not hardly,” Brubaker answered. “We had those Cherokee Lighthorsemen with us last night to help out if any of you got rambunctious. Now things are back to the way they were before.”
“It was sure a lot more comfortable the other way,” Cara said.
Brubaker let out a snort of disdain.
“It ain’t my job to keep you comfortable,” he said, “just to get you to Tyler so Judge Southwick can deal with you as he sees fit.”
“Listen, Forty-two,” Scratch said. “We’ve got us a pretty good routine down by now. I don’t see that it’d hurt anything if we made things a mite easier on these folks.”
“Blast it, don’t get taken in by ’em, Morton!” Brubaker exclaimed angrily. “They never made it any easier on the innocent people they killed in their robberies, now did they?”
Scratch shrugged.
“I reckon not. But it seems like it’d be less trouble for us, too. For one thing, we wouldn’t have to feed ’em. They could do that themselves. And if we kept on coverin’ em all the time the wagon is open, I don’t see how they could get away.”
Brubaker frowned in thought for a moment, then asked Bo, “What do you say, Creel?”
“Scratch is right,” Bo said. “I don’t see how chaining their hands in front of them is going to make any difference. It sure won’t while they’re riding and chained to the floor, too.”
What Bo said was true. He couldn’t argue with Scratch’s claims.
But he did wonder just why Scratch was taking the side of the outlaws. That was very unusual for him. It had to be because of the soft spot Scratch had for womenfolks. If all three prisoners had been hardbitten male owlhoots, he wouldn’t have worried about whether they were comfortable or not.
Scratch was just too much of a Southern gentleman. It was bred in him to be chivalrous to a woman ... even when that woman was a killer.
Bo resolved to keep an eye on his old friend. He wouldn’t let Scratch do anything foolish.
After both Texans had weighed in with their opinions, Brubaker gave a reluctant nod and said, “All right. We’ll try it for a day or two. But if anything happens, I’m holdin’ you two responsible.”
“That’s fine,” Bo said. He didn’t really expect any trouble. And if it arose, they would deal with it.
One by one, while the Texans covered them, Brubaker switched the chains on the prisoners. When he was finished with that and Lowe and Elam were padlocked to the rings in the floor again, the deputy said, “All right, Creel, take the woman into the trees. Morton and I will watch these two.”
Cara pouted. “Mr. Morton’s been takin’ me,” she said.
“It don’t matter who takes you,” Brubaker snapped, “just go get your business done.”
“Come on, miss,” Bo said. He, too, had been raised to be a gentleman, although it wasn’t ingrained as deeply in him as it was in Scratch.
Cara seemed to have gotten used to the lack of privacy and didn’t let it bother her anymore. She went into the brush and hoisted her skirts without argument. While she was doing that, she asked, “Has Mr. Morton ever been married?”
“Why in the world would you want to know that?” Bo said.
“I’m just curious, that’s all. He seems like such a nice man. I figure some woman must’ve hooked him at one time or another.”
“Well, you’d be wrong there,” Bo said. “He’s never been married. Never even come close, as far as I know, although he’s talked about it a few times when he met some widow woman he particularly liked.”
Bo didn’t say anything about his own tragedy-shortened marriage. Cara hadn’t asked about that, and he wasn’t just about to volunteer the information. It wasn’t that he tried not to think about what he had lost, all those years ago. It was so far in the past that the pain had almost receded to nothing. Almost. But it didn’t have any bearing on what went on now.
Instead he asked, “Why do you want to know about Scratch? Seems like I remember you trying to cut him open with a razor not that long ago.”
Cara came out of the bushes, straightening her clothes as best she could since the shackles still kept her from being able to move her arms very well.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I didn’t know him then, and I was just loco to get away. I can’t stand to be cooped up anywhere.”
“You seem to be standing that wagon pretty well these days,” Bo pointed out.
“What choice do I have?”
She had a point there, he thought. Unless Hank Gentry and the rest of the gang showed up to rescue the prisoners, the odds of Cara LaChance ever again experiencing freedom were pretty slim.
She didn’t say anything else about Scratch. Bo took her back to the camp and escorted Lowe and Elam into the woods in turn. The prisoners ate supper and turned in for the night, stretching out on the floor of the wagon and wrapping themselves in blankets against the chilly night air.
Bo and Brubaker headed for their bedrolls as well. Scratch stood the first watch. He sat on a log near the fire, his Winchester across his knees, and let his senses reach out into the night, alert for anything that was out of the ordinary. He never looked into the flames for more than a second at a time, knowing that to do so would weaken his night vision. He knew he needed to stay as vigilant as possible.
Time passed slowly, as it usually did when he was standing guard. Scratch was a naturally gregarious sort. He loved talking to people and just having folks around him. He had company tonight, of course, but they were all asleep. He was glad it was cold. The chill probably helped keep him awake.
The sound that drifted to his ears was so soft that he almost didn’t hear it at first. Then it came again, and he realized someone was saying, “Psst!”
The little hiss came from the wagon. One of the prisoners was trying to get his attention. Maybe supper hadn’t agreed with whichever one it was, and he or she needed to visit the bushes again. In that case, Scratch thought, he would have to wake up Bo and Brubaker, and the deputy would likely be pretty annoyed.
He stood up and went over to the wagon. Putting his mouth close to the tiny crack around the door, he asked in a whisper, “What do you want?”
“Mr. Morton?” It was Cara’s voice on the other side of the door. Scratch could barely hear it because of the snoring that came from Lowe and Elam. “Scratch? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” Scratch replied. He wondered if she had overheard the conversation between him and Bo and Brubaker earlier and had known that he was taking the first shift on guard. “You need somethin’?”
“Just ... some company, I guess. I’m havin’ trouble sleepin’.”
He didn’t doubt it. The wagon had to be as uncomfortable as all get-out, plus there was the fact that she was on the way to be tried and hanged. Knowledge like that had to weigh heavily on a person.
“I can’t let you out of there,” he told her.
“I know you can’t. But maybe ... maybe you can talk to me for a little while, until I get to feelin’ like I could doze off?”
Scratch glanced at the two bedrolls near the fire. Bo and Brubaker appeared to be sleeping soundly. As long as he whispered, he didn’t suppose it would hurt anything for him to talk to Cara for a few minutes. He couldn’t let it distract him from being watchful, though.
“All r
ight,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. I just needed to hear the sound of another human voice. You ever get like that, Scratch? Just so blasted lonely that you think you’re gonna shrivel up inside and die?”
“Not hardly,” he said. “Bo’s always around to talk to.”
“You’re lucky,” Cara said. “Growin’ up I never had any real friends.”
“You must’ve had family.”
She laughed, but the sound was bitter and humorless.
“Yeah, some family, tryin’ to make a livin’ out of a hardscrabble farm in the piney woods, down in East Texas. All my ma and pa cared about was how much work they could get out of me, and after I wasn’t a kid anymore, all my brothers cared about was what else they could get out of me, if you know what I mean.”
Scratch frowned.
“Sorry,” he said. “Must’ve been a pretty hard life. But that’s no excuse to go to robbin’ and killin’.”
“I never killed nobody!” Cara said, and now she sounded vehement. “I know they say I have, but that’s all lies. There’s nobody who can say they ever saw me kill anybody, because I haven’t. It was Hank and the other fellas in the gang who did all the killin’.”
“You were there for some of it.”
“Well, what else could I do? What happened is, Hank came along a few years ago and I met up with him, and all I could think about was how if I went away with him, I’d get away from that damn farm once and for all. And so when he asked me to, I did. It didn’t seem like I had any choice.”
“We’ve always got choices,” Scratch said.
“Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know what Hank was really like, either. I didn’t know he was an outlaw until I was part of the gang. And then it was too late. I had to go along with whatever he said. He can be ... well, he can be really nice when he wants to, but he can be really mean when he wants to be that way, too. I had to keep him happy with me, or else he would’ve turned me over to the rest of the men. Or worse, just left me somewhere to shift for myself.”
Scratch didn’t see how that could be any worse than what she was talking about, but obviously she felt differently about it. He said, “If all this is true, I’m sorry for you, miss. But you’ll have a chance to tell your side of it at the trial.”
“Do you think anybody will ever believe me?”
“Well, considerin’ how you came after me with that razor and how you’ve acted since we left Fort Smith ...”
“I haven’t done anything except yell some, and you’d yell, too, if you thought you were gonna be dancin’ at the end of a hang rope for things you didn’t do. And as for the razor, like I told your friend Mr. Creel, I was just about out of my head. I can’t stand bein’ locked up. I was loco to get away.” Cara paused, then continued in her soft whisper, “I’m sorry for what I done, Scratch, really and truly sorry. And I’m glad now that I didn’t hurt you.”
“Huh. You and me both,” Scratch said.
A big part of him didn’t believe anything Cara was saying to him. She was just playing up to him, he told himself, trying to make him feel sorry for her.
But what if it was true, even partially? Somebody living as hellish an existence at home as she had described might do anything to get away from it, even throwing in with a gang of bandits and cutthroats. And once she was a part of that gang, what else could she have done except go along with whatever its leader wanted? She must have been terrified of Hank Gentry.
So there was a part of him that actually did feel sorry for her ... if she was telling the truth, which she probably wasn’t.
“You’d better try to get some sleep now,” he told her. This conversation had gone on long enough.
“All right,” she whispered. “Thanks for talking to me, Scratch. It eased my troubled mind a little.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
She laughed again, and this time it was a more genuine sound.
“You probably thought I was gonna ask you to let me go, didn’t you?”
“It wouldn’t have done you any good,” he told her.
“I know that. That’s why I didn’t waste my time.
You’re not the sort of man who’d turn on his friends for a woman.”
“No, I sure ain’t.”
He started to turn away, when he heard her whisper, “But what about a woman who knows where there’s a fortune in greenbacks and gold?”
CHAPTER 20
For a long moment, Scratch didn’t say anything.
Then he asked, “What are you talkin’ about?”
“When me and Hank and the rest of the boys were runnin’ wild down in Texas, before we ever came up here to Indian Territory, we had a hideout in some rugged country west of Fort Worth. There’s not much out in those parts except rocks and rattlesnakes. So Hank figured it was safe to stash most of our loot there. We kept what money we needed to get by and cached the rest in a cave.”
Again, Scratch didn’t know whether to believe her or to think that she was making up some story for reasons of her own. It was possible she was telling the truth. Plenty of outlaws hid part of their loot, rather than spending it all right away.
“Are you sayin’ that money is still there?” he asked.
“Don’t forget the gold,” Cara said. “And yeah, it’s still there unless somebody found it. Nobody would know to look for it there, so it’d have to be somebody just stumblin’ over it. Just blind luck. I’d bet anything it’s still there.” She paused. “I’d bet my life on that, Scratch.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t see how that has anything to do with what’s goin’ on now,” he said as a feeling of crawling unease grew inside him.
“I know how to find that cache. I could lead you right to it. There’s plenty there to make two people rich.”
“Forget it,” Scratch said without hesitation. “Bo and me gave our word to Forty-two and to Judge Parker. Anyway, Bo would never go along with it.”
“I wasn’t talkin’ about Bo,” Cara snapped. “Or does he do all the thinking for both of you?”
“That ain’t the way it is. We’re partners. Equal partners.”
“Sure,” Cara said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
Scratch grimaced and rubbed his jaw. He figured now that he never should have come over here to talk to Cara LaChance. He didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking.
Bo would like it even less, especially if he knew the thoughts that were going through Scratch’s mind at this very minute. He could see how it would all play out, how he could let Cara loose and steal Brubaker’s horse, and they could take off together for the tall and uncut ...
With a fortune in stolen loot waiting for them.
It was enough to tempt any man, especially with Cara herself thrown in as an added prize. He could never fully trust her, of course, but if they were off on their own, he didn’t think she would double-cross him.
For one thing, she would need him to keep her safe. She might be hell on wheels, but a woman traveling alone would have a hard time ever making it to that hideout she’d talked about, especially if the country around it was as rugged as she made it sound.
“What about Lowe and Elam?” he asked. “We couldn’t take them.”
“The hell with them!” Cara whispered savagely. “I don’t owe them a damn thing. Brubaker and your friend can take them on to Tyler and the hangman as far as I’m concerned. I promise you, considerin’ some of the things I’ve seen them do, whatever happens to ’em, they’ve got it comin’.”
Scratch thought hard, following the idea to its logical conclusions. As far as he could see, it would work, except for one thing.
“Bo would come after us,” he said.
“You think so?”
“I know he would. He’d try to track us down, sure as shootin’.” Scratch thought some more. “It’d be better to wait until after we cross the Red River. Then it won’t take us as long to reach that hideout. We�
�ll have a better chance of gettin’ away with it.”
He knew he was talking like he agreed to go along with Cara’s suggestion. But he had to do some more thinking about it, and this would give him the time to do so.
“I suppose I could wait a few more days,” Cara replied with obvious reluctance. “Even though bein’ locked up like this is makin’ me awful crazy, Scratch.”
“You can do it,” Scratch told her, thinking that the delay would give him a chance to work out every last detail of the plan that had sprung into his mind. He couldn’t take a chance on anything going wrong. “It won’t be much longer, and then the two of us can be together.”
“That sounds good,” Cara breathed. “I’m so glad I didn’t cut your throat, Scratch.”
“You and me both,” Scratch said.
The next few days were uneventful, which came as a definite relief after the journey’s action-packed beginning. Brubaker kept the wagon rolling from dawn until nearly dark, changing trails several times but always trending in a generally south-to-southwest direction.
They passed a number of farms and skirted around a couple of settlements. Hank Gentry might have spies just about anywhere, Brubaker explained, and he didn’t want to make it easier for the outlaws to find them. That made sense to Bo.
They were out of the Cherokee reservation now and were crossing Choctaw land, Brubaker told them. Scratch commented, “You really do know every foot of this country, don’t you, Forty-two?”
“Damn straight I do,” Brubaker replied. “I’ve been ridin’ for Judge Parker for several years now. A man who don’t know where he’s goin’ winds up dead, more often than not.”
“Words to live by,” Bo agreed solemnly.
Scratch asked, “How about Texas? You know your way around down there?”
“Why in the hell would I know my way around Texas?” Brubaker replied with a disdainful snort. “I can find my way from one place to another, but it’s outta my jurisdiction. No offense to you Lone Star waddies, but I agree with General Sheridan: if I owned hell and Texas, I’d live in hell and rent out Texas.”
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