There was no question of surprising her, since she had certainly heard the gunfire coming from the canyon, so he decided he might as well give her a chance to surrender peacefully. Taking cover behind one of the more sizable stumps that filled the yard, he called out to her. “Hannah Cheney! There ain’t any of your friends left to help you! So come on outta there with your hands up. You’re under arrest. Surrender without causin’ no fuss and I’ll make it as easy on you as I can.” There was no answer, so after a long moment, he called out again. “Whaddaya say?” He was answered by three quick shots from the door, the shots humming around him a little too close for comfort. Then the door was slammed shut and bolted again. “That’s what I thought,” he muttered with a sigh of disappointment. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to try his next attempt to empty the cabin, since he was not that confident in the chance of success.
By this time, the heavy darkness began to fade with the approaching sunrise. Securely tied to the two poles in the small barn, the two prisoners could see what was taking place near the front of the cabin through the gray light. “I reckon he found out it’s gonna take a helluva lot more’n invitin’ her politely to come outta there,” Tater was moved to comment when Hannah’s answer was delivered by her daddy’s Winchester.
“Best thing that could happen for us is for the son of a bitch to break in that cabin and the two of ’em to shoot each other,” a bitter Jack Lynch snarled.
“That’d be good, wouldn’t it?” Tater agreed. “But we’d still need somebody to untie us.” He was about to say more, but hesitated for a moment when he saw Will roll away from the stump protecting him and make a dash to the front corner of the cabin. “He’s gonna try to get in!” he exclaimed. “Ain’t gonna be easy. That cabin’s pretty stout.” He paused again. “Wait a minute,” he started, caught up in the actions of the deputy. “What the hell’s he doin’?” Then answering his own question, he reported, “He’s fixin’ to crawl under the porch.” At that, both captives were straining to see what was taking place under the cabin. It had been built on a gentle slope back up against the cliff, causing the porch to be a couple of feet high where it joined the front wall, while the back sill sat firmly on the ground. “Well, I’ll be go to hell,” Tater said. “So that’s where our firewood went.”
Lying for the most part on his belly, Will pulled the firewood he had previously stashed under the porch to form a fairly large circle over the stack of kindling he had cut with his hand ax on the other side of the ridge where his horses were tied. He placed the kindling under the front sill of the cabin, hoping it would catch strong enough to feed on the cabin floor. It all depended upon whether or not he could get his kindling to burn. There was enough draft under the cabin, caused by a gentle breeze, to make it difficult to keep a flame going long enough to start the kindling, and he had only three matches. He usually relied on a flint and steel to start his campfires, but he hoped he wouldn’t have to resort to that.
His efforts were rewarded, however, for the firewood Rubin and Tater had split caught fire with no hesitation, and soon he had a healthy fire blazing under the front of the cabin. He began to expand the firewood out to make the burning area as wide as he could reach under the floor. It soon got to the point where the fire was too hot for him to stay, and he had to retreat from the flames, which now showed a keen appetite for the floorboards above them. He backed out cautiously, pausing only a moment to listen before exposing his backside to the open air to make sure Hannah wasn’t standing with the door open, waiting for him.
“Damn!” Tater exclaimed when smoke began billowing out from under the porch. “He’s fixin’ to smoke her outta there!”
Impatient with his simpleminded partner, Lynch bellowed, “He’s burning the place down, you damn fool! All our stuff is in that cabin.” He strained helplessly against the ropes that held him tight against the post as a large patch of flames became visible under the middle of the cabin. When Tater realized what he was saying, he began to yell for Hannah to come out. “She ain’t gonna come outta there,” Lynch said, so Tater began yelling at Will to get their saddles out of the cabin. Satisfied with the progress of the fire, however, Will moved around to the rear of the cabin, anticipating what he figured Hannah would likely try.
* * *
Inside the cabin, Hannah was rapidly losing her confidence to sit tight and force Will to come in after her. Dark heavy smoke was boiling up through the cracks between the floorboards, already filling the cabin with thick, hot air, making it difficult to breathe without coughing. It was obvious that he was going to burn the cabin down with her in it. As the situation became worse and worse, she began to panic when she could now see the flames licking through the edges of the boards. In a frantic effort to extinguish the fire, she picked up the bucket of water near the fireplace, left there to cook with in the morning. She dumped it in the middle of the floor where the flames were most evident. It only made her conditions worse, for it generated black clouds of smoke to mushroom up between the boards, causing her to back away until she was stopped when she bumped into the wall. There was no hesitation now—it was getting more and more difficult to breathe. She had to get out of there!
Doing her best to hold her breath, she retained enough courage to escape without surrendering to the hated lawman, determined to fight her way to freedom. She dragged her saddle to the back window, pushed the shutters open, and threw it outside, along with her saddlebags. In the process, she almost tripped over Rubin’s saddle, so she took the time to throw it out the window, too. Thinking it enough to take care of her brother and herself, she climbed out on the windowsill and lowered herself to the ground. As soon as she felt her feet touch the hard cold ground, she turned to collide with the solid form of Will Tanner. Her first reaction was to raise her rifle to protect herself, but he blocked her arm and wrenched the weapon from her hands. Like a trapped wildcat, she tried to strike him, but he locked his arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Then he picked her up and walked away from the burning cabin, ignoring her kicking and threats.
“I saved a piece of rope just for you,” Will told her when he plopped her on the floor of the barn, face-down. She did her best to resist, but he managed to quickly bind her wrists behind her back, then tie them securely to a length binding her ankles. In a matter of seconds, she was subdued and defenseless with no weapons save her mouth, and Will was very careful not to come too close to that.
“You son of a bitch!” she spat.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied in mock politeness. “You just make yourself comfortable while I go see if I can save another saddle, so one of you won’t have to ride bareback.” Confident that she was unable to move about, he ran back to the cabin. As well as a couple of saddles, there had to be other things he could save from the fire, like weapons and cartridges. The fire was building rapidly at this point, having caught onto the walls better than he had really expected, so he had little doubt now that the cabin was going to be completely destroyed. The fire’s center was already consuming the door of the cabin, so his only point of entry was the rear window that Hannah had come out of. He grabbed the top of the frame and swung his legs over the sill to land on the floor. The air was too thick to breath and the floor beneath his feet felt like a hot griddle, causing him to look around him quickly. In the smoke, he could make out the form of one saddle, but the other one was already scorched by the flames that were advancing toward the rear wall. He grabbed the one good saddle and pushed it through the window. Then he began to throw anything useful he could get his hands on after the saddle—saddlebags, cloth sacks, a box of .44 cartridges, and that was about all he had time for before he had to give in to the smoke. So the next thing out the window was his long frame.
Back in the small barn, Hannah craned her neck to look around her. Seeing Lynch tied to the ridgepole, she sneered, “You did a helluva job of savin’ the horses.”
“You ain’t sittin’ so pretty, yourself,” he replied. “We got hemmed up
in that damn narrow canyon. There wasn’t nothin’ we could do about it, specially since I took a slug in my shoulder. He got the jump on us. Tater can tell you that.”
She struggled to roll over so she could see the other end of the barn. Seeing Tater tied to the rear ridgepole, she asked, instantly alarmed, “Where’s Rubin?”
“Dead,” Tater answered. “He tried to draw on Tanner, but he warn’t fast enough. Jack’s right, we was bottled up with the horses and we couldn’t see where he was.” Then in an effort to give her some condolence, he added, “Too bad about your brother. It took some guts to make a play like that, even if he did get hisself killed.”
The news of Rubin’s death struck her like the heavy blow of a hammer. She had never been particularly fond of any of her brothers, but Rubin was the eldest of the four, her mother’s firstborn. And now he was gone. All the men in her family were gone, killed one way or another by the hand of Will Tanner. “That murderin’ bastard,” she muttered, barely audibly, suddenly feeling vulnerable for the first time since she could remember. She struggled furiously against the ropes that restrained her, but the deputy had not been careless in tying his knots. Finally she relaxed, surrendering to her predicament. Then she heard the voice behind her, calm and patient.
“Just as well you settle down and quit fightin’ it,” Will said. “You’ll just be givin’ yourself rope burns.” He had paused to watch her struggles to be sure he had not been careless when he had hurriedly tied her hands and feet. As damnable as the woman was, he couldn’t help feeling a modicum of sympathy for her. He supposed that she had not had many opportunities to take the right path, what with growing up in a family like the Cheneys, where wrong was considered right. He walked around her so that he could speak directly to her.
“Looks like you got the best of me again,” she said. “And I blame myself for not lookin’ where I was goin’ when I came outta that window. So now what are you fixin’ to do, kill me, like you did with all the men in my family?”
“I reckon that’ll be up to you,” Will said. “Depends on how much trouble you cause. What I’m aimin’ to do is take you down to Atoka, where you can wait till I can get a wagon to take you and your two friends on to Fort Smith. That’ll be easier on all four of us. You cause no trouble, and I won’t make it hard on you.” Then something she had just said occurred to him. “Whaddaya mean, all the men in your family? Your pa ain’t dead, is he?”
“Hell, yes,” she shot back. “And it’s on your soul, ’cause his heart gave out on him because of you murderin’ his sons. You might as well have put a bullet in his brain.”
He didn’t respond for a few moments while he considered that. Ike Cheney was dead? So there was no longer any threat from the old cattle rustler and murderer. That is, if he could believe her story. She could be telling a tale just to take the pressure off her father. Somehow, though, judging by the bitterness in her voice, he thought she might be telling the truth. Consequently, he again felt a spark of compassion for her loss of family. Even so, he deemed it prudent to watch his back, in case the ghost of the old man came back to rescue his daughter. “What about your mama?” he asked. “Is she dead, too?”
“None of your business,” Hannah replied.
“Reckon you’re right,” he said, then as the first rays of the sun broke through the fir trees to throw flickering imps of light dancing along the waterfall behind them, he gave them his marching orders. “We’ll be movin’ outta here as soon as I catch up the horses and get the saddles on ’em. We’ve got about a sixty-mile ride to Atoka and I aim to make it in a day and a half.”
It took a little longer than he figured to get ready to depart. After retrieving Buster and his packhorse from the ridge where he had left them, he rounded up the rest of the horses. By the time he had saddles on three of them, and the packhorses ready to travel, it was mid-morning. Needing some of the rope to use as lead lines for the horses, he untied Tater and Lynch and cuffed their wrists with a couple of sets of hand irons and chains he carried on his packhorse. It was still some time before noon when they filed out of the canyon, leaving the burnt remains of the outlaw hideout smoldering behind them. Led out by the big buckskin gelding, the three prisoners rode in single file behind Will, their hands bound together behind their backs. Behind them, also on lead ropes, came the packhorses with Rubin Cheney’s horse trailing the lot.
In another minor fit of compassion, Will had dragged Rubin’s body over to a gully and covered it over with rocks from the base of the cliff. He could not be sure if it was a wasted gesture or not because there was no apparent reaction from Hannah, her face remaining expressionless when they rode past the makeshift grave on their way out. “Ain’t you gonna give us somethin’ to eat?” Tater asked as they passed by the narrow point in the canyon where they had been corralled and captured.
“When we rest the horses,” Will replied. “Nobody’s done enough work to be hungry by now, anyway.”
“My shoulder’s painin’ me awful bad with my hands locked behind my back like this,” Lynch complained. “I ain’t sure I can stay in the saddle unless I have my hands free to hold on.”
“Then I reckon you’d best get a good grip with your knees,” Will said. He suspected Lynch might have come to an erroneous assumption, caused by the slight consideration he had shown Hannah for the loss of her brother. This is gonna be a long trip, he thought.
CHAPTER 14
Will figured they had covered about twenty miles when they came to a slow-moving creek that looked to be a good place to water and rest the horses. He was hoping to make about forty miles before stopping for the night. This time of year the days were shorter, so it would be pushing it to try to make the forty miles unless he moved on after a short rest. He considered it for a moment, then decided he couldn’t drive the horses that hard. Even though his task was a difficult one, he had no choice but to transport three prisoners with no prison wagon and no help. The first problem came up right away. “I gotta pee,” Hannah announced when he started to help her out of her saddle.
Of the many arrests he had made during the last couple of years, this was the first time he had been called upon to handle this problem. He hesitated for a moment before replying. Looking around him at the trees and the berry bushes growing beside the creek, he said. “All right. As soon as I make sure your friends are comfortable, I’ll take you over there in those bushes.”
“I can’t pee with you watchin’ me,” Hannah informed him. “And I sure as hell can’t pee with those two buzzards gawkin’ at me.”
Her remark stumped him for a moment, then he replied, “We’ll work it out. I ain’t gonna watch you.” He reached up and took her arm to help her down. When she was on the ground, he untied her hands. She immediately began rubbing her wrists. “Now, while I take care of them,” he said, nodding toward the two outlaws still sitting on their horses, watching him intently, “you can pick up some of those dead limbs and get a fire goin’.” He immediately saw a gleam of inspiration in her eyes, and knew what she was thinking. “Build your fire right between those two cottonwoods yonder.” He pointed to two sizable trees about twenty feet apart. “And, miss, I’ll be watching every move you make while you’re doin’ it. You make one wrong move, and I will shoot you. You can count on it.” The gleam in her eye faded as quickly as it had appeared. She was convinced that he meant what he said. When she seemed to accept his promise, he stepped back and gestured toward the trees. She proceeded to gather wood for a fire. He was somewhat surprised that she didn’t answer his threat with her usual defiant retorts.
While keeping a close eye on the woman gathering firewood, Will pulled his two male prisoners off their horses, one at a time, and handcuffed them to the two trees he had pointed out to Hannah. Confident that they weren’t going anywhere, he took care of the horses while Hannah built her fire. When she had a healthy blaze going, he said, “All right, that looks like it’s goin’ pretty good. I’ll take you so you can pee now.”
; “I told you,” she replied at once, “I can’t pee with you gawkin’ at me.”
“Damn it, I ain’t gonna gawk at you,” he shot back, getting a little irritated by her insinuation that he might. “You just do what I tell you and won’t nobody see your precious bottom.” Having little choice, other than wetting herself, she reluctantly submitted. Using the rope he had tied her with before, he looped a knot around her boot with one end of about a thirty-foot length. Leading her over to a clump of bushes, he said, “You can crawl in there behind those bushes and do your business. If I feel any slack in this rope at any time, I’m comin’ in there after you. You understand?” She nodded, realizing finally that he intended to give her the privacy she demanded. “Now, in case you get some crazy idea in your head, I can tell you that I know the difference between an empty boot and one with a foot in it.” She nodded again, after just having considered that possibility. “And when I say, ‘bush,’ you damn sure better shake some of those leaves, so I can see ’em. All right?” Once again she nodded. “All right,” he said. “Now get along, we need to cook something to eat.”
“He must figure himself to be some kinda gentleman,” Tater observed as he and Lynch watched the procedure taking place at the edge of the bushes. “If I had a gun on that woman, I wouldn’t go to all that trouble to suit her fancy. I’d tell her to pee or bust, specially that woman.”
“If he don’t watch hisself, that woman will get the drop on him,” Lynch said, his words still strained with the pain in his shoulder. “And when she does, we’ll see what she does for you and me. I don’t count on nothin’. She’s as likely to take off with everythin’ and leave the two of us tied to these trees.”
“Man, I hope she don’t do nothin’ like that,” Tater said. “Hell, she needs us. She can’t go it alone, a woman like that.”
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