“If what I am leading up to isn’t apparent yet, I will once again try—and no doubt fail—to cut to the chase.” He smiled. “Emma, I am prepared to offer to you the world, to travel across oceans, to the Far East, throughout Europe, Russia, anywhere you desire to go. The finest in jewels, furs, the grandest of mansions, the most decadent of private rail cars, the finest of Thoroughbred horses, the best foods, caviars, the rarest of fish and fowl, anything that money can buy—and a good many things it cannot. And last but by no means least, I am prepared to give to you, by way of my sincere intention, right now and with but one string attached, the free and clear deed and title to your family’s ranch, debt free forever and a day, with enough money to keep it self-sustaining in high style for lifetimes to come.”
It took Emma long minutes of staring at him, at the room, at the hand that she’d finally pulled away from his, the hand she was sure one of the fingers of which would be involved with his offer, before she finally worked up enough courage to ask the question: “In exchange for what . . . Lord Tarleton?”
He smiled again, smoothed his lapels, and ran a hand through his hair. “I should think, my dear, that would be the most obvious of answers. But I will oblige you, as I know you are a woman of straightforward means. I am asking for your hand in marriage, my dearest Emma.”
Considering all his talk, she had been expecting it, but it came as a shock to hear, a shock that made her entire body feel as if it were quivering. It must have been obvious because he jumped to his feet and poured her a glass of water.
“My dear, your face has positively gone white. Whiter than the snow falling outside. You should drink this. I daresay this has come as a shock, but I had hoped it would have been a pleasant one.”
She sipped the water, then said, “Oh, it’s a shock, Mr. . . . uh . . . Lord Tarleton. I don’t quite know what to think just yet.” She stood. “I have to go.”
“Of course, of course, my dear. But do keep in mind that it would be in your best interests to accept my charitable proposition. I am a wealthy and important man and you would be able to significantly raise your social standing. You would also be able to keep your beloved ranch, admittedly with minor alterations. But it would be yours to do with mostly as you see fit. And your loved ones too—all well and whole and taken care of forever, living in the lap of luxury. Otherwise all will be lost to you, to them, to everyone in this town. For when I say a thing, it comes to pass. You see?”
She walked on numb legs to the door, then turned back with her hand on the knob. “You don’t even know me.”
He smiled again. “I don’t need to, my dear. I can tell just by looking at you that you are all that I want.”
“What about what I want out of life?”
He smiled, shook his head. “Oh, but you are a clever thing. I daresay we shall be most happy together.”
She turned from him, closed the door behind her, and barely noticed the two men standing to either side of the door, tall men in black bristling with cross-draw guns. But she did notice them and cut wide around them. They nodded to her, touched their hat brims as she passed. She walked down the stairs and headed out through the lobby and into the snow, feeling colder than she could ever remember feeling, inside and out, in her entire life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“It’s about time you showed yourself! We been worried sick here, holdin’ down the fort whilst you go off gallivantin’, having yourself a time in town—that is where you was at, wasn’t it?” Arliss peered at Emma a long moment, leaned in close, and she could tell he was sniffing her breath, trying to determine if she’d been on one of those toots that he said all the Farradays were most apt to indulge in.
“Arliss, if you spent half the time worrying about what you were supposed to be doing and the other half ignoring the stuff you did that was just plain annoying to others, you’d be better off.” She tried to make this sound festive and light, but her heart wasn’t in it.
“Emma?” Arliss knew her too well. He held her shoulders and she noticed for the first time that she might be a pinch taller than him. Maybe she really was all grown-up. Maybe this was all there was to it, and that all she could hope for was to marry someone who wouldn’t mistreat her. Maybe life was just a long, dark tunnel with a few brief periods of happiness separated by long times of tolerance, of acceptance of the way things had to be because the people with power and money wanted it that way.
“Girly . . .”
She hugged Arliss, then wrapped her arms tight around his skinny neck and buried her face in his gray hair and his scruffy, whiskery face and coat collar, which smelled of old man and horses and sweat and wood smoke, and she wished things could be the way they were just two short years before when they were all there and safe from the world. She’d never known her mother, but felt somehow as if she knew her from the way her father and Uncle Payton had talked of her. Those had been good times, happy times when she thought that none of it would ever change.
Finally she stepped back from Arliss and rubbed her thumb and knuckles into her eyes. He pulled out an old soiled bandanna from his pocket and she wiped her eyes. Only around Arliss would she consider crying. She was grateful that he didn’t ask her what was wrong. He knew her well enough to know that she’d come out with it eventually. And she did.
“I met that man, the stranger Samuel mentioned. The English fella.”
Arliss squared off, his bony knuckles hanging at his side. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No,” she said, smiling slightly at his bold, selfless attitude. “He just asked me to marry him.”
If the situation hadn’t been so peculiar and frightening all at once to her, Emma knew she would have collapsed to the stable floor in laughter. It was too much, though, to take in, once she heard herself voice the words. And she knew she was in trouble, because saying the words out loud didn’t make her feel happy; they made her tighten inside.
“He did what?”
The voice from behind her made Emma spin.
Samuel Tucker stood, swaying slightly, his head bandaged, his shoulder padded. His wounds had leaked, stained the cotton batting a reddish black, but his color was better. He wore no shirt, but his torso, still thin, had muscled and had begun filling out. His eyes stared at her, searching hers for more information. Other than Arliss’s unconditional hug, it was Tucker’s look of concerned anger on this cold, lonely day that made Emma feel as if she might just live through this hell that her life had become.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Just how in the hell, I ask you, Vollo, did we come to this pretty pass?” Bentley Grissom’s fat head wobbled as he peered through his thick-lidded eyes like a hog in the sun on a close summer day. He looked slowly side to side. It appeared that his last remaining henchman had also deserted him. Then he heard a light snoring coming from somewhere beyond the desk.
“There that buzzard is. Sleeping and snoring his way through the day—right here in my office!”
Then the dark humor of what he’d said made him chuckle. This was no longer his office, no longer his bar, no longer his town. He slammed a pink fist to the desktop, and gritted his teeth at the pain.
From the floor in front of the desk, Vollo coughed and gagged. “Wha . . . what?”
“Get up, you sorry excuse for a Mexican. I have need of you and you are sleeping the day away.”
The man sat up slowly, his hands shielding his eyes. “I don’t work for you no more. We may be drinking buddies, but you and your bad plans, they always get us hurt or killed.” His damaged tongue made his words sound as though they were forced through cotton batting.
“You may definitely have been part of one, but most assuredly not of the other.”
“What?”
Grissom rolled his eyes, but even that simple act induced a twinge of shooting pain deep in his temple. “Never mind
. Right now, if you ever want to eat again, you had better help me clean up this office.”
“What’s the use, boss? You ain’t got no more money than I do. Plus, we don’t have Rummler no more.”
“It is true we don’t have the services of that genetic giant known as Rummler, but we do have you. Oh, and my not so diminutive mental skills.”
“I ain’t so stupid that I don’t know when you’re poking the fun, eh? But tell me, that foreigner fella with the fancy name and all the men, he took everything from you in exchange for what, huh?”
“Vollo, I am well aware that I may have made a slightly less than prudent business decision, but it was the only avenue left open to me. I stand to gain forty percent of all the guaranteed substantial takings from the exploitation of this foul little town. And all I had to do was sign over at the outset my holdings here.”
He shrugged. “It was the only way to keep this a fair fight, as they say. Otherwise, Tarleton, who has ample experience dismantling such towns, I can assure you, could have excluded me altogether. The advantage of what I have to offer him is that I was sort of an advance team, albeit unwitting, to the area. In said role, I set up the infrastructure that will, in turn, support the superstructure of his vast logging operation that will, in turn, transform this entire region of the country into the nexus of a massive logging empire.”
Grissom swallowed. Why, he could swear his headache from Vollo’s cheap whiskey had almost vanished. Talking through his woes always seemed to help.
“You talk too much, boss.” Vollo belched and staggered to the doorway that led to the back alley, leaned there a moment before whipping open the door and urinating off the back steps into the dirt.
“Vollo! I may not at present own this establishment, but that doesn’t mean I don’t run the establishment for Lord Tarleton. And as the manager, I must insist that you refrain from urinating right where we have to walk.”
“Huh? ’Kay, boss. But hey, what about Rummler?”
“What about him, Vollo? My gosh, man, he’s dead. You said so yourself.”
“He is. I went out and found him the next day, but I didn’t find that other one, that killer of Farraday.”
“You mean you went back to the scene?”
“Sure, I wanted to bury Rummler, thought I might piss on the body of that other one. But he was one hard fella to track down. Couldn’t find hide nor hair of him.”
Grissom waved away the comment. “I seriously don’t think we need concern ourselves any longer with the whereabouts of the man. No doubt he crawled off to die in the leaves somewhere. Now, come here and lend a hand. I don’t want last night’s drunken sendoff of Rummler to be indicative to Tarleton of how I intend to run affairs here.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, Mr. Grissom.”
Grissom looked toward the door to see it opened wide and Lord Tarleton staring at him, arms crossed and a smile on his face.
“How long have you been there, sir?”
“Long enough to know that you are perhaps operating under a delusion. You seem to think that you will somehow be my chief of operations here in Klinkhorn, and truth be told, I have had need of someone to assist with overseeing such affairs, should the need arise. But your assumption that you will be that person leads me to question the very nature of our dealings together.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Lord Tarleton. We have an agreement. A legal, binding agreement.”
“Technically, Bentley Grissom, there is no ‘we.’ You have nothing. I have everything, and never the twain shall meet, as they say.”
“What? What is this?” Grissom swung his gaze from Tarleton to Vollo.
Grissom retreated behind the desk. “No, no!” he shouted. “I will not let you do this, Tarleton.” He pulled in a deep breath. “Our agreement is null and void, sir. Consider our contract invalid.”
“That suits me just fine, Mr. Grissom.” Tarleton nodded to his two cohorts. “I believe we can now proceed, gentlemen. Escort this man off my premises. In fact, you’d do well to escort him and . . . that out of town limits.” He nodded toward Vollo, whose grimy hands had paused in buttoning his trouser fly. He stood looking at the strange exchange with a look of confusion on his face, even as Tarleton’s two black-clad cohorts advanced on him.
Grissom clawed at the loop handle of his top desk drawer and scrabbled in there for the one thing he hoped might help ease the tension in the room, back it off a bit so he could think. His pudgy hand closed around the handle of his derringer. Ever since he’d hired Vollo and Rummler, he’d gradually taken to carrying that in a trouser pocket, but always had a vision of the thing going off somehow and shooting himself in the beans. So he’d begun locking it in the drawer, except for long walks about town. And then came the day when he left it in the drawer altogether.
Had he even loaded it? Didn’t matter now. He snatched up the two-shot gun and peeled back the hammer. And there sat a shell—loaded.
“Now, then, Tarleton.”
“It is ‘Lord’ Tarleton. How many times must I tell you, Grissom? And put the gun away. Instead of having you banned from my town, I could have you jailed. How would you like that?”
“Not on your life, Tarleton. How dare you talk to me that way? I built this town. When I got here it was little more than a dry cracker with a handful of spent miners and a few ranchers looking to trade goods on the weekends. Now look at it!” He waved the derringer around his head.
“And I appreciate it, Grissom. But your time has passed here. You need to decide right now, sir, if you intend to leave quietly or stay awhile longer—as a guest in one of Marshal Hart’s commodious cells.”
Grissom felt that snaky vein on the side of his forehead begin to pulse and throb as he raised the derringer. From behind the smiling Lord Tarleton, an arm clad in black, its hand sheathed in a black leather glove, raised a silver long-barreled pistol, hammer cocked all the way back, and leveled it on Grissom.
Grissom traced the sight line back to a partially shadowed face, two cold eyes glinting. The same thing extended on the other side of the English dandy.
It seemed no one counted on Vollo, who they all assumed was still fumbling with his fly buttons. What he was fumbling with was his pistol. He backed to the open alley door, and as he cranked off a shot, Grissom grunted forward toward the same doorway.
Vollo’s shot shattered the wooden doorframe to the right of Tarleton’s head, pocking his face with spiny splinters that drew immediate bloody tears running down his face, spattering his spotless clothes with blood. The Englishman whipped sideways, screaming, and slammed into one of his hirelings, sending the man’s shot scudding into the floor.
It was all the extra time Grissom needed to force his portly frame through the alley door. He and Vollo scrambled to make it out of the alley and to the livery as fast as they were able. People in the street stayed frozen in place. This was a sight to see: Bentley Grissom, red-faced and running, panting as if air were soon going to be in short supply.
“Out of my way, damn you!” He pushed at them, forcing his bulk past, elbowing and screaming between huffs and puffs.
“Boss, they ain’t coming. They ain’t following!” Vollo had stopped running, which itself had not been much of a chore. He barely had to lope to keep up with his boss, looking behind them for sign of a tail.
“Where did they go?”
“Getting their boss fixed, I reckon.”
“I fear, Vollo, that I have somehow made an enemy of the one man I had been counting on to make me wealthy.”
“Maybe you weren’t never meant to be no rich man, boss.”
The back of Grissom’s fat hand lashed out and caught Vollo square in the mouth, splitting a barely healed lip and snapping his head back on its stem. Immediate anger flared in the Mexican’s eyes like a struck match. His own claw
like hand snatched Grissom’s by the wrist, bent it downward hard. “You do that again, boss, and it will be the last time—you get me?”
The fat man nodded. “Yeah, yeah, Vollo. I—”
“We best get off the street, boss.” Vollo licked his lip, tasted blood. “Can you ride?”
“Been a while,” said Grissom, numb from the speed of everything that had happened in the last few minutes.
As they hustled down the end of the street to the livery, Grissom said, “They’ll be coming any second, I can tell. Those men in black, I never trusted them from the start. They’ll come for me and shoot me, sure as day follows night.”
“Nah, they don’t want you, boss.”
“What? Of course they do.” They slipped into the side door of the dark stable.
“No, they don’t neither, boss. What they want is you to be gone. You are a headache, but it don’t sound like you got much to stand on. You signed away your rights to everything here. Last thing they can take is your life. Don’t give it up cheap, boss.”
“How did you get so smart, Vollo?”
“Never said I wasn’t. That was you . . . and Rummler. Me, I just figure that if there’s someone else around smart enough to make the big decisions, why should I have to scratch my thinker, you know?”
“So you’re saying that I’m not smart enough to make the big decisions.”
“Well, boss, you ain’t been doing so good with it lately. Now, let’s get out of town, think about things. Might be we can come up with a plan to take back what is yours. Course, I won’t be doing this for nothing, boss. You got me?”
In the dark of the livery barn, Bentley Grissom stared into the eyes of his newest partner and did his best to not shoot the grimy man in the gut with his little derringer.
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