Arliss rummaged in the weapons box, loading up his pockets and cradling a shotgun. “Ain’t much of a plan.”
“Nope,” said Tucker. “But then again, we ain’t much to look at.”
Arliss cackled. “Don’t count this old Tennessee hill boy out of the game just yet, whippersnapper.” He winked. “Now let’s ride.” Arliss kicked Grissom on the haunch. “You too, fat boy.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Marshal Hart barred Tarleton and his two cronies from entering the jail with him and Emma.
“You don’t need to be in here,” he said. “Anything you needed to say has most likely been said out there in the street. We’ll get her in here, let her cool down. And you all can go about your business.”
Tarleton leaned against one side of the open doorway and talked low to Hart as if Emma hadn’t been standing just inside the door, wanting to edge closer to the warmth of the stove.
“Marshal Hart,” he said in a low tone, “you seem to forget your place. I intend to marry that girl, and in so doing, make this town one hell of a special and rich place. I will not be denied anything. Do you understand me?”
The marshal’s response surprised Emma.
“Lord Tarleton, you seem to forget that I am wearing a badge pinned on me by someone who has more legal right to tell me what to do than any ten rich Englishmen.”
But Emma saw the sweat collect on Hart’s chin, saw the muscles of his left eye jounce and jump. And she was sure Tarleton saw much the same.
After a few long seconds, he said, “Keep her here until the poor little dove regains her senses. I will be in my hotel. Send for me.” Tarleton turned away, then paused and looked back inside, but this time he stared straight at Emma. “And don’t make me wait too long, Marshal. I do not like being denied. I will not be denied.” He stared at Emma, touched his hat brim, and flanked by his two black-clad hirelings, Tarleton strode off the porch, down the steps, and crossed the street.
The marshal stood at the open door for a minute more. Emma gave brief thought to braining him in the back of the head with a length of firewood.
“Fixing to snow, I reckon.” He breathed in deeply once more, then turned to face the room, closing the door behind himself. Emma had retreated to the feeble warmth the woodstove offered.
“Marshal, let me—”
“I can’t, Emma. I can’t do it, so don’t ask me to let you go. I’m . . .” He turned from her, hugged his arms, his back to her. “I’m in this too deep. Been in it for a long time. Longer than that fool Tarleton knows.”
“What do you mean? In what too deep?”
He rummaged in a cupboard beside the desk, came up with a pair of wool pants, a stack of mismatched socks, and a knitted wool sweater. “Here,” he said, stacking them up beside her. “And now for the important stuff, coffee.” He tried a weak smile and poured them both a cup.
She pulled on the trousers underneath the dress, and the marshal looked way. Then she put on the socks and bunched the dress up under the sweater. The dress wasn’t anything she wanted to wear, but it did add a few layers of warmth. She dippered the ladle in the water bucket a half dozen times and drank her fill. She turned her attention to the coffee and the greasy biscuits the marshal had set out on a tin plate on the tabletop before her. Emma guessed he’d been saving them for his noonday meal. She didn’t care; she ate them all.
“What did you mean, Marshal, when you said you were in too deep?”
“Got to get you in that cell, Emma. I’m sorry about it. Here’s a pair of boots. They’re a mite worn and no doubt too big for you, but they’ll help keep the warmth in and the cold out. And there are plenty of wool blankets, no worries.”
“Why lock me up? I’ve done nothing wrong. Let me go! I have to check on Arliss and Samuel. You know there’s something wrong here. What aren’t you telling me?”
“I have to lock you up, not because you’re dangerous but because they’re the dangerous ones. I think the only place you’ll be safe for the time being is in here. I can hold them off for a while yet.”
“Hold them off? What are you expecting to happen, Marshal Hart?” Emma paused in chewing the last biscuit, sipped coffee to wash it down.
“I don’t expect much to happen until they get tired of waiting and come after you.” He looked at her then for the first time since they’d come into the office. “And when I don’t let them in, there’ll be hell to pay.”
That made her feel a little better about him, but far from impressed. “What if they hurt you? Then I’m stuck in a cell, a sitting duck? That hardly seems fair. At least let me go, let me get a head start on out of this powder keg.”
“No. I can’t do that. It’s too dangerous for you out there. There are people out there who have things they think they have to do to other people, and I’m thinking that one of them will find you and use you as an excuse to get to other people.”
“You’re talking in circles, Marshal. Let me go.”
“No!” He spun on her. “Let’s go, Emma. Back to the cell. Please don’t fight me on this. I’ll explain it all later. Trust me.”
Emma began to protest, then looked in his eyes. Something there told her to not push this. That somehow maybe the marshal knew something she didn’t. But she sat unmoving until he sighed and pulled out his pistol. “Emma, now.”
* * *
He got her in the cell, clanged it shut, and turned the key in the lock. She grabbed the bars and pressed her face close to them. “Marshal, what did you mean? What is going on here?”
He walked a few steps away, then said, “I . . . I have to make it right, Emma. I can’t do this anymore.”
He half turned to face her. She saw the light from the back door’s window slant in, shadows forming lines on his tired face.
“Emma . . . I killed your father.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“I think he’s gone round the bend on this one.” The speaker, a short, densely built man with a thick brushlike black mustache that hung over his top lip like a sleeping creature, sat in the seat of the narrow work wagon, the lines looped loose in his hand while he waited for the mule to drink its fill.
His partner on the seat stretched, yawned, and adjusted his dusty bowler hat. “I hear you. We’ve been working for Tarleton, what, three years now? Every town he finds a new filly to set his cap to, right? But there ain’t never been one to tell him no like this one, not ever. And that’s what’s got him all bunched up.”
“How so?”
“Ain’t you ever noticed how he hates it when there’s something that he can’t have? Always makes a new way around the tree.”
“Yeah, and he always ends up with what he wants. I reckon that’s what makes him so successful in business.”
“I guess so, but betwixt you and me, I don’t like what he’s doing to this girl. Hell, I’m not so sure this town deserves what he’s planning to do to it.”
“Well, forcing the girl to marry him is one thing. Mostly out of spite for the fact that she’s told him to go whistle on his own. Right or not, that’s just one person. But setting all of Klinkhorn out on its ear? I don’t know how right that is. And most of the boys feel the same way too.”
“Good thing none of us is getting paid to think too hard.”
“Yeah, but I tell you what, that can only go on for so long before I get my fill.”
“I hear that. Getting out of town while he marries that wildcat is about the smartest thing we done all week. I expect the camp is just fine, but you never can tell if a critter has gotten into things. And telling him that if our equipment is fouled up it will slow us down, now, that was genius thinkin’.”
The driver slapped the lines on the mule’s back. “Hup there, mule! I do have my strokes of genius.”
“They’re just few and far between.”
“Since you never had one, how would you recognize one?”
As the two bickering men rumbled along in their loaded and tarped work wagon, Tucker peered out from behind the streamside boulder where he’d been crouched. He and Arliss and a bound-and-gagged Grissom had crossed the stream earlier and had paralleled the track Tarleton’s work crews had made through the woods in getting to their day camp.
By the time he made it back to Arliss and Grissom, snow had begun to fall at a steady rate, large, thick flakes that clumped on tree limbs and hat brims. Tucker wiped the gathered snow from his sparse beard and decided he would have to ride on ahead. The town could sell its soul for a dime—he didn’t care—but there was no way he was going to risk letting Tarleton marry Emma.
He pulled Arliss aside and explained what he’d heard. And to his surprise, Arliss suggested the very same course of action.
“You going to be able to keep tabs on Grissom? And without killing him?” Tucker almost smiled as he watched shock and desire war on Arliss’s face.
“Don’t you worry. I’ll bring him in, one fat piece and alive. Once I get him to town, though, I can’t predict what will happen to him.”
“Fair enough. Grissom said Tarleton is most likely holed up in the hotel, so I’ll head there first, try to get Emma out of there without too much fuss. Maybe we can meet up at the livery?”
Arliss nodded. “I’ll tie up outside town, creep on in. You really think it’s gonna be this easy?”
“Hell yes.” Tucker smiled. “Don’t you?”
Arliss shook his head and mounted up. “Good luck, boy, though I reckon you’re so full of beans and vinegar you don’t need luck.” He held up a hand. “This snow, can’t decide if it’ll be a help or a hindrance to us.”
Tucker gave the old man a last look. “It’ll be what it’ll be. Nothing we can do to change that.” He nodded toward Grissom. “Watch him,” he said, looking at Arliss. “I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”
“Unless you got more muscle than what you’re showing, I’d say tossing him is out of the question.”
Tucker gave a final wave and rode on, booting Jasper into a swift run. His best guess was that he’d make it to the town close to dark. A wedding ceremony was one thing, he thought. But from what the surveyors in the wagon were saying, Tarleton was a user who didn’t love her, didn’t seem to love anything but money, and since she’d refused him, he wanted her more than ever. Just because he couldn’t have her. What lengths would such a man go to just to get what he thought he wanted?
The only possible answer made Samuel Tucker boot the big buckskin hard and head for Klinkhorn.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
As the afternoon wore down and the storm clouds bunched tight enough to become one cloud, daylight lost its struggle and a raw wind kicked up, blowing the new snow straight down Main Street, Klinkhorn, from the east, forcing it between buildings, through gappy windowsills, under eaves, and down chimneys. Wood smoke drafted back into sitting rooms and kitchens one minute, pulled hard out of chimneys the next with a rush that burned firewood fast. It allowed little precious heat to fill the rooms where residents sat close, gloved hands outstretched toward the roaring stoves, layers of clothes all but covering their faces.
Huddled in her stone cell, wrapped in six wool blankets, Emma Farraday sat dumbly, oblivious of the cold. Every so often a shiver jerked through her body.
As soon as the marshal had said he was the one who had killed her father, she froze inside. None of it had made any sense. And then as she sat on the bunk in the dark, wrapped in the blankets, the more she let her mind work back, she began to unravel the knotted threads that made up the hellish two years since her daddy had been taken from her, shot by some unknown person. They’d all suspected Grissom, but no one could prove it. And he had of course denied it repeatedly. Now it looked as though he might have been telling the truth.
But why did Marshal Hart kill her father? He had been with the Farraday brothers during the war, and then they’d all come west together to try their hand at finding gold. Young men with muscles and dreams and bellies full of killing. So what had happened?
Emma had an overwhelming urge to shout to him, to ask him to explain himself, but every time she wanted to demand that he unlock the cell, a creeping futility seemed to sap her strength and leave her more tired than before.
So that was the real reason why he locked her up before he told her. She didn’t blame him. She promised herself she’d kill him the second she got the chance.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The storm was blowing in hard from the east, and the snow grew thicker by the second. Tucker was thankful that Payton’s horse was a stout beast that showed little sign of flagging, but even with that advantage, the situation was grim.
He hoped Arliss was able to make it through and trusted that the old man knew the terrain. Tucker played over in his mind what he remembered of the town and found he recalled very little. That first night, he’d ridden into Klinkhorn intent on getting food and drink, and by the time he’d been dragged to jail, he was both battered by the marshal and feeling the effects of the whiskey. Then when he left town, it had been under a tarp in the back of Emma’s wagon. But she’d saved him then, and now it was his turn to repay the favor.
For a man who had come to town with next to nothing, a man intent on dying any way he could, and the sooner the better, he had ended up with the few things no man could ever pay for—renewed health, new friends, and the promise of love. And he’d be darned if he was going to give up on any of them now.
Scarcely two minutes more found him rimming a little ridge to the north above town. Far below, to his right, he saw intermittent flickers of warm light from the windows of houses of Klinkhorn and reined Jasper toward the far end of them, close by where he knew the livery sat.
“I’m coming, Emma,” he said aloud, the words whipped away by the bitter wind.
By the time he reached the livery, it was full dark, no moon or stars. As Tucker dismounted, he looked up the main street and saw little other than already drifting snow, and a few weak clouds of light barely strong enough to cut through the storm.
The hotel sat to his right, a third of the way up the street, and was one of the few buildings to offer more than a single light from its many windows. But it was the third floor, where Grissom had said Tarleton had set up shop, that Tucker was most interested in. Could she be up there? As likely a place as any. And so, a perfect place to begin his search. He lashed the horse to the rail out of the wind behind an angled section of chute used for funneling stock from one corral to another. His pockets were filled with ammo for the six-gun holstered and strapped on his waist over the wool mackinaw, and he cradled the rifle across one arm. His burns throbbed, as did his wounded shoulder, but the blowing snow provided a welcome relief to his seared features and uncovered head and hands.
He knew what he looked like because he’d seen his reflection in the stream earlier in the day, before Tarleton’s men had come along with their wagon. He was not a pretty sight, and neither was Arliss. They’d both be scarred for the rest of their days, though how many of those days were left to them, neither of them knew. Come the morning, if they were alive, they might better be able to hazard a guess. Rescuing Emma was his only goal right now.
Tucker cat-footed around the backsides of the stark structures lining the right side of the street, past the back door of the saloon he’d visited when he’d first come to town. He paused, jerked back into the deeper shadows against the building. He swore he heard a cough. Too soon for Arliss to have made it to town. Someone else out on such a night? Or was he being watched?
The thought made his gut tighten, turn cold. “In for a penny,” he whispered, and double-timed it to the hotel. A quick glance upward toward the well-lit third floor verified his guess, and he groped against the dark wall of
the building for a door. It took him longer than he had expected, and only when he tripped over the snow-buried bottom step of the back stairs did he find what he was looking for. He paused on the top step, his hand on the doorknob, turned it slowly, and it gave under his hand. The door swung inward, a long, drawn-out squeak accompanying it. He stood outside, peered in down the long corridor that he knew must lead to the lobby.
As he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, he heard the voices of many men, talking, laughing, socializing, possibly from the front parlor. He’d been in enough town hotels to know the basic layout of the place. They would be Tarleton’s men, gathered on such a night in the warm downstairs room, the one with a stove or a fireplace. They would be drinking, and perhaps less inclined as the night wore on to want to fight for their boss. Or perhaps they would because their money source would be worth protecting. If that was to be the case, he hoped they’d be drunk, less accurate with their hurried shots.
He passed several closed doors. Behind one he heard what sounded like pots or pans being clanked together. The kitchen staff was busy with supper preparation or cleanup. All those men to feed would make for a big mealtime and lots of work. The place smelled of polished wood and something more, maybe mold and cooking smells that wafted through the hallway.
There might well be a back staircase to the top floor, but he hadn’t seen sign of one on the outside and he didn’t know the interior well enough to venture a guess and end up stuck in a closet. So up the central staircase he’d go. He didn’t dare go slow any longer—every second he stood without someone stumbling on him was a second wasted. He took the stairs two at a time, made it to the landing of the second floor with no interruption. And by the time he reached the third, he guessed he’d been given some minor gift by whatever god was up there watching over him.
And that’s when he saw the two men in black.
Ralph Compton Tucker's Reckoning (9781101607770) Page 24