Willie nodded and gave him a small smile.
“Good. Fredrick, you are in charge,” Billy said. “I’m going to fetch my horse. If I’m lucky, we’ll meet up with you at the stage, but don’t wait if we’re not there. If it takes longer, we’ll ride to Denver and meet you there.” Billy put on his Stetson. “Fredrick, you can explain to Ben what has happened. And when Ben quits cussing, tell him I will bring her back.”
Fredrick hurried behind Billy as he strode to the cattle cars.
They leaped up into the car, and Billy wasted little time finding his saddle and getting ready to go. While he was saddling Spot, Fredrick dropped the walkway for the horses to walk down.
“Are you going to take Claire’s horse?” Fredrick asked as he wiped his hands on the back of his pants.
“No. Her horse isn’t used to this part of the country and would slow me down. I’ll steal a horse when I find her,” Billy said as he tightened the cinch.
“They hang you for horse thievery,” Fredrick pointed out.
Billy smiled. “Not if it’s thieving from outlaws.” Fredrick turned somber. “Do you think they’ll kill her?”
Billy stopped. He felt those now familiar knots forming in his stomach at the thought. He turned from Spot and stared at Fredrick. “I don’t know. She will have seen their hideout. I can’t imagine them letting her go. But she is smart. If she keeps her wits about her, she’ll be fine.”
The train whistle blew, and Billy knew the engineer had cleared the tracks and was ready to get underway. He led his horse out of the car, then blew out a disgusted sigh as he mounted. “You’d best get back on the train before it pulls out. The train’s way behind schedule as it is. Watch out for Willie, Fredrick.”
“You can count on me,” Fredrick said.
Spot was prancing, ready to stretch her legs, and Billy was anxious also.
Fredrick turned back toward the passenger car, but stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”
But Billy had already ridden off.
As Billy rode he kept his gaze on the ground as he tracked the bandits. Two of their horses were missing shoes, so that helped. It would slow them down some, and it would be easy to tell where they went if they crossed paths with other horses. He did take a brief moment to look up to the sky and say a small prayer. He was going to need all the help he could get.
Claire wasn’t sure how long they had been riding. It felt like days. She was sore in places she hadn’t even known she had, and she was real sick of this Creek person trying to squeeze her bosom every chance he got.
At the top of a hill, they paused for just a minute. Down in the valley, surrounded by trees, sat a small brown cabin, which Claire assumed must be the gang’s hideout. She was so glad to see a place to stop, she almost cried with jay.
They rode down to the cabin after getting a signal from one of the gang below. The moment they stopped and Creek loosened his grip, Claire slid from the horse and immediately crumpled to the ground. Her legs had gone to sleep and offered no support. And worse, the dust she’d stirred up drifted into her nose and made her cough.
Crumpled in a heap on the ground, she coughed and coughed while she frantically went through her pockets, searching for the little brown bottle she always kept there.
“What’s the matter with her?” Grat asked Bill.
“Damned if I know.”
“Well, somebody drag her into the house. I’m ready for some grub.”
Claire was still coughing as she tried to get the bottle out of her pocket. She managed to reach her handkerchief, just as she had a deep retching cough, and she held it to her mouth.
Creek reached down and jerked her to her feet so she couldn’t get the bottle. When she removed her hankie from her mouth there were small specks of blood on the white cloth. It was proof that the cough had caused some of her lung tissue to hemorrhage. A long time ago, Doc Worden had warned her about coughing so hard. Claire took a deep breath and started to tell the man she needed her medicine, but before she could get the words out, she blessedly fainted and the world went black.
When Claire awoke, she was disoriented, having forgotten what had happened. Then everything came flooding back to her in a rush. She struggled to sit up on the small bed and managed to squeak out, “Water.”
The three men sitting at the table turned. But no one moved.
“Please,” she begged.
Grat got to his feet. “I’m going to get her some before she starts that hacking again.” He walked over to the sink where he dipped some fresh water out of a brown wooden bucket. Moving back over to the bed, he offered Claire the dipper.
She took several sips of water, and it helped relieve her parched throat. “Thank you,” she said, but his next words wanted to make her take them back. “Get some rope so we can tie her up,” Grat said to Bitter Creek.
Claire knew she couldn’t stand to be tied, so she had to think fast. “If you tie my hands, I’ll not be able to write my notes about all of you. You do want to be in the magazine, don’t you? Or maybe you don’t want to be as famous as Billy the Kid?”
Thankfully, she saw their eyes brighten with interest. “We’re twice as mean as The Kid,” Grat informed her.
“Well, I’m sure no one back East knows that,” Claire insisted. “I’ve seen lots written about Billy.”
She paused so her words could sink in. She started to say article, but assumed that they wouldn’t know what she was talking about. “Don’t believe I’ve ever heard anything about the Duttons.”
“That’s Dalton, lady. And we’re getting ready to tell you a thing or two,” Grat said.
“At least tie her feet to the chair. She can sit at the table to write,” Bill said.
“Who in the hell are you giving orders to?” Grat snapped at the other man. “Get off your ass and help me tie her.”
Bill shoved back his chair. “Sometimes, Grat, this house ain’t big enough for the two of us. If you wasn’t my brother, I’d probably put a bullet in you.”
Splendid! This was all she needed, Claire thought She was very tired and grumpy as well. She didn’t need any more fighting.
She pulled out the pad and pencil which she’d stuffed in her other pocket before they’d so rudely dragged her off the train. She also had a charcoal pencil. She placed the paper on the table, then ran her hands over it to smooth out all the wrinkles. When she was ready, she looked up at the three men sitting across from her. She wished her editor could see her now.
“Tell me something about yourselves,” Claire said when no one volunteered to speak. It seemed the men had lost their voices and needed coaxing.
“Like what?” Grat asked.
“What did you do before you became robbers?”
Grat and Bill laughed and looked at each other.
“You tell her,” Bill said.
Grat grinned and then said, “We were Deputy Marshals.”
Claire couldn’t hide her surprise and she chuckled. “You might say that you went from good to bad. But why? What made you turn your back on the law?”
“I don’t know about that good and bad,” Bill said, pursing his lips. “We like to think of it as going from poor to rich.”
Claire jotted down her notes before looking up. “Other than money, was there something else that made you turn?”
“Yup,” Bill nodded. “You might say it all went South when Grat, here, got accused of stealing.”
Claire shifted her gaze to Grat. “And did you steal something?”
“Maybe a horse,” Grat said with a grin.
“Isn’t that a serious charge out West?”
“You’re not exactly out West, yet.” Bill pointed out. “Heard a city slicker once say that the Missouri River is the dividing line between the East and West. A man with a chunk of land on the East side is a farmer; on the West he is a rancher. A cow on one side is milked; on the other it’s punched.”
Claire chuckled. “I like that. I believe
I’ll write that down.” She scratched a few notes on the paper, then looked up. “Now back to the story. Were you guilty of taking the horse?”
“Hell, yes,” Grat stated. “But the law should carry special privileges,” he justified. “Anyway, when they threatened to lock me up, I knew it was time to hightail it and look for another line of work.”
“And you couldn’t find work?”
“Sweetheart, robbing trains is hard work. Takes lots of planning, and it’s right dangerous, too. Could get your ass shot off real fast,” Grat said, then caught himself. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” At least she had them being polite. “Now can you tell me, what was the one job that you remember most?”
“Hey, you going to mention me? I’m part of this here gang,” Bitter Creek protested.
Claire felt as if she were working with children. But she also knew that these were violent children. So she would have to make them feel that they needed her. “Of course I’m going to mention you. Tell me where you came from and how you joined the gang.”
“Let’s see.” Creek rubbed his jaw. “Came from Fort Scott, Kansas. At the age of twelve I started working on a ranch.”
“What about your parents?” Claire asked.
“Who do you think sent me out to work? Anyhow, I grew bored with working for nothing, and several years later I stumbled upon these two, and I kind of improved the gang. I got brains, you see.” He tapped a grubby finger to his head.
“Are you finished?” Bill asked.
“Yup.”
“Good. Now what our biggest job was...” Bill tapped his finger against the table and looked at Grat He nodded. “Probably was our job that wasn’t,” he said with a chuckle.
“You’ll have to explain that,” Claire said.
Bill reared back in his chair, balancing on the back two legs as he prepared to tell his story. Claire assumed that this was going to be a good story by the way he was smiling.
“Somewhere around June, last year, we went to the Red Rock train station. We positioned ourselves and waited for the train to come along. When the train got to the station, the coaches were dark. It didn’t look right, so we let the train go on unmolested. Suddenly, a second train appeared, and as it slowed at the station we boarded it and proceeded to rob it. Turned out to have a measly fifty dollars.”
“Yep,” Grat agreed. “But we was right to be suspicious of the first train. Heard later that it was full of loot to the tune of seventy thousand dollars.”
“That must have made you sick,” Claire said, not bothering to look up as she wrote. She had some good stuff here.
“Well it did and it didn’t,” Bill stated. “We come to find out, it did have seventy thousand dollars, but it was also full of armed guards, y’see.”
“So that could have been the end of everything.”
All three men nodded, but Bill said, “Like to have thought we’d out-foxed them, but we’ll never know.”
“Are you planning future holdups?” Claire asked.
“You betcha,” Bill said. “We’re planning to rob two banks in the same town at the same time. Ain’t never been done before.”
Claire didn’t bother to hide her surprise. “When are you going to do that?”
“In a couple of days. We’ll have to decide what to do with you first.”
Claire laid down her pen. “If you hurt me, you will not get your story printed. It all starts with me.
Grat stood and looked down at her. “I guess we’ll have to think about this problem and see what’s worth having ... gold or a story,” he said, and this time he wasn’t smiling. He was dead serious.
Claire didn’t say anything. She just hoped that if they killed her, they’d do it quick. She’d miss her last few months, but she wasn’t going to be scared.
On the other hand, if she’d just keep her mind sharp and convince them that she could make the Dalton gang as famous as Billy the Kid, she might be able to wiggle out of this mess.
And in the meantime, she’d pray that Billy would find her.
But with every day that went by without Billy coming to her rescue, Claire’s hope faded little by little.
Chapter Fourteen
Billy had ridden for two damned days.
It had taken him half a day to figure out that he’d taken the wrong trail, so he had to backtrack and pick up the tracks of the gang, hoping all the way that the trail had not grown cold.
Fortunately, it hadn’t.
Billy was thankful Thunder had taught him to track, or he would have still been on the train, in a world of trouble from having lost the boss’s niece.
Now as he sat atop Spot looking down into a craggy ravine, he knew he’d found the outlaws’ hideout. The rudely built cabin was well hidden in the trees. Only someone well trained in tracking would have spotted it. There was an outhouse and a corral over to the side of the cabin, and he recognized one of the horses there as one he’d managed to glimpse from the train window.
Watching the small brown house, he couldn’t see any movement, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Their horses were in the corral, so they had to be close. Billy counted five horses, which meant he was outnumbered. That in itself wasn’t so bad, but he couldn’t ride in firing for fear of hitting Claire, or worse, one of the Daltons might shoot her before Billy could get to her.
His stomach tightened into one large knot at the thought. His life used to be so simple. Strange, he hadn’t felt this way in a long, long time. Hell, when you had nothing to live for, there was no reason to fear dying. And it wasn’t fear for himself that he felt, but fear for Claire. Not knowing whether she was dead or alive was eating a hole in his stomach. If she’d only kept her mouth shut, none of this would have happened.
But then, that wouldn’t have been Claire.
He reasoned that she had to be alive, but he didn’t know if they’d molested or beaten her. The thought of all the things they could do to Claire made his stomach turn and his blood run cold.
Billy had lived with outlaws when he was a boy, and he knew full well that most of them didn’t have a thread of decency. How many beatings had he suffered at the hands of drunken outlaws? More than he cared to remember. There had been times when he’d thought he would never be able to get up from the floor again.
Slowly, he drew out his Colt .45 and opened the revolving chamber to check the load. There were six bullets: one for each man and an extra, just in case. Grimly, Billy flipped the chamber closed and twirled it before replacing the gun in its holster.
He waited for the right moment There wasn’t much movement down below, and that gave him time to look over the compound. The first thing he needed to do was sneak down to the corral and get a horse for Claire. They wouldn’t get far riding on one horse, not with the others hard on their trail. He just hoped she could ride with a western saddle instead of one of those fandangled, ladies’ saddles.
He’d never seen any of that kind around these parts. Claire had brought her own sidesaddle but, of course, it was on the train. It wouldn’t do her much good now.
Hell, if he could do nothing else, he’d throw her over the saddle and give her riding lessons later. One way or the other, she was coming out of there. Or he’d die trying to get her out.
Billy tied Spot to a tree, and then made his way to the corral. He moved very quietly so not to alert anybody in the house.
Once he reached the corral he glanced around. He was in luck—nobody was watching the horses. Evidently, they were not worried about somebody tailing them.
Looking over the horses, Billy selected a mare from the group, thinking it would be better suited for Claire. After saddling the horse, he left the gate open so the other horses could wander out. If he scattered them now, it would be the first thing the gang noticed once they came out And he didn’t want a gun battle. Claire could get hurt.
He led the mare back to where Spot was munching on grass and tied her. Already one of the horses had wandered o
ut of the corral, looking for greener grass.
Now to rescue Claire.
Billy crouched low and made his way slowly down the hill. The cabin door opened and Billy froze. Two men came out dragging a big black Wells Fargo box behind them. They placed it a good twenty feet from the house.
“This is the damnedest box I’ve ever seen,” one of them muttered. “Maybe a few bullets will help open the cussed thing,” the man said. Billy recognized him from the train. He thought he remembered the Daltons calling the man Creek.
“I’ll go first,” Creek said, then drew and fired at the box. The bullet ricocheted off the box, and both men had to duck to keep from getting hit.
Billy smiled at the idiots. He recognized one of the Dalton brothers. The cabin door opened again, and two more men shuffled out “What in the hell are you doing, Creek?”
“Aim was a little off,” Creek said. “I say, we try it again.”
“Have at it,” the other said.
While they were busy, Billy seized the opportunity to make his way down the hill to the back of the cabin. When he got there without incident, he breathed a sigh of relief. There was a window in the back, and it was half open. He smiled. Luck was on his side.
Now to rescue Claire, who was probably scared to death and wishing she’d listened to him, Billy thought. After he made sure she was safe, he’d make her beg for forgiveness to teach her a lesson.
Claire was exhausted.
The novelty of having a reporter around seemed to have worn off and the men were not as eager to talk to her as they once were. Even her freedom to move around the cabin was being curtailed. They had started tying her to a chair, and she could barely stand the confinement And she hadn’t eaten anything but a biscuit in two days. She was past the point of being hungry, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat the filthy stuff her captors had offered her. Two more gang members had arrived, but they had left her alone, so far.
Until September Page 17