“In what?”
The girl studied Lonnie through the veil and then turned her head slowly toward the casket containing the body of the man he’d killed. “Sorry about Willie,” she said. “He was a good man, I reckon. Anyways, Pa seemed to think he was worth his salt as a part-time deputy.” She paused. “How did you know him?”
“Oh, I … uh … just knew him,” Lonnie said, wondering if the saddlebags were visibly leaping up and down on his shoulder from the mad beating of his heart. “Just knew him … that’s all.” He could think of little else except pulling his picket pin as fast he could, before he ran into the other deputy—the one who was still alive and would most likely recognize Lonnie. He hadn’t recognized the deputy with the mole on his cheek. The boy didn’t think he’d been the one with Willie.
When had Stoveville hired three deputies, and why?
“I’m sorry if he was your friend. You looked pretty shocked, seein’ him there.”
“Yeah.” Lonnie raked his gaze away from the man he’d killed, toward the girl. He tried not to betray the fact that he was shaking in his boots. “You’re Stoveville’s …”
“I’m his daughter. Casey. Who’re you? I know I’ve seen you before but I can’t place you. Maybe it’s those big bags you’re totin’ around. If you’re not careful, you’re gonna tip over under all that weight.”
“I’ll manage,” Lonnie said, shifting the bags on his shoulder. “I’m Lonnie Gentry.”
“Ah. Your ma has an account over at the mercantile.”
“That’s right.”
“I work there.”
“I know.”
Behind the gauzy, black veil, the girl’s lipped quirked slightly in acknowledgment of that. Her eyes turned beleaguered once more as she shifted her head toward the coffin containing the marshal. Tears oozed out from their corners to dribble down her cheeks.
If he didn’t find a way out of there soon, Lonnie thought he was going to start bawling, as well.
CHAPTER 17
Curiosity held Lonnie in that horrible room with the two dead men—Marshal Stoveville and the deputy Lonnie had killed— and Stoveville’s pretty daughter.
The boy cleared his throat and asked Casey, “How did … how did your pa … ?”
The girl sniffed. “Figured everybody knew by now. The bank in Golden was robbed. Pa got the telegram sayin’ the robbers were heading northwest. Him, two of his deputies, Willie Drake and Lou Dempsey, and a couple of other men from town rode out to cut ’em off at the southern pass. They cut ’em off, all right. But they didn’t stop ’em. Pa was shot out of his saddle. Willie an’ Dempsey kept after the robbers. This afternoon, Dempsey returned to Arapaho Creek with Willie shot in the head. Said they were bushwhacked by one of Dupree’s gang.”
Lonnie was sweating. The saddlebags were growing as heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil on his shoulders. He looked from Stoveville’s casket to the casket containing the man he’d killed.
The man he’d killed …
“What you got in them saddlebags?” Casey Stoveville asked him.
Lonnie jerked a startled look at her. His nerves were leaping like striking diamondbacks. He wondered if word about his mother and Dupree had worked its way as far as Arapaho Creek yet. It likely hadn’t, or Lonnie would have been eyed with suspicion, and so far, even carrying the bulging saddlebags, he hadn’t.
He turned to the gambling parlor’s half-open door through which the low roar of the drinkers in the main saloon emanated. He hurried over to the door, closed it, and walked back to stand in front of the girl, the words exploding out of him like Fourth of July firecrackers detonating in his mouth.
“This here’s the money them robbers stole,” he told the girl, eager to remove the weight from his exhausted shoulders. Suddenly, Lonnie couldn’t speak fast enough as he said, “I found it up at our old line shack on Eagle Ridge. I came here lookin’ for your pa, because I figured he was the only one I could trust to unload it on, but now …” He let his voice trail off. “I never realized he had so many deputies …”
The girl rose from her chair and said woodenly as she stared at the saddlebags, “He hired ’em last month, right after gold was discovered south of town … and a bad element started driftin’ in … started drifting in from Denver.” She looked at Lonnie, beetling her pretty brows. “How on earth did you—?”
The door burst open. Lonnie jerked his head around to see the deputy from the marshal’s office, and another man also wearing a badge stride into the gambling den. Lonnie almost fainted when he realized that the second man was the other deputy from up on Willow Run.
“Yep, that’s him, all right,” the second deputy said, stopping about six feet from Lonnie, cocking a hip, and folding his arms across his chest. He was tall, with long arms, like an ape, and relatively short legs. His beard was thick and pewter-colored, and he had one green and one blue eye. He wore a brown bowler hat and a wool vest over a white shirt, and patched broadcloth trousers.
He sneered at Lonnie. “That there’s the kid who bushwhacked Willie—why, you little demon!”
“What?” exclaimed Casey Stoveville.
Lonnie’s heart dropped into his boots. At the same time, righteous indignation swept through the boy like a wildfire, and he yelled, “That ain’t true an’ you know it! You two was takin’ potshots at me. I tried to get away and you kept comin’, and then I dropped my rifle in the stream, and …”
Lonnie let his voice trail off. The deputy he’d seen in the marshal’s office, Chase, and the second deputy, Lou Dempsey, were coming at him hard and fast, gritting their teeth, eyes fiery. Behind them, the other men from the saloon were pushing through the open door to get a look at what was happening in the gambling parlor.
“This little jasper killed Willie!” Dempsey shouted at the top of his lungs.
He and the deputy Lonnie knew only as Chase were all over Lonnie, grabbing his arms. Lonnie didn’t know what to do. Chase and Dempsey had kill-crazy gleams in their eyes while the men crowded together in the doorway and spilling into the room behind them looked grim, grave, angry.
Lonnie jerked free of the two men’s grips. Dempsey was likely lying because he didn’t want anyone to know that he and Willie Drake had shot at a thirteen-year-old boy first. That would make them look stupid and inept, which both obviously were. Or, at least, Willie had been, before Lonnie had drilled him. Lonnie knew that no one would likely listen to his story, however. He looked wildly around for another way out of the gambling parlor.
But there was only one door, and it was filled with head-wagging townsmen holding beer mugs or shot glasses and, in some cases, burning cigars. Even if Lonnie could get to the door, he’d never get through it.
As Lonnie backed into a billiard table at the front of the room, Dempsey and Chase still coming at him, he held his arms up, palms out. He had no choice but to try to explain himself. “Hold on!” he yelled. “Let me tell it the way it really happened, galldangit!”
“Save if for the circuit judge,” snarled Dempsey, gritting his teeth as he grabbed Lonnie’s right arm while Chase grabbed the boy’s other arm.
“That kid’s Lonnie Gentry!” a man’s voice thundered at the back of the room. The beefy bartender was pointing at Lonnie with one arm while planting his other fist on a broad, apronclad hip, his face as red as a well-stoked fire. “He’s Calvin Gentry’s boy! Calvin’s widow’s been shackin’ up with Shannon Dupree for over a year now!” The barman snarled like an angry mountain lion. “When he ain’t been off robbin’ banks, that is! Apparently, he’s taken Calvin’s boy down the garden path!”
The onlookers muttered their shock, eyes widening in sudden understanding.
“I thought I recognized that kid!” yelled one of the other townsmen, looking over the shoulders of several others in front of him.
Another townsman shouted, “Sure enough, I seen May Gentry ridin’ with Dupree in a buggy up near Bachelor Gulch. May’s kid threw in with Dupree and his thievin’ killin�
�� ways! Oh, how could ya do it, boy?”
“I didn’t throw in with Dupree!” Lonnie screamed, trying in vain to pull his arms free of the much larger, beefier deputies. “If I threw in with him, what am I doin’ here in town … with the money he stole from Golden?”
One of the townsmen stepped away from the crowd and crouched over the saddlebags that Lonnie had dropped on the floor near where Casey Stoveville was standing with her back to her father’s casket. The girl appeared to be in stone-faced shock. The townsman glanced darkly up at Lonnie, frowning, then he unbuckled the strap on one of the saddlebag pouches.
He lifted the flap and dipped his hand carefully inside, looking tense, as though he was afraid the pouch was filled with rattlesnakes. Slowly, he pulled out his hand filled with a green pack of bills.
“Sure enough,” the man said, staring in awe at the bills in his hand.
“Crafty,” one of the other men from the crowd said, stepping forward. He was short and plump, with long, coarse gray hair tumbling down from his bowler hat. He wore a three-piece butterscotch suit with black patent half boots. “The kid’s crafty, all right. Prob’ly double-crossed Dupree and stopped here for grub on his way over the mountain!”
The men around him laughed and roared their agreement.
Dempsey said, “What should we do with him, Mayor?”
The little, plump man officiously rose up on the balls of his half boots and canted his head to one side. “I don’t care how young he is. Hang a killin’ child and save yourself the trouble of hangin’ a killin’ man later! Toss him in the hoosegow. I’ll cable the judge first thing in the morning, and we’ll try him and hang him in the town square before the week is out!”
The crowd roared.
“Hangin’s too good for that little catamount!” a disembodied voice cried.
CHAPTER 18
Lonnie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wanted to yell back at the men around him, to explain himself, but what good would it do him? They’d never be able to hear him above their own roaring.
Willie Drake must have been roundly liked. The town was out for blood. These men were only too eager to play cat’s cradle with Lonnie Gentry’s head!
“That don’t make sense,” Lonnie couldn’t help saying as Chase and Dempsey began leading him across the room toward the crowd spread out in front of and around the door. “Why would I bring the money to town if I was in with Dupree?”
He’d been only talking to himself. No one could have heard him above the din.
“Hold on!” a girl’s voice sounded behind him and the men holding fast to each of his arms.
Chase and Dempsey stopped and turned Lonnie around. Casey Stoveville stood before Lonnie. Her flushed cheeks were wet with tears. Her hazel eyes were wide and bright with rage. “If you killed Willie,” she said through gritted teeth, “you just as easily could’ve killed my pa!”
Lonnie opened his mouth to protest but before he could get a single word out, the girl cocked her right arm back and swung her balled fist forward. She bunched her lips and winced as she smashed her fist against Lonnie’s left cheek.
It wasn’t like any punch you’d think a girl would throw. It was a hard, crushing blow. Pain was a railroad spike hammered through Lonnie’s jaw and into his brain plate. He flew backward and would have hit the floor if both deputies hadn’t been hanging onto him, and kept him upright. Laughing, they turned him around and half dragged him into the parting crowd and through the door of the gambling den.
Lonnie must have passed out for a minute because the next thing he knew he was being dragged along the street, his head hanging so that he could see his boot toes carving slender furrows in the dirt and finely ground horse manure. He couldn’t remember being hauled through the saloon’s main drinking hall. Then he was being dragged past the General, who gave a shrill, indignant whinny when the horse saw the unceremonious way his rider was being treated.
The deputies jerked Lonnie up the steps of the town marshal’s office.
“You little demon!” Dempsey snarled as he and his partner hauled Lonnie to one of the three jail cells lined up along the rear of the dimly lit office. He turned to his partner, cementing his story. “Shot Willie in the head! Never even gave him a chance. You should have seen him in action! Never seen the like! Well, you won’t get no chance to grow up, kid, and that’s bond!” This last was shouted as Lonnie was shoved into the cell stumbling and falling onto the cell’s hard cot as the deputies slammed the cell door behind him with a rattling clang!
Lonnie sat up, touched fingers to his cheek, oily with blood. Chase and Dempsey stared in at him as Dempsey turned the key in the cell door’s lock.
“Hah!” Dempsey laughed. “Miss Stoveville got you good, didn’t she?” He glanced at Chase. “Did you see that cute little gal wind up on him?”
“Yeah, I seen her,” Chase said, laughing. Lonnie found Chase staring at him critically. “Hey, you sure this kid shot Willie, Demps? He don’t look like the type that would shoot a man, especially a lawman, from bushwhack.”
“I didn’t shoot nobody from bushwhack!” Lonnie said sharply, sitting on the edge of the cot, frustrated down to the heels of his boots. “Them two—him and Willie—bushwhacked me, just like I said. I ran and tried to get away, but they kept comin’ … and shootin’.”
“Don’t listen to him, Chase.” Dempsey tugged at his pewter beard, blinked each of his unmatched eyes in turn. It seemed like his habit to not blink each unmatched eye at the same time, and he appeared to be scowling, even when he laughed. His eyes were deeply shadowed under a heavy brow bone. “He shot at us from bushwhack when we was about to fill our canteens at a spring. I figure Dupree must have sent the kid to check their back trail. When he seen me and Willie, this yellow-toothed little devil laid in with a Winchester.”
Lonnie got up and walked to the cell door. “Don’t listen to him, Chase. He’s lyin’!”
Dempsey glared through the bars at Lonnie. “You shut up, or I’ll come in there and lay the strap to you. How would you like that?”
“You just try it!”
“All right—I will!”
Dempsey dropped his hands to his belt buckle, but before he could start unbuckling the belt, Chase swatted his partner’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Forget it. Leave him for the judge. I ’spect we’ll be puttin’ that gallows together before the week’s out.” Chase shook his head. “Too bad you an’ Willie didn’t know about his ma and Dupree. Could have gone right to the cabin, thrown a loop over Dupree and them other two renegades right then and there. The boy’s ma, too. ’Stead of lettin’ ’em lead you in circles.”
Chase had the saddlebags draped over his shoulder. He turned toward the cluttered table that sat in the middle of the dingy, smelly jailhouse office. “Come on—let’s see how much loot Dupree took out of the Golden bank.”
Lonnie drew a deep breath and sagged back down on the edge of the cot. He probed his cheek with his fingers. Dempsey had been right. Miss Stoveville had really cut into him. He could feel a two-inch gash in the nub of his left cheek. The abrasion wasn’t bleeding much, but it burned.
The cheek was the least of his concerns. He looked at the cell’s three walls. There was a window in the rear wall, which was solid stone, but the window would have been too small for him to crawl through even if three stout iron bars hadn’t crossed it.
Lonnie’s goose was cooked.
The boy no longer even felt frustrated and angry. All he felt now was hollowed out and so tired that all he really wanted to do was sleep.
But then he thought about the General, and he looked at Chase and Dempsey, who had poured all the money packets out on the table and were staring down at all those greenbacks in shock.
“Hey, my horse needs tendin’,” Lonnie said. “He needs feed and water. Get him over to a livery barn, will ya?”
He could never be so downtrodden that he did not think about the welfare of his horse.
“Shut up, kid
,” said Dempsey, staring down at the money. All those greenbacks piled up in packets on the table had the deputy riveted. “We’ll tend your horse when we’re good and ready. Hot diggity—look at all that money!”
“How much you suppose is there?” asked Chase in a hushed tone, fingering the large, dark mole on his cheek. Lonnie thought they were both going to doff their hats, get down on one knee, and cross themselves.
Even the jailed, downtrodden boy admitted there was a lot of dinero strewn about that table. That much money could buy a whole lot of things.
“Let’s find out,” Dempsey said, pulling a chair out from the opposite side of the table from Chase. He’d sat down and was starting to roll up his shirtsleeves when someone knocked on the jailhouse door.
The first person Lonnie thought of was Dupree, and fear grew in the boy once again.
CHAPTER 19
Dempsey and Chase leapt to their feet, drawing their pistols and clicking the hammers back.
Lonnie was glad they were on their toes. If Dupree came calling, as he was bound to do, Lonnie would be dead sooner rather than later. Lonnie didn’t put it past the outlaw to storm the jailhouse and kill the deputies … as well as Lonnie … before retaking the loot. Lonnie didn’t really know why it mattered how he died—by the rope or by Dupree—but it seemed to.
Maybe he didn’t want Dupree to have the satisfaction.
“Who is it?” Chase called, aiming his Colt at the jailhouse door.
“Mayor Teagarden,” said the voice on the other side of the door.
“Come on in, Mayor,” Dempsey said, letting his pistol sag slightly in his hand though he did not uncock the weapon or holster it.
The door opened and the pudgy little man in the butterscotch suit stepped over the threshold, his fingers in the pockets of his wool vest. He grinned when he saw the money, showing one silver front tooth. “Just … uh … just wanted to make sure the Golden money was secure …”
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