Authors: Johanna Lindsey
W
hen Casey stormed from the room, she didn’t head upstairs. The front porch was closer, and at this time of the morning it was usually empty and peaceful. Today was no different.
It was a big porch, only ten feet wide but some eighty feet long, fronting the entire length of the house. It was filled with small white tables and chairs, a couple of two-seater swings that her father had built, and a profusion of plants that her mother babied and that hid the numerous spittoons the ranch hands made use of.
She moved to the railing, gripping it until her knuckles turned white. As far as the eye could see was Straton land, either her father’s or her grandfather’s, vast plains dotted with the occasional hill or a lonely stand of trees around a watering hole, and the usual cactuses and fauna of Texas. There was a forest on the northern border, but you couldn’t see it from the house. A creek bed divided the two properties. Farther south, they shared a freshwater lake teeming
with bass. It was stark land, it was beautiful land. Yet on that fine spring morning Casey noticed nothing.
She never should have said what she did to her father, but then, he’d been
so
unreasonable. And choking on both guilt and anger wasn’t an easy thing to deal with. Anger she was used to, growing up with two brothers who delighted in teasing her. But guilt was another matter, and for something that might be true…
What else was she to think? Her father had always given the impression that he really didn’t care about the Bar M. He didn’t want anything to do with anything that had ever belonged to Fletcher Straton. Everyone knew that. Yet Casey had loved her grandfather. She had never understood why he and Chandos couldn’t bury the hatchet, so to speak, and get along after all these years. Fletcher had made every effort. But Chandos was unyielding.
She knew the history, of course—how Meara, Fletcher’s wife, had left him, apparently because of his unfaithfulness. She had taken their son with her, and although Fletcher had searched far and wide for them, intent on bringing them home, they had completely disappeared.
He didn’t find out how they had managed to elude him so thoroughly until years later, when Chandos showed up at the Bar M. He had been lucky he hadn’t been shot on sight riding in on his pinto, wearing buckskins, his long black braids, and little else. He’d looked like a full-fledged Indian, all except for his deep blue eyes, Meara’s eyes, and the only way his father was able to recognize him.
To hear Fletcher tell it, Meara had left him in a fit of temper without taking the precautions she should have before running off. She and her child had been captured by Kiowas and sold to a Comanche. They had been fortunate, though. The young brave had taken Meara to wife and adopted Chandos. A few years later, another child was born of that union, Chandos’s half-sister, White Wing, whom he had adored.
He had been a child himself at the time of the capture, and it wasn’t until ten years later, when he was eighteen and ready to take his place in the tribe as an adult, that Meara had sent him home to his father. She had wanted him to experience living in the white man’s world before he chose the Comanche way of life.
That had been a mistake. Chandos had gone, because he would have done anything his mother asked of him, but his decision had already been made. He had been raised by the Comanches. As far as he was concerned, he was a Comanche.
But he wasn’t averse to learning all he could from the whites, as he had thought of them at the time.
Know thine enemy
wasn’t only a white man’s creed. The trouble was, Fletcher, thrilled to have his son back, thought Chandos was there to stay, so he couldn’t understand his son’s hostility. And Fletcher, stubborn, belligerent, and autocratic in those days, had managed to increase that hostility, not lessen it.
They argued constantly, with Fletcher trying to mold Chandos into the son he wanted him to be. But Chandos was no child at that age.
The breaking point came when Fletcher or
dered his men to corral Chandos and cut off his braids. It was quite a fight, to hear Fletcher tell it, with Chandos wounding three of the men, and that was when he took off, three years after he’d shown up. Fletcher had thought to never see him again.
Later, the old man discovered that Chandos had returned to his tribe to find most of them dead, massacred by a group of whites, his mother and sister both raped and killed, and this had happened the very day he’d gone home to them. For four years he and the few remaining men of that small band of Comanches had tracked down the killers to exact their revenge, and brutal it was, as brutal as the massacre of all the women and children of the band had been. It was during that time that Chandos had met Courtney Harte, Casey’s mother.
They had fallen in love. Chandos had eventually made the decision to settle on the property that belonged to Courtney’s family and adjoined his father’s; he wanted to compete with Fletcher and prove that he could be just as successful at ranching without his help. He’d had a fortune in the bank in Waco that Fletcher had given him long ago, but he never touched that money, likely never would. What Chandos created, he did on his own.
Chandos and Fletcher, father and son, never made peace, at least not that anyone was aware of. And even though Fletcher was dead, Chandos hadn’t buried their differences with him. Yet one day the two ranches would be combined through Chandos’s children, and that probably didn’t sit well with him at all, which was why
he’d as soon see the Bar M go under than get the proper management it needed.
But Casey never should have said so aloud. She could believe it all she liked, but to actually say it was an insult of the worst sort, and she had never insulted her father before.
She didn’t hear any footsteps come up behind her, yet she was asked, “You gonna cry now, missy?”
Without turning around, she knew who had joined her and must have been near enough to overhear the fight she’d just had with her father. She’d gotten pretty close to Sawtooth after Fletcher’s death, close enough for him to easily question her and expect answers.
“What good will tears do?” she replied in a tight voice.
“Never served no purpose in my opinion, ’cept to make a man squirm. What are you gonna do, then?”
“I’m going to prove to Daddy that I don’t need a husband to get by, that I can work in a man’s world just fine without having one tied to my apron strings.”
“Not that you’ll ever wear aprons.” He chuckled at the idea of it. “But just how you gonna do that?”
“By getting a job that isn’t suited for a woman,” Casey answered.
“Ain’t many jobs that are suited for a woman, let alone those that ain’t.”
“I mean
really
unsuitable, dangerous maybe, or something so strenuous a woman would never consider it. Wasn’t that Oakley girl a bull-whacker for a time, and a scout, too?”
“From what I heard tell, that Oakley girl looked more like a man than some men do, dressed like it, too. But what’s your point? You ain’t thinking of doing something stupid like that, are you?”
“‘Stupid’ is a matter of opinion. The point is, I need to do something. Daddy isn’t going to just miraculously change his mind. He’s as hard-headed as they come, and we know where he got that from, don’t we?”
There was a snort. Sawtooth had been a good friend of Fletcher’s, after all. But he also admitted, “I’m beginning to not like the sound of this.”
“Well, too bad,” she grumbled. “I wasn’t asking for permission. But I wasn’t expecting to have to prove myself either, when Daddy already knows I’m capable, so this will require some thought.”
“Thank God. Spur-of-the-moment actions from you, missy, scare the bejesus out of me.”
T
here was a fire up ahead, a campfire—at least, Damian Rutledge hoped it was a campfire, because that meant people, something he hadn’t seen for the past two days. He’d settle for even the uncivilized sort at the moment, anything that could point him to the nearest town.
He was utterly lost. He’d been assured the West was civilized. And to him, civilized meant people. Neighbors. Buildings. Not mile after mile after mile of nothing.
He should have suspected that this area of the country wasn’t quite what he was used to when the towns he passed through kept getting smaller and smaller in population. But he’d been doing fine, traveling on the railroad all the way from New York City, at least until he reached Kansas. That was where he started running into some unpleasantness.
First it was the railroad. The “Katy,” as the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway was fondly called, was not running that week because of the small incident of a train robbery that had blown
up about fifty yards of tracks and damaged the train’s engine. He had been told the stage lines were running, and he discovered he could catch another train in the next town, so he thought he’d just have a short detour on the stage. What hadn’t been mentioned was the fact that that particular stage hadn’t been used in over five years, what with the railroad having made it obsolete.
Most folks traveling in that direction preferred to wait out the repairs, but Damian was too impatient to wait. And that was his worst mistake. He should have realized, when he saw he was the only passenger, that there had to be a good reason for most people to shun the dilapidated vehicle.
There were other stage lines that still ran in Kansas between towns that the railroad didn’t pass through, and they had been having a rash of robberies lately. But Damian didn’t find this out until a watering stop where the stage driver got a bit talkative. And then he also found out the hard way not long after that…
At least when he heard the shots fired, he knew what was going on. The driver hadn’t stopped, though. He’d tried to outrace the robbers, a foolish endeavor in such an old, cumbersome vehicle. And then the driver veered off the road, for reasons Damian would likely never know. Mile after mile sped by in a blur, more shots were fired, then the coach came to a crashing halt, so suddenly that Damian was tossed across the interior, slamming against the door, his head connecting with the metal door handle, and that was the last he knew for several hours.
It was the rain pounding against the coach that probably woke him. Night had fallen. And by the time he managed to exit the coach, which was turned half on its side, he found himself completely alone, in the middle of—nowhere.
The horses were gone, stolen or let loose, he didn’t know. The driver was gone, possibly shot and fallen along the wayside or taken by the robbers, or maybe he had survived and gone for help. But Damian wasn’t to find that out either. He had been covered in blood himself from the wound on the side of his head. The rain washed some of it away while he gathered up his belongings, which were strewn about the area, and stuffed them back into his traveling bag.
He spent the rest of that miserable night inside the coach, where it was at least dry. Unfortunately, it was midday by the time he awoke again, so the sun was no help in determining which direction to take, not that he knew which way he wanted to go. Even the track marks of the stage had been washed away during the night.
His watch had been stolen, along with the money he’d had in his pockets and his bag. The money he’d tucked inside the lining of his jacket was still there, though, small compensation for the predicament he now found himself in. He discovered a canteen of water strapped to the side of the coach which he took with him, and an old, musty lap robe under one of the seats that was much appreciated when he still hadn’t come upon anyone or anything by nightfall.
He had traveled south, in the direction of the next town he’d been headed to, but that was
only a general direction, since the road they had been on had been a winding one. He could be too far east or west, could pass the town by without even knowing it. He had hoped to run into the road again, but no such luck.
By the end of that first day he was seriously worried about ever eating again. He had no weapon to catch his own food if he came upon anything to catch. Having lived in a city his entire life, he had never imagined he would need one. He stumbled across a small watering hole where he was able to wash off the rest of the blood matted in his hair and change into some clean, if still rain-dampened, clothes. And he went to sleep that night with a belly full of water at least, small consolation, as hungry as he was.
The throbbing headache from the lump on his head that had been with him all that first day began to lessen the second day. But the blisters he’d developed on his hands from carrying his bag, and on his feet from so much walking in his town shoes, were so painful his headache was barely noticeable. And he’d run out of water. So he was more than just a little miserable by the end of that second day.
It was sheer luck that he happened to notice the campfire just before he was about to roll up into his musty lap robe for the night. It was a long ways off, though, so far that he was beginning to think it was an illusion, since he was taking so long to reach it. But then it did start to enlarge from the wavering dot it had been, to define itself, a definite campfire, and finally he could smell the coffee, smell the meat roasting, and his stomach rumbled in anticipation.
He’d almost reached the fire, was only twenty feet away, when he felt cold metal against his neck and heard the click of a trigger being primed for firing. He hadn’t seen or heard any other movement, but the sound from that weapon kept him from taking another step.
“Don’t you know better than to enter someone’s camp without warning first?”
“I’ve been lost for two days,” Damian replied tiredly. “And no, I wasn’t aware that it was customary to give a warning before seeking help.”
Silence, of the nerve-racking sort. Damian finally thought to add, “I’m unarmed.”
Another click sounded the release of the trigger, then metal sliding into leather. “Sorry, mister, but you can’t be too careful out here.”
Damian swung around to face his savior—at least he hoped he’d found a guide back to civilization. But he was amazed to find a mere boy staring back at him. The kid wasn’t very tall and was on the skinny side, with baby-smooth cheeks above a bright red bandana tied loosely around his neck. A boy, probably no older than fifteen or sixteen, wearing denim jeans with knee-high moccasins, and a brown-and-black woven wool poncho over a dark blue shirt.
There was a gun holster there somewhere, hidden by the poncho at the moment. A wide-brimmed hat, which Damian had noted plenty of since he’d crossed the Missouri line, sat atop scraggly black, shoulder-length hair. Light brown eyes were taking his measure, catlike eyes that could have been called pretty if they belonged to a girl. On this boy, they were merely very—unusual.
It was the poncho and the moccasins that led Damian to ask, somewhat hesitantly, “I haven’t wandered onto an Indian reservation, have I?”
“Not this far north of the Territory—what makes you think so?”
“I was just wondering if you were an Indian.”
A sort of grin; Damian couldn’t be quite sure. “Do I look like an Indian?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen one before,” Damian was forced to admit.
“No, I don’t reckon you would have, tenderfoot.”
“Are my blisters that obvious?”
The boy stared at him blankly for a moment, then laughed, a throaty, sensual laugh that was a bit disconcerting, coming from a boy. Damian was sure the joke, whatever it was, was at his expense. But then, he must seem laughable in his present condition.
Damian was hatless himself, which made him feel almost naked, his derby having been unsalvageable after the stage crash, and the only one he’d brought with him on this journey. Though he’d changed to a clean suit yesterday, today he was covered in dust and burrs. He probably looked as lost as he felt. But he hadn’t lost his manners. Ignoring whatever had amused his young host, he held out his hand to introduce himself properly.
“Damian Rutledge the Third here, and truly delighted to make your acquaintance.”
The boy stared at his hand, but he didn’t take it, merely nodded before saying, “There’s three of you?” Then he waved a dismissive hand, obviously deciding the question had been a foolish
one. “Never mind. The grub’s hot and you’re welcome to share it and my camp for the night.” With a slight smirk, he added, “Sounds like you could use a meal.”
Damian flushed because his stomach had been making noise ever since he’d gotten close enough to smell the food. But he wasn’t about to take umbrage, not when food was being offered. And although he had quite a few more questions he’d like to ask, food was uppermost on his mind, and he headed straight for the fire without further ado.
There were two fires, actually, a large one that was still flaring and lighting the area nicely, and a small one doing the cooking. A pit had been scraped out in the ground, with four rocks set around it to support an iron grill. Beneath it had been placed the smaller branches from the fire that had already turned to embers, used so the meat wouldn’t overly burn before it was done cooking. A black tin coffeepot was set on one corner of the grill, a tin box was on another corner, which he was to find held a half-dozen freshly made biscuits, and there was a can of beans heating up. As far as Damian was concerned, it was a feast.
“What kind of meat is that?” Damian asked as he was handed a plate.
“Wild prairie hens.”
They weren’t a very big bird, but there were two of them, and one was plopped down on his plate, along with three of the biscuits and half the beans. He dug in so quickly, it was a while before he noticed there was only one plate, that the lad was eating right off the grill.
“I’m sorry,” he began, but he was cut off.
“Don’t be silly. Plates are a luxury out here. Besides, we got a river down yonder for washing up after.”
Washing? That sounded heavenly. “I don’t suppose you’d have any soap on you?”
“Not any that you’d appreciate” was the cryptic reply. “Just use the silt on the bottom of the river like most folks do if you want a bath. It will scrape any dirt you’re wearing right off.”
How primitive, he thought, but this whole situation was—camping outdoors with only the barest of essentials. The food was excellent, though, and much appreciated. Damian said so.
“Thank you for sharing half of your meal with me. I don’t think I could have gone on much longer without sustenance.”
There was another one of those small grins, so subtle Damian wasn’t quite sure it was an actual grin. “You really think I could have eaten all that on my own? That’s my breakfast you’ve been guzzling—and don’t go apologizing again. Just saves time in the morning to eat leftovers, rather than cook fresh. But I’m not in such a hurry that I can’t whip up some jacks in the morning.”
Damian was already looking forward to it, whatever jacks were. But now that they had dined together, so to speak, and his belly was satisfied, if not quite full, his curiosity was fast returning.
Damian began by reminding the lad, “I didn’t catch your name.”
Those remarkable light brown eyes glanced up at him before returning to the coffee he was
pouring. “Maybe because I didn’t toss it your way.”
“If you’d rather not—”
“Don’t have one,” the boy cut in curtly. “Least I never knew it.”
That wasn’t exactly what Damian had expected to hear. “But you must go by something?”
A shrug. “Folks tend to call me Kid.”
“Ahhh.” Damian smiled. That was a name that had come up frequently in the file on the West he’d been given, though each of those names had had another name attached to it. “As in Billy the Kid?”
There was a snort. “As in I’m a mite young to do what I do.”
“Which is?”
The coffee cup was handed to Damian. He almost spilled it when he heard: “I hunt outlaws.”
“I—ah—wouldn’t have taken you for a policeman. I mean, you don’t exactly look—”
“A what?”
“An officer of the law.”
“Oh, you mean like a sheriff? No; who’d elect me at my age?”
Damian had been thinking the same thing, which was why he’d been so surprised. “Then why do you hunt outlaws?” he asked politely.
“For the rewards, of course.”
“Lucrative?”
Damian expected to have to explain that word, but again he was surprised. “Very.”
At least the lad was very intelligent, Damian thought.
“How many have you apprehended since you began this career?”
“Five to date.”
“I’ve seen a few Wanted posters,” Damian mentioned. Actually, the file he’d been given was full of them. “Don’t most posters offer the reward dead or alive?”
“If you’re asking how many of them lowlifes I’ve killed, the answer is none—at least not yet. I’ve caused a few wounds, though. And one of those five has an appointment with the hangman, so he’ll likely be meeting his maker before the new year.”
“They take you seriously, these hardened criminals?” Damian ventured to inquire.
The subtle grin appeared again, the one that wasn’t quite a grin. “Rarely,” the kid admitted. “But they do take this seriously.”
The gun seemed to materialize in his hand, there in the blink of an eye. Obviously, he’d already had it palmed under that poncho, and Damian just hadn’t noticed him bring it out in the open.
“Yes, well, guns have a way of getting one’s attention,” Damian allowed.
That was the most he would concede, though. The boy was just too young to have done the deeds he was laying claim to. Even if he were a few years older, Damian would have had doubts. But then, children did tend to boast of grand deeds to impress their peers, easy enough to do when proof wasn’t available or required.
However, Damian wisely kept his eye on that gun until it was put away again. Handing the coffee cup back got the weapon back into its hol
ster so the kid could pour a cup for himself.