Authors: Johanna Lindsey
T
hey’d marched her back over to the saloon, where with a single word the bartender had reached down and started piling weapons on top of his bar. Their weapons. So they’d never really been without them, just didn’t wear them handy, probably for political reasons.
It had been decided that Mason would face her. Jed’s younger brother was pouting over being passed over, and had nearly gotten backhanded for complaining. But Jed wasn’t taking chances here. He wanted his fastest gun.
They all strapped on their guns, though, making Casey wonder just how fair a fight it was going to be. They even offered her a weapon. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it didn’t have a single bullet in it. She declined, of course, and retrieved her own.
She would have liked to have time to change her clothes, but didn’t think she’d get any approval if she asked. It just felt…odd, strapping on her gun belt over such a fancy dress. The snickers she was receiving weren’t at all sur
prising. Not one of these men expected her to know much about guns. They were expecting an outright slaughter—hers.
Back outside, Casey moved down into the middle of the street. Mason was the last to leave the saloon. He was a tall, slim man, with black hair floating about his narrow shoulders and a very neat, trimmed beard. He’d removed his coat, despite the chill of that October day. Underneath was an embroidered silk vest that went with his business suit. He looked about as unusual with his double-holstered gun belt as she did. Nothing like looking civilized and uncivilized at one and the same time.
The street had been cleared immediately, as if the townsfolk knew what to expect. Just having Jack’s bunch step out wearing their guns had seen to that. Made Casey wonder how much blood had been spilled outside Barnet’s since Jack had arrived in Culthers.
Her father would blister her hide if he ever heard about this. Capturing outlaws was one thing. Chandos had taught her long ago about the element of surprise, and she had made good use of that knowledge in her bounty-hunting career. She didn’t give outlaws a chance to draw on her, and even if they did, her weapon would already be out, already be in command of the situation.
This was entirely different, standing there facing someone, giving him the opportunity to draw on her. She was fast with her draw. She was also very accurate with her aim. But still, timing would be everything here, and it was downright disconcerting, knowing that. And
Bucky and his friends had said Mason was fast…
Her palms were actually beginning to sweat. To have suggested this had been real stupid on her part. She could have thought of some other way to get out of that restaurant in one piece—if she’d had more time to think on it. She could even have started screaming, playing the threatened female. Someone might have come to her defense—and gotten himself killed as well. No…but damn, she had the feeling she was going to die.
And Mason, he looked as calm as it was possible to be.
He
was used to this sort of thing. Casey didn’t look nervous either, but then, she was drawing on inner resources so she wouldn’t show what she was feeling. She was, in fact, as nervous as she’d ever been in her life.
She watched Mason’s eyes, cold, impartial. He didn’t mind killing folks, didn’t mind killing her either. It took a certain kind of man to be that way, the kind she didn’t care to get to know. Then suddenly it was happening and she didn’t have time to think about it anymore, just reacted naturally as she’d been taught to do.
And she had to allow that she’d been taught well. She was still standing. Mason was falling. She was so surprised over that, she didn’t notice Jethro drawing his gun on her. A rifle cracked to her left. Jethro’s gun hand was hit. He started screaming. Other weapons were quickly drawn to retaliate.
Casey hit the dirt and rolled before she fired off another shot. And now other bullets besides those coming from the rifle were peppering the
street and the front of the saloon, forcing everyone to run for cover, though the shots weren’t hitting anywhere near where Casey was lying. She couldn’t see where they were coming from either, but obviously, someone else in this town didn’t take kindly to Jed and his boys ganging up on a woman.
She wasn’t going to lie in the open with her frilly dress all bunched up, just asking for a bullet. Fortunately, the rifle was giving her plenty of opportunity to get up and get moving, which she did, dashing toward the restaurant. Once stationed next to the door inside, she returned the favor, and in another moment, Damian was there glowering at her.
“Not now,” she said, knowing he was just dying to lay into her, he looked so furious.
The window shattering next to them must have encouraged him to agree, because he moved over to it and started firing off his rifle again. Now that she had a chance to actually look at the scene outside, she saw that Elroy Bencher hadn’t made it to cover in time, probably because of his broken ribs. He’d taken a bullet in one knee and was curled up in a ball on the porch of the saloon, moaning something terrible.
Candiman was lying across the steps. He looked a mite dead. Mason was still in the street, unmoving, dead or not, Casey didn’t particularly care at the moment. The other three had managed to get inside the saloon, and at least one was firing from behind the door.
“I take it you’ve recovered your memory?” Damian asked between shots.
“Never lost it.”
He snorted. “Just what did you think you were doing out there?”
So he wasn’t going to wait? “I didn’t go issuing challenges, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just figured since I had time to kill, waiting for you to show up, I’d try to get Jack to open up a little. Men are known to do a certain amount of bragging when women are around, and I don’t exactly look the same in this outfit.”
“You really thought they wouldn’t recognize you?” He shot her an incredulous look.
She managed to keep from squirming. “Well, they weren’t exactly paying attention to me that day you first confronted Jack. You announce that you’re arresting their money supply, and every eye in that saloon went to you and stayed on you. I was simply a no-account kid who happened to be at your side. So yes, I didn’t think they’d recognize me, and they didn’t—least not at first. And the rest you can imagine. Jack realized I was trying to trick secrets out of him and took exception.”
He said no more on the subject—for the moment. But after firing a couple more shots out the window, he did glance her way again. “You—uh—you look very pretty in that dress, by the way,” he remarked.
Casey snorted this time. “Bows! It figures you’d like silly bows.”
“Excuse me? I give you a compliment and you snap my head off?”
“No, I’m feeling like ten kinds of a fool, that’s why I’m snapping your head off. And you wouldn’t happen to have any extra bullets,
would you?” she asked after loading the last from her gun belt.
A box of bullets came sliding toward her from the back of the restaurant, compliments of a very frightened cook. Her own weapon came sliding toward her from Damian’s direction. Well, hell, with this extra firepower, she started thinking about ending this thing for good.
“Maybe one of us should try to get in the back of the saloon,” she suggested to Damian as she stuck the extra gun and bullets in her reticule, which was slung over her shoulder to keep it handy but out of the way. “Before they think about leaving from it.”
“One of us, as in you? Forget it. And I’m not letting you out of my sight, so forget that, too. Where the hell’s the sheriff when you need him?”
“Conveniently gone fishing, probably. But they felt no qualms about pulling an unfair gunfight, so I’d say if he was here, he’d be shooting from their side. It’s just as well if he doesn’t show up.”
“A moot point.”
“Why?”
“Because I just saw one of them dash across the back of that alley next to the saloon. Looks like they’re leaving after all.”
Casey peered across the street again. She fired off another shot, waited, but there was no return fire this time.
“Only one?” She frowned.
“I barely noticed that one. The other two could have crossed already.”
Casey nodded. “I’m not going to step out
there to make sure. How about we head out the back ourselves and see if we can cut them off at the stable?”
“Now
that
I’ll agree to. Come on.”
The stable was about a block and a half away. Taking the back-street approach when there wasn’t a back street required hopping a few fences. At least Damian did some hopping. Casey got lifted over any obstacles that got in their way, and, after the first such unasked-for help, didn’t bother complaining again. If she was going to wear a dress, then she would damn well be treated like someone wearing a dress, he told her.
Particulars—from a man still furious about coming into town and finding her in the middle of a gunfight. She wasn’t dumb enough to argue, though—at least not now. But later, she’d be sure to mention to him that wearing a dress did
not
define a person or her capabilities. Hadn’t she left home to prove that very point?
The stable was, fortunately, on their side of the street. The back of it was fenced off for an exercising corral, but was still the easier path to enter without getting shot right off. That is, if Jack and the two Paisley brothers had arrived there yet—and if that
was
their destination. Which didn’t seem to be the case. The stable owner was slowly pitching hay into a nearby stall.
But at second glance, the man looked a mite nervous, too nervous considering he didn’t know why they were there. They might have their weapons out and ready, but neither was pointed at him…
Casey tried to grab Damian’s arm to stop him from proceeding further, but he’d stepped too far in front of her. And quicker than giving him a warning, she threw herself at him, knocking them both to the ground—just as the shot was fired.
The stable owner ran, yelling, out the wide-open front entrance. Damian rolled to his left before firing off a shot, at nothing in particular, since he didn’t have a visible target yet. Unfortunately, Casey rolled in the opposite direction at exactly the same time, and right within Jack Curruthers’s reach.
A gun nozzle pressed into her neck, while “Drop it” was hissed in her ear.
Dropping her gun went against every instinct she had, but she couldn’t think of any way to keep it and stay alive. She dropped it, and was assisted to her feet none too carefully, Jack having more strength than one would imagine for such a little man.
“Back off, Rutledge, or the little lady gets it right now,” Damian was warned. “We’ll be taking her with us for insurance. You follow, she dies—simple as that.”
Damian just stared at them, probably trying to figure out a way to shoot Jack without hitting her instead. But it wasn’t going to happen, not when she was a bit taller than the target and he was doing a good job of hiding behind her. She was about to try dropping to the ground again to give Damian his shot, but the Paisley brothers came out in the open just then, and with Jed’s weapon aimed directly at Damian,
she
wasn’t taking any chances.
Damian was pretty much rendered harmless if he wanted to preserve her life, and they knew it. They didn’t even ask him to disarm, they were that confident he wouldn’t interfere now. And he didn’t.
She rode out of there doubled up on Jack’s horse, sitting in front of him with his gun still pressed hard against her. Things didn’t look very promising at the moment—for her anyway. In fact, she wondered how long it would be before Jack decided he didn’t need her for insurance purposes any longer and pulled the trigger.
T
he little cabin must have been a regular hideout, because they rode directly to it. At least that was Casey’s first thought when she was taken inside and thrown into a corner. The place didn’t look lived in; in fact, it contained a serious coat of dust over everything. Yet she soon saw that the room was also well stocked with canned goods that had been stashed under a loose board in the floor. There were blankets in that rather large storage hole as well, and a small crate of extra guns and ammunition.
A place prepared in advance to hole up for a last stand? It looked like something Jed would have a use for, considering his line of work, but Jack?
Casey, sitting in the corner and keeping her mouth shut for the time being, wasn’t feeling as dejected as she’d felt earlier. It had taken about four hours to reach the cabin, and once she’d finally remembered that she still had that borrowed reticule hanging from her shoulder, her whole perspective had changed.
The men weren’t the least bit worried about the bag she was carrying, weren’t going to bother taking it away from her, because they’d already searched through it back in the saloon and had found only the one weapon in it—which had been left behind in the stable on Jack’s orders. They had no way of knowing that between the saloon and the stable, she’d gotten another weapon and still had it.
She just needed to bide her time until they stopped paying such close attention to her. And that ought to be soon, with the dinner hour approaching.
So she was not pleased to hear Jed order his brother, “Don’t take your eyes off of her.”
Jethro had been busy rewrapping his still bleeding hand with the same bloody cloth, so the sour look he gave Jed was understandable. “I still don’t know why you didn’t just kill that marshal while you had the chance. Then you wouldn’t need to worry ’bout him following, or keeping her around in case he does.”
“Idiot, you don’t kill a U.S. deputy marshal, at least not when there’s a town full of witnesses, unless you want thirty more to come knocking on your door” was Jed’s sharp reply. “They seem to take it personal when you kill one of theirs. Might as well call yourself dead.”
“I’m not sure he really is a marshal,” Jack put in in a tired voice. The little man wasn’t used to the hard riding they’d just done. “He comes from upper-crust New York society, and is rich to boot. It’s ludicrous for someone like that to become a lawman.”
“We’ve already been over this, Jack. He could
have got the badge
just
to hunt you down. So whether it was a convenient lie or the truth, I’m not taking any chances. You want him dead, you do it when there are no witnesses. Hopefully, he’ll show up here and we can end it.”
Casey just loved the way she was being put in the “no witness” category. Of course, that simply meant that once they were done using her as a shield against Damian, she’d be as dead as they planned to make him. Not that she was going to let things progress that far. Funny, though, how Damian’s little lie about being a U.S. deputy was all that had kept him from being killed in the stable today. And she wasn’t about to point out that it was a lie.
She hadn’t missed the significance of Jack’s words. For him to know that Damian was a rich society Easterner, when Damian had never mentioned any such thing to him, pretty much confirmed that either Jack was Henry and knew Damian personally, or Henry had very recently confessed everything to his brother. She would have bet it was the former, except for one little glitch. Jack really didn’t add up to everything she’d been told about Henry. People
could
change, she supposed, but this much?
She decided to find out the truth. After all, Jack had no reason to stick to his original story at this point. He was on the run again. It would take some rather far-fetched excuses to explain away what had happened in the street today, which meant he could pretty much forget about becoming mayor of Culthers. And since he fully expected to kill her before this was over, he had no reason to maintain his secrets.
So she asked him right out, without wasting breath leading into the subject, “Which is it, Curruthers? Are you Jack—or Henry?”
He turned his owlish eyes on her and said derisively, “I would think you’d be scared enough to keep your mouth shut, little lady. What is someone like you doing with that Easterner anyway?”
“I’ll be glad to answer your questions just as soon as you answer mine.”
He snorted, but then he shrugged. “You want your morbid curiosity appeased? Very well, Henry’s dead. He’s been dead about a year now.”
That wasn’t exactly what Casey was expecting to hear, but did he mean that figuratively or literally? Before she asked for clarification, though, something else occurred to her that was even more pertinent.
“You killed him, didn’t you?”
Another shrug. “In a manner of speaking. I’d gone home for a visit, figured it was time after all these years. We got into a fight, he tripped and hit his head. It was an accident, but one that didn’t bother me much.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone, did you?”
“What for? So I’d get blamed for it? I don’t think so. Besides, old Henry wasn’t missed at all,” Jack added with a smirk.
It was his smug, self-congratulatory look that made it all click together in her mind. “You pretended to be Henry, even at his job.”
Jack chuckled. “And why not? I don’t know much about numbers, except to make them work in my favor. I was already there. It was an
easy way to make the trip profitable. And it wasn’t as if that company couldn’t afford a few losses. Old Man Rutledge had already made his fortune. The fool should have kept his nose out of the books, though. I was getting ready to quit the city when he started nosing around and demanding explanations.”
“Then why didn’t you just leave if you were already planning to? Why kill him first?”
“Because some of those questions he was asking were too personal. It’s easy to pretend to be a weakling like my brother was, harder to try the reverse. But I guess I wasn’t that good at it,” he concluded with a chuckle.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Rutledge was suspicious of my behavior, probably because I just didn’t bow down enough to him like my brother would have,” Jack replied derisively. “Because he had his doubts about me, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to question my aunt and find out that Henry’s twin had recently come to town for a visit.”
“That wouldn’t have been hard for anyone to do,” she pointed out.
“Yes, but only the old man suspected something wasn’t quite right with Henry. Why would anyone else ask about a twin? They wouldn’t have a reason to, now would they? No, the plan was, Henry would get blamed and be the one hunted down, not me. So the old man had to die, to keep it that way. And it would have stayed that way if Rutledge’s son wasn’t so hell-bent on revenge.”
“Revenge?” she questioned. “How about sim
ple justice? You killed the man’s father. Maybe some folks would just shrug that off and figure they can’t do anything about it, but then again, some won’t.”
“It was set up to look like he took his own life!” Jack complained heatedly. “That should have damn well been the end of it.”
“Unless someone knows the victim well enough to know they wouldn’t kill themselves. But I guess you didn’t take that into account, did you? And by the way, why didn’t you do the actual killing yourself instead of paying to have it done? Simply because Henry wouldn’t have?”
“Well, there was that,” Jack said with still another shrug. “But there was also the fact that Old Man Rutledge was a huge son of a bitch, just like his son. To have it look like a suicide required some brute strength, not something I could have handled alone. Now it’s your turn. What are you doing tagging along with Rutledge, aside from keeping his bed warm?”
It was beyond annoying, how so many men jumped to assumptions like that, refusing to admit that some women might have capabilities other than cook, breeder, and bed warmer. That perhaps some women might be able to do what men could do, possibly just as well or even better. They couldn’t accept it, much less allow women to prove it.
Casey’s resentment had her pointing out, “I outdrew your fast gun, that maybe give you a clue? I’m the one who tracked you down, Jack. Got offered a nice ten thousand to do it, too. And someone with
half
my tracking know-how
could have done the same. You don’t cover your trail very well, Jack.”
Her effort to belittle him resulted in the expected glower. “Maybe I won’t kill you after all, little lady. I might keep you around for a while, for what you’re really good for.”
“Come anywhere near me and I’ll show you how the Comanches deal with scum,” she shot back. “’Course, you don’t have much hair to work with, so it might be a bit painful.”
Heat suffused his face as his scowl grew darker. Jed’s busting out laughing might have been responsible for some of Jack’s present anger, though.
“What the hell did she mean by that?” he demanded of his lackey.
“The way she talks, Jack, I get the impression she’s learned stuff from an Indian along the way. They always were the best trackers around. So she’s probably not kidding about the scalping part.” Jed let out another chuckle. “Wouldn’t be surprised if she knows how to skin in less time than it takes to spit.”
“I need a doctor, Jed,” Jethro interrupted at that point in a whining tone. “This hand won’t stop bleeding, and I’m getting dizzy.”
“Lay down, Jeth, and get some rest,” his brother told him with very little actual concern. “I’ll wake you later for the third watch.”
“Get a fire started and I’ll get that blood stopped,” Casey offered.
Jethro paled, but Jed laughed again. “Yep, definitely some Indian training there.”
She shrugged indifferently. She’d made the offer only because it
would
be painful, cauteriz
ing the wound, and the boy didn’t look like he had much tolerance for pain. He might faint, and one less pair of eyes to watch her every little move was what she needed if she was going to manage to get herself out of this cabin in at least a breathing condition.