Merline Lovelace (5 page)

“I’m sure he meant it at the time,” Suzanne replied with a show of nonchalance. “This morning, he may very well see things differently.”

Greenleaf looked skeptical, Matt downright worried. “I wish you’d think hard on this, Miss Bonneaux.”

“I have thought hard. I must get to Fort Meade as soon as possible, either with or without Mr. Sloan’s escort. I’m not without certain skills, you know. I grew up on army posts. I can ride and shoot as well as any trooper.”

Better, actually, considering the months of training it took to teach raw recruits how to handle a rifle or stay on a horse. She only wished she carried more firepower than the two-shot derringer nestled in her skirt pocket.

“Well, it’s your choice,” the merchant said, shaking his head. “I hope you don’t come to regret it.”

Suzanne sincerely hoped so, too. She dug into her breakfast, knowing she’d need energy for the hard ride ahead. Knowing, too, that her journey to Cheyenne River had taken on an added dimension, one with a deep, rough voice and eyes the color of a winter morning.

By the time she gathered a few supplies, scribbled a promissory note to the station manager for the boots and foodstuffs and sent Matt out to round
up an Express Line horse, Sloan had a good hour’s start on her.

She’d catch him easily enough. He’d be riding hard but couldn’t push his horse in this heat or it would get the thumps and Sloan would find himself walking again. Suzanne was smaller, lighter. And, as she’d pointed out to Matt and Benjamin Greenleaf, she was army-raised. She couldn’t count the number of times her mother had bundled her, her younger brother and everything they owned into an ambulance wagon for yet another move to another post. When Suzanne and Sam had grown big enough to sit a saddle, they’d made the marches on horseback.

Matt’s return brought her clumping out of the way station in her borrowed boots, the burlap sack of supplies clutched in her fist. He’d brought two horses down, she saw, one a chestnut gelding with black points, the other a dappled gray. Both were saddled and bridled.

And with his particular brand of shyness and gallantry, he announced that he was going with her.

“T
oo bad Becky can’t see me now.”

Suzanne hid a smile as Matt squared his slumping shoulders, narrowed his eyes and tried to look bad.

“She didn’t hold much with my desire to go off adventuring,” the youth confided ingenuously. “Predicted I’d squeal like one of Pa’s hogs on the way to the butchering block if I ever come face-to-face with one of the desperadoes I read about in dime novels.”

“Like Big Nose Parrott.”

He gave an embarrassed grin. “I’ll admit I near about jumped outta my skin when he stuck his beak through the stagecoach window. But now here I am, escorting you across the prairie like some Pinkerton man.”

“I appreciate your company,” Suzanne said truthfully. Matt might not be the best rider in the
world, but he did make the dusty miles seem shorter.

“After I get you safe to Fort Meade, I’ll head on over to the gold fields. I’ll have to work some to pull together another stake,” he admitted. “I shoulda knowed better than to hide the fifty-dollar gold piece Mam slipped me inside the lining of my carpetbag. The bag’s stashed in the stage boot.”

“Maybe Parrott and his gang didn’t catch up with the stage,” Suzanne suggested. “With luck, the driver whipped the horses clear to the next way station and your bag will be waiting for you at the Express Office in Deadwood. It could be the stage line is even offering a reward for information about the men who held us up.”

Matt brightened at the prospect. “I can tell them all about Big Nose Parrott. I’ve read up on the fellow! Did you know he’s robbed as many trains as stages? And how he’s rumored to hole up in the Dakota Badlands?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, shoot fire, could be I even get my name in the papers! Mam and Pa and Becky might just read how Mr. Mathias Butts of Plainsboro, Ohio, helped capture a notorious road agent.”

Clearly dazzled by the possibilities, he shrugged off the fact that he had less than a dollar in loose change jingling around in his pocket. The possibility of fame didn’t appear to make up for the
ache in his hindquarters, however. With each slap of the saddle Suzanne suspected he felt a little more like a raw rumpsteak.

“Do you need to rest?” she asked when he rose up in the stirrups to shift his weight.

“No, ma’am. I’ll admit, though, I’m a sight more used to dragging a plow behind the two ornery mules Pa keeps at the farm than riding them. I kin hitch the pair to the wagon quicker ’n spit when it’s time to haul hog carcasses into town. I never spent much time in the saddle, though.”

Suzanne declined to comment on the obvious.

Clearly embarrassed that she should have caught him favoring his bottom, he tried to change the direction of her thoughts. “How’d you learn to ride and read signs the way you do?”

“Didn’t I mention that I grew up on army posts? My stepfather commands the Second Cavalry regiment, currently stationed at Fort Russell, outside Cheyenne.”

“Oh, a horse soldier. That explains it, then.”

“The colonel put me on my first pony when I was six years old.”

“No wonder you take to a saddle so easy.”

“I take to one a lot better when I’m wearing a riding habit,” she said ruefully.

Matt darted a look at the length of ankle and stockinged calf displayed above her borrowed
boots. Her bustled-up skirt wasn’t cut for riding astride.

Suzanne caught the quick glance and the wave of red that surged into his cheeks. He shifted in the saddle again, sweating profusely under his shirt.

Poor thing! He was obviously at the age where the sight of any portion of a female’s anatomy would enflame him. She didn’t doubt his Becky had kept him in a constant sweat.

“Did your step-pa teach you to track, too?” he asked in a rather choked voice. “You picked up Sloan’s trail and have been following it like a hound on the scent of a coon for the past two hours.”

“No, I learned to track from the father of the friend I told you about, the Arapaho medicine woman. Lone Eagle was an army scout. He could glance at a bent stalk of grass and tell instantly whether a two-legged or four-legged creature had crushed it and how long ago.”

“You sure had me fooled. When you climbed aboard the stage at Cheyenne, I coulda sworn you’d just stepped off the train from Boston or New York or some big city like that.”

“Actually, you’re not far off the mark. I just returned from Philadelphia a few weeks ago. I’ve been at school. The Misses Merriweather’s Academy for Select Young Ladies.” She sent him a
smile. “That’s where I read
Romeo and Juliet.
It’s really quite a beautiful love story.”

“If you say so.”

“I’ll tell you what. When I get back to Cheyenne, I’ll try to find a volume of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays and send them to you at Deadwood.”

“If I’m going to spend my free time fingerin’ pages, I’d much rather be reading ’bout characters like Pecos Bill and Black Jack Sloan.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the penny presses, you know. I suspect Mr. Sloan’s reputation is much exaggerated.”

“I don’t doubt we’ll find out when we catch up with him! He’s not going to take kindly to us tailin’ him.”

As they discovered a little less than an hour later, Matt had understated the case considerably. Not only did Sloan not take kindly to being tailed, he came damned close to putting a bullet right through Suzanne’s heart for the second time in less than twelve hours.

Jack first sensed he was being followed when he stopped beside a sluggish stream to water his horse. Eyes narrowed, he studied the little swirl of red dust rising into the air some distance behind him. It could have been stirred up by a rabbit scurrying for his hole, chased by a kestrel diving for prey. But the sky hung cloudless and clear of cir
cling hawks, and Jack had lived too long looking back over his shoulder to take a chance on maybes.

He was waiting, the Colt drawn, when his pursuers rounded an outcropping of rock and scrub. Disbelief pounded through his veins, followed fast and hard by fury.

“Have you gone sun loco?” he snarled, pushing out of the scrub.

“Not yet,” the damned snip replied calmly, reining in her horse. “Although that’s a distinct possibility. I should have borrowed a wide-brimmed hat to go along with these boots.”

Her unruffled demeanor sent his fury shooting up another three or four notches. “Don’t you know that tracking down on a man is a sure way to get yourself blown out of the saddle?”

“Of course I do. If I’d been tracking any other man, I wouldn’t have followed so close or let you know we were behind you.”

His jaw snapped shut so tight he almost heard the bones crack. What in hell did she have rattling around in her brain box? Did she figure she could follow him clear to Deadwood without his knowledge if she had a mind to? For that matter, how in blue blazes had she followed him this far?

She read his thoughts with an ease that had Jack grinding his teeth. “I told you last night I’m not the helpless female you think me.”

“And I told
you
last night, I’m not for hire.”

“Then I won’t pay you. But there’s no law that says Matt and I can’t ride along behind you.”

He threw a savage look at her companion. The kid sat his saddle like a sack of old potatoes. Jack would bet he was already raising saddle sores.

“Are you snake-bit, boy? Or did
Miss
Bonneaux here smile sweet-like and get you so hot and pokered up you didn’t have the gumption to tell her she’s crazy as two loons.”

The red that rushed into his face answered Jack—not that he needed answering. Young Butts was at that age where he shot up faster than new corn if a passable female even looked at him sideways.

The fact that this particular female had made Jack himself shoot up twice now didn’t exactly ease his fury. Nor did her crazy plan to tail after him clear to the turnoff to Fort Meade.

“We won’t be a burden to you, Mr. Sloan, but surely you can’t object if we use your reputation as a shield for the next day or two?”

“The hell I can’t.” He thrust the Colt into its holster. “You listen to me, lady. You’d better rid your mind of the idea I’ll protect you if we run into some nervous squatters or another bunch of road agents.”

“You did before.”

“Dammit, you don’t understand. I’m more likely to pull you into trouble than out of it.
Whether or not you believe all you’ve heard about me, I’m a walking target for any drunk or hothead who thinks he can prove himself a man by outdrawing me. If you and the boy ride with me, you might just become targets, too.”

Her eyes held his. “Matt is old enough to weigh the risks and make his own decisions. So am I.”

“Well, you made the wrong ones this time. I suggest you haul your carcasses back to Ten Mile Station.” Snagging his mount’s reins, he brought it around and swung into the saddle. “I ride alone. I always have.”

Since he was twelve years old, anyway.

His face grim, Jack spurred his mount into a gallop. With every thump of the roan’s hooves on the dry earth, he repeated the litany that had kept him going all these years. The same litany he’d sung in his head since the night he’d strapped his father’s Colt around his skinny hips and ridden away from the farm his folks had been trying to scratch out of a Colorado hillside.

They wouldn’t escape. None of them. They wouldn’t escape.

Charlie Dawes was the last. The man was hiding out in Deadwood, breathing borrowed air. The last thing Jack needed was a feather-headed female and fuzz-cheeked boy hanging on to his coattails when he cornered the bastard and blew him full of lead.

He set a punishing pace.

The Express Line mount he’d chosen covered the sun-baked road at a steady lope. The gelding was big, probably a wheeler judging from the easy way he neck-reined. Every hour or so, Jack would take him to a slower gait, then dismount and walk for ten or twenty minutes until he’d cooled.

Each time he stopped, he scanned the sun-browned dips and swales behind him. And each time he spotted the two mounted figures trailing farther and farther back, he spit out another curse.

Didn’t the woman have the sense God gave a crow? Didn’t she know what could happen to her out here in the open, without a man to protect her? The boy didn’t count. Hell, from the way young Butts flopped around on the back of his horse, he’d be lucky if he didn’t fall off in a heap before another hour passed.

Not that Jack cared what happened to him. The boy was no concern of his, dammit. Neither was
Miss
Bonneaux.

He was still trying to convince himself when twilight purpled the horizon. He pushed on until night dropped like a buffalo skin over the earth, determined to let the two fools behind him reap the rewards of their folly. Unsaddling the roan, Jack ground-tied him and left him to graze.

He soon had a campfire spitting sparks. He’d
helped himself to a tin mug from the way station to boil coffee in, but sure could have used some of the cold beans he’d wolfed down for breakfast. Well, he’d gone to bed with his stomach shrunk up and rumbling often enough in the past ten years. He’d shoot a jackrabbit or a grouse tomorrow morning, he decided, and grease his insides up good.

Jack wasn’t sure when he first caught the scent of frying bacon. It just tickled his nostrils at first, so faint he thought his brain was playing games with his belly. The night had cooled the air and the horse blanket he’d pulled over him for warmth provided a powerful scent of its own.

He lay still, head propped against the saddle, hat tipped back to give him a clear view of the stars. There were a million or more out tonight, bright points of silver in a sky so dark and vast it swallowed a man up whole. Nights like this, Jack was almost glad he didn’t have a place to call his own or a roof to keep out the stars. Almost.

He hadn’t looked back since he had ridden out of Colorado all those years ago, hadn’t thought much about the homestead his folks had staked out above Rainbow Junction. Times like this, though, he had to fight a longing for…

Damn! He pushed upright, sniffing the air. That
was
bacon he smelled. The tantalizing aroma had his stomach doing a jig with his backbone. For
some reason, that infuriated Jack even more than being tailed. Lock-jawed, he grabbed his rifle and stalked down the scent.

They’d set up camp just over a small rise, almost within shouting distance…which, he knew, was exactly her intent. Part of him had sensed their nearness. Another part, the ornery part, refused to acknowledge either his relief that they’d managed to stick so close or his disgust at not being able to lose them.

“Good evening, Mr. Sloan.”

The blasted female was squatting beside the fire and didn’t even bother to glance up.

“Would you care to join us for supper?”

Jack had a feeling his back teeth would be ground down to stumps before he shook loose of the woman. He aimed an evil glare at young Butts, who was looking about as miserable as a man could after ten hours in the saddle, and stomped into the small circle of firelight.

“I’ve met some stubborn fools in my time,
Miss
Bonneaux, but you’re about the stubbornest.”

“Thank you.”

The answer was so polite and proper his teeth ached all the worse, but laughter danced in the eyes that met his across the snapping fire.

“Dinner should be ready soon. Would you like some coffee while you wait?”

Acting for all the world as if she’d just invited
him to take Sunday afternoon tea, she tipped a stream of thick, black liquid into a tin cup and held it out to him.

The mug hung in the air, an invitation, a challenge. Jack swallowed a curse, and came within a breath of spinning around and stomping back to his own campsite. Reaching out, he took the damned cup.

“I can’t figure out why someone hasn’t strangled you long before now.”

Her laughter spilled free. “My brother says the same thing. Do sit down, Mr. Sloan. You’re giving me a crick in the neck.”

Nursing the coffee in both hands, he planted his backside a few feet from the boy. Matt sat cross-legged on a saddle blanket folded three times over. Shoulders drooping with weariness, wrists draped loosely over his knees, he gave Jack a sheepish glance.