The other man smiled and set the Colt on the square, flat top of a gatepost. “I don’t need a gun to kill you,” he replied. “I can do it with my bare hands.”
Gil led the way into the silent street, which was lighted only by the glow of the moon and stars. Gas-powered streetlamps, while common in large cities, had not yet come to Plentiful.
They faced each other, Gil and Montgomery, in the middle of that dusty, unpaved road. While Gil supposed the scene had its comic side, he knew Montgomery truly intended to kill him, and was willing to die trying. Thinking of all Montgomery had cost him, by paying thugs to knock him over the head that night in San Francisco and then turn him over to a sea captain willing to pay for able-bodied men, Gil was filled with a cold, quiet rage.
“What made you decide to tell the truth now, after all this time?” he asked, standing just six feet from Montgomery, clenching and unclenching his fists, his only weapons, in preparation for the coming fight.
Montgomery cast a glance over one shoulder, toward the field where Brother Joy’s tents were erected. There was a faint glow against the sky from the bonfires. “Old Dillard, the postmaster, got himself saved today,” he said. He smiled and laid the spread fingers of one hand to his breast. “He was truly repentant.”
Gil thought of his letters to Emmeline, scratched out a sentence at a time, on paper he’d stolen or traded his dinner for, posted by freemen in return for his whiskey ration. They
might as well have been penned in blood, those missives, so great was the risk of writing them, and he’d written them without knowing whether even one would ever get through.
“Dillard was repentant,” Gil repeated. He wanted to get the fight over with before old Marshal Scead showed up and got himself hurt. “Specifically, I guess, for pulling my letters to Emmeline out of the mailbag when they came to the stagecoach and turning them over to you.”
“Exactly,” Montgomery said with a smile. He’d taken a cheroot from the inside pocket of his coat, along with a wooden match, which he struck against the sole of his handmade boot. The flame flared, and the scent of sulfur uncurled in the air. “I must say, Hartwell, you write a touching letter.”
Bile rushed into the back of Gil’s throat at the idea of Montgomery reading his tenderest and most private thoughts. Every word had been wrung from his soul, and had been meant only for Emmeline’s eyes. “Let’s get on with this,” Gil said, opening his cuffs and rolling up his sleeves.
Montgomery drew on his cheroot, then expelled the smoke. He tossed the small cigar aside with a flip of one wrist, and in that same motion a derringer slipped into his palm.
“I’ll put the Colt in your hand,” he said smoothly, “and it’ll look as though you drew on me.” He shrugged. “An obvious case of self-defense.”
Gil didn’t argue that Miss Emmeline was bound to tell the truth of the matter, because he knew Montgomery would never give her the chance. Montgomery meant to kill Emmeline, too, and then testify that Gil had done it. Folks might believe a story like that, since most of them probably thought Gil had never cared about Emmeline in the first place, disappearing without a word as he had. Montgomery, now that Gil considered the matter, had probably done what he could to foster that assumption.
He lunged at Montgomery, letting out a low roar of desperation and fury as he landed on the other man. The derringer went off, and Gil heard the report, felt the bullet burrow deep into the flesh of his shoulder. But the explosive pain, rather than felling him, sent the power of a wounded grizzly surging through his system.
He and Montgomery rolled on the ground, struggling for possession of the derringer for what seemed to Gil an eternity, and then there was another shot. Montgomery stiffened, then went still, and Gil raised himself to his knees.
He was holding the derringer in both hands, still pointed at Montgomery’s dead heart, when Emmeline arrived, accompanied by Marshal Scead and a handful of heathens who’d no doubt been waiting out the revival in Kelly’s Saloon.
Gil found Emmeline’s pale face in the darkness, focused on it, and passed out.
When he woke up again, he was lying on the billiard table at Kelly’s, and old Doc Blitter, the most devoted heathen of them all, was digging in his shoulder with what felt like a broken ax handle. There was blood everywhere, and the pain was so exquisite that it set Gil’s head spinning and brought his supper surging up into the back of his throat.
“Don’t go puking,” Doc Blitter said, speaking around the lighted cigar dangling from his teeth. “That’s all I need right now, you puking.”
Emmeline was somewhere nearby, at the edge of a shifting fog. Gil heard the rustle of her skirts as she paced back and forth, stirring the filthy sawdust floor with her leather shoes. “You, sir,” she said to the doctor, “are nothing but a butcher!”
“Maybe so,” said Doc, digging deeper, “but I’m the only man within fifty miles of this shit-heel town who knows how to get a bullet out.”
“Look at you,” Emmeline went on, her voice rising note by
note toward a shrill crescendo. “You’re filthy. Why, even if you do manage to get the bullet out, he’s bound to die of infection!”
Doc swore, tossed aside his cigar with a bloody hand, and reached for something. Gil watched in horror as the doctor upended a half-filled bottle of rotgut whiskey into his wound.
“This’ll fix that,” the physician said.
Fire blazed in the wound and sped through Gil’s veins, and he lost consciousness again and dreamed he was back aboard the
Nellie May.
He’d relived the entire experience by the time he woke up again.
This time he was in a bed, with clean linen sheets lying smooth against his skin. The pain was with him, a dull, incessant ache, as though his bones had been pried apart at the joints. Emmeline sat nearby in a rocking chair, tatting an edge onto a pillowcase.
Gil tried to say her name, but it came out as a croak, and left his throat raw.
As though lit from within, her face brightened when she looked at him, and she set aside her needlework and rushed over to pour water from a carafe on the bedside table and offer him some.
He took a careful sip and fell back onto his pillows, feeling as weary as if he’d just plowed a field without a mule. Looking up at Emmeline, he suddenly did not know what to say.
She stroked his forehead with a cool, light hand, and he marveled that so simple a caress could send such a sweet echo pulsing through his soul. “At least that horse doctor didn’t kill you,” she said, and sat down carefully on the edge of the mattress.
“I thought I dreamed that part,” Gil said gruffly, with a grin that wavered on his lips. Hell, he thought, even his mouth was weak.
Emmeline shook her head. “It was quite real,” she told
him. She was holding his hand in her lap, her fingers intertwined with his. “Neal Montgomery is dead.”
“I know,” Gil said, and was surprised to realize that he felt sorrow. He had, after all, intended to kill the other man, in order to save his life and Emmeline’s.
Her cheeks were pale as parchment. “Everybody knows it was self-defense, so there won’t be any trial.”
Gil let out a long sigh, because he’d been worried that the incident would be construed as murder, even though he’d taken a bullet in the shoulder himself. He brought his hand to his mouth, and Emmeline’s with it, and brushed his dry lips over her knuckles. “‘Everybody’? Tell me what
you
think, Emmeline, because that’s all that matters to me.”
She looked deep into his eyes. “I think we were both fools to spend even one day apart,” she said earnestly. “Why, we acted as if we had all the time in the world!”
He nodded. “I agree,” he replied, and looked around the room at the bright wallpaper, the solid furniture, the lamps with their colorfully painted glass globes, the silver picture frames on the guest-room fireplace mantel. “You won’t mind leaving the judge’s house and coming back to the cabin with me?”
Emmeline’s smile nearly blinded him. “Mind? I’ve got my things all packed, and the house is already up for sale.”
“What about Izannah?” Gil asked.
“She and Becky Bickham are going back east,” she answered. “They’ll both spend a year traveling in Europe with our aunt. Once we’ve sold the property, Izannah and I will share the proceeds.”
Gil nodded, but he was weary, and his concentration was flagging. “I believe I’ll rest for just a minute,” he said.
Emmeline bent and kissed his forehead, then rose and went back to her chair. He heard the comforting sound of the rocker as he drifted off to sleep, away from the pain. Slumber
was a quiet, peaceful realm, no longer haunted, and he rested there, and healed, safe in the constancy of Emmeline’s love.
One Month Later . . .
Emmeline stood alone on the veranda, wearing her doing-business hat and carrying her gloves. Gil’s precious letters, retrieved from Neal Montgomery’s desk by the marshal, were tucked safely in her handbag.
Izannah, dressed to travel, was beside her, tearful and yet eager to set out on the journey east. Mr. Connors, the stage driver, had agreed to bring the coach right to their door, in honor of the occasion, since he had to pass by the judge’s front gate on the way to Missoula anyhow.
The house, along with most of its furnishings, belonged to a young doctor from Boston now. He and his family would live on the upper floor and use the lower one as a clinic and small infirmary.
Emmeline heartily approved, her opinion of Doc Blitter being what it was. And she knew she would not miss the many possessions she had sold or given away—Gil’s letters and the brooch he had brought her were all she really cherished.
Still, the house had been her refuge, first as a child, then as a bride believing herself to be a widow. As eager as she was to go home to Gil and the little cabin beside the creek, she could not turn away from it without sentiment, and gratitude.
She laid one hand to the whitewashed siding, as if caressing a living creature.
Good-bye,
she said in the silence of her heart.
The arriving stagecoach made a great racket and Becky Bickham, waiting by the front gate with her parents and a good-sized trunk, called out to Izannah in an eager voice to hurry up. Emmeline smiled and turned toward the street with one arm around Izannah’s waist.
“We’ll go forward,” Emmeline said firmly, “and not look back.”
When they reached the gate, Izannah embraced her. The coach driver and Reverend Bickham were already loading baggage, while Mrs. Bickham wept into a much-mended handkerchief.
“I promise I’ll write every week,” Izannah said.
Emmeline kissed her cheek. “You’d better,” she answered with a mock scowl. There was a flurry of good-byes after that, along with a few tears, and then Emmeline stood with the Bickhams watching the stagecoach trundle off toward Missoula, where the girls would board a train that would take them all the way to New England.
When the dust settled, Emmeline and the Bickhams said farewells to one another—they would meet again on Sunday morning, of course—and then Emmeline climbed into her overloaded surrey. She took up the reins, released the brake, and turned the rig toward her future.
Gil was standing in the doorway of the barn when she arrived, his shoulder in a sling, leaning on a pitchfork. He watched, with a slight, crooked smile, as she drew the surrey to a stop beside the creek and climbed down. Lysandra lowered her ancient head to the clear waters and began to drink noisily, and on both sides of the stream, Gil’s cattle grazed in the rich grass.
“You are not supposed to be working,” she scolded as she drew near. Reverend Bickham had organized a crew to make repairs on the barn, and there was wood chopped and stacked for winter. With the cattle Gil had bought from other
ranchers, they had the beginnings of the ranch they dreamed of building together.
“And you’re not supposed to be nagging,” Gil said when she reached him. He set the pitchfork aside and drew her against him in a one-armed embrace. Their kiss was gentle at first, even cautious, and Emmeline’s heart leaped, brimming with a new and ever-deeper love.
They were like newlyweds—although not in all ways, for they had agreed not to consummate their marriage until they could wake up together the morning after and go on with their lives.
Gil eased Emmeline into the barn, where the fresh hay was sweet-scented and prickly-soft, and kissed her again, this time with hunger. She responded by parting her lips to receive his tongue.
“Perhaps we should go inside,” she gasped, breathless, when he finally allowed her to take air.
Gil nuzzled her neck and stroked her breast. “You’ve forgotten what I said, Miss Emmeline,” he teased as she trembled under his touch, yearning to shed her dress and underthings and receive him completely. “I have no patience, this first time. I’ve waited too long to have you.”
Emmeline flushed, but with pleasure, not embarrassment. She stepped away from him, and he watched her breasts rise as she reached up to remove her sensible hat and toss it aside. After that, she unpinned her hair and shook her head, causing the auburn tresses to fall, bouncing, to her waist. Then, like a temptress, Emmeline began unfastening the small buttons at the front of her dress. Presently she stepped out of the garment and stood before Gil in her petticoats, drawers, and camisole.
He pulled her to him with a low, impatient cry and wrenched the eyelet-edged camisole down, freeing her full, sumptuous breasts. He admired them, fondled them gently in
his calloused hand, and then bent his head to take fierce suckle at a taut nipple.
Emmeline cried out in shameless pleasure when he pushed down her petticoats and literally tore away her drawers to cup her in a firm, possessive grip. The heel of his palm pressed against the nubbin of flesh he’d bared, and he made slow, tantalizing circles as he continued to feast on her breasts.
He kissed her again, and the two of them dropped to the hay and knelt facing each other. “Next time,” he said hoarsely, “I’ll take you like a lady. Right now, I want you in the swiftest and most primitive way I can have you.”