Spirit of the Wolf (24 page)

Shelby, taken aback by her businesslike acumen, grinned sheepishly. "I, ah, well, I'd be happy to arrange that."

"Thank you! I just knew you'd understand!"

His relieved laughter filled the eatery, drawing curious, momentary glances from other patrons. "Hold it down over there, Shelby," the man in the corner booth hollered. "You're curdlin' the milk in my tea!"

"Save it, Boone!" Shelby hollered right back. "The milk curdled the minute it looked up from the cup and got a gander of your ugly face!"

Everyone seemed to find that funny
,
including Mister Boone. Everyone but Bess, that is. She was far too busy reading the posters tacked to the board outside the restaurant's wide window. There would be a church social this Sunday, one flyer said. Amos Mossman's wagon was for sale, said another. But it was the sketch of the white wolf that had captured her attention, its wily, wary eyes boring into hers in much the same way the timber wolf had all those years ago in Baltimore.

"I didn't know there were wolves in this part of the country," she said.

"Ain't. Not in the wild, least-ways. That one there," he said, pointing, "was on her way to a zoo up in New York City when the train de-railed.
Rumor has it she’s ‘bout to birth a cub or two. Not good news ‘round these parts, on account-a t
hat she-wolf is responsible for killin' more cows'n I can count," Shelby said, realizing where her attentions had been focused. "She's got herself a roving spirit, and by golly, I'd like to be the one who stills it. Why, I'd kill her for free, just for the pleasure of hangin' her hide on my wall!"

Bess couldn't take her eyes from the animal's portrait. She was a farmer's daughter, and fully understood Shelby's reaction to any animal that threatened his breeding stock. Still, it seemed a shame that this beautiful one-of-a-kind creature should pay with its life for doing what came naturally....

"Now, iffen it was
money
I wanted," Shelby added, nodding to the wanted poster beside the wolf's, "
there's
the animal
I'd
go after."

Bess looked at the other wanted poster again. Really looked at it this time. Above a face that looked a
little
like
Chance
's, big black letters said
'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'
And beneath those words, the same bold type spelled out
“
W.C. ATWOOD.
”
On the last line, behind
the huge dollar sign, Bess read aloud,
"Five hundred dollars! What on earth could he have done to
inspire a price like
that
on his head!
"

Shelby proceeded to fill Bess in on the killer's vicious crime: He'd beaten a man to death
with his bare hands, and al
l he'd gotten for his trouble was a gold
watch
on a chain. As the story went, the killer had outrun dozens of Texas Rangers, outfoxed twice as many U.S. Marshals
, and evaded more than his share of bounty hunters, too,
in the ten years since his escape. "Seems every lawman between Maine and California is huntin' him. Can't set foot in a post office or a bank these days without havin' to look into his cold-blooded eyes."

He leaned forward
to add
, "I heard-tell of one marshal who came back empty-handed from huntin' Atwood
and claimed he’d bagged
his prey.
But
the slippery fella got clean away, but not before promisin' to run every lawman ragged. Said it'd be easy work, too,
since
not a-one of 'em had the brains or the brawn to outlast him."

According to Shelby, the challenge
—if
indeed one had been issued
—rankled
every man with a badge, and inspired a few of the badgeless to vow they'd see W.C. Atwood
swing
...or die trying. So far, Shelby said, W.C. had outwitted them all, making himself a legend of sorts
.

"But five hundred dollars," Bess echoed. "Surely dozens of murders are committed every year. Why is
this
man worth so much?"

Shelby shrugged. "
The gov’ment didn’t set the amount. Was his widow.
Rumor has it she said at
the
funeral that she wouldn't rest 'til
the killer was just as dead as her husband.
" Winking, he added, "
Way I see it, it’s b
een a long time since that woman had a
good night’s sleep. Might just be
the
g
ood Lord
is
on
ol’
W. C.'s side."

Bess gasped.
"Why would the God help a killer?"

"Atwood said from the get-go that he never kilt nobody, never stole no watch, neither. Me? I believe him."

"
Really.
But why?"

Shelby shrugged. "Well, for one thing, if he kilt the man for the watch
,
why'd he leave it behind?"

Bess glanced at the crudely-drawn portraits again, and couldn't help thinking that the wanted man and the hunted beast had a lot in common, right down to those icy, wolfish eyes.

Bess's heart beat harder, and she didn't even know why.

***

All during the train ride to Baltimore, Bess thought about the amazing likeness between the man in the wanted poster and
Chance
Walker.

Chance
was a Texan. He'd told her he hadn't been home in more than ten years
, a
nd he'd been mighty evasive about where he'd been and what he'd been doing all that time.
And i
t had been like pulling teeth barehanded to get him to talk about any aspect of his past, she recalled.

Once settled in the comfort of the train's passenger car, Bess had opened her copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, and Billy Steele's business card
—which s
he'd been using as a bookmark
—fluttered
to her lap.
For a moment, she considered
crumpl
ing
it into a ball and toss
ing
it into the trash
receptacle
. But
something
stopped her
, and she slipped it
into her purse
, instead
.
Mr. Steele
had said
he was willing to travel...if the case was interesting enough to make it worth his while. She
remembered
the address on the card
and nodded
. Gettysburg
wa
sn't all that far from Foggy Bottom...
should she ever need a Pinkerton detective….
.

Matt and Mark were at the station to meet her. She was thrilled to see them, yet her heart sank. She'd hoped that, after reading her note,
Chance
would realize he needn't avoid her
, e
specially not for
exposing his more
sensitive side
to her
.

The twins chattered all the way home about the things
Chance
had taught them while she was gone. They'd learned to birth a breech calf
and h
ow to mount a moving steed
, wh
en to administer medication to a sickly horse
a
nd
the proper time
to stop saddling a pregnant mare.
As they rattled on,
Bess sighed and thanked God for
Chance
. Her brothers had been little more than boys when he showed up early last spring. In these few months, they'd begun to show signs of turning into
fine, upstanding
men, thanks to his patient influence and tutelage. Before
Chance
,
she'd regularly had to threaten to tan their hides just to get them to wash up for supper. Now, in an attempt to emulate their hero, they came to the table squeaky clean...
with no prompting from her
.

Not so long ago, it took no fewer than three requests to get them to make up their beds in the morning. Now, Bess couldn't remember the last time she'd had to ask them to tidy their rooms. And schoolwork! She recalled the nagging and pestering it
once
require
d
to get those boys settled a
fter supper
to complete their lessons. These days, a sideways glance from
Chance
encouraged such an immediate response that the
dining room
curtains fluttered from the breeze of quickly opening books.

He'd
affected
Micah's life, too, in his quiet
cowboy
way. The change had been more slow and subtle, but the man who, until
Chance
's arrival, had been sullen and withdrawn, began to shed his gloomy spirit. The smiles she remembered as a girl were back again, and so was the jovial, high-spirited daddy who tickled and teased, hugged and
tousled
with abandon.

And there was no denying the impact
Chance
had had on
her own
life. He'd never come right out and told her how capable and efficient he believed her to be, yet she knew it's what he thought
, for he showed his approval with smiles
and the genuine respect
that glowed
in his eyes.Until
Chance
, she'd resigned herself to being a spinster. Like Old Martha Willis, who at eighty-one still cooked and cleaned for her younger siblings, Bess always believed she'd be caring for her brothers until they married and moved into homes of their own. And after that, she'd care for her father 'til he
drew that last breath
…or she died of loneliness. It made her
grin, just thinking about the wedding dress she'd
sketched one night when she couldn’t sleep. I
f
Chance
ever screwed up the courage to ask her to be his wife
….

Bess sighed again, thinking of that awful m
an on the Baltimore dock,
of
th
e
wanted po
ster.
She'd slipped outside after her meeting with Ernest Shelby and, when no one was looking, untacked the poster from the board and stuffed it into her purse. Bess guessed she must have taken it out and looked at it a hundred times
during the trip home
. The black and white rendition of the murderer
did
bear an uncanny resemblance to
Chance
. The man in the picture had longer hair, wore muttonchops and a mustache
, and t
here were no laugh lines beside his pouting mouth.
But those eyes....
Pale and slanting and darkly-lashed, they captured her attention in exactly the same thrilling-yet-terrifying way the timber wolf had all those years ago in Baltimore.

Once she’d unpacked her
bag
, Bess separated p
etticoats and stockings in need of a good laundering
from her
dusty bonnet
s and boots
.
After stowing her valise in her chiffarobe, she emptied her purse and
carried th
e wanted poster
to her bed, holding it
this way and that to catch the light
. B
ut no m
atter
which way s
he looked at it, the drawing resembled
Chance
.
She flopped
onto her plump feather pillow
and pressed the poster to her
che
st.
It c
ouldn’t
be
Chance
, she thought, biting her lower lip. He simply couldn't be a thief and a murderer!

She thought of all the
many
thoughtful things he'd done
—none
of which had
been required of him
as foreman
—since
coming to Beckley's Hollow.
Eyes closed, she could almost hear the
powerful tremolo
of his masculine voice,
floating over the yard as he sang, unaware
that
he had an audience of one.
Could a man who sings like an angel
really
be a cold-blooded killer
?

Bess
held the picture aloft, so that
it seemed
the man in the poster was looking
a
t her in much the same way
Chance
had that day in the parlor. She stared long and hard into those wolf
ish
icy eyes, at the firm set of that broad jaw and the grim line of his mouth. Even the slight rise of that well-arched left brow
…
exactly like
Chance
's....