The Redhead and the Preacher: A Loveswept Historical Romance (2 page)

She studied the man making the offer. She had nothing for them to steal and, as long as he didn’t know she was a girl, accepting his offer was less likely to give her away than refusing. Besides, Promise was only a short way down the trail, and once she reached town, she’d separate herself from these rough-looking men.

“Much obliged.”

Macky grabbed the saddle horn and vaulted onto the horse, kicking him into a steady gallop to keep up with her new companions. She wondered where they’d come from and what had happened to the man who stayed behind. All the horses had been ridden hard; their coats were icy with frozen perspiration. Why were they heading for a town that had little claim to fame other than the attempts by a few homesteaders to raise crops in an area where the only year-round water belonged to one man?

The leader slowed his horse, allowing Macky to come abreast of him. “What kind of place is Promise, kid?”

“Small,” she answered.

“We’re heading there to do a little banking. You can watch our horses while we’re inside.”

That hadn’t been part of Macky’s plan. At the moment, however, she couldn’t see a way out. Maybe it wouldn’t matter. The bank, standing between the blacksmith’s forge and the dressmaker’s shop, was the first thing they’d come to.

The men reined in their horses in front of the rustic building and slid to the street mushy with melting snow. Macky, anxious to separate herself from the strangers, stopped her horse in front of the smithy’s shop. She was already in enough trouble with the town; riding in with a group of strangers would only make matters worse. She’d just tie the horse to the hitching rail and disappear.

She soon found
that
wasn’t going to work. “Watch the horses, boy,” the man with the beard said as he climbed down and dropped the reins to his horse.

Two of the riders stationed themselves beside the front
door of the bank while the leader and the other man went inside. Before Macky could figure out how to get away, gunshots rang out. Seconds later the two men ran out of the bank.

“That’s far enough, Pratt,” the sheriff’s deputy called out from the roof of the general store across the street.

“Drop the money and throw down your guns,” Sheriff Dover ordered. Macky couldn’t see him where he was standing in the alley between the bank and the blacksmith’s shop. “We got word from the federal prison that you were heading this way. Just let me have the money.”

Pratt? The sheriff had called the man Pratt. Everybody in the West knew about the infamous Pratt gang. One outlaw suddenly dropped to the ground, rolled away from the door and got off a shot. The deputy fell, but not before he’d wounded one of the robbers.

The man by the door found cover and opened fire. The sheriff responded with a barrage of bullets, grazing the horse’s haunches as Pratt mounted. The frightened animal reared up. In his attempt to stay on his horse, Pratt lost control of the flour sack he was carrying, flinging it behind him toward the startled Macky who caught it instinctively.

Macky, who’d been paralyzed by what was happening, suddenly realized that Pratt and his men had robbed the bank. At any moment the sheriff would step out from the alley and see her. With the money in her hand, he’d believe that she was a part of the gang. She’d come to town to ask the banker for money and she’d been caught in a holdup.

Desperately, Macky kicked her horse into action and rode into the blacksmith’s barn. She slid to the ground and slapped her horse on the rear and watched him gallop out the back.

Macky followed the horse. When she’d hoped to find something she was good at, she hadn’t expected it to be a crime. She could only pray that all the attention had been on the shooters and that nobody had recognized her in Papa’s coat and hat. No matter, her chance of selling her brooch
had been ruined and it was almost time for the stage. The stone for Papa’s grave would have to wait.

Desperately, she looked around. Perhaps the dressmaker would buy the cameo. Macky knocked on the shopkeeper’s back door, found it open and slipped inside. “Hello?”

Moments later a woman peered furtively from a small room opening off the shop. Seeing that Macky was alone she came forward, facing Macky with distaste and disbelief. “Yes?”

Macky had never visited her shop and nobody knew that better than the proprietor. “Yes, I wonder if you can help me?” Macky started to reach in her pocket and realized she was still holding the flour sack filled with money.

“What are you looking for?” the seamstress asked icily.

“I’d like—” Macky reached for her cameo, heard the sound of coins jingle in the sack and stilled her movements.

Considering how she was dressed, she could understand the dressmaker’s attitude, and after what her brother had done, the sheriff would never believe that Macky was an innocent pawn. Now she could be in even bigger trouble with the outlaw Pratt. He was sure to come after his money. Becoming a criminal was the final insult in her life.

Then it came to her. She didn’t have to sell the cameo now. She had money for her ticket if she wanted to use it. Granted, it wasn’t hers, but she’d been handed a means to administer justice to the man who’d cheated her father and so many others. She’d take the money her father had been swindled out of, plus interest. It would buy her a ticket out of Promise and stones for both Todd’s and Papa’s graves—at the banker’s expense. Later, she’d return the money that wasn’t truly hers.

Macky calmly considered her next move. The sheriff hadn’t seen her, only the outlaws and the deputy, and from what she’d seen the deputy’s wound looked fatal. The dressmaker didn’t know what had happened for she’d obviously been in her workroom with no view of the street. If Macky was lucky she still might get out of Promise.

Macky made up her mind. Providence had provided.

“I’d like to buy a dress and a bonnet and cape. Quickly, please. I—I have a pressing engagement.”

The seamstress studied her as if she thought Macky’s pressing engagement might be with a ragman, then turned to her rack. “I do keep a few skirts made up but they might be a little small for you and the only blouses I have are probably too big. I could alter a dress by tomorrow.”

“No, get the skirt and shirtwaist. I’ll wear them.”

The woman pulled the clothing from the rack and handed it to Macky. “You can try them on behind the changing screen.”

Keeping an eye on the door, Macky quickly shed her brother’s clothes and pulled on the unfamiliar women’s garments, wondering how on earth anybody could wear such things. By the time the commotion outside died down, Macky was wearing a pale blue shirtwaist and darker skirt over her brother’s drawers and had covered it all with a dark blue serge cape.

She reached inside the sack and withdrew enough money to pay for her goods and buy her ticket on the stage. Then she looked around for a means to conceal the rest. Getting on the stage holding a flour sack would only call attention to herself.

Hurrying now, she selected a tan-colored portmanteau in which she placed her old clothes and the flour sack. She added a second shirtwaist, a flannel nightgown, and a petticoat.

“Might I suggest this?” the seamstress said, holding out a blue velvet drawstring purse. “For your traveling money.”

Macky took the purse, paid for her purchases, and placed the remaining money inside. When the coins clanked together she looked around and picked up a lacy handkerchief to cushion the sound.

At the last minute she selected a blue bonnet with a pink rose on its crown and poked her red hair beneath it.

After registering the seamstress’s haughty disapproval,
Macky glanced at herself in the mirror and bit back a very unladylike oath. The dressmaker was right. The blouse needed altering, but with the cape to cover it, nobody but Macky would know that it gaped open between the buttons. There was nothing she could do to hide a skirt that fell two inches short of covering her heavy work boots.

So be it. The people in Promise didn’t matter anymore and the citizens of Denver wouldn’t care what she looked like. She’d just keep traveling until she found a place where she could belong.

When the driver, Jenks Malone, crawled up on the stage, he cast a dubious eye on the odd-looking young woman who ran from the dress shop to the stage office, then boarded the coach at the last minute.

“Females,” he muttered, “always late.”

She was looking around as if she were searching for someone. Another minute and he’d leave her behind.

The only other traveler was polite and well mannered enough. According to the stationmaster, he was a preacher, “Brother Brandon Adams, headed for Heaven.”

But most preachers didn’t wear fancy clothes or a black patch over one eye.

And most preachers didn’t carry a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other.

Still, everybody along the line knew that the folks in Heaven were expecting their new minister. And if this man looked like the devil instead of a messenger of the Lord they wouldn’t care. But he made Jenks uneasy.

Jenks wasn’t sure that even a man of God could do much about the trouble in Heaven. If the federal marshal couldn’t find out who was running the miners off their claims, Jenks doubted the Lord would care.

Trouble was no stranger in the West. Lately the stage line had suffered a mess of it on the weekly run from Leavenworth to Denver to Salt Lake. Five days ago, Jenks had lost
his own coach to an Indian attack. He’d managed to make his way to the next way station to wait for a new assignment. When the driver on the incoming stage came in roaring drunk, the stationmaster sent for Jenks to finish the western run.

Giving the horses a flick of his whip, Jenks moved the coach out. They were due in Denver by the next day, and there was Indian country to get through first. Indians and the Pratt gang who’d broken out of the territory prison and robbed the bank in Promise only minutes earlier. The deputy and one of the outlaws had been killed. But the sheriff had caught one and wounded another. Only Pratt and a young boy who’d been riding with them had escaped and they were likely heading west.

Jenks had a bad feeling about the trip, even if the Lord was on their side.

J
ohn Brandon didn’t move as the new passenger boarded the stage. He’d been alone in the coach since he and the previous driver had buried the real preacher just inside the Kansas line.

That driver had found a bottle of whiskey in the preacher’s things, and by the time they reached the next station, he was roaring drunk. Fortunately, a substitute had been available to take the coach into Promise.

For Bran, the change in drivers was a stroke of luck.

His luck improved even more when the stationmaster in Promise took one look at Bran carrying the preacher’s Bible and assumed that he was the Reverend Adams. For Bran, that cover seemed ideal and he didn’t correct him.

Now there was another passenger, a lone woman, and it had been Bran’s experience that nothing appealed to a woman more than a man of God. If he allowed it to happen, he’d be forced to make conversation all the way to Denver.

Leaning his head against the back of the seat, his face covered by his hat, he hoped that she’d think he was asleep. He’d learned long ago that his senses could discover much without the aid of his eyes and that good luck was as valuable as good planning.

Good. He winced over that word. He’d lost any goodness in his life the same time he’d lost the sight in his eye.

Bran wished he hadn’t been able to see or hear the night the thieves pretending to be Indians had swooped down on his family’s small homestead along the Mississippi.

What he’d lived through that night had forever robbed Bran of love, a family, and any hope of a normal life. The outlaws had come for the money from a year’s crop of indigo and skins. They’d murdered everyone but the eight-year-old boy, who was saved by an arrow that lodged in his eye, causing a paralyzing pain that convinced the outlaws that he was dead. Then they’d burned the house. The last memory Bran had was of the gang leader, a silhouette of black against the orange flames of the cabin. That vision had been forever burned into his mind.

The commanding general at the nearby fort found the cabin burned to the ground and the boy half unconscious. He put the blame on the Indians he’d been sent to restrain instead of the river pirates.

Later, John had tried to explain that the gang of men who murdered his family were white but nobody would dispute the officer’s claim. The general offered John to a local farmer. Alone and filled with anger, he’d run away from the fort authorities, who were no better than the thieves. But the memory of his sister’s screams and the killer’s laugh had driven him ever since.

Later, the Choctaw Indian tribe who’d taken him in and saved his life called him Eyes That See in Darkness. They thought he had special powers; he could see in the dark. And he’d stayed with them, determined to learn to kill.

Later, he’d accompanied the tribe west to the lands they were assigned in Oklahoma. Along with his Indian brothers,
he’d attended the missionary’s school where he studied the white man’s Bible, the same one his mother had read to him as a boy.

The wound in his eye healed, but nothing healed the scar in his heart, and as he grew into a man he made a vow that if it took the rest of his life, he’d find the outlaw who’d been responsible.

For the last fifteen years he’d wandered across the country, looking, searching, hiring himself out as a private avenger of evil. As a gunfighter he found and punished thieves and murderers of every kind. But the man he sought was still out there.

Always, he watched for a rangy man of authority with an odd laugh, to no avail. Now Bran was on his way to a little mining town called Heaven, just outside Denver in the Kansas Territory. He’d been hired to find out who was causing accidents and holding up the gold shipments from a mine called the Sylvia.

Assuming the identity of the minister had seemed a ready-made cover for his mission. Now, in the coach, he amused himself by listening, feeling, allowing his mind’s eye to discover the identity of his traveling companion.