A Wanted Man (23 page)

Mortification stung her cheeks at the remembrance of it.

She’d lain in the back of that wagon with Rowdy willingly, even eagerly, for heaven’s sake. And she’d carried on something terrible while he—while he—did what? Did it have a name, what he did?

Did other people do it?

She wished she could ask Maddie, but of course, that would be impossible. She’d die of embarrassment before she even got the words out.

And what if it happened again?

She stiffened, remembering her vow to mend the crotch of her best bloomers, the ones she’d worn tonight. Where was her sewing kit?

Should she get up, light a lamp, and see to the task right now, this very minute?

She simply couldn’t.

It would be too terrible if Mrs. Porter, or even Mai Lee, got up for some reason, and caught her sewing up her drawers. Why, they might arrive at all kinds of wicked conclusions, and how would she explain?

No.

Better to do her mending another time.

Perhaps after she got home from the dance tomorrow night.

She could wear another pair of bloomers, after all.

But what if she succumbed to temptation again? Rowdy would surely tear the second pair, in just the same way, and she knew she wouldn’t tell him to stop.

Her cheeks flamed with renewed heat.

She wouldn’t tell him to stop.

Tonight she hadn’t even been able to tell
herself
to stop, not with any conviction, anyway.

He’d said he was already seducing her. And then he’d proved it.

He’d also said she’d
ask
him to take her to his bed.

She’d been so sure she’d never do that.

That’s what you ought to feel when a man makes love to you, Lark. It ought to make you moan and writhe and holler out his name when you come undone.

Was
that what she was supposed to feel?

Lark wasn’t sure.

All she knew for certain was that she wanted to feel all of it again.

S
ATURDAY MORNING DAWNED
clear and fairly warm, for the twenty-eighth of January. It bothered Rowdy to shut Pardner up in the house, though he’d left him plenty of water and beef jerky to last. But he did it. Pardner was an old dog, and he might just fall over, same as John T. had out there in his cornfield, if he attempted to go all the way to Flagstaff and back. And carrying him in the saddle would have slowed them down too much.

Still, the dog’s howls echoed in Rowdy’s ears long after he and Gideon had ridden off.

They made good time, though. Arrived in Flagstaff at midmorning and tied their horses in front of Ruby’s Saloon and Poker House, amid a flock of others.

Tinny piano music flowed out over the doors, proclaiming it was business as usual at Ruby’s. Rowdy wondered how she was explaining Jack Payton’s absence to curious customers and anyone else who might show an interest.

Gideon, he noticed, glanced toward the street. From the boy’s expression, Rowdy figured he was watching Rose fall under the wheels of that wagon, as surely as if it was happening right then, and he wondered how many times the kid had relived that day over the ten years since then.

A chill ran down his spine.

It was my fault,
Gideon had said.

Rowdy laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder, nodded toward the saloon doors.

Gideon braced up, tore himself from his private reverie and followed Rowdy inside.

Ruby’s place was like a hundred others Rowdy had seen in his many travels—there was sawdust on the floor, and the piano needed a tuning it was never going to get—but Ruby catered to local businessmen, not just cowpokes and drifters, as evidenced by all the suits he saw standing around.

The bar was fancier than most, made of some gleaming hardwood, intricately carved with curlicues and such. And the mirror behind it had none of the usual murky spots, where the silver showed through.

Someone must have alerted Ruby to their arrival, because she came sweeping out of a side room, her red skirts swirling around her, and headed right for them.

“Gideon Payton,” she said, putting her hands on her rounded hips, “I’ve worried myself
sick
about you.”

“I left you a note,” Gideon reminded her. But he took his hat off and twisted it nervously in his hands.

Ruby was a force to be reckoned with, it appeared. She’d have had to be, Rowdy figured, to hold her own with Payton Yarbro all this time.

Her gaze sliced to Rowdy. They’d only met once, and briefly at that, but it was plain she remembered him.

“My office,” she said summarily, and turned in a flurry of skirts and expensive perfume to glide across the saloon toward the same door she’d just come out of a minute before.

Gideon followed right away.

Rowdy left him to it. He had no business with Ruby—he’d just come along because he didn’t want Gideon making the ride alone.

He didn’t want any whiskey, the day being so young, so he took a seat at an empty table, resigned to wait. A dancehall girl offered him a drink and whatever else he might enjoy, and he politely refused.

He tapped his fingers idly on the tabletop and scanned the room for a second time. There sure were a lot of suits in this saloon, he thought, for a cow town like Flagstaff.

Then, finally, it registered.

These weren’t bankers or storekeepers.

They were rangers, hard-eyed and watchful, and there must have been a dozen of them.

Rowdy was glad he’d worn his badge, but truly it wasn’t much comfort to him just then. There were Wanted posters all over the West bearing his description, and even his image, in a few cases, and some or all of these men must have seen them.

He’d known there would be an encounter, of course, but he’d expected to be in Sam O’Ballivan’s company when the introductions were made. Even if some of the men were suspicious, Sam’s presence would have automatically put a lot of their questions to rest.

Damn.

Why hadn’t he
thought
of this?

Because he’d been thinking about Lark Morgan instead, that was why.

One of the men peeled himself away from the bar and approached, tall and spare, with weathered features and a dark handlebar mustache streaked with gray. His hair reached almost to his collar, trailing limp from under his round-brimmed hat.

“Robert Reston,” the ranger said, putting out a hand.

Rowdy almost swallowed his tongue before he realized, in the split second between the first name—which was his own—and the last, that the man was introducing himself, not making an identification.

“Rowdy Rhodes,” Rowdy replied affably. “Have a seat.”

“Obliged,” Reston answered, and pulled back a chair. His gaze rested a moment, thoughtfully, on Rowdy’s badge. “You’re a marshal,” he said.

“Stone Creek,” Rowdy confirmed.

“Stone Creek,” Reston repeated. His eyes were brown, and luminous with the many sorrows he’d witnessed, but there was intelligence in them, too, and it was sharp as a razor fresh from the strop. “You know Sam O’Ballivan and Major Blackstone?”

Rowdy nodded, wishing he’d ordered a drink when he’d had the opportunity. He didn’t need liquor, but he wouldn’t have minded having something to do with his hands. No matter how good a man was at keeping his face impassive, his hands could give him away.

“I know them,” he said mildly.

“You put me in mind of somebody,” Reston told him, narrowing his eyes a little. “I can’t say who it is, though.”

Rowdy shrugged, even though his insides were jumping. Kept his hands still, and his feet resting easy on the floor. “Maybe you rode through Haven,” he said, “while I was the marshal there.”

“Haven,” Reston echoed. “That’s down south, isn’t it? Around Tucson someplace? Never been there, far as I can recollect. Why’d you leave it to come to Stone Creek? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Rowdy knew it didn’t matter to Reston whether he minded or not. “Sam O’Ballivan sent for me,” he said.

“Made you a ranger?” Reston asked, raising an eyebrow so bushy that it could have served as a mustache had it been on another part of his face.

Rowdy hadn’t planned on volunteering that he’d been sworn in as an Arizona Ranger, given that the major had asked him to keep it a secret, but Reston and the others would know soon enough. Tomorrow, in fact, when he and Sam rode to Flagstaff. They’d settled their plans the night before, while putting the team away in Sam’s barn before supper.

“Maybe,” he said, after a carefully calculated pause.

“Officially, though, I’m just the marshal of Stone Creek.”

Reston gave the slightest semblance of a smile. “If you’re riding with O’Ballivan and the major,” he said, “I’d allow as how you must be all right. But you sure do look familiar.”

Rowdy didn’t comment. He wished Gideon would come out of Ruby’s office so they could return the rented horse to the livery stable, buy the kid another one and get the hell out of Flagstaff.

Sure enough, the side door opened again, right while he was wanting it to, and Gideon appeared, looking red-faced and anxious to be gone. Inside that office Ruby must have given him a dressing-down to remember for running off the way he had. Like as not, she had a spleenful for Payton, too, and Gideon had been unlucky enough to be the one to take it.

Gideon tucked some folding money into his coat pocket and looked around the place with an oddly confused expression, as though it had changed mightily since he’d been there last.

Rowdy nodded toward his brother and stood, easy and slow. “I guess I’d better ride,” he said. “There’s some ground to cover, between here and home.”

Reston stood, too. “Good to see you again,” he said, putting out his hand for the second time.

That “again” stuck in Rowdy’s mind long after he and Gideon had left Ruby’s place, paid a brief visit to little Rose’s grave and turned in the white horse, dickered for a bay gelding to replace it and headed for Stone Creek.

A
UTRY HAD JUST BEEN SERVED
a king’s breakfast at the table in his railroad car when the whistle shrilled and the wheels screeched, grabbing so hard at the tracks that his coffee and everything on his plate flew at him like they’d been sprung from a catapult.

Esau, his butler, who always traveled with him, was thrown clean to the floor.

Autry bellowed a curse, but it was barely audible over the shriek of those wheels, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw blue sparks shooting past the window, like a shower of strange, small stars.

Esau, an aging black man, portly and slow, groped his way to his feet, holding on to the edge of a seat to keep from being flung down again. “Lord have mercy,” he cried. “This train done jumped the tracks!”

Furious, Autry grabbed a linen napkin and swabbed futilely at his egg-stained clothes. Spilled coffee, fresh from the dining car, burned his hide right through his pant legs.

The locomotive gave a great, teeth-rattling shudder and stopped, and the shock of it reverberated right through Autry’s car and on down the line. Cries of alarm echoed from behind him as he stood, shoving Esau aside to storm through to the engine room.

Up ahead somewhere, a gunshot cracked in the crisp air.

A robbery?

No. Impossible. Everything Autry Whitman did was news, given the extent of his financial empire, and that meant everybody capable of reading the papers knew he was onboard that train.

By God, no one would
dare
stop a train pulling his private car.

No one.

He blazed into the engine room like a wildfire, and found the engineer standing stock-still at the controls, face colorless, shoulders heaving, mouth working like a fish flopped up on a creek bank, staring out the little window above the levers and gauges.

Livid, Autry descended upon him, his big fists clenched at his sides. “What the
hell
…?”

The engineer turned, stared bleakly at Autry. “They blew the tracks up—see for yourself, boss—”

Autry blinked, stunned—as scalded as he’d been when his morning coffee cascaded into his lap. He stooped a little, being a tall man, peered out through the rectangular window and saw twisted, blackened track and railroad ties standing up in the ground, splintered and leaning.

Riders waited, three on either side of the ruined tracks, bandannas tied over their faces, rifles upraised.

Autry watched through a red haze as a glistening black gelding separated itself from the other horses. Bold as you please, the bandit steered that critter right up alongside the locomotive and leaped deftly from the horse to the metal steps leading into the engine room, without ever touching the ground.

“If I hadn’t stopped,” the engineer lamented stupidly, apparently more afraid of Autry than the half-dozen train robbers bent on stripping every strongbox, every wallet and purse, every copper
cent
from that train, “we’d have jumped the rails!”

“Shut up, you damn fool,” Autry growled.

Meanwhile the robber, a leanly built, agile-looking fellow, boarded the train, clad in rough clothes and muddy boots. His eyes were a vivid and strangely peaceful shade of blue.

Autry remembered the small but deadly pistol in his inside suit pocket and reached for it.

“I wouldn’t,” the robber said, lowering the rifle and cocking it, one-handed, in the same motion.

“This is an outrage!” Autry blustered.

“I reckon it is,” the bandit replied, boldly relieving Autry of both the hidden pistol and his wallet.

Autry’s gizzard rushed up into the back of his throat, and he was mad enough to chew it up and spit it out. “It’ll cost me thousands of dollars just to fix those tracks. And I’ve got a trainful of passengers stranded out here, with no way to get to Flagstaff—”

The robber opened Autry’s wallet, extracted the fat wad of bills inside and had the effrontery to toss the empty billfold straight into the furnace that powered the boiler, where it curled in the coal embers. “I reckon the good folks in Flagstaff will send help, once word reaches them,” he said.

Autry saw the other riders trail, single-file, past the open doorway, set to board—and loot—every other car on that train. He seethed.

The bandit put the money—
Autry’s
money—into the pocket of his coat. Nudged at Autry’s chest with the tip of his rifle barrel.

“Rich man like you,” he drawled, “with his own private railroad car, well, it just stands to reason there’d be a safe somewhere, doesn’t it?”

“I do not have a safe!” Autry lied, perhaps a bit too vehemently.

“Move,” the robber replied.

The engineer cowered in the corner, of no earthly use at all. Autry could only hope that Esau would have armed himself by now, from the small arsenal stored carefully in a discreet wooden chest behind the two rows of seats in the next car.

“Do you know who I am?” Autry demanded.

The rifle barrel poked into the hollow at the base of his throat, and the robber flicked the hammer back with a gloved thumb. The blue eyes above that mask were glacial. “I know, all right,” the man answered, “and I’d just as soon shoot you as listen to another word.”

“Do what he says, Mr. Whitman,” the engineer pleaded. “You’ll get us all killed if you don’t—”

If Autry had been close enough, he’d have backhanded that yellow-belly hard enough to hit the wall and slide down it. But a sudden move would not be wise, with that rifle barrel shoved into his gullet.

Autry swallowed.

“Keep your hands out from your sides,” the robber ordered, as Autry turned to cross the coupling into his private car, his den, his sanctuary.

Autry obeyed, having no immediate choice in the matter. He’d left the door to the locomotive open in his haste, and the one leading back into his car as well.

The rifle jabbed hard into his spine as he navigated the coupling.

Esau sat, bound and gagged, in Autry’s own seat, while two of the other bandits ransacked the place.

One of them found the store of guns and let out a whoop. “Pay dirt!” he yelled, and started tossing the rifles, two by two, to his partner, who caught them readily and relayed them to someone outside the train.

“Those weapons are
valuable!
” Autry protested.

“All the more reason to take them,” replied the man at his back.

“You’ll pay for this,” Autry growled. “I’ll have rangers and Pinkertons all over you—”

The rifle barrel skipped up Autry’s vertebrae, one by one, to chill the underside of his skull. “Where’s the safe?”

Esau’s eyes were the size of wagon wheels. He was
sitting
on the safe, which was cleverly hidden beneath the seat cushion. Watching Autry, he made a pleading sound through whatever had been stuffed into his mouth before they’d gagged him with one of Autry’s own monogrammed table napkins.

Without thinking, Autry shook his head.

The gunman behind him slammed him to the floor with such suddenness and force that, for a moment or so, Autry honestly believed he’d been shot. He waited for the pain, but all that came was a boot, pressing hard into the small of his back.

He gave a yelp, and that was when a weight came down on him, knocking the breath from his lungs.

The weight, which must have been Esau, was hauled off him.

Damnation, had they whacked Esau up alongside the head with a pistol butt?

Autry was significantly less concerned with that possibility than the safe hidden, heretofore, under Esau’s black butt.

“Tie his hands,” the leader said.

Autry groaned as his wrists were wrenched together behind his back and bound with what felt like a leather belt, cinched tight enough to cut off the blood flow to his hands.

“There’s a real pretty woman in the third car back,” a youthful voice said. “Can we bring her along?”

“Leave the women and the kids alone,” the leader said coldly. It was a tone not even Autry would have defied with a gun in each hand and an army of Pinkertons standing with him.

He heard Esau moan, somewhere nearby.

Then they found the safe.

Dumped the cushion right on Autry’s head.

He closed his eyes and silently damned all their souls to perdition.

“What’s the combination, old man?” someone asked.

Autry clamped his jaws shut.

A shot splintered the air, frigid because of the open door between Autry’s car and the locomotive, and Autry felt that bullet as surely as if it had penetrated his own flesh, instead of the lock on his safe.

“Well, now,” the leader remarked. “That was worth the whole exercise.”

Autry listened, helpless, while they looted personal funds.

“Just let me have the one woman,” the young voice wheedled.

“Lay a hand on her,” the boss replied, “and I’ll kill you.”

Someone else spoke up. “What’s one female?” a man asked. “We been hidin’ out a long, lonely while—”

The rifle barrel rose from the back of Autry’s neck, and he felt a rush of relief—until he heard it go off with a bang that must have blown a three-foot gap in the teakwood-lined roof of his railroad car.

A tense silence fell, and Autry felt the first snowflakes drifting down through that hole above his head, coming to rest cold and soft on his nape.

“Mount up and ride,” the ringleader told his men, apparently having made his point concerning the woman.

“This train is due to roll into Flagstaff at two o’clock this afternoon. When it doesn’t show, the rangers will follow the tracks right back here, and we’re going to be hard put, with all we’re carrying, to get clear of the place.”

Suddenly there was a lot of scrambling, and Autry literally felt the blessed absence of everybody but Esau and the man who’d forced him onto his face in his own railroad car and robbed him blind.

“So long, Mr. Whitman,” the robber said cordially.

Autry was draped in a sheet of snow before he dared get to his feet.

R
OWDY KNEW
, when Sam and the major met him and Gideon on the outskirts of Stone Creek, leading a fresh horse, that he wouldn’t be taking Lark to the dance that night, and the state of her bloomers would remain a mystery.

“The two-o’clock train never arrived in Flagstaff,” Sam said.

Without even dismounting, Rowdy climbed from Paint’s back into the saddle of the chestnut gelding Sam had brought along as a spare.

“See to Pardner,” Rowdy told an openmouthed Gideon, “and then go on over to Mrs. Porter’s and convey to Miss Morgan my regrets concerning the dance. Tell her I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Gideon swallowed, nodded. “I don’t reckon I could go along?” he ventured hopefully.

“Do as I asked you, Gideon,” Rowdy replied.

“I guess, as deputy marshal, I ought to stay in town. Make sure things stay peaceful.”

Sam gave one of his spare smiles, then bent to catch Paint’s reins and hand them to Gideon. “That’ll be a real help,” he told the boy.

Gideon sat up a little straighter in the saddle, looking proud.

“We’d better ride,” the major said, standing in his stirrups. “We’ll be damn lucky to get to Flagstaff before dark as it is.”

Rowdy shifted, adjusting himself to the new saddle and the prospect of a ride he didn’t want to make, with a lot of things he didn’t want to do at the other end of it.

Gideon tugged at his hat brim, out of deference to Sam and the major, and rode straight-spined for home.

Rowdy hoped to God there wouldn’t be any real trouble in Stone Creek while he was away. If anything happened to Gideon, he’d bear the weight of it for the rest of his life.

T
HE RUM CAKE SAT
, fragrant, in the middle of Mrs. Porter’s kitchen table, with a fat candle stuck in the middle of it. There was to be a party of sorts, in honor of Mr. Porter’s birthday.

Lark wondered if he might actually show up, in the flesh or as a specter, and put on the coat his wife had brushed and aired and hung on a peg beside the back door.

She glanced at Lydia, bundled in a quilt in a chair drawn up close to the stove, and smiled. The little girl was wearing one of the nightgowns Mrs. Porter had bought for her, and Mai Lee had braided her hair neatly for the festivities and given her a piece of rock candy to soothe her sore throat.

“If it’s somebody’s birthday,” Lydia inquired, “why aren’t there any presents?”

Lark was trying to think of a reply when a knock sounded at the back door. Her heart leaped a little.

Rowdy?

She’d have to face him eventually, of course, but at the moment she’d have preferred to hide behind a door, or even under a bed, until he left.

Since Mrs. Porter was in the study, and Mai Lee had gone out to run the usual errands, there was no one else to answer.

Lark drew a deep breath, released it slowly, smoothed her skirts and her hair and crossed the kitchen. Turning the knob, she closed her eyes for the briefest moment and felt color seep into her cheeks.