Cherish (39 page)

Race drew Dusty to a stop on a slight rise and stared down at the white farmhouses and outbuildings below. The houses were situated in a large circle around a common, the barns and outbuildings extending out onto the surrounding grassland from behind the dwellings. Race saw a few oxen in one fenced field, three horses in another. No other stock was visible. The people he saw outside wore all black garments, as drab and lifeless-looking as the farming community they were trying to start.

Race remembered Rebecca telling him that the brethren couldn’t buy stock, crop seed, or farming implements until they had received the proceeds from the land sale in Pennsylvania. These folks had come here with only the money to erect their homes and farm buildings, with enough left over to survive the winter. Without the money in Race’s saddlebags, they would lose their shirts come spring.

Well, their wait was over. He’d brought them their money. He’d also brought them his woman.

Even if he hadn’t seen the black-garbed people moving about the community common, Race would have known he’d come to the right place by the farming community’s
layout, the houses built in a perfect circle, each one exactly alike. It obviously wasn’t acceptable for a man to slap red paint on his barn or to build a bigger house than his neighbors had. One for all, all for one.

A sinking sensation entered his stomach. He had to agree with the sheriff in Santa Fe. A bunch of real strange folks lived here. Race had gone into town first to get directions so he could find this place. He’d ended up getting a lot more from the sheriff than just that. An earful, more like. The Bible thumpers out this way, according to the sheriff, weren’t exactly neighborly. They stuck to themselves, and they didn’t want to be bothered. Real straitlaced people, the women covered chin to toe and painfully shy in manner, the men stern and unsmiling.

Race would stay here if Rebecca got well. He would hang up his guns, and he’d eat dust, walking behind a plow from dawn to dark. He’d wear a sacklike suit and a funny-looking hat. He’d even try to grow a beard, though his Apache blood made his whiskers come in thinner than most with only a few stray hairs where others had sideburns. He’d pray and read from the Bible. He’d go to meetings. In short, he’d go to hell and back every day and twice on Sunday if it would make her happy.

But that didn’t mean he was going to like it.

Nudging Dusty’s flanks, Race started down the slope. As he rode near the farm, two men who worked together installing fence posts stopped to stare at him. Then a woman in the common caught sight of him and cupped a hand to her forehead to shade her eyes. After a moment, he saw her stiffen and take a faltering step forward. Race suspected the woman had recognized the girl he held cradled in his arms.

The woman shouted something. A moment later, other black-clad figures began emerging from the houses to gather in the common. Race headed straight for them, praying with every breath he took that their familiar faces and voices would reach Rebecca and bring her out of the stupor.

None of them offered to speak when Race drew up in front of them. Their faces all looked the same to him. The
women all wore their hair in braided coronets atop their heads, as Rebecca did, except that they looked sturdy, drab, and plain, while she looked delicate, golden, and beautiful. The men seemed shapeless in their loose black suits. Their beards covered their faces to such a degree that Race was mostly aware of only their staring eyes.

“My name is Race Spencer,” he informed them in a hoarse voice. “My wife is dyin’, and I’ve brought her home to you in hopes your love and prayers can save her.”

Race swung his right leg over Dusty’s head and slid off the horse with Rebecca still clutched to his chest. He shifted his gaze from one unreadable face to the next, his eyes burning with tears. Why were they just standing there? She was dying, and all they could do was gape at him?

“Her folks was all massacred. I’m the one who found her. She was in shock. She got better for a time, and durin’ that time, I took her to wife, thinkin’ I could keep her safe and make her happy. But the men who killed all her folks came back, and she went like this again. You gotta take her. Please. She’s in shock again. The doctor says she’s dyin’. And I can’t save her.” He found himself staring into a thin young man’s gray eyes. “Please, take her. Help her, if you can. Pray your words over her. Tell her she’s home.”

The young man stepped forward and took Rebecca’s limp body into his arms. Her golden head lolled on his shoulder. Her blue eyes stared blankly from her pale face. Her arm dangled limply from her shoulder. Race gazed at her through a blur of tears, his own arms hanging like lead weights at his sides.

He had gotten her here. She was still alive. Maybe these people who knew her and loved her would know what to do for her. He sure as hell didn’t.

That was Race’s last thought. The next instant, he pitched forward in a dead faint.

“Oh, mercy!” Sarah Miller cried. “Zachariah, help me!” She knelt by the unconscious man, reached to turn
him over, and froze when she saw his sidearms. “Oh, dear heaven…” She glanced up at her husband. “Father, I believe this man is a gunslinger.”

Zachariah knelt on the other side of the stranger. “Many men wear a gun, Mother. It doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“He’s wearing two,” Sarah said softly. She glanced up at Henry Rusk, who was gazing down at the girl he held in his arms, his expression stricken. “God have mercy. What kind of man has our Rebecca gotten herself tied up with?”

Nessa Patterson, a woman of considerable girth, hurried over to Henry, her hands fluttering as she checked Rebecca for injuries. “Whatever on earth is wrong with her? Oh, my, Henry. Take her to our place. She’s in a very bad way.”

George Hess had just settled back with his boots propped on the corner of his desk to enjoy his afternoon brandy and an expensive Cuban cigar when a loud knock sounded on his closed study door.

“Who is it?” he barked, displeased that someone would choose this moment to disturb him. If it was that stupid Mexican housekeeper he’d recently hired, he was going to fire her on the spot. The damned woman was about to drive him crazy.

“It’s Gib,” a muffled, masculine voice replied.

George sighed. “Come on in.”

When Gib stepped through the doorway, George couldn’t help but note how incongruous the hired gun looked in the well-appointed room. Gleaming knotty pine, leather-bound books lining the shelves, expensive furnishings, and an imported Tibetan rug. In his filthy, stained buckskins, Gib looked as out of place in here as a turd on a fine china plate.

George lifted his snifter. “May as well pour yourself a drink.”

The slender hired gun stepped over to the mahogany sideboard, pulled the stopper on the brandy decanter, and sloshed a measure of liquor into a snifter. As Gib turned
toward the chair in front of the desk, George ran his gaze over the younger man’s leather garments, barely able to control his sneer. The gunslinger looked like a cross between a vaquero and a redskin, the stench that came off him so sharp it stung George’s nostrils.

Following George’s example, Gib threw up his legs to settle his dusty boots on the desk, his spur shanks scarring the polished oak. The hired gun’s arrogant disregard for his possessions made George’s blood boil, but the smile he pasted on his face revealed no trace of his anger. One of the problems with employing sidewinders was that you didn’t dare antagonize them for fear they might bite.

“I thought you went to town for a little slap and tickle.” George meant that literally. In the year since he had hired Gib, he’d had to bail the man’s ass out of jail three times for beating whores. The little bastard couldn’t get his rocks off unless he hurt a woman first. “What happened. All the ladies run when they saw you coming?”

Gib smiled and took a slug of brandy. The man was too unrefined to sip the stuff. George figured he could pour Gib a jigger of bull piss, and the son of a bitch would never know the difference.

“We got us a problem,” Gib said. “Race Spencer just paid a visit to our local sheriff.”

George had been about to take a puff from his cigar. He froze and swore under his breath. “Spencer? You sure? He’s in Colorado. Or so you said. What in the hell would he be doing here?”

“I followed the man for a month. I reckon I know him when I see him. As for why he’s here, who knows?” Gib twisted in the chair to expel gas, the sound disgusting, the resultant stink even worse. “Had the little blond with him. Appeared to me she was ailin’ with something. Judging by the bulge of the man’s saddlebags, he brought the church folks their goddamned money.”

“Christ!” George slapped his brandy glass onto the desk, slopping liquor onto the blotter. “I told you this would happen if you didn’t get that money. I goddamned told you, didn’t I?”

Gib’s blue eyes went cold and threatening. “You dissatisfied with my work, boss man? I got plenty of job offers.”

George gripped his chair arms with such force his knuckles ached. “I know you did the best you could. It’s just so damned infuriating. I sent sixteen men to take some money from a bunch of religious fanatics who wouldn’t piss on their own pant legs if they were afire, and only two of you came back. Empty-handed, I might add! Now you tell me Spencer is here with the damned money. Do you know what that means? Do you?”

Gib’s eyes began to glitter. “Don’t raise your voice at me. I don’t take that kind of shit off nobody, old man. No matter how much you pay me.”

George sat back, struggling to calm down. “I don’t mean to raise my voice. It’s simply that this will cause me no end of difficulty. I told you, under no circumstances did I want that goddamned money to reach Santa Fe. Now those Bible thumpers will be able to buy their mules and farming equipment. Unless I drive them out, they’ll plant crops come spring. And they will undoubtedly have enough capital left over to make their payment to the bank as well. If you had done your job, they would have gone broke and pulled out come spring instead of breaking ground. I could have gotten their land dirt cheap after they left, no one the wiser.”

“Calm down. You’ll get your goddamned land. Then you’ll be the largest landholder and richest cattle rancher in this territory.”

“If we make a mistake—just one—I could end up being the richest rancher ever to shake a hoof for a hemp committee.”

“No mistakes.” Gib smiled and shrugged. “We can burn the church folks out just like we did so many of the Mexicans. Make it look like a comanchero attack. It doesn’t have to be a situation that casts suspicion on you. A few unshod horses in with the shod. A little rapin’ and scalpin’ tossed in for looks. The law here will never think you were behind it. Hell, if that little blond doesn’t have somethin’ catching, maybe we’ll even steal her. Coman
cheroes do that, you know. She’d bring a fine price across the border.”

“Not after you had your fun with her, she wouldn’t.”

Gib laughed. “True. But she’d be a nice little reward for all my trouble.”

George recalled the staggering sums of money he had paid this man and his ragtag bunch of hired guns to either drive out or murder the Mexicans who had recently owned parcels of land all around his ranch. “I pay you handsomely for your services.”

“Yeah. But it’s all relative, right? You’ve gained a hell of a lot more than you’ve paid, old man. Thanks to me, you own tons of land you had no hope of buying otherwise. Land you had no moral right to take, and once it was abandoned, you got your hands on it for a fraction of its worth. Every dime you’ve ever paid me was money well spent, and you know it.”

George huffed. “Don’t talk to me about moral rights. As if those Mexicans’ stupid land grants meant anything?”

Gib chuckled. “I reckon they meant something to the Mexes. And there are a lot of folks who’d disagree with you. According to treaty, the Mexicans had every right to own that land.”

“This is U.S. territory now, and I don’t give a shit how the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo reads. Why should I let a bunch of stinking greasers stand in the way of accomplishing my dreams?”

Gib held up his hands. “I’m not saying you should. I’m just saying you’ve paid me to get the job done, and I’ve done it. You’ve gotten their land, extended your boundaries, and have one of the biggest spreads in northern New Mexico. All thanks to me.”

“With one big exception, the Lunas’ parcels, which just happen to have the water I need.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault they were smarter than you gave them credit for!” Gib said with a laugh.

George couldn’t argue the point. The Lunas had seen what was happening to all their neighbors and had decided to get out while the getting was still good, selling their
parcels for a decent market price to that religious sect back east. Now George had a group of fanatics to contend with, a stickier problem, by far, than no-account greasers. The sheriff might get a little more upset when it was a passel of white U.S. citizens who were murdered.

And murdered, the fanatics would be. George couldn’t risk being linked to any of this church business. A dozen of the sect members had already died in Colorado, and he had orchestrated their deaths. If he sent in men to attack that farm and allowed anyone there to live, that person might start putting the facts together, realize the two attacks were related, and then figure out who stood to gain from the results. George Hess wasn’t about to dance at the end of a hangman’s rope.

“I want that land,” he told Gib gruffly. “No loose ends, no problems rearing up to bite me in the ass later. You understand?”

“Spencer is a mean son of a bitch, and he’s one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. I don’t risk dying cheap, Hess. You want me to take him, you’re gonna increase my pay substantially.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to take him. Be simpler to just wait until he rides out and then settle our business with the Bible thumpers.”

“And have him get wind of it, then come back here after my ass? No way! Right now, he thinks the attack in that arroyo was random—just some no-account skunks who got wind of the money those folks were carrying. But the minute something happens here, he’ll put it all together. When he does, you’re a dead man. I’m not going to be buried with you.”