Defiant (20 page)

He nodded. “I'll leave for the mountains in the next few days, after I'm sure Tuck and Ed will be staying.”

Mary Jo again felt an odd disquiet, as she had several times during their conversation. Wade Foster wasn't saying something that was very much on his mind, that was obviously worrying him.

But when he stood to leave, she didn't know how to stop him, how to get him to tell her what was wrong. He simply nodded to her and left. Mary Jo watched Jeff slip out behind him.

After several moments, Jake whined and awkwardly rose on his three good legs, moving toward the door. Mary Jo followed and opened it, watching as Jake limped out.

She stepped outside, to get away from the heat of the stove inside, and she took a few steps toward the barn. The two hired men had disappeared into the new bunkhouse, and Jeff and Wade were talking earnestly. She wasn't spying intentionally, or maybe she was.

It was sunset; there was light enough to see Wade's features in the soft glow of twilight. He was saddling Jeff's horse, and now he was wearing his gunbelt. Her throat tightened as she overheard some of the conversation between their new foreman and Jeff.

“Will you take me with you sometime,” Jeff said, “to practice shooting?”

Wade hesitated; she knew he wanted to escape.

“I don't think your mother would approve,” he finally said.

“Sure she would,” Jeff replied. “Ty taught me to shoot a rifle and six-shooter, but I want to learn to draw fast.”

Wade looked down at him. “Why?”

“I'm going to be a lawman.”

“I thought you were going to be a rancher.”

“Naw. Ma wants me to be a rancher, but I'm going to be a Ranger. Like my pa.” He looked up at Wade. “Have you ever been a lawman?”

Wade shook his head. “No.”

“A soldier?” Jeff said hopefully.

Wade hesitated a moment, then seemed to sense Mary Jo's presence. He looked up, and for a moment, their eyes met. Mary Jo waited for an answer, just as Jeff had. There was so much mystery around Wade Foster. She wanted every answer she could get.

“No,” Wade said, but something flickered in his eyes. He didn't lie easily. He usually ignored questions he didn't want to answer, but this time Mary Jo knew he was lying. She felt it deep in her bones. And she wondered why. Being a soldier wasn't something to hide, no matter which side he had favored.

But he didn't give her time to ponder his short answer. He centered his attention on Jeff. “Don't be so anxious to do either. You might have to kill, and killing, Jeff, changes you forever. You can never go back once it happens. You can never be what you once were.”

“But you—”

“Me?” Wade said bitterly. “I killed, Jeff, because it became easy for me. Too damn easy. Because I lost my soul a long time ago. I don't want that to happen to you.” His voice was rough with feeling.

Jeff's face filled with consternation. “Everyone has a soul.”

Wade smiled. “Maybe, but if I do, it's in bad shape.”

“Like our ranch?”

“I think it will take more mending than that.”

Jeff considered that for a moment. “But it can be fixed?”

Wade shook his head as if he had no more answers to Jeff's incessant questions. “Some things can't be fixed, Jeff.”

Jeff's attention was drawn to Wade's holster. “But you're still wearing a gun.”

Mary Jo, listening, wondered herself. He hadn't touched his gun until they'd returned from Last Chance.

But now he only shrugged and finished tightening the cinch with one hand.

“I still want to learn to draw fast,” Jeff persisted.

“Then you'll have to learn it from someone else,” he said shortly and placed his foot in the stirrup, swinging himself up easily despite his injuries. He turned toward Mary Jo. “Don't wait up for me.”

13

Wade held the six-shooter with his left hand, aimed and pulled the trigger. The bullet went to the right of his target. Considerably right.

He cursed his clumsiness. And he cursed the damn gun. He hated the damn thing. At one time, he thought he would never use a weapon against a human being again, but then he had killed three men. Coldly. Purposely. And he had learned he hadn't truly escaped his past, that the devil had continued to hover inside his soul, waiting for the right opportunity to show him self.

He had taken up shooting again to avenge his wife and child, telling himself that anyone who had killed an innocent child deserved to die, that they would do it again and again. But it had really been revenge, the return of a blood lust he thought he had purged years ago.

And with the death of that final miner and the injury to his right arm, he'd thought it over at last, the killing. But then he'd seen Clay Kelly, and he knew it wasn't. Death followed Clay just as it followed Wade, and the moment Mary Jo had mentioned the bank in Last Chance, he suspected he knew why Clay was in the area.

The bank held Mary Jo's future. And Jeff's.

And their future was now vitally important to him, even if he had no place in it.

But he could say nothing without revealing his own past, and seeing the horror in the woman's and boy's eyes, without sentencing himself to an ignominious death. There was only one solution. Find Clay Kelly. He was out here someplace. The slaughtered heifers and Jake's bullet wound had been Kelly's work. Wade felt it, just as he'd learned to sense danger years ago. That instinct had been dulled in the mountains, when he'd found a measure of peace, but it'd returned now.

Wade had only a few minutes of dim light remaining. He glared at the offending tin can that continued to sit rakishly on a rotting log.

He aimed again, concentrating with all his power, willing his left fingers to do what his right had been able to do such a short time before. Wade slowly squeezed the trigger. The can remained in place, mocking him.

He didn't know if practice would ever help. He'd known men who could shoot with both hands, but during the war one fast one had been enough. More than enough.

Wade aimed one more time. The gun clicked. Out of bullets, and it was damn hard reloading with one hand. Damn hard doing anything with one hand. He holstered his gun in an awkward movement. The holster still rested on his right thigh, and there was no easy way to get to it.

If he had to face Clay Kelly, he had few doubts about the outcome. How long did he have, he wondered, before Kelly struck? He was waiting for something or he would have hit the bank that day Wade and Mary Jo were in Last Chance. More men? A gold shipment of some kind?

Wade returned to his horse, running his good hand down its shoulder and feeling the animal shudder in contentment. He wondered whether he would ever know contentment again.

After going to the Abbots to buy cattle tomorrow, he would go looking for Clay Kelly. Perhaps he could convince him that Last Chance could be exactly that. Wade knew how to look for him. He knew what Kelly required in a camp. They had made one together enough times.

The thought was not a pleasing one. Somehow he didn't think that summoning back memories of old times would work. They hadn't parted the best of friends.

But as he mounted Jeff's horse, Wade could think of no reasonable alternative. He could ask Mary Jo to withdraw her money from the bank, but she would want to know why. And he would have no reason, none he could give her.

The three of them—Wade, Mary Jo, and Jeff—rode to Joe Abbot's the next day. Mary Jo wore a split skirt and green blouse and looked uncommonly pretty to Wade. Unlike most women, she had the sense to ride astride rather than use a sidesaddle, something he'd always considered dangerous in this country.

To Mary Jo's obvious surprise, Wade had urged both her and Jeff to go. “It's your cattle, your ranch,” he said, “and Jeff can learn something about herding cattle.”

He tried not to notice Jeff's face, the delighted grin that spread across it, the freckles that appeared to pop out as he did so.

He also tried to dismiss Mary Jo's smile, the sudden brightness of those green eyes.

“It won't be easy,” he warned them, hoping he wasn't making a mistake. But if Mary Jo and Jeff were to stay here, and he was becoming more and more convinced they would, they had to learn to move cattle. They could farm all right, and they weren't shirkers. He had seen the garden, what was left of it after the rains. But Mary Jo had been right; they couldn't make it farming. Not the two of them. They had an even chance with ranching if they could keep a couple of good men.

Jeff nodded. “I know,” he said. “You can take King Arthur,” he added generously. “I'll take old Seth.” Old Seth was one of the wagon horses, broad and steady and slow.

Wade nodded, feeling guilty as hell. He hadn't explained his reasons, that he would leave soon, and Mary Jo and Jeff needed to watch him bargain for cattle and to help him drive them back to the ranch. He had herded cattle back on the farm and later during the war when Anderson was raiding the pro-North farmers. He'd read enough about cattle prices to bargain adequately enough.

Wade had always been charmed by Mary Jo's smile, by the quiet humor that usually hovered in her eyes, but on the way to the Abbots, her smile was open and happy, and his own spirits lightened. She was so confident everything was going to work out exactly as she planned, so pleased with him. She almost made him feel he could accomplish anything. Almost.

She was one reason, he knew, they reached such a good bargain with Joe Abbot. Once the rancher believed she was here to stay, he couldn't say no to her any easier than Wade had been able to.

They picked out forty head at four dollars each, all that Mary Jo and Wade had decided they could purchase.

Abbot watched how carefully they chose, then grinned at the end of the haggling. “I'll throw in a couple of them young heifers. And I got a damn good bull. I'll loan him to you for a month.”

Mary Jo flashed him that smile that had always set Wade's nerve endings on fire.

At the end of the bargaining, Joe Abbot held out his hand. “Been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Smith. Hope you stay around a while.”

Wade felt the firm grip, the friendliness in the man's manner, and he was surprised at his own reaction. A measure of pride was creeping back into him, pride that had been missing for a very long time. But then he tamped it. Joe Abbot didn't know who the hell he was talking to. He sure as hell wouldn't reach out a hand to one of Anderson's raiders or to a man who'd lived with the Utes for years and had taken a Ute wife.

He nodded. “We're indebted.”

He watched as Abbot's men cut the animals out of the herd, and they started back to the ranch without more conversation.

Wade was hard-pressed on the way back to keep them together. Neither King Arthur nor old Seth had been trained for herding and cutting stock. But Wade had always had a way with horses, and King Arthur was a fast learner. So was Mary Jo, on her neat little mare, and young Jeff, despite his obstinately slow mount.

Still, it was late when they arrived back at the ranch. Ed and Tuck had repaired the fence, and they would keep the cattle in the corral until the new branding iron was ready.

The two new hired men admired the stock. They'd found eight head with the old Callaway brand on them, and had brought them in. Fifty animals.

“The beginning of the Circle J,” Mary Jo said proudly when they'd finished.

Wade tried to ignore the glow in her face. As ranches went, hers ranked near the bottom, but he was aware of her sense of accomplishment and it warmed him. She was building something. So was he. He swallowed hard, admitting for the first time the emptiness of the past years, even when he'd had Drew. He'd been avoiding life, avoiding people, avoiding real commitments. He'd grown close to the Utes for many reasons, not the least because they were nomadic people, picking up an entire camp at a day's notice. But now he yearned for something more.

“What's wrong?” Mary Jo asked, her face crinkling with concern, some of the pleasure in her eyes fading.

He was surprised at the question. She asked so few of them. “Nothing,” he said shortly, turning away from her to unsaddle the horse. Tuck and Ed had disappeared into the bunkhouse and Jeff had hurriedly unsaddled his horse and gone to see about Jake, who'd been left behind.

Wade hated Mary Jo seeing him try to unsaddle King Arthur, hated her seeing his awkwardness, his difficulty in doing so simple a task. But when he turned back to her, she had moved away, and was unsaddling her mare. He didn't know whether to resent that thoughtfulness or appreciate it. He chose to resent it.

When he'd finished, he stalked across the yard toward the barn. He'd moved back into the small room now that the hired men were using the bunkhouse. He'd wanted the privacy.

Her voice was soft but it carried. He turned.

“Will you be up for supper?”

“No,” he replied.

Disappointment spread over her face but was quickly gone, hidden with a blankness of her own. The rebuff had hurt, he could see that, but he wasn't going to apologize. He was suddenly angry. He couldn't quite figure out why, but it had something to do with that brief surge of pride, and the realization that he had no right to that pride. He couldn't afford to feel that, or feel anything else where Mary Jo Williams was concerned.

He started toward the barn.

“Thank you, Wade. Thank you for today.”

He didn't move. Not toward her, not toward the barn. He felt rooted to the ground with no safe place to turn. “No need to thank me. I'm repaying a debt, that's all.” His voice would have frozen most people where they stood.

“Maybe,” Mary Jo said. “Not everyone would have done it so well.”

“Buying cattle when you have money isn't that hard, Mrs. Williams. Tuck could have done it just as well.”

“I don't think so,” she said. “Joe Abbot liked you. He trusted you from the beginning. And I wouldn't have Tuck or Ed without you.”