Fire on the Plains (Western Fire) (31 page)

He didn’t.

Goddammit!

When
, a few seconds later, Starkweather returned fire, Ben experienced an emotion that he was unaccustomed to feeling – out-n-out fear
.
Although it wasn’t fear for himself; it was the fear that a stray bullet would inadvertently hit Lydia.

Another bullet whizzed past.

Christ! What will it take to make these damn Rebs call retreat?
Since four years of armed combat hadn’t slowed ‘em down any, he had his doubts that—

The Gatling gun!

By God, if that didn’t stop ‘em, nothing would.

Leaping into the back of the wagon, Ben yanked the canvas cover off
of the metal bows that spanned the top of the wagon bed. Then, with an almost gleeful delight, he spun the Gatling gun on its’ specially designed turret, aiming it toward the pack of mounted Confederates. Pulling back the trigger guard, he took aim and fired, peppering the air with a blast of bullets.

Almost immediately, Lt. Starkweather raised his gloved hand, signaling the rebel riders to a sudden halt
. A seasoned soldier, the Southerner knew that he and his men didn’t stand a chance against a weapon that could fire a hundred rounds a minute.

The battle won,
Ben eased his finger off the trigger. In the next instant, the top-half of
Casa de Paradiso
exploded into the air, the force of the blast raining the ground with adobe bricks. In the shuddering aftermath, Ben nearly lost his balance as the wagon precariously swerved from side-to-side.

Relieved that they were making their escape in the nick of time,
Ben jumped back into the wagon seat and grabbed the reins out of Lydia’s hands.

Noticing his wife’s
flushed face, her red hair flying wildly about her face, he spared a moment to quickly graze his fingers across her reddened cheeks. “Are you all right?”

Lydia
graced him with a shaky smile. “I’m fine. And I’ll be even better once we get home.”

Ben slapped the reins
down. “In that case, we’re not stopping until we reach the Rio Grande.”

They reached the Rio Grande well after dark
.

Exhausted, Ben yanked on the brake handle. For several moments, he sat silent as he stared at a nearby cluster of
prickly pear. While some might deem it a barren sight, he thought the full moon cast a welcoming glow onto the stark Texas landscape.

“
It’s time to call it a day,” he said to Lydia, knowing that it was also time to clear the air with his wife. Though they’d been traveling for hours, only a handful of words had passed between them, each of them locked in their private thoughts. Each of them unwilling to address the calamitous chain of events that had unduly strained their marriage.

About to suggest
that they make camp along the riverbank, Ben, instead, peered into the wagon bed. Cursing under his breath, he listened as Percy Beaumont griped about the cramped accommodations. Earlier, he’d hog-tied his prisoner to the wagon box. He now wished that he’d had the foresight to stuff a gag into the Southerner’s mouth.

“Sit tight. I’ll go
check on Lord Percy.” Given that the bastard had held a loaded revolver to Lydia’s head, Ben refused to let his wife anywhere near Beaumont.

Climbing into the back of the wagon, Ben crouched beside his gray-suited prisoner. “All righ
t, make it quick. What do you want?”

Despite the fact that
his lips were hideously swollen, Beaumont somehow managed to plaster an unctuous smile onto his face. “I merely want some polite conversation. Is that so much to ask?”

“I don’t have time
to listen to your drivel,” Ben muttered as he spun toward the wagon seat.

“
Is that because you’re so busy scheming what you’re going to do with your ill-gotten fortune?” Beaumont taunted, knowing exactly what to say to reclaim Ben’s attention. “Why, I imagine that even a buffoon like you could make a change for the better with a king’s ransom at his disposal.”

Glaring at
his prisoner, Ben wondered if he could wring Beaumont’s neck and still collect on the bounty.

“I told you
already. The gold is being turned over to the Federal authorities.”

Beaumont
chortled, the hollow sound punctuated with a self-important simper. “Since
Casa de Paradiso
is hours behind us, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to let the cat out of the bag.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I hope that you won’t be
too
disappointed when you find out that the gold isn’t—”

“Ch
rist Almighty! Don’t tell me.” Lunging toward the large trunk stowed in the corner of the wagon, Ben yanked it open. To his fury, he saw that it was filled to the brim with worthless desert sand.

“All right, where is it?”

“By ‘it,’ I assume that you mean the Confederate treasury. Really, sir! If I didn’t tell you before, do you actually think that I’m going to make a full disclosure at the eleventh hour?”

Ben grabbed a handful of sand, letting the buff-colored crys
tals sift through his fingers. “I’m guessing that you buried the treasury somewhere in the Mexican desert so that you wouldn’t have to worry about the gold being stolen by the Juaristas or confiscated by your newfound ally, the Emperor Maximilian.”

“As good a hypothesis as any,” the Southerner
equivocated.

“They’ll hang you for this. You know that, don’t you?”

“So be it,” Beaumont said with an unconcerned shrug. “Not only am I fully prepared to die for my beloved Southland, you may rest assured that I
will
take the secret to my grave.”

Why, the smug bombastic bastard.

Ben leaned over and roughly opened Beaumont’s gray frock coat. Ignoring the other man’s affronted outcry, he plucked a square of white linen out of the uniform’s breast pocket.

“I beg your
pardon, Lord Percy –” prying open his captive’s mouth, Ben stuffed it with the handkerchief – “but I’ve endured all that a man can take.” He next untied the yellow silk sash wrapped around the Confederate’s waist and used the long piece of fringed fabric to hold the gag in place.

Just then, Lydia poked her head into the back of the wagon. “Ben, what in heaven’s name are you doing?”

Ben vaulted over the tailgate. “Something that I should’ve done at the get-go,” he answered as he approached Lydia’s side of the wagon seat. “Guess you heard what we were talking about, huh?”

“
I did. And it’s my fault that Colonel Beaumont duped us,” she said dejectedly. “When you earlier asked me to verify that the gold was in the wagon, I never thought to open the trunk. I just assumed that . . . that Colonel Beaumont was telling the truth about the gold being stowed inside the trunk.”

“
That’s exactly what he was banking on.” Ben shrugged, his earlier anger having run its course. “I wouldn’t fret too much over it. Besides, there’s nothing to be done about it now.”

“But you intended to turn the
Confederate treasury over to the Federal authorities.”

“
Yeah, well, what a man wants and what he gets aren’t always one and the same.”

“Just like you wanted a docile, obedient wife and you ended up with me,”
Lydia murmured, her eyes teeming with unshed tears.

Hearing that
, Ben clamped a hand on either side of Lydia’s waist and swung her off of the wagon seat. He then headed for the copse of trees near the riverbank, his teary-eyed wife in tow.

“
Ben, where are you taking me?”

“The two of us have some u
nfinished business to attend to.”

When they’d gone far enough to insure
that they wouldn’t be overheard by their captive back in the wagon, Ben came to a halt. “I want to know what these damn fool tears are all about,” he said without preamble.

Taken aback
by Ben’s gruffly-issued demand, Lydia stared at her husband. Little did he know that she did indeed consider herself a ‘damn fool.’

“Words are profoundly inadequate to express my . . . my heartfelt co
ntrition,” she began somewhat awkwardly. “Be that as it may, I am
truly
sorry for what transpired.”

“I know
that, Lydia.”

“No!
You don’t know,” Lydia retorted with a vehement shake of the head. “Because of my foolishness, I could have gotten you killed.” Well aware of how very close she’d come to losing Ben, she began to tremble. For hours she’d held her tears in check. Now, to her utter shame, the dam had finally broken.

Ben shifted his weight from one booted foot to the other.
“Come on, now. There’s no need to cry. Luckily, you pulled that revolver on the good colonel and saved my ornery hide.”

“Percy Beaumont is anything but good.”
Brushing a hand over her cheeks, Lydia swiped at her wayward tears. “Because he rescued us from the Comanches, I saw him through rose-colored glasses. As I have painfully come to realize
that
was a grievous error. Moreover—” she stopped in mid-confession, uncertain whether she should continue.

“
Moreover. . . ?” Ben prodded a few seconds into the silence.

Unable to look her husband in the eye,
Lydia bowed her head and said, “Moreover, I thought that your plan to capture Colonel Beaumont and collect the five-thousand dollar bounty was solely motivated by your hatred of all things southern.”

Ben put a hand under her chin and gently
raised her head, forcing her to look at him. “You’re a Southerner, and I don’t hate you, Lydia. Surely, you know that.”

“But I fear that you’ll
never be able to forgive me for having –” the word stuck in her throat – “for having
betrayed
you by not trusting in your judgment.”

Still holding her gaze, Ben said,
“I forgave you enough to come and rescue you, didn’t I?”

“I know you too well, Ben Strong. You would have rescued me no matter wha
t transgression I had committed.”

“
Truth be told, when I woke up and discovered that you’d flown the coop, I was mad enough to— Ah, forget it,” Ben said abruptly, waving away the unspoken thought.

While Ben might want to ‘forget it,’
Lydia very much needed to clear the air. “You knew all along that Percy Beaumont was a renegade. Just as you knew about the contraband arms that he’d stolen and all the innocent men that he killed in order to acquire those munitions. Given all that you knew about the man, why you didn’t you tell me the truth about Colonel Beaumont?”

The question
caused her husband to visibly wince. Clearly, the conversation was no easier for him than it was for her. “Because you were always so quick to come to Beaumont’s defense, I figured that I’d just be wasting my breath.”

Shamefully
aware that Ben’s rationale had merit, Lydia said, “It’s true. I
was
foolishly deceived by Colonel Beaumont’s courteous manners and fastidious dress. But as I’ve learned, such things have no bearing on a man’s character. It’s what is here –” she placed her left hand on Ben’s chest – “in a man’s heart that truly counts. In that regard, you are an honorable man; and he is not.” Wracked with guilt, Lydia withdrew her hand. “Given the disgraceful way in which I besmirched your honor, it would not surprise me if . . . if you chose to sever our marital bonds.”

When Ben made no reply, Lydia
feared that her knees might buckle beneath her.

“
Do you know why I married you?” Ben finally said after a lengthy pause.

“I
thought that you did so . . . because you, um, wanted a helpmate on your Kansas farm.”

“Not particularly.” Ben punctuated
his reply with a shake of the head. “I married you because I wanted a warm and willing woman beneath me at night. But as I quickly discovered, that’s one helluva bad reason to enter into matrimony. Although I suspect that your reason for marrying me was equally flawed. Am I right?”

Lydia forlornly nodded
her head. “When your sister Mercy married Spencer, she rightfully became the new lady of the house. I thought that if you and I wed, it would enable me to leave the farm with my head held high. And while I was only interested in a marriage of convenience, you wanted something entirely different,” she acknowledged, still embarrassed by the memory of their first few volatile weeks of marriage.

“
And our lack of marital bliss wasn’t helped by the fact that I was a hard-hearted man.”

“That’s not true!” Lydia
protested, convinced that the blame for their contentious beginnings was hers entirely.

Ben smiled
wistfully. “What do you call a man who has no dreams other than nightmares? Four years of warfare had turned my heart to stone.”

Those
quietly spoken words struck a deep chord.

“
Eight years of mourning had hardened my heart, as well, turning me into a rigid woman.”

“You weren’t rigid
,” Ben said, shaking his head. “You were like me, peering at the world through a glass, darkly. Except I was so consumed in my own heartache, I couldn’t see that there was a kindred spirit standing on the other side of that glass. Even when I saw how loving and tender you were with Dixie, it never occurred to me that what I was glimpsing was the
real
woman hiding behind those widow’s weeds.”

The
unexpected disclosure gave Lydia cause for hope. “Then you don’t wish to divorce me?”

“
Hell, no, I’m not going to divorce you!” Ben bellowed loudly. “I took a vow to love, honor, and cherish you. And, by God, that’s what I intend to do!”

“Lest you think otherwise,
sir, I, too, take our marital vows to heart!” Lydia retorted, refusing to buckle under his profane exuberance.

Hea
ring that, Ben grinned broadly.

“
And why, may I ask, are you grinning at me like that?” Lydia demanded to know, thinking her husband’s reaction an odd one, indeed. Particularly given the seriousness of the topic under discussion.

“
I’m grinning because I just caught a glimpse of the Lydia Strong that I know and love. With all of this teary-eyed moping, I’d begun to worry that you might’ve left your indomitable spirit somewhere back in Mexico.”

Lydia put a hand to her mouth
to stifle a joyful gasp, the mention of the word ‘love’ instantly causing her heart to swell. “I feared that this unfortunate episode had dampened your love for me,” she confessed timidly.

“Now, why would you think that?” As he spoke,
Ben put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her around so that she was facing in the opposite direction. Then, standing directly behind her, he raised his right arm and pointed to a gleaming constellation in the northern sky.