Liz Ireland (6 page)

“What about you, Will?” Paulie asked. She reached
over and nudged him in the arm—at her merest touch, he nearly shot right out of his saddle.

“Good grief!” Trip exclaimed. “From the way you reacted, Will, anyone would have thought she’d poked you with a bolt of lightning!”

Will shook his head to clear it. “What were you asking, Paulie?”

“I asked, what’s your poison going to be?”

“I’m not here to socialize,” he said tightly. “I’m here for answers.”

He spurred his horse and rode on, loping into Vinegaroon just ahead of the others. He needed to put some distance between himself and Paulie and Trip. Their relationship was just none of his business. He needed to get a hold of himself.

Roy Bean, a tough wiry old cuss if ever there was one, pushed out of his chair and leaned against the porch railing, looking bemused by the approaching party. “Well, if it ain’t Will Brockett!” he said in his signature terse, wry voice. He tugged at his handlebar mustache. “I heard you’d gotten back from Kansas, Will, but I wasn’t expecting you to come callin’ so soon.”

Will dismounted and tethered Ferdinand at the post in front of saloon. “I just came by to—”

“Well, well!” Roy cried, too focused on the company Will was keeping to care about why he had come around. “This is a ragtag band you got riding drag! Oat, Trip Peabody and some whippersnapper I ain’t never seen before.”

Before Will could make introductions, Paulie was off her horse.

“I’m Paulie Johnson, from Possum Trot,” she said excitedly, pumping Roy’s hand a mile a minute. A while back she had seemed reluctant to meet Roy, but now she was greeting him as though he were her long-lost uncle.

“Johnson?” he asked, his beady eyes sparking with interest. “That girl that runs the Dry Wallow?”

Will folded his arms and felt the corners of his lips tug into a frown. Paulie, apparently, could charm men more ably than he had ever given her credit for. At least rough types who hung around saloons.

“I imagine you folks want to come on in and wet your whistle,” Roy said. “I was just about to set myself down to lunch.”

Paulie practically licked her lips. “Lunch?”

Roy eyed Will. “Man, are you leading these folks on some sort of starvation trail?”

It seemed as good an opening as any for telling Roy why they were really there. “Actually, I’m—”

Roy didn’t wait for his explanation. He was too enraptured by his other newcomers. “Well, come on inside and help yourself,” he told Paulie. “I don’t know if the vittles is what you’re used to, but I’ve got plenty of ‘em.”

The judge led Paulie, Oat and Trip into the saloon, leaving his companion on the porch unintroduced. Will turned to the man, a mean-looking character who didn’t even bother to glance up at him. He just kept staring at the dusty planks that made up the saloon’s porch, pivoting once to spit off to the side. Frankly, the stranger gave Will the shivers, but he couldn’t say exactly why that was. He was a regular-looking fellow with sandy blond hair peeking out from under the brim of his hat. Only he had a hardness in his eyes that made Will uneasy.

After a few more moments of the silent treatment, Will followed the talking and laughter into the saloon and found the group of men nursing drinks around Paulie, who was seated at the head of a long table, stuffing herself with a plate of some sort of concoction of rice and beans, with a few hunks of nondescript meat mixed in for good measure.

They all glanced up at him when he took a seat nearby, then looked quickly away again, focusing all their rapt attention on Paulie.

She swallowed down a gulp of food and said, savoring every syllable of what apparently was a punch line, “…And so I told the man, ‘I don’t know about your wife, Mister, but you sure could use a new horse.’“

The men roared with laughter. Even Oat. Roy was all but slapping his knee, and of course Trip was laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes. He had probably heard the silly joke about a thousand times already. People in love certainly did make fools of themselves, Will thought, crossing his arms sourly.

Roy took note of his demeanor and turned to him for a moment. “Well, Will, I keep expecting you to come out and tell me what it is you’re doing here any minute now.”

As if he hadn’t already tried to tell the man twice already!

“Why so closemouthed, Will?” Roy went on.

Glad for the opening to finally get down to business, Will took a breath.

Paulie downed another heaping spoonful of that unappetizing mash of Roy’s and blurted out, “We’re looking for Night Bird. That’s why we’ve come. Everybody thought maybe you’d heard of his whereabouts.”

At this explanation, Roy looked almost startled. His narrow eyes widened and he rubbed his stubbly jaw in wonder. “Night Bird, huh?” he asked, looking at Will as if he’d just gone plumb crazy. “You got a death wish, Brockett?”

Will opened his mouth to defend his mission, but Paulie once again beat him to the punch.

“That’s what I said!” Paulie exclaimed. “But the trouble is, we suspect Night Bird ran off with Oat’s wife.”

They
suspected? Will thought. The last time he’d checked, Paulie considered the Night Bird theory to be nothing but pure flapdoodle. Now she was almost making it sound as if chasing the renegade had been her idea!

“That pretty Redfern girl I heard so much about?” Roy asked, uninhibited in his shock. He didn’t have to mention that he’d heard so much about her precisely because she had married Oat, either. Despite her beauty, Mary Ann hadn’t gained any real notoriety until she’d made a surprising choice of husband.

“That’s the one,” Paulie said.

“I lost her,” Oat added, still as puzzled as ever.

“Good Lord!” Roy exclaimed. Then he called out to the porch. “Cal, you hear that?”

When they looked up, the man with the cold gaze had it fixed on Will, as if sizing him up for the task of chasing Night Bird. “I heard,” he said curtly.

“What do you think, Cal?”

The man shrugged.

Roy looked at his assembled guests. “You all have something in common with Cal here. He’s been hired by the family of one of those men Night Bird killed to catch him dead or alive.”

A killer. That would explain his demeanor, Will thought. One glance at the man was enough to know that he didn’t give a fig about whether his quarry was alive or not when he laid him at the feet of the family who hired him.

“Do you know where Night Bird is?” Will asked.

The man spat on Roy’s floor, then shrugged. “Mexico.”

“Are you going after him?”

The bounty hunter shook his head. “Nope.”

“It’s foolhardy to chase a bandit into Mexico, Will,” Roy said. “He’ll get more trigger-happy the closer he is to the border—and the farther away from American law.”

Will shook his head, feeling the weight of his responsibility more sharply the worse the news became. “I can’t just let him go,” he explained. “Not while he’s got Mary—I mean, Mrs. Murphy.”

“I promise you one thing, Oat,” Roy said. “If that damned renegade comes within smelling distance of this place, he’s a dead man.”

No one gathered around the table appeared comforted by that pronouncement.

Will crossed his arms. Truth be told, he’d prefer to go alone—or with one other person, maybe. But by themselves, none of the others seemed substantial enough help to be of much use to him. He needed somebody like the man named Cal. A man accustomed to chasing killers. But even Cal wasn’t willing to chase the murdering bandit onto his home soil.

He had to take what he could get. He still didn’t like the idea of dragging Paulie into this. And now that he knew about Paulie and Trip, he didn’t feel much confidence in that man, either.

Somehow, his prospects had never seemed so grim. But there was no changing the way things were. The best he could do was try to make everyone realize they weren’t duty-bound to follow him into Mexico.

The first chance he had, he pulled Trip aside, leading him away from Paulie and Roy’s spirited conversation and onto the front porch. Cal was nowhere to be seen, although his horse was still hitched out front.

“Something wrong, Will?” Trip asked.

“No…not yet, anyway,” Will answered, not sure how to begin. Trip wasn’t a man to wear his heart on his sleeve, and he was too honorable to ever say on his own that he had changed his mind about going into Mexico. “The thing is, Trip, I’m trying to see that things don’t go wrong.”

Trip nodded, but the confused look in his eye as he squinted out over the broad horizon let Will know that he hadn’t made his meaning clear.

Will took a deep breath. “What I wanted you to know is that I’ll understand if you stay behind.”

The man looked stunned. “Behind?” he repeated, swaying a little. “You mean, here at the saloon?”

Will nodded. “Or if you and Paulie went back to Possum Trot, I wouldn’t hold that against you, either.”

Trip blinked. “Oh, Paulie’s not going back. I’d bet money on that, Will.”

Stubborn kid! “But if I can convince her to,” he insisted, “I would understand if you stayed back with her. In fact, I would feel better knowing she had you to look after her.”

“Well of course I’ll look after her, Will. But as for us stayin’ here, or goin’ back to Possum Trot, you can put that idea right out of your head. Neither one of us would feel right doin’ that. We’ll be right behind you all the way to South America, even, if that’s where you reckon we should go.”

The man’s loyalty moved him. In fact, from the anguished look on Trip’s face, Will saw that he was on the verge of tears himself. He thought regretfully of how he’d kissed Paulie last night—how he’d enjoyed it. It wasn’t right, especially if she was Trip’s girl.

He patted Trip’s arm. “Still, see what you can do to convince Paulie to stay back, will you?”

Trip shook his head. “It was her idea to come along, Will. It ain’t my place to talk her out of it. You can try, but it won’t do you any good. Paulette Johnson’s got a head like a mule’s.”

Will knew he was right—but he couldn’t help thinking that Trip had just given the most unflattering description he’d ever heard a man give of his sweetheart.

An hour later, he tried to take heart in the looks of his crew as they poured reluctantly out of Roy’s saloon, their spirits bolstered by food and drink. He didn’t see evidence of Cal’s gloomy warning on any of their faces anymore. Not even on Oat’s.

Roy and Cal appeared at the door, ready to take up their positions on the porch again. “Hope we see you all soon,” Roy called out. “You give that bandit a big kiss hello for me.”

But sandy-haired Cal had no words to bolster them. He merely shook his head and spat as he watched them mount up.

Paulie noticed a distinct increase in tension when the Rio Grande came into view. Will looked more alert than ever. Oat, riding behind them, slowed to a snail’s pace. And beside her, Trip was uncharacteristically silent, although he managed to clear his throat every ten seconds. And every time he cleared it, he made a hitching sound—heh
hmmhmm.

“Lord, I hate crossing rivers,” Paulie said.

Trip didn’t answer. And then…
Heh-hmmhmm!

The sound was beginning to get on her nerves. “What the heck’s wrong with you, Trip? For heaven’s sake, take a drink, or spit, or do
something
to clear that darn throat of yours once and for all. Or better yet, why don’t you just tell me what’s got you so tied up in knots?”

He looked away, and then, unexpectedly, brought Feather to a halt. “I guess I been thinking about something Will told me.”

His words made Paulie tug Partner to a quick stop, too. Just the mention of Will’s name was enough to make her heart cease beating. “What about Will? What did he say to you—was it about me?”

She tried not to sound too eager, but from the surprised look on Trip’s face, she could tell that he noticed the way she was champing at the bit for any smidgeon of Will gossip—and that she had hit the nail on the head. Will
had
been talking about her!

“As a matter of fact, he did mention you, Paulie. It was the strangest thing.”

She nodded encouragingly to Trip, just keeping herself from taking hold of his shoulders and shaking the information she wanted out of him.

“He said that if I wanted to, I could stay back with you.”

This was not what she’d expected to hear.

“Back with me?” she asked, confused. “But I’m going with him!”

Trip shrugged. “I know. That’s what I told him.”

“But he didn’t say anything to me about it!” Paulie exclaimed, looking ahead as if she could get a clue concerning this new mystery from Will’s straight back. Just looking at him made her throat go bone dry. No man looked as proud or handsome sitting atop a horse as Will did.

“He told me I should talk to you.”

“You know that’s pointless.”

“Well sure…” Trip’s words trailed off like mavericks from a herd before he could gather his thoughts and round them back up again. “What I don’t understand, though, is why Will would think I should be the one to try to convince you to stay.”

“Oh!” Paulie exclaimed, sucking in a breath.

Suddenly, she understood Will’s thinking. He didn’t want her and Trip along if he thought their being in love would interfere with the manhunt.

But that was just plain ridiculous!

“Can you figure that one out?” Trip asked.

She didn’t want to lie to her friend—especially when he
was coming all this way on her account. Besides, it wouldn’t do to have Trip in the dark, considering that Will thought they were sweet on each other. “Well, I guess I can. You might say Will’s suffering under a…a…misconception.”

Trip’s gray eyebrows rose. “What kind of misconception?”

Paulie felt awkward. How could she explain to Trip—good, kindhearted Trip who’d probably never told a lie in his life—what she had done? Deciding it was best just to plunge in, she blurted out, “Well, I guess you could say in a way that he sort of thinks that you and I are in some way, you know, a little bit…well, in good company together.”

She took a deep breath. There. She’d said it. Surprisingly clearly, too.

“What?” Trip asked, not nearly so impressed by her verbal skill.