Merline Lovelace (6 page)

“I couldn’t let her ride out by herself.”

“I’m guessing there wasn’t a whole lot of ‘let’ involved.
Miss
Bonneaux’s going to do whatever she takes it into her head to do.”

The subject of their discussion poked the sizzling bacon with a stick whittled to a green point. “Do you think it might be time you stopped referring to me as
Miss
Bonneaux in that detestable manner?”

He considered the matter. “It might.”

“Good. Well, gentlemen, I think I’ve got enough grease to fry up some johnnycakes.”

She used a pointed stick to transfer the bacon from the skillet to a tin plate.

“I see you made yourself free with the station manager’s supplies,” Jack said sourly, conveniently forgetting that he was wishing he’d done the same thing just moments ago.

“I left a note promising payment.”

Just like that, his stomach did another jig. She’d promised him payment, too, but not the kind he’d wanted from her.

“Matt, would you pass me the sack of oats?”

Scowling over the brim of his cup, Jack watched while the trim, dainty miss who looked like she’d melt in a good rain picked weevils from a handful of oats and flicked them into the fire. That done, she mixed a little water into the coarse-ground grain and shaped the lumpy dough into thick cakes.

The woman was one surprise after another, and Jack didn’t particularly like surprises.

“Where did you learn to cook over a campfire,
Miss…
” He caught himself. “Suzanne.”

The smile she sent him near about lit up the night. He gripped the tin cup so hard he felt the thin metal crease under his fingers.

“As I told Matt earlier, my stepfather is a cavalry officer. He made sure my brother and I learned all manner of necessary skills. Some,” she con
fessed with a grin, “I had to un-learn when I went back East to school. My teachers almost fainted dead away when I demonstrated to the other students how well-dried cow dung burns in a kitchen stove.”

Jack buried his face in his cup. He didn’t want her to see the smile that tugged at his mouth. He wasn’t ready to let down the barriers separating him from this prickly, contrary, fascinating female. Couldn’t let down the barriers, he reminded himself grimly. Surging to his feet, he tossed out the dregs of his coffee.

She glanced up at the abrupt movement. Smoke from the frying dough wreathed her face. The heat had put a flush in her cheeks. Long, straggling tendrils had escaped her untidy bun to curl over her shoulder. Her eyes were dark and luminous in the firelight.

Walk away!
his mind shouted.
Make dust. Now, while you still can.

Her voice drifted to him across the crackling fire, calm and steady as a tall oak in a storm. “The johnnycakes are browning up nicely.”

Ride out. Tonight. Leave her here with the boy. She’ll find her way.

“We’ll be ready to eat in a few minutes.”

He swore a silent, savage oath. Knew damned well she’d keep on his tail whether he wanted her there or not.

“I’ll take you as far as Rawhide Buttes tomorrow. After that, you’re on your own.”

“Very well.”

At least she had sense enough not to crow. Jack gave her marks for that.

“You’d better douse your fire and retrieve your horse,” she suggested with a poke at the johnnycakes. “I’ll have supper dished up by the time you get back.”

T
he following day, Jack ate Suzanne’s dust most of the way to Rawhide Buttes.

She rode astride, as loose-backed as any cavalry trooper, skirts flapping at her calves. If the length of silk stocking showing above her borrowed boots flustered her, she sure didn’t let on. She’d plucked the quail feathers off her hat and bent down the brim to shield her eyes. She’d shed her bustle, too. The rucked-up fabric at the back of her skirt sagged without the wire cage. Although the sun didn’t burn with quite the same intensity it had the past few days, it generated enough heat for her to shed her jacket, tie it behind her on the saddle and undo the top few buttons of her high-necked blouse.

Yesterday, Jack would have bet his last dollar that the dainty miss seated across from him on the stage would suffocate before she’d shed any of her
fancy outer layers. It bothered him that he’d read her so wrong. The glimpses he caught of the long neck and creamy skin now exposed to the breeze bothered him even more.

Deliberately, he dropped back. No sense torturing himself. Not that viewing her backside was any easier on him than viewing her front. She’d given up trying to bundle her honey-brown hair and left it down, tied back out of the way with a rawhide thong from her saddle. The long, curling tail fell down her back and swished when she moved, just like a mare’s. And just like a stallion on the scent of a rut, Jack couldn’t keep his eyes off her.

It didn’t help that young Matt Butts appeared just as taken with the woman.

“Best not to think what you’re thinking, kid.”

The hog farmer wrenched his gaze away from Suzanne’s legs. Cheeks crimson, he mumbled that he wasn’t thinking nothing. Jack knew better. His own thoughts weren’t the sort a man could take into church with him.

“That kind of female ties a man up in so many knots he can’t stand up straight,” Jack warned, “let alone stiffen his spine.”

An unexpected flash of humor appeared in the boy’s blue eyes. “Is there any other kind?”

“Been knotted up before, have you?”

“Sort of.” Grimacing, the kid shifted his
weight. “I slipped free, though, to come out to the Black Hills.”

“You don’t think the rope will still be waiting for you when you get home?”

“I’m not going home. Not for a while, anyway. There’s places I want to see, things I want to do.” His voice took on an eager note. “You ever been to San Francisco?”

“Once, a few years back.”

He’d tracked Obediah Chilton, the third man on his list, to San Francisco. Jack had spent weeks roaming the city’s fog-shrouded streets before he discovered his quarry had moved on to the California gold fields.

“Is the city as wide-open and wild as they say?”

“It’s taming down some, but a man can still buy just about anything there if he’s got the cash in his pockets.”

“That’s the way I heard it. What about Sacramento? Have you been there, too?”

Jack’s jaw locked. He’d found Chilton fifty miles west of Sacramento, in one of the hundreds of mining towns that had sprung up along the gold trail that cut north to south along the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The man had cried like a baby when Jack cornered him in a saloon and told him to draw or die one small piece at a time.

“I’ve been there.”

The flat reply drew a quick glance from the kid.
He might still show some green behind the ears, but he was old enough to tread warily on another man’s past. Especially a man with a past like Black Jack Sloan’s. Matt’s questions eased off.

But not his saddle aches.

By midafternoon, he could hardly sit upright. Whenever the travelers dismounted to walk their horses, he stumbled along on India-rubber legs. Suzanne kept the lead and slowed the pace more with each passing hour. Once or twice she’d flicked a quick glance over her shoulder at Jack, as if she sensed how much it chafed him to amble along at a slow walk.

She sensed right. Impatience bit at him like a three-fanged snake. He’d get her and the kid to Rawhide Buttes, he’d promised her that much. The station was a good size stop, not like the swing station at Ten Mile. If she was so bullheaded as to want to keep traveling from there, she could damned well sweet-talk someone else into riding shotgun for her.

She wasn’t his responsibility, dammit.

The sun flamed low and orange when the massive red rock formations that gave Rawhide Buttes its name rose in the distance. As the three riders drew closer, the lively notes of “Buffalo Girls Won’t You Come Out Tonight” rolled through the gathering dusk to greet them.

Like most of the major home stations strung out along the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage route, Rawhide Buttes offered the wayfarer both sustenance and sin. This particular station, Suzanne soon discovered, combined the two in one rather lively operation.

Music pumped out of a clapboard building erected in the shadow of the butte. A crude sign nailed to a porch strut identified the place as Mother Featherlegs Shephard’s Saloon and Hurdy-Gurdy Parlor. Raucous laughter bellowed through the open door of the saloon, almost drowning out the wheezing notes of the hand-cranked organ.

A combination of rods and strings, the hurdy-gurdy had once graced the courts of Europe. Composers such as Haydn and Mozart had composed music for the instrument. In more recent years, its easy portability had made it so popular on the frontier that the women who worked the dance halls had become known as hurdy-girls or hurdies.

Suzanne was no stranger to hurdies, generally considered one class up from the prostitutes who serviced the troops stationed at frontier army posts. While social barriers existed in the West, just as they did in the East, the distinctions tended to blur when troopers starved for feminine attention and the comforts of their own hearth took wives wherever they could find them. One of her stepfather’s top sergeants had married the most popular hurdy-
girl at the Blue Snake Saloon, just outside Fort Huachuca. Leaky Peg had made the transition from dance hall denizen and occasional whore to army wife with her ribald sense of humor and great, gusting belly laugh intact. Suzanne had found her stories fascinating, although she suspected Leaky Peg had censored them considerably before sharing them with the colonel’s daughter.

Still, Suzanne probably wouldn’t have chosen to enter the doors of Mother Featherlegs Shephard’s parlor if it wasn’t also doubling as the temporary way station for the Black Hills Stage and Express Line. The charred remains of the wooden building that had previously served as the stage stop lay just across the street from the hurdy-gurdy parlor.

The place had burned down only last month, the station manager explained. The fire almost took the barn and granary, too, but the saloon’s patrons had rushed out to form a bucket brigade and saved those structures.

The station manager also gave the weary arrivals another bit of grim news. Big Nose Parrott and his gang had indeed caught up with the stage they’d been traveling on.

“They kilt the driver stone-cold dead. Gut-shot one of the passengers, too. A wrangler off the Diamond J, up to Hell’s Canyon way.”

The drunken cowboy. Suzanne didn’t waste much sympathy on him. If the fool hadn’t dived
for his gun, he wouldn’t have a bullet in his belly and she wouldn’t be standing here in borrowed boots.

Matt slid off his horse and hooked an arm around the pommel to keep his legs from collapsing under him. “What happened to the luggage on the stage? My carpetbag was in the boot.”

“Can’t say for sure ’bout your grip, but Parrott and his gang took whatever was worth taking, including the strongbox. We put another driver aboard and sent the stage on to Deadwood. You folks kin claim whatever Parrott didn’t make off with at the Express Office.”

Matt looked so discouraged that Suzanne’s heart wrenched. His grand adventure was off to a shaky start.

Well, Sloan had promised to bring them this far and he had. Now it was up to Suzanne to find another escort on to Cheyenne River and Matt the stake he needed to see him through the winter in Deadwood Gulch.

She had a far better notion of what he faced in the coming months than he did. Winters in Ohio couldn’t begin to compare to those on the Great Plains. Blizzards howled like banshees from hell across these vast open stretches. Snow swept in under windowsills and piled so high against doors it took days to tunnel out. Even the more wooded, mountainous regions like the Black Hills offered
little protection from the frigid blasts and smothering blankets of snow. Men trapped in the frozen gulches without adequate provisions had been known to eat their mules…and their fellow prospectors.

The sensational trial a few years ago of William O’Day was still talked about throughout the territories. As the judge noted when he sentenced the man to be hanged by the neck until dead, Carver County once had five Democrats. O’Day ate four of them.

Yes, Matt would definitely need money for a stake. And Sloan’s rude response to Suzanne’s offer of a promissory note in exchange for his escort suggested she would need some hard cash to hire his replacement, as well.

She tapped a toe in the dirt, annoyed by the way her stomach hollowed at the reminder that she and Black Jack Sloan would part company at Rawhide Buttes. She couldn’t deny the man fascinated her. Or that he stirred urges she didn’t want stirred. Urges that should have dissipated after so many hours in his gruff, unsociable company, but hadn’t.

She’d now spent two days and nights with the man, yet knew little more about him than the lurid tales published in the penny presses. She was almost certain those tales had been highly embellished.

Well, now she’d never know for sure. Summon
ing a smile, she gave her attention back to the station manager.

“Mother Featherlegs kin put you folks up for the night,” he assured the travelers. “The Express Line will cover the cost of beans and a bed, seein’s how you were inconvenienced out of your seats on the stage.”

Inconvenienced
wasn’t quite the word Suzanne would have used to describe being held up and left stranded, but she merely tipped the man a polite nod.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll take your horses to the barn,” he told them, obviously eager to make amends on behalf of the Express Line. “You folks go in and wet your whistle.”

She glanced at Sloan. “Are you coming in, or should we say goodbye?”

Best to do it here in the street, quick and now. No sense dragging matters out. Jack acknowledged that fact even as he passed the roan’s reins to the station manager.

“I’ll stand you and the boy to a beer.”

With a quick little nod, she gathered her skirts and mounted the single step onto the rickety porch. Jack eyed her trim backside and cursed himself for a fool.

He cursed again when Matt released his grip on
the pommel, took a single step and went so barrel-legged he almost landed in the dirt.

“Come on, kid.” Hauling him upright, Jack walked the groaning youth up the step. “Let’s put some vinegar back in your veins.”

A few steps plunged them from new dusk outside to old gloom inside. A quick sweep told Jack that Mother Featherlegs Shephard’s Saloon and Hurdy-Gurdy Parlor was no different from any of the hundreds of other similar establishments he’d strolled into over the years. The same odor of stale sweat and spilled whiskey soured the air. The same assortment of ranchers, wranglers and drifters hunched over their drinks, fingering the coins in their pockets as they waited their turn with one of the three hurdies working the sawdust-covered dance boards.

From the look of them, Jack guessed the women made more working the sod huts out back than they did on the boards. None of the three looked to be particularly light on her feet. Not that the men who paid for the privilege of pressing up against female flesh would mind. Women were as scarce as cow eggs on the frontier.

And women like Suzanne were even scarcer.

She paused just inside the door, a small, delicate thrush set down amid crows. The dancing slowed to a standstill. Every head in the windowless dance hall turned. Eyes popped. Jaws sagged. The wran
gler cranking the hurdy-gurdy froze, and the last verse of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” died a wheezing death.

No one moved or spoke until a cigar-chewing hurdie gave her partner a shove that sent him stumbling halfway across the floor. Rolling the black stump of her cigar from one side of her mouth to the other, she ambled over to greet the newcomers.

Jack had no difficulty identifying Mother Featherlegs Shephard. The dingy gray pantalets billowing beneath her shortened skirts gave her the appearance of a fat, feathery hen on the strut. As she neared, she sent out waves of lavender scent. The oversweet odor fought a fearsome battle with the cigar smoke that wreathed her painted face and graying, corkscrew curls.

“If you folks are looking for the Express Office, you’re at the right place.”

With a nod, she indicated the Ticket Office sign nailed to the wall above the faro table. “Next stage won’t be through for another couple of days, though.”

“And that’s only if it don’t get holt up like the last one,” a customer volunteered, elbowing his companion aside to get a better look at Suzanne.

“Actually, we were on the stage that was robbed,” she explained to the gathering crowd.

“So you’re the ones.” Mother Featherlegs darted a quick look at Jack and the still weak-
kneed Matt before turning back to Suzanne. “We’d heard some of the passengers got left behind. Word came up the line that you hightailed it back to Ten Mile Station.”

“We did. However, we decided not to wait there for the next stage.”

The saloon owner hooted, expelling a cloud of blue smoke in the process. “I can’t blame you none for that. Nothing to do in that sorry hole but scratch your fleabites. Well, come on in and sit a spell, missus. I can’t offer you wine or sarsaparilla, but the beer don’t pack too bad of a punch.”

“A beer would be wonderful.”

“You and your man will want a bed for the night. I’ll get the Chinee girl to put clean ticking on mine. It’s big enough to take you both. The boy kin bed down out back.”

“That’s very kind of you, but this gentleman isn’t my, er, man.”