Without Words

Bounty hunter Bret Sterling kills Rufus Petty, thief and murderer, less than ten feet away from a frightened, half-starved woman. Rufus should have surrendered. The woman should have kin to help her. But Rufus went down shooting, and the woman has no one. Bret figures by the time he finds a safe place to leave Hassie Petty, he’ll earn the five hundred dollar reward several times over.

Hassie doesn’t mourn Rufus, but the loss of the ten dollars he promised her for supplies is a different matter. The bounty hunter gives her nothing, takes everything, ties the body on one horse and orders her on another. Afraid if she defies him, he’ll tie her down tighter than Rufus, Hassie mounts up and follows the icy-eyed killer.

Mismatched in every way, the sterling man and petty woman travel the West together, hunting thieves, deserters, and murderers. Wary traveling companions, friends and partners, lovers, Bret and Hassie must decide what they want, what they need, and the price they’re willing to pay for love.

SPRING 1871

CENTRAL MISSOURI

H
ASSIE FETCHED ANOTHER
stone and added it to the pile. Coyotes would be at the grave before a week passed unless she covered it with a heavy layer of stones.

The clang of the pick against frozen ground stopped. Rufus swore and switched to the shovel again, scraping up the few small clumps of dirt he’d loosened and throwing them alongside the grave.

He’d quit soon. The only surprise was he hadn’t already. In the short time she’d known him, she’d learned Rufus wasn’t much for hard work.

“I can’t believe it,” he said for at least the hundredth time. “I come home for the first time in years. Jube and Clete are gone, and the old man’s dying.” He pointed a long, boney finger at her. “Don’t you expect me to be taking care of you. Ten dollars, I can spare you ten dollars, and after that you better find yourself another man.”

Hassie’s stomach clenched. Ten dollars’ worth of supplies wouldn’t last through the spring, even supposing she succeeded in getting to town and buying anything.

Rufus jumped out of the hole. “That’s deep enough.” His eyes widened, and he dropped the shovel. “Who the hell are you?”

Hassie whirled to see what Rufus saw. Only yards away a stranger sat his horse. With the late morning sun behind them, both man and beast were dark shadows with golden halos.

“I’m the man the army is going to pay five hundred dollars for dragging you back to Fort Leavenworth,” the horseman said.

Rufus spit. “Bounty hunter.”

Hassie saw it coming, saw Rufus tense, and his mouth twist. His hand dove under his open coat and came out with a pistol.

Before he brought the gun to bear, a shot cracked through the cold air. Rufus fell like a puppet with strings cut, groaning and clutching his side, but he didn’t drop the gun. His lips pulled back in a snarl. Eyes gleaming with malice, he tried to lift the gun again.

“Don’t,” the horseman said. “Don’t be stupid.”

Rufus didn’t listen, found the strength to raise the pistol. Another shot rang out, and he fell back, twitched a few times, and lay unmoving.

The bounty hunter—for that’s what he must be—dismounted, cursing in a low voice. He kicked Rufus’s pistol away, leaned over, and touched his throat. “I suppose that was easier for you than hanging,” he said, “but the army won’t pay for your useless corpse.”

He straightened, and his cold gray eyes swept Hassie from head to toe. Short, dark beard growth obscured his lower face, but she didn’t have to see his jaw to know it would be strong. Light-headed with fear and shock, she stumbled back a few steps.

“Your husband?”

She pointed at the grave.

Hands on hips, the bounty hunter looked into the narrow hole. “That’s sure not deep enough for two. Have you got other menfolk around to finish it?”

She shook her head.

“Family to help you out?”

Hassie started to shake her head again, clamped a hand over her mouth, and ran for the house. The sound of the door as he followed her inside turned her nausea to panic. She skittered around the kitchen table, grabbed for the iron skillet on the stove.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he muttered, yanking open the flour bin.

After that he searched every cupboard, bin, and shelf in the kitchen. He pulled the cork on one of the jugs along the wall, sniffed, and smacked the cork back in place with the heel of his hand.

In spite of his words, Hassie kept the table between them. He was tall, taller than any of the men she had been around, as much as six feet maybe. Hat pulled down over dark hair, fine wool coat hanging almost to his knees, gloves, boots, everything but his hard face was hidden under winter clothing. Yet Hassie sensed quickness and strength that would make a mockery of her efforts to elude him if he took a notion.

Knowledge of what he was, what he had done and could do, stalked around the room with him.

“You can’t be living on whiskey,” he said when he finished his search, “and you sure won’t live long on the food in this place.”

His gaze roamed around the room, not missing one bare inch. His expression never changed, but contempt edged his voice. “So your husband starved to death?”

Indignation almost overrode her fear. Almost. She had spooned the best of anything available down Cyrus for months, done everything she knew how for him.

The bounty hunter disappeared deeper into the house, and Hassie sucked in a deep, relieved breath. Breathing was easier with him out of the room, even though the house rang with sounds of his presence. Drawers opened and slammed shut. The lid on the bedroom chest screeched as it opened and banged as it closed. He wasn’t looking for food back there, so what was he doing?

Her knees trembled, and she leaned against the wall to stay on her feet in spite of another wave of nausea. She hadn’t liked Rufus, but he had provided fresh meat for the table, and Cyrus had been so happy to see one of his sons.

She couldn’t blame the bounty man for what he’d done. Rufus had left him no choice, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t have nightmares about the way Rufus fell and died. It didn’t make being alone with a killer any easier.

Did he look at everyone the way he looked at her, or did he only look down that strong, straight nose with disdain at women who lived on rundown farms? Or who had four jugs of home brewed whiskey in their kitchen but only a few cups of weevily flour left in the bin and even less of beans and corn meal? Or women related to the likes of Rufus Petty?

The bounty hunter appeared again, empty handed. If he had taken anything, it must be small. He walked past her and out of the house without a glance. She moved to the window and peered out, watched him stride across the yard as if he owned it and go into the barn.

Right now while he was out of sight, she should run outside and go through Rufus’s pockets. He must have more than ten dollars to have promised her that much, and she should take the gun. It had to be worth something. Except there was all that blood, and the bounty hunter wasn’t going to let her keep anything. He was already angry about not getting the reward.

At the thought of him touching her, taking away anything she found, Hassie turned from the window and sank into a chair. Five hundred dollars. What could Rufus have done that would make the army put such a high price on his head and that he would hang for?

He must have killed someone, and he must have stolen something, something the bounty hunter wanted. That Rufus would do such a thing didn’t surprise her. That he’d gotten away with it, even for a little while, did.

As she waited for sounds of horses leaving the yard, Hassie toyed with thoughts of selling the whiskey the bounty man had mocked her about. Sooner or later one of Cyrus’s old customers would come around, and she could sell him one of the jugs.

She tried to picture it. Failed. None of those men would pay her for the whiskey. They’d take it, and she didn’t want to face any of them alone.

Hassie thought about the gun again. Thought about what might be in Rufus’s pockets. She was halfway to her feet when sounds came from the yard, but not sounds of horses leaving.

B
RET LEFT THE
house disappointed. The money wasn’t there, and neither was much else, although the place was surprisingly clean considering the rundown condition of everything outside. Weeds covered the fields. The fences were falling down. Like the woman, one of the horses in the corral was well on the way to starving.

The bay with the US brand on its left shoulder was still in good shape. If you didn’t count robbery and murder—and Rufus probably didn’t—keeping the horse had been his first mistake. Telling a stable boy he was headed home to the family farm was his second, the one that put Bret on Rufus Petty’s trail.

Bret shoved his way through the sagging barn door, expecting to search the rundown building as thoroughly as the house—and as futilely. Rufus could have gambled away every penny he’d stolen by now and probably had.

So much light poured in through wide cracks between the boards of the siding Bret spotted the cavalry saddle easily. The worn leather gleamed amid a dusty jumble of equipment heaped on the floor. The saddle didn’t quite conceal bulging saddle bags underneath.

Bret’s mood improved steadily as he counted the wads of bills stuffed in the bags. Hard to believe, but Rufus couldn’t have spent much of it.

Even though he’d killed the paymaster in order to steal the Fort Leavenworth payroll, the army wouldn’t pay for Rufus Petty dead. The poster on Rufus didn’t mention a finder’s fee for recovering the money either, but they’d pay one.

The bags held almost six thousand dollars. Bret decided to ask for ten percent, hold out for at least the five hundred they’d offered for Rufus.

Bret hauled all the U.S. Army equipment outside, shoved the saddlebags into one of the panniers on his packhorse, and contemplated the bodies. Tempting as it was to leave Petty where he’d fallen, packing the body to the nearest town would be wiser. With a choice, the army wouldn’t care what became of the body. Without a choice, they’d probably get starchy about identification.

Hacking another grave out of this ground held no appeal anyway, and two in the shallow hole Rufus had dug would be coyote food with or without those rocks piled on top. Bret grimaced. Much as he didn’t like it, tipping the woman’s husband over the edge and filling in the grave wouldn’t kill him.

He grabbed the body, planning to just roll it in the hole. No coffin here. A sheet for a shroud. The sheet rode up at one end, pulling a trouser leg up with it and exposing boney, blue-veined shins above black stockings. White hair stuck out at the other end.

Curious, Bret pulled the sheet down a little. Sickness aged a man prematurely, and men reduced to skeletons always looked ancient, but from the thin hair on his head and coarse hairs jutting from his nostrils, this one was ancient, or close to it.

In spite of the emaciation and yellow cast to his skin, the old man had a curiously well-groomed look, hair clean, face freshly shaved, shirt snowy white. Even so, not Rufus Petty’s brother, but his father, grandfather even.

What was a young woman like Mrs. Petty doing married to an old man like this? Relatively young. She looked like she might be a year or two past his own thirty, but with a few good meals and enough sleep to erase the dark circles under her eyes, she could prove to be anywhere from twenty to thirty.

Maybe she’d been a catalog woman. If so, she’d made a bad mistake believing whatever the old man had written to lure her here.

Now that he thought about it, she had to be from somewhere outside this area. She didn’t look anything like the people in these hills. They tended to be raw-boned, with narrow faces and close-set eyes that brought to mind cousins marrying cousins for too many generations.

The woman’s chin was too wide for her face to be oval, not wide enough to make a square. Her purple eyes were anything but close set. The absurdity of that thought made Bret throw the next shovelful so hard the frozen clods bounced.

No one had purple eyes. Grayish blue, bluish gray. In decent light and without the shadows underneath, her eyes would be blue. Still, hair blacker than black, skin whiter than white, nose ever so slightly sloping and turned up at the end. During the war the camp followers and soldiers’ wives with that look had been Irish. Maybe Old Man Petty had somehow gotten hold of the daughter of an Irish railroad worker.

Slapping handcuffs on a man in front of his womenfolk was bad enough. Bret had never had to kill a man in front of kin before. He glanced at the house, remembering the Colorado woman who stopped screaming at him, ran back to her house for a rifle, and shot at him as he rode away with her son in tow.

Even if Mrs. Petty were so inclined, the rusty musket in the house posed more danger to the shooter than the target. No, Mrs. Petty wasn’t going to scream at him or shoot him, but if she was telling the truth about having no family to go to, she was a problem. He couldn’t leave a woman alone in a place like this with no food and no prospects.