by Craig, Emma
She didn’t fear them, though, because she had Jed to guard her. With a happy sigh, she snuggled against him. It was dark now, but the stagecoach continued to rattle them through the night. This trip might have been romantic if they’d been alone. Or if the road weren’t so rough.
Rosamunda continued to sit with the minister, which was strange behavior on her part, but Tacita didn’t begrudge her a friendly lap. The poor darling. She’d been ousted from her place of honor in Tacita’s bed, and that must have been a blow. Tacita knew also that, while she still loved Rosamunda dearly, another love now filled her heart. She squeezed the muscled arm filling her hands and rubbed her cheek against it. Jed squeezed her back, and she knew a moment of ecstasy. If only it could continue.
She frowned out the window and commanded herself to stop thinking in terms of eventuality. What mattered was the present, and Tacita had to keep that in mind or she’d enter San Francisco in tears.
Chapter 16
It must have been nearing three in the morning when a strange thing happened.
Exhaustion had finally claimed Tacita in spite of the uncomfortable ride. She had been napping on and off for two or three hours, although her sleep was unrestful, being interrupted every few minutes when the stage jogged over a big rut or bump in the road. Jed’s comforting arm warmed her, and his chest served as her pillow. Rosamunda had finally abandoned the preacher and climbed back onto her lap, and Tacita was surprised by how glad she was to have her back.
Her hand rested on Rosamunda’s soft fur when a loud clatter and assorted yells jerked her awake. She recognized the racket as indicating the coach’s entry into a stage stop and sat up, rubbing her eyes. Then, without thinking, she yawned.
Almost immediately, she perceived the impropriety of her action. “Oh, my goodness. I beg your pardon. How dreadfully rude of me.”
“It’s all right, Tacita. Nobody can see you. It’s still night time.”
Tacita recognized the grin in Jed’s voice as the one he used when she was being big-cityish. Although she was excessively sore and sleepy, she didn’t take umbrage. Rather, she smiled at him. At least, she hoped it was him. The atmosphere was so dim both inside and out, she couldn’t tell for sure.
Soon the door opened, and faint lantern light filtered into the coach.
“If’n you folks want to get down and stretch, we’ll be here for about fifteen minutes. There’s sandwiches and coffee inside, if y’all want.”
“Thanks. Reckon I will step down for a minute or two. Want a cup of coffee, Tacita?”
“Yes. Thank you. That sounds like a good idea.” She frowned. “If I can get my lower limbs to work, I might even enjoy a brisk walk?”
Tacita was certain, too, that Rosamunda would appreciate the opportunity to do her doggie duty. She didn’t say so aloud, as it would have been inappropriate to do so. A sandwich didn’t sound like a bad idea either, although she doubted that it would taste very good if her experience with prior stage-stop sandwiches was anything by which to judge.
As they’d been doing since they entered the stage in Denver, she and Jed allowed the fat lady to climb down from the stage first. They would have done this for courtesy’s sake, even if the preacher traveling with them hadn’t made a point of mentioning its propriety at their first stop. Tacita thought that was nice of him.
After the fat woman had chuffed and grunted her way off the stage, Jed whispered, “You all right, Tacita? Do you need me to help you?”
“Thank you, Jed. That’s very sweet of you, but I think I can manage.” She gently set Rosamunda on the seat next to her and began to test her own legs and back for cricks.
All at once the preacher made a lunge for the door. Tacita had been about to stand, but he knocked her back into Jed’s lap.
Startled, she cried, “What on in the world . . .?”
“Shut the hell up,” The preacher snarled, barring the door and shocking Tacita greatly.
She saw his eyes glittering in a strange way. In fact, his whole manner seemed to have undergone a sudden, inexplicable change. He looked quite mean all at once. She didn’t understand, although his peremptory command offended her. Then she had the frightening thought that perhaps the stagecoach was under attack by wild Indians or stage robbers.
“Oh, dear. Is something wrong?” She leaped up again and glanced quickly towards the door.
Jed grunted and grabbed her around the waist, hauling her back into his arms. “Better be quiet,” he whispered.
That offended her, too. “What do you mean, be quiet? I want to know what’s going on.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” the preacher said in an ugly, growly voice. He reached for the door handle with one hand, as if he planned to yank the door shut, and dug into his coat with the other.
It had just occurred to Tacita that the preacher was behaving in a most incongruous manner when she saw his eyes, which had narrowed into two ill-natured slits, pop open wide. He whuffed out a startled, “Huh?”
And then he wasn’t there anymore. They heard a loud thump and a grunt from the ground outside the coach, but he had disappeared.
“Good heavens, Jed. What was that all about?”
“I don’t know.” Jed’s voice sounded as bemused as she felt. “But I bet it’s nothing good. I think our friend the preacher isn’t what he pretended to be.” He stood and leaned out the door.
“Did he just fall out of the coach?”
“Yup.” And then Jed stepped off the stage, too.
Provoked that he should abandon her at such a time, Tacita snatched Rosamunda off the seat next to her, uttered an indignant, “Humph,” and stepped to the door to peer out.
“My goodness.”
At the foot of the steps the driver had set out for their convenience, she saw the preacher sprawled. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping. Which was silly, as she understood at once. He must have knocked himself out when he fell out the door, poor thing.
By the dim light of two lanterns hanging from hooks on the coach, Tacita noticed that his trousers had slipped down and bunched up around his knees, too. She pressed a hand to her cheek in empathetic embarrassment.
Then she noticed his gun belt. It had apparently been hidden underneath his coat, but it had slipped down with his trousers and now lay beside his knees. How strange. Tacita didn’t know ministers carried firearms. The practice must be confined to the West.
Jed picked the gun belt up even as she watched and removed a gun from its holster. Tacita could plainly discern that the belt had been cut through next to its buckle. Or, rather, it seemed to have been chewed. Oh, dear.
It looked as though the poor man had lost all of his buttons, too, because his coat gaped open, exposing his shirt and knitted under drawers. Tacita closed her eyes, shocked at being exposed to such sights, her recent experiences with Jed and those nearly naked opera ladies notwithstanding.
Jed stood up again, holding out the gun belt, and peered up at her. “Looks like your dog’s been busy, ma’am.”
As he bent to investigate the parson’s pockets, Tacita stared down at Rosamunda. Rosamunda looked up at her, a satisfied expression on her face.
“My goodness, Rosamunda, did you chew that poor man’s clothes off?”
Rosamunda snorted. If Tacita didn’t know better, she’d think she was cross.
“Rosie did a good job of it, Tacita. If she hadn’t chewed through this fellow’s belt and pockets and gnawed off all his buttons, he’d probably have held us up.” Jed stared down at the sprawled figure. He looked vaguely astounded.
“Held us up?” Tacita hurried down the steps to get a better look at the parson, studiously avoiding the view of his underwear. “Why would he want to hold us up? What reason would he have to delay our trip?”
“I didn’t mean he wanted to delay us.” This time Jed sounded exasperated.
Tacita didn’t understand. “But you just said—”
“I said he wanted to hold us up. Hold
up. At gunpoint. He wanted to rob us.”
“Rob us?” Tacita stared at the scene, bewildered. Other men had dashed up to Jed and the fallen parson, all talking at once, barking out questions and answering them in the same breath. Neither questions nor answers made sense to Tacita.
Suddenly she heard somebody say, “The dog did it?” And he started to laugh, huge guffaws that bludgeoned Tacita’s nerves. Anger flared in her bosom and she turned toward the offending party, keeping Rosamunda close to her chest in case any of these uncivilized men offered to punish her dog.
“Stop laughing this instant! Help this poor man, if you please.” She ceased her indignant tirade as things began to settle into place in her mind. Merciful heavens, how embarrassing this was going to be.
Taking a deep breath, she said, “Apparently, my dog has injured this poor minister in some way. I didn’t realize what she was doing at the time.”
“Me, neither,” said Jed. He sounded amused. Tacita didn’t think it was funny.
“She done good, all right,” another man said. He was the one who had been laughing. Tacita looked at him, irritated both by his grammar and by his sentiments. She wasn’t sure she’d ever understand Western sensibilities. These men found the most outrageous things amusing.
She said, “Well, she didn’t mean to.”
Jed, still squatting next to the parson, grinned up at her. “Sure she did.” He cast Rosamunda a look of outright approval. “Maybe old Rosie’s not completely worthless after all.”
Rosamunda lifted her lip in a sneer.
“Oh!” Tacita stamped her foot, something she hadn’t done in years. “How can you be so callous? Help that poor man!”
“I’ll help him, all right,” Jed muttered.
“Here. I’ll help, too,” another man offered. “O’Casey’s gone to wire the sheriff in Boulder. We can tie him up and keep him in the station house in the mean time.”
“Tie him up? Sheriff? What are you talking about?” Tacita looked at the group of men gathered around the preacher, whose eyelids were beginning to flutter. She wished somebody would pull up his trousers. The poor man would be mortified when he came to and found them bunched up around his knees.
“Why, ma’am, don’t you know who this here feller is?”
The question came from a beefy fellow with a scraggy beard. She hesitated, then said, “Er, I don’t believe we were ever properly introduced. He’s a minister of the Gospel, though.” A glance around the semicircle of rough-looking men, all grinning, made her reassess her answer. “Isn’t he?”
A roar of laughter greeted her timid addendum. Even Jed was smiling when he detached the ever-present rope from his belt and laced it around the parson’s hands and tied them together. As he did the same with the man’s feet, he said, “Nope.”
Tacita said, “Nope?”
The bearded man said, “Parson? Hell, ma’am, this here som’bitch is Stagecoach Willy.”
“Stagecoach Willy?” What an odd name. Tacita had never heard the surname Willy before. Or of the first name Stagecoach, for that matter. Most of the ministers she’d met in her day had been blessed with more dignified names than that. On the other hand, she was beginning to get the feeling that perhaps the man had duped them into thinking he was a preacher. Such a deception seemed dreadfully unethical to her.
“Do you mean to tell me this man is not a minister?”
Her question precipitated another round of laughter, which didn’t sit well with her.
“Tacita, apparently this fellow’s been robbing stagecoaches for years along this route. He’s no more a parson than I am.”
“Oh.”
Tacita stared down at the man. Then she stared at Rosamunda, who peered back mildly.
Then she saw the fat lady, hanging back at the edge of the group of men, and decided it was time for her to get a sandwich. Carefully, she picked her way through the throng to the fat woman.
“I do declare,” said the woman. “Have you ever heard the like?”
“No, I certainly haven’t,” Tacita declared, meaning it.
The fat woman, whose name, she told Tacita, was Gloria Withers, continued to chatter her excitement as they entered the stage stop to purchase a sandwich. Tacita bought one for Rosamunda, too, and fed it to her outside.
“What an adorable little dog, Miss Grantham. What kind is she?”
“Rosamunda is a Yorkshire terrier, Miss Withers.”
“She must be a very intelligent dog, to have seen through that terrible man’s disguise and recognize a criminal.”
“Yes,” Tacita said mechanically. Then she took herself to task. “Yes,” she repeated with more enthusiasm. “Indeed, she is very intelligent. Why, Rosamunda is a direct descendent of the great Huddersfield Ben himself.”
“My goodness,” said Miss Withers, sounding suitably impressed.
Now how, Tacita asked herself, could Rosamunda have known that alleged preacher was an outlaw? No answer occurred to her.
“I don’t know how she knew,” Jed said when she asked him. “But I’ll bet you anything that man was hired by your uncle.”
Tacita didn’t speak to him for a good hour.
# # #
Ah. This was better.
Rosamunda curled up on the coach seat where Stagecoach Willy had sat, on a cushion the stagecoach driver had given her. He’d done so because he appreciated her efforts on behalf of the Butterfield line. He’d told her so himself. Rosamunda had thanked him in her usual gracious way. Her tummy was pleasantly full of the beef she’d eaten out of her sandwich and the cheese the other men had offered her in thanks for doing such a good job in helping them snabble the desperate criminal, Stagecoach Willy. She considered both cushion and treats merely her due. As she saw it, they were the least those humans could have done.
“Do you really think she knew, Jed?”
Rosamunda saw him shrug and decided he’d never amount to anything.
“Well, he fooled me.”
Rosamunda lifted a brow and peeked at Mistress from across the aisle. Mistress had very few failings, all things considered, but she certainly had a knack for misjudging people.
First Jedediah Hardcastle and then Stagecoach Willy. Rosamunda wondered if there were some way to educate humans, and then decided the task, even if it could be performed, was too daunting a one for her to attempt.
She dozed off.
# # #
Cesare Cacciatore Picinisco had seldom felt so ill-used. First Jedediah Hardcastle thwarted him in his attempt to steal that ridiculously expensive dog. Then Farley Boskins beat him up. Then Virendra Karnik foiled his attempt to snatch the dog from the railway car.
He’d even shaved off his beautiful beard, discarded his colorful clothes, and stashed his wagon in Alamogordo, of all heathen places. And all of those sacrifices, so far, had gone for naught.
Well, he wouldn’t allow the gods to impede his progress any longer. He was going to get that dog if he had to go to the ends of the earth do it. Which, he decided grimly, was about the size of it.
“They went to San Francisco?” he asked the clerk behind the registration counter at the Silver Baron Hotel in Denver. He hoped he’d heard wrong. His ears hadn’t worked right since that dog had gotten hold of them.
“That’s what she told me,” the clerk said, dashing Picinisco’s hopes.
“But that’s the end of the world.”
The clerk grinned. “Reckon it about is, all right.”
Picinisco frowned at the man, finding nothing in this situation worthy of mirth.
“Do you know how they planned to travel to San Francisco?”
The clerk shrugged. “Butterfield Stagecoach, I think.”
The stagecoach. Well, Picinisco’s finances couldn’t stand the expense of purchasing passage all the way from Denver to San Francisco by stagecoach. It had taken almost everything he had to get to Denver. With a discouraged sigh, he decided it was time to perpetrate another robbery.
# # #
“He failed.” The telegraph communication in Agrawal’s fingers shook. His eyes glowed like hot coals.
“Who failed?”
Agrawal’s stare bored into Luther like a drill and he knew he shouldn’t have asked.
“The man I hired to interrupt their stagecoach journey from Denver to San Francisco.
“Oh.” Luther couldn’t hold Agrawal’s implacable gaze. His own staggered away. “Too bad.”
“Isn’t it?”
The way Agrawal asked the question, and the smile with which he asked it, penetrated the alcohol-slush in Luther’s head unpleasantly. Luther had a very bad feeling about it.
# # #
The remainder of Tacita and Jed’s journey to San Francisco was accomplished without further delays, barring those necessitated by a flood in Utah and a broken axle outside of Carson City. They both considered these occurrences acts of God and merely incidental to their expedition. No other villain after Stagecoach Willy threatened them.
Jed hoped this was an indication that her uncle had given up attempting to obtain whatever it was he was after. He didn’t give his hope much weight. He did, however, pray fervently that the sissy Jeeves would be able to protect Tacita from whatever evil seemed to be following her. The thought gave him a prolonged case of indigestion. Unless that was caused by the lousy food they had to eat along the stage route.
Tacita uttered suitable ohs and ahs about the scenery they passed through. In truth, the setting was grand. However, although she tried very hard to concentrate on the trees and mountains, rocks and fauna along their way, her mind was more often occupied by the wretchedness of her situation.
Oh, she knew she should appreciate Jed during the short time she had left with him and leave tomorrow’s worries until tomorrow. She’d been trying to do so ever since their first night together out under the stars, in the middle of the immense American frontier. Being a mere human, she was unsuccessful more often than not. As the stagecoach continued its obstinate progress and San Francisco got ever closer, the less successful she became.
