“He’s got guts. There’s some fire in that boy. His hand didn’t even quiver.”
“He’d kill me right now if he had even half a chance.”
“You saw that, too, huh?” Stanton grinned.
Chane nodded. There was still something about Cantrell that bothered him, aside from his impending death and Stanton’s unwillingness to commit himself to pardon him. There was a quality he saw in Cantrell that he saw in his son—an unwillingness to bend. Unfortunately, not bending could mean breaking instead. That was why the trait bothered him in young Chantry. Such stubbornness was rarely rewarded by society.
Stanton must have read his mind. “Looks pretty cocky now, but that young man has just been ushered to the gates of hell. It’ll take him a little time to realize it, but when he does he could crack under the pressure.”
Kincaid shrugged. “I’ve been wrong about men so many times. I’ve seen what looked like brave men who had to be carried to the gallows, kicking, screaming, and crying like babies. I’ve also seen little wimps who walked up the steps and put the noose around their own necks. So don’t ask me to tell you which way he will do it,” he said gruffly.
Stanton grunted. “Did you decide yet?” Chane asked, wondering how he was going to stall Jennie again.
Stanton shook his head. “I’m still thinking about it. I gotta see which way the wind is blowing.”
Chane cursed his friend’s political bent, but he knew there was nothing more he could do. Jennie and Leslie would just have to live with it, whichever way it came out.
Ward Cantrell had never been given to soul-searching, but with the promise of death at sunrise, he knew he would not sleep. “Anybody you want to see?” the sheriff asked after dinner.
Ward thought about his sister, but that was out of the question now. He couldn’t make peace with Jenn without crawling to Kincaid, and there was absolutely nothing in it for Jenn. All he would be giving her would be a chance to grieve. She didn’t need that. He knew, at least on one level, that Jenn would rather see him than not, no matter what the outcome, but he was too practical to indulge himself at so great a cost to her. There was nothing anyone could do to save him now, and no reason to open old wounds. Jenn had no doubt made peace with his disappearance. She had earned her right not to be disturbed again.
The first hours of the night were spent in denial—he could not believe that tomorrow morning he would die. He prepared for bed in the usual manner, ignoring the small table the sheriff had moved into his cell, ignoring the paper, inkwell, and quill. He laughed to think that he was supposed to want to write letters at a time like this.
About nine o’clock, a wagon rattled to a stop outside, and he moved to stand so he could watch. Two men leaped down and unloaded a long pine box. They carried it inside and put it down on the floor beside the door. The sheriff and his deputies were noncommittal, but the two delivery men looked significantly at him. He felt the first faint stirring in his chest. He walked to the window and looked out. The incessant hammering had stopped hours ago. Now, in the dim light of the street lamps, he could see the gallows where they intended to hang him. He glanced back at the long pine box. All the preparations for his death had been made. Everyone except him had accepted it. He sat there for a long time, looking at the box, and finally the realization sank in that even though he was alive now, and even though it felt like it was permanent and unconditional, these men had the power to end his life. He had never felt uncontrollable fear before, but now he felt himself quaking inside. He really was going to die. This was not a bad dream.
Once he accepted that fact and measured his own helplessness, those emotions gave way to more anger and bitterness. Rage swelled up inside him. If he could have, he would have torn that small cell apart, but he suddenly realized the futility of it.
It was not until the guards had gone to sleep and the moon had arced overhead, that he settled into acceptance of his death and his sister’s importance to him. Then he desperately wanted to see her. He was grateful that he didn’t have the option to send for her, because he would be forever ashamed of himself for subjecting her to that. Besides, he remembered, she was a Kincaid now. There was still bitterness there, but he did not blame Kincaid for what had happened to him. Kincaid may have speeded up the time schedule so that he would hang tomorrow instead of next year, but there would be no real difference. He was still a nobody, going nowhere. One more year wouldn’t have changed anything.
Once he faced that, he knew what had been bothering him for the last year. Now that it was too late, he could admit that he wanted to do something with his life—something to look back on with pride. Maybe that was why he had been hoarding half of the money from his share of every job. He decided he would give his sister the key to his safe deposit box. That way, in case she was staying with Kincaid out of necessity, she would have a way out of the marriage. There was enough money there to give her a new start.
Thinking about Jenn and his family always reminded him what a failure he was. At least there was no one there to verbalize that fact, or tell him what was expected of a Van Vleet. They would hang him in a few hours, and it wouldn’t even be noticed in Phoenix, much less make the news in New York. If it did, he could see the New York Times headlines now: “Scion Of Once Wealthy Van Vleet Family Hanged For Train Robbery.” There were people in New York who would enjoy that tremendously. Dying in anonymity had some advantages. At least Jenn would be spared that final indignity. He hadn’t spared her much else, he thought bitterly, suddenly despising himself for his stubbornness.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ward sprawled on his bunk, staring up at the plastered ceiling and wondering if there was anything he could have done differently so that he wouldn’t have ended up here, waiting to die.
Could he have stayed in New York? Instead of joining the cavalry? It hadn’t seemed so at the time. Too many things had happened that last year in New York. His parents had died, both shot with the same gun. It had been touted as murder and suicide, but he and Jenn had known that their father had been driven by Chantry Kincaid III to that final act of desperation. Then Jenn had by some inconceivable process fallen in love with Kincaid. And he had incurred Kincaid’s ire by proxy and had been beaten so brutally that he still carried the scars. And even before he had recovered, Jenn had married Kincaid, without even bothering to tell him.
He had joined the cavalry. Simone had begged him to take her, and he had. Could he have changed his fate by not leaving the service? Would that have changed the outcome of that fateful day in June of 1882? He searched for a beginning, and his mind always came back to that night when he came home to find Simone sobbing into a pillow, sprawled across the bed in the small house they shared…
“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked, moving to her side.
“Nothing, everything,” she said tremulously, sniffing noisily.
“You want to tell me about it?”
“No…yes…I don’t know,” she wailed.
He lay down beside her and took her into his arms. Her lips were salty, trembling, and cold beneath his. He kissed her for a long, slow time, until her breathing changed, settling down into rhythmic looseness that indicated a mood he could handle. When he finally lifted his head, she smiled shakily.
“You’re going to hate me,” she whispered.
He looked at the luminous delicacy of her face, seeing the tears glisten on her cheeks and the flicker of pain in her wide brown eyes, and felt that same sense of wonder he always felt when he looked at her. “I love you,” he whispered, leaning down to brush the tears off her cheeks.
“Hold me.” She sighed. “Please hold me.”
He held her close to him. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m…I’m…pregnant,” she blurted.
“And?” he prompted.
“You don’t want a baby,” she said. New tears brimmed in her dark eyes and spilled over, cascading into the dark hair that fanned out on the pillow. He brushed gently at th
e tears, letting the relief he felt ease some of the tension that had been building up inside him when he thought there was something serious wrong.
“Of course I do,” he whispered. He held her close, feeling the trembling in her slender form. He had no family left of his own, except Simone. Simone was all he had, all he wanted. She was good and loving and loyal, and she had no one except him.
When they had come west two years before, they had brought her mother with them because she had tuberculosis. She had seemed to get better, but she had died eight months ago. And while it was true that he had never actively wanted a baby, and also true that this might not be the best time in the world, since he was scheduled to be officially mustered out of the army in ten days, he was also sure that he could find some way to provide for them.
“We’ll manage just fine with a baby,” he said firmly. “Why wouldn’t we?”
She cupped his face in her hands and they were cold and trembling against his warm skin. “You aren’t angry, chéri?”
He searched inside himself to see how he did feel about it. His father had always been too busy for him. His mother thought boys belonged in school—the farther away the better, probably. Only Jenn had really seemed to love him. If he had any feelings about the matter, it was probably just that his son would not grow up like that. He would have two parents who cared about him, and he would go to school only if it was within walking distance from home. His son would not learn riding and hunting from strangers and teachers. There were some things a boy should learn from his father.
He must have scowled, because Simone’s face registered alarm. “Peter, chéri, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“I was just thinking that I don’t want our son to be a bastard.”
Tears sprang into her eyes. “But what can we do about that?” she said, the last words dissolving into a wail of sheer anguish.
“We can get married,” he said firmly.
Now Simone covered her face with her hands and burrowed into the pillow as if she would hide herself there. “No, no, you don’t know…” she moaned, turning away from him.
“Know what?” he demanded.
“I-I don’t know enough to be a mother,” she wailed.
He chuckled softly. “How do you know that?”
She reached under the pillow and pulled out a tiny blue sock that was dirty from so much handling and strangely misshapen. It had an extra bulge on one side, and the soft, thick yarn still hung from it. Deformed and tiny, with strings hanging from the toe, it seemed so pathetic that he couldn’t help himself, the laughter bubbled out of him, surprising him.
“See?” she wailed, covering her head.
“Well,” he said, stifling the laughter as best he could, “that’s not so bad for a first try. You’ll get better. You have months to practice.” He kissed her until she forgot her misery, and they made love. Life seemed full and rich.
The next day was his day off. He bought two tickets on the stagecoach, and they went to Dodge City and got married there so no one in Fort Dodge would have to know that they weren’t already married. He didn’t want anyone throwing that up to her.
Two weeks later, when he was standing in line in the bank in Dodge, waiting to cash his last check from the army, he noticed two white men outside hazing a big, black soldier named John Trayner, while at least a dozen laughing men egged them on.
“Hey, nigger! Come outta that store! Your skin may be black as the ace o’ spades, but your liver is lily white! Come out here this minute ’fore we come in there and drag you out!”
The big Negro, an aide to one of the officers at Fort Dodge, was justifiably reluctant to tangle with drunken white men, especially in Dodge City, which was one of the wildest towns in the West. Dodge was the end of the line for all the crews that drove cattle up the trail from Texas, and those southern boys didn’t cotton to smart-alecky blacks.
“Yassah, I’s coming out, suh!”
“Yassah, yassah!” a tall, lanky, raw-boned man in a large black Stetson mocked him. “You make me sick, nigger! Ain’t no wonder they use manure like you for fertilizer back home.”
“Reckon he wouldn’t even make good fertilizer!” the other one laughed. He was a pale, red-haired Georgian who had gained notoriety because of his habit of refighting the Civil War every time he got drunk. “Hey, nigger! This your wagon?”
Sergeant John Trayner, whom Peter knew as an industrious, hardworking man, with a wife and two small children at home, peered out of the doorway of the general store, his eyes round with fear. He hadn’t worn a sidearm, probably because he was only coming into town for supplies. There was undoubtedly a rifle in the wagon, but with those ruffians where they were, the rifle might as well have been a hundred miles away.
“Nawsuh! Belongs to the army,” Trayner said, still holding a fifty-pound sack of flour he had been in the process of carrying to the wagon the man was pointing at.
“You hear that, boys? This here is a nigger wagon! Hey! Y’all come on! Let’s take us a ride in a nigger wagon!”
Men up and down the wide dusty street lounged about in chairs tilted back against the storefronts. Other men stood in small clusters. They could have been talking about the heat, or the lack of rain, or the news they had read in the Dodge City Expositor. Now they stopped talking and turned to watch.
Six of the men who had been shouting encouragement now left the shade of the sidewalk and scampered aboard Trayner’s wagon. The one who had started the hazing stood in the back of the deep wagon bed. He leaned down and picked up a bag, held it up for Trayner to see, then pulled his knife and slashed the bag, laughing as the contents spilled out. The other men yelled lustily and laughed as the black man dropped the sack he had been carrying and plunged off the sidewalk to save the rest of his supplies.
“Yuh can’t do that. That’s gov’ment property!” he shouted, his rage overcoming his desire not to cause trouble. Before he could reach the man, the wagon started to move, whipped by one of the rowdies who had taken up the ribbons.
“Who’s gonna stop us, nigger?” the one with the knife shouted, laughing at the helpless look of rage that had transformed the black man’s face. “Who’s gonna stop us?”
Trayner no longer realized that they were all armed and he wasn’t. He ran as fast as he could after the wagon and the jeering men. “Stop! Yuh can’t take that wagon!”
“Come and get it, nigger!”
The driver whipped the team as the men in the back all laughed and mimicked the black man. One of the men began throwing the sacks and boxes of tins out of the wagon, trying to trip the man who ran after them. Another man grabbed tin cans and began pelting the Negro with them.
“Them’s gov’ment property! Stop that! Come back here with that wagon!” he yelled, jumping deftly over the sacks of flour and sugar they threw in his path, fighting his way through the shower of cans.
Peter was just coming out of the bank when the wagon came even with him, the men howling and laughing with insane boisterousness. Peter was shoving his money into his trousers pocket when he saw one of the men draw his gun and fire. Trayner stumbled and dropped, and Peter didn’t think beyond the moment. He drew his own gun, fired, and hit the one who had shot the unarmed soldier. The man flipped out of the wagon and lay motionless on the ground.
A yell of outrage rose up from the men in the wagon. The driver whoaed the racing horses to a halt, and the men in the wagon bed dropped down, clawing for their revolvers. Peter dived behind a water trough and returned their fire. He saw one man hit—he was flung backward, screaming.
Someone in the wagon called out to the driver to get that damned wagon moving. Peter saw Trayner begin to inch his way out of the wide, dusty street. A man in the wagon lifted his head and pumped another bullet into Trayner. Peter fired almost simultaneously and the man stood up, pivoted, and fell headlong out of the wagon as it began to move forward again.
Peter ignored the receding wagon and rushed to the fallen man’s si
de. Trayner was breathing slowly with an audible rattle. Blood had already soaked through his clothing and was spilling into the dirt, turning dark brown.
“My wagon,” he groaned. “They got my wagon.”
“The army can get your wagon back. Here, let me help you.”
“Aaahhh…no, please, Cap’n. Hurts too bad to move.”
“Jesus! I didn’t think. I’ll go for the doctor,” Peter said, cursing himself.
“No.” Trayner gripped his arm with desperate strength. “No, won’t do no good, Cap’n Van Vleet. I’m a goner, me. Gotta say something to you, though,” he panted raggedly, gasping as the pain hit him in waves now. The rattle became more pronounced, and his face was the color of clay, gray and damp.
“My wife,” he gasped, “she’s a fine, proud woman. It would hurt her to know how they shamed me. She comes from a proud family, wif brave menfolks. It would hurt her too bad. Tell her…Would you…tell her I died like a man, please, Cap’n?”
Peter’s chest felt clamped by a vise. He was remembering the pretty brown-skinned woman who would have to receive that message. He remembered her as a hardworking woman and a good mother. He felt a weariness inside him. She didn’t deserve this, but neither did John Trayner. Peter nodded, gripping the cooling black hand. “I’ll tell her,” he said, his voice thick.
“Cap’n Van Vleet…”
Peter didn’t bother to remind him that he wasn’t a captain anymore. He was officially out of the cavalry now.
“Yes, Sergeant Trayner.”
Trayner smiled at the title of respect. He opened his eyes, and they were unfocused and glazed with pain. “Tell her, Cap’n,” he panted around the deep rattle in his chest, “tell her that I love her.”
Peter nodded. He didn’t have to ask if he should send for her. John Trayner was too proud to be subjected to that final indignity—having the woman he loved see him lying in the street like a stray dog that had been shot for stealing scraps.
The Lady and the Outlaw Page 19
