His mind was a hundred miles away, Leslie could tell by the look in his eyes—they were smoky blue in the shabby room. White pitiless sunshine streamed in the undraped window. A shade pulled halfway down was flapping gently in the afternoon breeze.
She straightened and walked to the vanity, picked up the shawl to feel the texture of the lace, and saw Sandra McCormick’s locket lying on the dusty wooden table. Ward stretched, languorously, and she noticed the scratches on his face, the ones she hadn’t bothered to ask about when she arrived, because she’d been too caught up in her overwhelming response to him.
The intricately engraved Chinese dragon on the gold and enamel locket seemed to glow with a perfect, terrible light.
He had lied to her! Perhaps only indirectly, since she didn’t ask questions…but surely allowing her to believe he didn’t know about Sandra’s disappearance…She picked up the locket and walked to the bed.
Eyes closed, he was still sprawled like some pagan lord, his lean body completely relaxed. Words trembled on her lips, but she dared not speak. How could he answer her? He would either lie or tell the truth. If he said yes, it is Sandra’s, then she would know he had taken her. If he said no, it wasn’t Sandra’s, she would know he was lying to her. Either would be equally damning, because neither was acceptable to her. The room was suddenly cold and tawdry-looking, like she felt. A great place for a quick, meaningless encounter.
Trembling, she cautioned herself to take her lead from him—to keep it light and get the hell out before he inspired her to do anything else stupid.
“Well, sir, was that satisfactory?”
Ward frowned, his eyes narrowed, and one corner of his mouth pulled down. How did he manage to look so damned reserved and sensuous at the same time? It had to be his mouth, the way it could look so kissable and yet so insolent—like now.
“Very,” he said softly, watching her intently.
“Good,” she said briskly. She had finished dressing, but her hair was still loose. It swung in a fragrant, heavy mass when she leaned across the bed to pick up a small reticule he hadn’t noticed before. He picked up a tress of her hair, trapping her there within easy reach.
Leslie forced one of those sunny smiles Chane and Jennifer raved about, leaned forward, and kissed him very quickly on the nose. “Excellent. Then this should take care of it.” She let the money sprinkle down on his thighs. “I have to go now, love. I’m sure you will agree I have kept my part of the bargain. There is ten thousand dollars there. You can live like a king for a long time on that—almost anywhere except Arizona.” She laughed.
His hand fell away from her hair. He seemed to go still all over as if he were turned to stone. He didn’t move—didn’t change expression. He just looked at her without speaking, and she could feel the pain spreading out in waves around her throat and chest and knew she had to get out of there fast.
He picked up one of the hundred-dollar bills, then a thousand-dollar bill. His impassive mien didn’t change, but the look in his eyes did. The blue cooled inexplicably, turned opaque, unresponsive. He lifted one eyebrow questioningly, and she forced a little trill of laughter.
“I’m defining a new market for myself. That’s a new term I learned listening to Tim talk. We’re—getting married soon. I really can’t continue being your mistress—but you deserve to be compensated. A deal’s a deal.” She shrugged as if money matters always embarrassed her.
“Thanks, but as you can see”—he gestured casually to the shabby room—“I have everything I need.”
He was right about that anyway, she thought bitterly. She ached all over just looking at him—Apollo—sprawled in naked abandon.
She turned away, a smile curving her lips, shrugging. “Well, keep it anyway. I don’t need it. As Tim’s wife I will have everything I need. Who knows? You said once, maybe you could go straight. Why don’t you try it? You might even like it.”
“I tried that once,” he said softly. “People won’t let you up—once you’re down.” Did she detect bitterness in that husky quiet voice?
She was at the door now, and he was still on the bed, naked, his left arm folded under the back of his head. A ray of sunshine hitting the window just right sent a shimmer of brightness across the bed, backlighting his still form so that he was only a silhouette: Apollo, the sun god, framed in gold.
She paused, knowing better but unable to help herself, and her mind was filled with craziness: “A lighted chamber, a darkened court.” The phrase “Chambre Ardente” flashed into her head from some forgotten history lecture, and she could see the Courts of Cardinal Lorraine, in those dark ages before the Revolution, where prisoners were tried in torchlit chambers, the judges’ faces carefully hidden from the hapless men and women they judged. Those people had known instinctively, as she did now, that you could expect no mercy from a judge who hid his face from you.
It reminded her of the way Cantrell had always hidden his real self from her. Or had she only refused to see?
“So long, Cantrell.”
Ward picked up one of the bills and blew her a kiss.
“Thanks, hellcat.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Leslie was home by dinnertime.
“Did you have a nice ride?” Jennifer asked, smiling at her wind-flushed cheeks. “It was a lovely day for it.”
“Beautiful,” Leslie said, forcing a smile. She had resented all that autumn splendor because it didn’t suit her mood. But maybe, she conceded, there wasn’t a climate anywhere that would satisfy the needs of a woman who had just been ravished, impoverished, and rejected.
Jennifer was sensitive enough to catch the insincerity in her less than jubilant reply.
“Are you all right?” she asked, looking at Leslie closely. Leslie sighed. “I don’t know,” she admitted wearily.
“Would you like to talk about it?”
She shook her head, and even that negative response was a lie. She did want to talk about it—desperately—but there was no one she could turn to.
Jennifer might be one of his mistresses. How could she know? Even Chane, whom she trusted instinctively, was off limits because she might slip and incriminate his wife. Even Debbie was suspect. She had gone out with Ward, but fortunately she didn’t brag. Certainly Tim wouldn’t appreciate hearing about her love or hate relationship with another man.
Tim came after dinner that night and took her for a ride, and this time when he kissed her she responded exactly as he wanted her to. She couldn’t lie, but she snuggled closer into his arms, and that was answer enough. He wanted her, and she needed someone who wasn’t just using her. His love was a soothing balm, at a time when she desperately needed comforting.
“Leslie, please say you’ll marry me,” he pleaded.
The instinctive denial rose, but Leslie stifled it. She had already told Ward she was going to marry Tim. She could do a lot worse.
“All right,” she said softly.
“Do you mean it?” he asked incredulously, holding her away from him to let his black eyes burn into her.
“Yes, of course,” she said weakly.
“Oh, darling, you’ve made me the happiest man in the world!”
When he took her home he made a big production of asking Chane for her hand. Chane’s warm green eyes jolted her like a physical shock when he turned from Tim to her. She felt exposed—the whole facade she had erected to hide behind peeled away under that piercing look.
“So you’ve made your choice?” he asked gently.
He knew! She felt like a traitor now. What was he asking her? Since Ward is in trouble, you’ve chosen Tim? Her chin lifted defiantly. Let him think it! He didn’t know Ward—not really. But she writhed inwardly under his scrutiny. Was he really as disappointed in her as she imagined?
“Yes, I think marriage is still a valid choice,” she murmured, smiling.
“Well, if you’re sure, then of course you two have our blessing,” he answered smoothly, graciously, bending down to kiss her cheek. �
�I’ll find Jennie. She’s going to be thrilled at the prospect.”
The announcement of their engagement did not need to appear in the newspaper. Word was all over town instantly. Everyone knew! And she was wearing a one-carat diamond solitaire.
“It’s beautiful, Tim, but it looks so expensive.”
“I’ve had nothing to spend my money on before. All I ever did was work and save it. Now I have you, my darling. I want to dress you like a queen, set you in a beautiful mansion, frame you like the rare masterpiece you are, show you off to all my friends.”
He went on, but she wasn’t listening. Why did she suddenly feel like a possession?—the most prized treasure of all, but still only an acquisition?
Dusty Denton watched the lovely black-haired creature rush out of the hotel, her cheeks flushed with color. He waited patiently for Cantrell to come down. In two minutes Ward was coming down the stairs tying his guns down, one on each thigh as he strode into the room.
“Get ready to ride out,” he said flatly as Dusty came to his feet, his gray eyes watchful.
Dusty nodded to the others and they began to comply.
Ward passed on what Leslie had added to what they already knew.
“What’s the plan?” Dusty asked when he had finished.
“I want you and the rest of the men to gather up as big a herd of mixed brands as you can in three days and drive them to that point where the rustlers load ’em onto the railroad cars. By the time you get there, I should have something arranged. I’m going to pay a visit on Younger.”
“Alone?”
Ward grinned. “You’re not afraid, are you? I realize it gets scary out there at night, but if you all stay close together…”
“Graduated from Radcliffe, didn’t you? You know what I meant.” He grinned.
Ward had already dismissed him from his thoughts. There was a mood of controlled brutality that he was going to work off on someone. It might as well be Younger. He didn’t need a sorceress to tell him where Trinket had gone. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t dead.
Dusty interrupted, still trying to stop him from going it alone. “Boy, she must be some girl—spends two hours up there and turns you into a one-man army.”
“You should see what I’ve done in the last three days,” Ward said dryly.
“Just hearing about it was enough to scare hell out of me.”
“Me, too.”
Ward left, and Dusty joined Doug Paggett at the bar.
“What the hell is he up to?” Dusty asked.
“I don’t know. Did he look like he’d been shot or anything?”
Dusty scowled angrily at Doug.
“No,” Doug said, shaking his head, “I’m not joking. The last time he got real quiet and cool like this and took off all by himself we found out later it was because he took a bullet in the back when we were running from a posse. We didn’t see him again for months. He almost died. Hadn’t been for an old Mexican woman finding him in the desert he would’ve.”
“Why do you suppose he did that?”
Doug looked at the tiny dust cloud that was all they could still see of Ward Cantrell.
“He couldn’t keep up. I guess he didn’t want to slow us down.”
“You suppose it was the same woman I heard him telling the Castenadas about? He asked them to send a priest to bless the grave.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know she was dead.”
That mood of bitter passion still menaced Cantrell—growing darker and more vicious as he rode toward the Powers spread. Dusty hadn’t wanted to separate, but they knew each other well enough now so that he had accepted Ward’s mood and his decision as final.
Fate played strange tricks. Dusty Denton had grown up with him and graduated from Harvard in the class Ward had been expelled from. This was the third time his and Dusty’s paths had crossed. They rode with the Jackson Hole Gang in Wyoming at the same time, and now they were both trying to earn a pardon.
Dusty’s story was almost as bizarre as his own. He had inherited a ranch in the Texas panhandle about a year after he got out of school. He and his cousin took a trip to Lubbock to look over his holdings. He didn’t intend to stay, just to find out how much to sell it for, but his cousin got into a fight—a simple fistfight over a girl who smiled at him once too often. The other man drew a gun and shot Jonathan Denton in the chest. Jon was unarmed. When Dusty found out he went to the sheriff and demanded that justice be done, but there was a mob on the other side, and the sheriff was too timid to buck it. So Denton issued his own challenge for the other man to meet him in the street—Texas-style—even though he had never worn a gun around his waist. He bought a gunbelt, gun and bullets, and spent less than an hour practicing his draw before the showdown. He was a practiced marksman with a hunting rifle, and he discovered he was just as good with a handgun. He wasn’t as fast on the draw as the other man, but his opponent’s first shot missed. By then Dusty had his gun out. He fired one shot, and Red Dooley fell—dead before his head hit the ground.
The Texas rangers chased him out of Texas, and he couldn’t go home because the sheriff wired the police in Boston. He discovered that nothing spreads faster than bad news. The only solution was to travel in places where there was even less law than Texas.
Dusty hadn’t been a close friend of Ward’s at school or in Wyoming, but he was developing into one now. If they both managed to survive this…
Ward stopped himself with a frown. He was no Jack Hays, ranger hero. He was more a Poggin, the kind to die with his back against the wall, both guns smoking and only one bullet left in the chamber. When he took this job he hadn’t expected to survive it—just to die in a manner more of his choosing. He wasn’t a coward or a quitter; if he could survive it, he would. But survival hadn’t been a condition then, and it certainly wasn’t one now. He hadn’t gotten emotionally involved with a girl since Simone, and now that he was, he felt the loss as frustration and fury: frustration because he was trapped by circumstances that made it impossible for him to pursue her and fury that she was too eager to grab the gold ring!
He pushed the big black relentlessly, and the exertion of a wild, heedless ride brought all the muscles in his lean frame into play. The exercise and the rhythmic pounding of hooves flying over the desert finally worked its magic, and after an hour he slowed the horse, finally beginning to relax.
He settled down to a ground-eating pace that was more comfortable for his mount. The killing mood—the cold, deadly passion of the gunfighter—was in him now, and he knew it. He had felt the icy flicker of foreboding too many times—before too many confrontations—not to recognize it now. But always before he had resisted it. Now he welcomed it—goading the horse forward when it slowed its pace across the desert, ignoring the splendor of the sunset that was turning the sky into a panorama of coral and purple.
Dusk found him on the hill overlooking Powers’s fortress. The same controlled rage that had brought him there in headlong flight, cooled his nerves, now that he was in sight of his goal, hardening them with grim purpose. He rode the rest of the way slowly, deliberately, expecting Younger to be waiting for him. To all outward appearances he rode coolly, casually, but to a man familiar with his type, the very coolness of his demeanor was warning enough.
He stopped at the gate to Younger’s walled sanctuary, drew his gun, and fired twice into the air. He could hear the scuttle and yell of men in startled awareness and then a voice:
“Who goes thar?”
“Cantrell.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Younger.”
“He ain’t here anymore. Picked up his things and left last night.”
“Then you won’t mind if I come in and look around, will you?”
There was a short conference and then the gate screeched open on rusty hinges. The man doing the talking looked like any honest range rider. He wasn’t one of the men who rode with Younger; and he wore no gun. Most cowboys didn’t, though.
“Come ahead.”
There was a man in the lookout tower with a rifle trained on Ward as soon as the door swung open. It followed him all the way to the house, and Ward knew it would be there when he came out, if he came out. If these men believed he had killed Powers, they weren’t showing any signs of it. He didn’t believe Younger was gone, but it was possible. Younger knew exactly where he stood with the new owner. At the porch he stopped, dismounted, and faced the man who had greeted him at the gate.
“Did Younger have a girl with him when he left here?”
Slim Whitman watched the man’s eyes—cool, merciless blue—and was suddenly glad he wasn’t Younger. “Yeah. A pretty, blond girl. She waited here two days for him to come from Phoenix, then they grabbed a few things and hit off for the mountains.”
“Talk in town has it that I killed Powers and made off with the girl,” he said, watching the man’s face for any sign.
“Reckon they must be wrong, then,” the man said coolly.
Ward considered the answer and then nodded—much to Slim’s relief. “Did he take any men with him?”
Slim felt no special loyalty to Younger. He’d had his own doubts about the gun-toting foreman and his special riders. “You want to set a spell? About dinnertime,” he said laconically, waving to the man in the tower to lower the rifle.
“Thanks.”
Ward shared the simple fare with twenty or so cowhands, and then he and the man who had finally introduced himself as Slim Whitman moved out to the porch to enjoy the whir of crickets and the trill of a few birds before the cold night winds made it too unpleasant.
They talked about numerous things, all seemingly inconsequential, but in short order Ward had gotten a picture of an operation similar to the robber baron Cheseldine’s some years back. Slim was perceptive. He was one of the spread’s regular hands, not privy to any crooked deals, but he had sharp eyes and a quick mind, and apparently he had sized Ward up and made his decision. Else Ward could have gotten a bullet from that tower without warning. When Ward stood up to go, Slim put out his rough hand, and Ward took it. A grin spread across Slim’s lantern-jawed face, then quickly disappeared.
The Lady and the Outlaw Page 39
