The driver banged on the compartment door and warned his passengers they were moving out again. Luke tied his horse’s reins to the back of the coach, then climbed up into the driver’s box. The hardwood seat had been rubbed smooth by more than one guard riding alongside the driver. It took only a few seconds to realize a pillow under his backside would have been a comfort.
The driver pulled the reins off the brake, settled them in his left hand, then used the long whip to crack over the lead horse’s head. The team protested and lurched forward. Once on the road they settled into a steady pull.
“Don’t want to tire ’em out more ’n they already are with a quicker gait,” the driver said. “As much as I want to get to town, it’s no good havin’ them die in harness.”
“Your team’s lathered up already,” Luke observed.
“I might have pushed them a mite hard when I saw the smoke risin’ up from the way station. That was a goodly three miles down the road. I’m real sorry I done that now, but how was I to know? There’s not been serious trouble since the Pawnee uprisin’ four, five years back.”
How was he to know? Luke didn’t have a good answer, so held his tongue. The rattle of the wheels and the wheezing of the tired horses as they strained to pull the heavy stage drowned out much of what the driver said. It didn’t matter. The man was less inclined to want conversation than someone to listen to him. That suited Luke just fine. He drifted with the roll and bump and creaking of the leather straps acting as springs and returned to the day.
That day. The day he married Audrey.
He hardly remembered the preacher’s words. He was drifting in a world of shock and love and realization that he had finally found his heart’s desire in the woman. So beautiful and she had taken to him right away, unlike any other woman he had ever met. He had seen her in the general store and had been too shy to speak, but she had been bold. Now the wedding dress accentuated her trim figure and turned her into an angel come to earth. His hand had shaken like he had the palsy as he slipped the gold band onto her finger. The preacher’s words had come from a thousand miles away, as if through the roar of a Kansas tornado and Audrey laughing in delight at his shock. “Man and wife,” the preacher had said. “You may kiss the bride,” he had said.
Luke had. Audrey returned the kiss fervently and the world shattered around them. He remembered gunfire. Three of the guests had been cut down. Luke kept his arm around Audrey’s waist and saw Rollie Rhoades, his smiling baby face and his six-gun blazing away. That vision distracted him from Mal Benedict.
Crazy Water Benedict, they called him, because of his fondness for whiskey laced with locoweed. He was worse than his boss when it came to wanton killing. He had rushed forward. Luke saw his best man slaughtered. He tried to push Audrey behind him when Benedict’s first bullet crashed into his shoulder. A second slug knocked him flat onto his back so he stared up at the bower blocking the hot noonday sun.
He clenched his hands so tight he shook as he remembered how Benedict had kissed her and aimed the six-shooter at him and the muzzle flash and smoke and tearing pain in his chest. He pressed his hand against the spot.
“You all right?” The driver looked sideways at him. “You ain’t havin’ a heart attack or anything like that, are you?”
“An old war injury.” Luke laughed but there wasn’t a shred of humor in the sound. Rhoades had been responsible for saving him, though he didn’t know it. Luke had hardly been fifteen in 1858 but his pa had sent him to Trading Post to buy seed grain. Charles Hamilton had led the Border Ruffians in what became known as the Marais des Cygnes massacre. Riding with him had been Rhoades and Benedict and other bloodthirsty killers. Rhoades had detonated an explosion that sent a piece of shrapnel into Luke’s chest.
He had cursed the shrapnel for sixteen years, and yet it had saved him. Rhoades’s buried shrapnel had deflected Benedict’s killing bullet, even though the shard had slipped deeper into his chest.
“You for certain sure you’re all right? You turned pale as a whitewashed fence post. Now, I know a man who sees what we just did can react later on. It’s like a fuse burnin’. You not gettin’ ready to explode because of what happened to the Tomlinsons, now, are you?”
“How much farther?”
“Not far.” The driver sounded as relieved to declare that as Luke was to hear it.
Within a half hour, the prairie town of Preston showed itself and before the hour the driver drew rein on his exhausted team in front of the depot. The two passengers erupted from the compartment before the driver or Luke had a chance to warn them what they’d find when they retrieved their luggage.
Their reactions caused a ripple of laughter among the men gathered to greet the stage, but the silence that descended on them all when they saw the condition of the woman’s corpse gave Luke the chance to drop down, heave the body over his horse’s back and ask where to find the town doctor.
Several men pointed in the same direction. Luke headed that way. He considered asking for new directions when he turned the corner on the main thoroughfare and headed down a narrower street. Then he saw the badly painted sign swinging in the late afternoon breeze.
“‘Doctor Payne.’” He smiled ruefully. If he couldn’t take some amusement at that, he wasn’t likely to ever find laughter in the world.
His horse let out a thankful whinny as he took the body from the saddle. The woman hadn’t weighed much in life. In death she was only a pile of bones and charred flesh, but the horse’s objection came more from the smell than the weight. Luke kicked open the door, swung about agilely and dropped his load on an examining table.
Seated at a desk across the room, a man with a shock of mussed gray hair looked up. He adjusted his wire-rim glasses and scowled.
“I’m not taking patients, sir. Especially not ones all wrapped up like a mummy.”
“Don’t rightly know what a mummy is, but this isn’t a patient intended for a doctor. It’s a dead body wanting a coroner’s expert opinion.” Luke almost choked. The stagecoach driver had said only the Tomlinsons were in the way station. This woman had been the same size as Audrey. The Rhoades gang might have shot her and left her to burn. Why bring her all this way was a mystery, but Rhoades and Benedict acted out of mad dog spite, not any kind of logic.
“You paying for the burial? I’m the town digger, too.”
“Tell me what you can about her.” Luke settled on the edge of the doctor’s desk.
“You get on out of here and let me work.”
Luke didn’t budge.
Doctor Payne shrugged, ran his fingers through his hair instead of using a decent comb, grabbed a white coat and went to the examining table.
“Well, now, what do we have here? A burned body.” He rubbed his nose as the tarp fell away from the body. “A woman.” He poked and prodded and made a rude noise when an arm fell off.
“How old was she?” Luke wanted to hear that Mrs. Tomlinson’s grandmother had been visiting. That would explain the unknown extra female in the way station.
“Not old. From the look of her, not more than thirty. Less.”
Luke tried to swallow but a lump in his throat grew and choked him.
“There’s no way to ever know what she looked like when she was alive and kicking. The fire burned away her face. Even the skull is cracked from the fire. What caused so much heat?”
“It was likely an explosion.”
The doctor nodded slowly as he ran his index finger around the bare skull.
“That makes sense. The cheekbones are broken, but not from a beating. A stick or two of dynamite going off a few feet in front of her would cause this damage.” He made a quick grab as the arm fell off the table. He caught it before it hit the floor.
“Is that a wedding ring?” Luke wondered if the words even escaped his lips. His heart hammered so hard he barely heard his own voice.
&nb
sp; “It is.” Doctor Payne broke off the ring finger and knocked debris away, cleaning off soot and charred flesh the best he could. He held it up, looked at it, then polished it with a cloth.
Luke grabbed it from him. He wanted Audrey’s wedding ring back. If he couldn’t have her, he’d treasure the ring forever.
Looking at it brought tears to his eyes. The initials etched inside the ring weren’t hers—or his. It was a terrible thing to be grateful for another’s death, but his hope that Audrey still lived flared bright and true, as bright and true as his love for her.
The doctor took it back and tucked it into his coat pocket.
“’Less I miss my guess, that’s the ring Tommy Zinn gave Beatrice Willum. Those are the right initials. Not many Z and W folks in these parts and none of them would end up together inside a ring like this.”
“Willum?” Luke had heard the name but was too numbed to remember when.
“Tommy worked at the way station until Beatrice took it into her head to marry him. He was a layabout, a good-for-nothing boy, but then she was hardly a prize. Their wedding was the talk of Preston a few months back. Where’d you find this body?”
Luke told the doctor/coroner/undertaker what he could.
“Sounds like she was visiting the Tomlinsons. Sorry to hear about them. They were good people. Some of the few in this forsaken town to actually pay up their bills when they came due.” The doctor cleared his throat. “Are you going to ride out to the Willum farm and let Beatrice’s folks know?”
Luke shook his head. “It’s not good hearing this from a total stranger. You knew them, at least a little. I’m not too good with delivering such sorry news.” Luke felt the itch to hurry on, now that he knew Audrey hadn’t died in the fire.
“You have any idea where Tommy is? No, I reckon not if you’re just riding through.” Doctor Payne turned the simple statement into condemnation.
Luke dropped a twenty-dollar gold piece onto the doctor’s desk for the burial and left without another word.
He stepped into the sultry night and wished for a wind to kick up and dry the tears pouring down his cheeks. Like his luck, not a puff of air came his way.
CHAPTER TWO
LUKE HADLEY FELT apart from everyone around him. He bumped into a man and bounced away, hardly noticing. The man muttered something about drunks, but Luke’s shock didn’t require booze. Nothing mattered anymore. Preston, Kansas, was a decent enough town. It wasn’t much different from the town he had grown up in, but everything struck him as hollow, empty, no longer the sort of place for anyone to make a home.
Audrey was gone and her kidnappers were still at large. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought the encounter with the Border Ruffians before the war would echo down through time to blight him now. At every turn they made his life a living hell. He had been so sure that the body in the burned-out way station had been his wife’s.
“What if it had been Audrey?” He realized he spoke out loud when heads turned to stare at him. He hurried on. While he cared nothing about what the townspeople thought of him, he still felt embarrassed at acting this way. He lied to himself about getting tougher emotionally. If anything, every contact with the Rhoades gang opened new wounds. Giving up was the sensible thing to do. The easy trail. Just walk away. The chance that Audrey was still alive after so many months was less than drawing to an inside straight against a professional cardsharp. But a tiny spark of hope still burned in him.
Without knowing it, his steps turned toward the Drunken Cow Saloon and Drinking Emporium. Music playing badly on an untuned piano poured from inside. Bright lights spilled onto the boardwalk under the double swinging doors, and laughter reminded him it was possible to enjoy life.
“Others can enjoy themselves. There’s no way I can, not without Audrey.”
He stopped just outside the doors. The heavy clouds of cigar smoke and black fumes from the coal oil lamps engulfed him. He coughed, then heard the clink of glasses against the bar and the liquid gush of rotgut whiskey going into those glasses. Taking the doors one in each hand, he pushed them open and stared around inside the Drunken Cow. It lived up to its name. Three men were stacked like cordwood to one side, all passed out. Another man sprawled in a barber chair at the back of the room. Whether it was the barber sleeping off a long day of cutting hair or someone who found the empty chair comfortable and claimed it for his own hardly mattered. All that mattered to Luke at the moment was quenching his thirst—and letting the tarantula juice make him forget for a while.
The saloon keeper worked to keep the lined-up glasses filled with tarantula juice and the mugs topped with foamy beer. The sight drew Luke to the mahogany bar that ran the length of the room. He wasn’t a drinking man, but he had built a powerful thirst from the instant he saw the destroyed stage depot out along the road.
“Welcome, mister. What’s your pleasure?” The jolly barkeep twirled the tip of a well-greased mustache and grinned. Two gold teeth flashed in the light from the oil lamp overhead. He hitched up his canvas apron and moved so he could rest his protuberant gut against the back of the bar. “We got the finest bourbon whiskey in all of Kansas. Billy Taylor’s, it is. Or if you want to do nothing more ’n wet your whistle, nobody’s complained about our beer. It’s brewed right here in Preston, just down the street. I ain’t sampled it but customers say this batch is ’bout the best old man O’Malley’s cranked out in months.”
“They wouldn’t dare complain,” joshed the man next to Luke. “You’d cut them off.” The man slapped Luke on the shoulder and explained. “The beer’s awful but it’s all we got in Preston. O’Malley’s pa brews it himself.”
“He does that very thing, and I take pride in the family business.” The barkeep held up a clean mug so Luke could see the cut facets reflecting rainbows. He even caught sight of himself. “Whiskey or beer? Both will get you where you want to go.”
“Beer,” Luke decided. It didn’t matter to him if Abe Lincoln’s ghost brewed the beer. He wanted it to be wet and he wanted to forget, if only for a few minutes. He dropped two bits on the bar.
“That’s good for five mugs. You want change or should I keep the brew flowing?”
Luke tasted the beer. Then he drained it in a long draft and put the mug down with a click.
“Keep it coming.”
“That’s what I like to hear!” O’Malley refilled the mug and worked his way back down the bar, listening to sad stories and telling jokes and keeping his customers happy.
Luke wished he could share in that joviality. He didn’t know any of them. He didn’t care to. All he wanted was to be alone with his sorrow. It didn’t matter if he wallowed in self-pity. Audrey was still captive.
For a moment he brightened at the notion she wasn’t dead, that Benedict and the others held her captive. But that might be worse than being dead. They weren’t men any woman should be forced to deal with.
He eventually lost track of how many beers he downed. He remembered dropping another fifty cents on the counter but never knew if he had polished off five beers before starting on another ten. Or if he got anywhere near what he’d paid for. The best part was that the men on either side left him alone. He drank and thought of Audrey and the life they had planned.
Then he just drank.
The saloon turned quiet as the men passed out or left. He had a full mug in front of him and lifted it, only to have his elbow jostled. He spilled the beer onto the bar. Irrational anger flared. Pivoting on his heel, he spun and faced a man an inch taller and fifty pounds heavier. There might have been an ounce of fat on his body, but where wasn’t obvious. Luke faced a giant capable of ripping his arms off and beating him to death with them.
This enraged him even more.
He shoved the man so hard he took two steps to keep his balance. Spurs jingling, the man turned and squared off. His hand hovered near the Colt slung low on his right hip. He
might not be a gunslinger, but he was no stranger to using the smoke wagon weighing him down.
“You’re mighty clumsy,” the man said in a voice so low it rumbled like summer thunder.
“You made me spill my beer.” Luke put his hand in the frothy puddle on the bar.
“How’d you know? You’re so drunk you can’t see straight. Now tell me you’re sorry you shoved me.”
Luke lifted his hand and flicked beer droplets in the man’s face. It was as if his brain had become detached from his body. He floated a few feet away, watching himself provoke the man. With either fists or gun, that man could destroy him. Luke knew it, but his body never got the message. He stepped away from the bar, slipped the leather thong off the hammer of his Model 3 and waited. If he listened to the detached part of his brain he would have been scared and run like a scalded dog. Nothing of the sort penetrated the alcoholic fog.
“I’ve never killed anybody in Preston before. Looks like I’ve got the chance now—unless you tell me real sincere like how sorry you are.”
“Busby, wait. Busby!” A voice from the direction of the door made Luke half turn. It was stupid to do that when he faced a man ready to throw down on him, but he wasn’t thinking clearly. Or thinking at all.
Standing with the batwing doors held open, the stagecoach driver looked downright perturbed.
“Busby,” he called again. “I need to talk with you.”
“In a minute, George. First, this galoot’s going to apologize for being such a—”
“Busby!” The driver rushed over and grabbed the man’s hand to prevent him from drawing.
Luke recognized this as an opportunity. If he drew and fired, that would end the fight. But nothing made any sense. He was mad but had trouble remembering why. He wiped his beer-soaked hand on his lapel and tried to focus.
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