“Let me see her better,” Luke called. “Just to be sure it’s her and not some whore you brought with you. The sun’s in my eyes.”
“You know who it is. Your little songbird. We had her in camp long enough for her to tell us all about you bein’ her hubby.”
“That’s not true,” Luke said quickly, never taking his eyes off Sarah and Benedict as they moved away from the woodpile. The morning sun made them both glow in a golden light. “She mistook me for her dead husband.”
He lifted his gun and steadied his nerves. It would be a hard shot, but he had it in him. All he needed was patience and the right opportunity.
“Two. Or did I already say that? Three!”
Luke exhaled, aimed and squeezed the trigger. At the same instant, something hard and flat smashed into his head, stunning him. His finger came back reflexively. The six-gun fired but the bullet tore into the dirt not ten feet in front of him. It missed Benedict by a country mile. The frying pan landed again on his head. This time the world turned black around him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SHE SAYS IT’S true, so it must be. Why, by stars and garters, a sweet little thing like her’d never lie. Would you, Sweet Little Thing?”
The voice came from a million miles away. Through a dull ache and eyes that threatened to pop from his skull, Luke Hadley fought to understand what was happening. A blink or two got his eyes open enough so he had to squint into the sun. He lay flat on his back outside the cabin. Crazy Water Benedict snaked his arm around Sarah Youngblood, drawing her close. She tried to force herself away, but he was too strong. As thin as she was, Sarah might never have been strong enough against such a powerful man.
“Let her be. She’s done nothing to you.” Luke struggled to sit up. Benedict kicked him squarely in the chest, slamming him back to the ground.
“Now, boy, did I ask you for an opinion? I don’t remember doin’ that, not at all.” He drew Sarah to him and planted a kiss on her lips. She went limp and collapsed. He stepped away and stared at her wilted body.
“You always had that effect on women, Mal.”
“Audrey?” Luke craned around and saw his wife moving about. She held a skillet in her hand. As she came more fully into his line of sight, she swung it back and forth. The swishing sound reminded him of something. It took a second to finally place it.
He’d heard that sound an instant before something whacked him in the back of the head.
“Audrey? What are you doing?” Luke tried to make sense of what had happened. He was too mixed up to find answers to a heap of questions, about Sarah, about Benedict, about why Audrey acted the way she did.
“See, Mal? Keeping me all cooped up for a month like this sapped me of my strength. I meant to mash his head flatter ’n a pancake. Twice. I had to hit him twice to knock him over!”
“You didn’t have to bother. I’d’ve shot him.” Benedict straddled Luke, a six-gun aimed squarely at his face.
He caught his breath. He had been in this same position before. At the wedding. Flat on his back, only he’d been shot a couple times then before Benedict pointed the gun at him. The only thing missing was . . .
“Kiss me, Mal.” Audrey spun into the outlaw’s embrace and planted a big wet kiss on his lips. She looked down at Luke and grinned. Never had he seen a woman so evil. And memory trickled back. She had given him the same look at the wedding, only he had been too stunned to realize it. All he had seen was how Crazy Water Benedict kissed her, not how she returned her supposed kidnapper’s kiss.
“One thing’s missing.” Benedict swung the woman around and raised his six-shooter.
A flame a foot long spat from the muzzle. A slug to his shoulder drove Luke back flat on the ground. He kicked feebly. The physical impact hurt him bad. The way Audrey kissed the outlaw hurt him even more emotionally.
“I wanted to get away from Rollie. I saw you, Mister Farmer Man. You couldn’t keep your eyes off me, but you were dirt poor.” Audrey laughed. “Get it? A farmer is dirt poor? I heard about the railroad wanting your land and knew you’d come into a pile of money.”
“So you married me?” The words grated as they came out. Anger buoyed him. If he got to his feet, he’d rip Benedict’s arms off and beat him to death with them. What he’d do to Audrey was going to be worse.
“She thought she’d cross Rhoades by leaving the gang. Nobody does that.” Benedict guffawed. “Nobody did that. I’m glad he’s buzzard bait now. I never liked him much.”
“I only had eyes for you, Mal. That’s why I snuck off in Chicago to get away from Rollie. He wanted things from me that I wanted to keep private just for you.”
“You’re such a liar.” Benedict pulled her close again.
“That’s why we’re so good together. We understand each other just fine.”
“I want a divorce,” Luke said. He slumped back and stared into the sky. Clouds formed. There’d be rain later in the day. He wanted to see it. He hoped he lived long enough to see it.
Both of them laughed. Audrey bent and plucked a six-gun from where it lay beside Luke. She hefted it, cocked it and fired. Luke winced. The two laughed at him again.
“Darling Luke, I was checking to see if the gun was loaded. I’m a crack shot. I never miss.” She snuggled closer to Benedict. “Let me shoot him, Mal. Please. You owe me that much.”
“He married you.”
“He said he wanted a divorce. Let me give it to him.”
Luke looked up at a pair of six-shooters aimed at his head.
“Don’t be dumb. He can’t divorce you. You’re already married. Or have you forgot that night in Chicago?”
“Forgot it? How could I, Mal? It was the best night of my life, all night long.” She looked down the barrel at Luke. “It was our honeymoon, our wedding night.”
“Wedding? You were already married to . . . him?” Luke thought the pain in his soul had reached a limit before. He found out how wrong he was. She had lied over and over. The worst part of it was that part of him still believed her and loved her.
“Of course she was.” Benedict cocked his six-gun. His finger drew back on the trigger and then the gun discharged.
Luke lay on the ground, wondering if this was what it felt like to be dead. His agony hadn’t changed one iota. Then he saw how Audrey had batted Benedict’s gun away. How she had batted her husband’s gun away.
She still loved him! He had begun to doubt her but this showed she would risk her own life to save his.
Then he realized what he should have before. Nothing Audrey did was for him. She thought only of herself.
“I told you to let me shoot him, Mal. You owe it to me. You do.”
“Go on. Shoot him. Smack in the middle of the chest like I did before.”
“That didn’t work out so well for you,” Luke grated out. Then he screamed in pain as Audrey pulled the trigger and heavy lead smashed into his chest.
Things happened all out of sequence from the way they should. Her gun spat lead and there was a second explosion and a bullet ripped through his flesh, only it ran across his chest, not through it. The shock knocked him senseless.
“All happy, my sweet?”
“Yeah, Mal, all happy. And I’m glad you finished off Rollie. It saved me from having to do it.”
“You’d never work up the nerve. You were scared of him.”
Luke heard the argument through the ringing in his ears. He didn’t understand what had happened. He wasn’t dead. His chest burned like fire, but a sticky stream trickled down his side. Dead men don’t bleed. Their hearts stopped pumping their lifeblood. And nobody he’d ever talked to spoke of a dead man feeling such pain.
There’d been a preacher who talked of hellfire and eternal damnation for the wicked. Luke had done nothing to deserve that fate. Killing the outlaws he had in the past day ought to send him to heaven, not the ot
her way. He had stopped killers from murdering even more innocents. And it had been in self-defense. Coming to rescue his wife and then Sarah Youngblood was the right thing to do, too.
His life wasn’t perfect, but damnation for what he had done seemed far too extreme.
“What are we going to do, Mal? Rollie wanted to head down into Indian Territory until the law stopped hunting us.”
“That was his plan. He buried the gold, then we killed off the rest so we could keep it for ourselves.”
“I knew him like the back of my hand. He intended to kill you, Mal. Maybe me, too, and keep it all for himself.”
Luke heard the pair moving back and forth. One sound confused him until he recognized Audrey’s skirts brushing the ground near him. He held his breath and kept his eyes closed. The impulse was to squeeze them shut tight but he resisted.
“I killed him good and proper. Look at that, Mal. His vest caught on fire. Why’d that happen? I wasn’t close enough to him for the muzzle flash to heat him up like that.”
Luke kept from grunting as a foot ground down on his chest. Audrey stamped out the smoldering cloth. He hadn’t even felt the fire.
“Leave him be. I ought to find some of the dynamite Rhoades always carted around and stick that in his mouth. Blow his fool head off.”
“Why’d you go and do a thing like that, Mal Benedict? He’s already dead.”
“Those are the lips that kissed my blushing bride. I don’t share you with anybody, much less a Kansas sodbuster.”
“He was a Free Stater, too. He said so.”
“All the more reason to blow him to smithereens.”
“The gold, Mal. You know where Rollie hid it? If we get it, you and me, why don’t we just take it and ride north? It’s cooler up in Canada right now. Or heading over to Montana would give us both a change of scenery.”
“He had a point about the posse. I tried to decoy them south. That marshal from Crossroads is one smart cayuse. He didn’t buy it for a second. And from what I overheard one night as I spied on his camp, there’s a second posse roaming around hunting for us.”
“You spied on them? Like an Indian creeping up in the dark? That excites me, Mal. It excites me a whole bunch. Why don’t you do that tonight, when we’re camped and the fire goes low? Then me and you—”
“Where are we going to camp? Somewhere in the direction of where Rhoades hid the gold?”
Audrey laughed. From the sound, she kissed Benedict again, but Luke dared not sneak a peek. The pain faded a mite, but the blood kept running down his side and soaking into his coat. That meant he hadn’t died and this wasn’t his punishment in the afterlife. His mind spun about in crazy circles. He wasn’t dead, but what if Audrey remembered him telling her he had sewn the gold dust into the seams of his coat? If she searched him, she had to find out he was alive. As weak as he was, fighting was out of the question. Even pulling a trigger was too much of an exertion.
He went limp. The sun burned his face, and the sounds around him faded to nothing.
In his dreams, he swam in a cool lake. Water all around, floating, drifting, going nowhere and not caring. Then he sputtered as he started to drown. He turned his head to the side. Water cascaded down against his injured ear. Every drop turned to acid. The pain jolted him awake. He blinked and got dirt from his eyes and stared up into Sarah Youngblood’s admiring face. She held a china pitcher.
“More? Do you want more water?”
Luke sputtered and then croaked out, “Drink. Thirsty.” His face felt like leather and someone had lined his throat with sandpaper.
“Don’t choke like you did before.”
She lifted his head and rested it in her lap. A trickle of water from the pitcher became a downpour. This time he was ready. Spitting some out, he kept enough in his parched mouth to revive him. Then he wondered if it was worth the effort. No part of him didn’t hurt like a million ants crawled along his veins, nipping viciously and biting out hunks of his flesh.
He forced his way to a sitting position. Her hand stroked over his matted hair. When she brushed across his ear, he recoiled. The movement highlighted how many other places he hurt, especially dead center of his chest.
“Why aren’t I dead?” He probed the burned spot on his vest. Then he laughed. “The derringer. Audrey’s bullet struck the derringer!” He pulled the ruined two-barreled pistol from his vest pocket. Her slug had hit the gun and set off a round, making her think she had killed him. The errant round from the derringer left a shallow groove in his chest and caused the blood to run down his side. The way it soaked his coat fooled both Audrey and Benedict into thinking she had killed him.
“Those terrible Johnny Rebs,” Sarah said. “They tried to kill you, and I couldn’t stop them.”
“You collapsed. Are you all right?” He felt a pang of guilt. He had intended to shoot past her in an attempt to kill Crazy Water Benedict. If he had missed, Sarah’s life would have been forfeit. She might be crazy but she wasn’t murderous like his wife.
Like his never-wife because she had already married Benedict.
“They rode off. That way. You should warn your commanding officer. This battle isn’t over yet.”
“No, it’s not.” He peeled back the matted cloth of his shirt and vest. The blood that soaked into his coat made it feel twice its weight, and that included the gold dust sewn into it. Audrey had been in too big a rush to lay her hands on the gold from the bank robbery to remember what Luke had considered their nest egg.
“I’m not good at bandaging wounds, but I can try. For my hero, Lucas, I can try.”
Deceiving her caused him less guilt than he expected. As he leaned heavily on Sarah, they made their way to the stream. He stripped down and began washing off the caked blood. She disappeared for a while, leaving him to his own devices. It gave him a chance to plot and plan. He lacked the skills to track that most of the others showed, but he knew the general direction Benedict and Audrey had taken.
“Mister and Missus Malcolm Benedict,” he said with bitterness oozing from every word. That simple declaration, as much as anything else, solidified his plans and strengthened his resolve. Justice would be meted out. They had left him his Schofield. If he thought he needed them, other weapons were scattered around the gang’s former hideout.
Chasing after them on his plow horse might be a slow process, but he needed time to heal. He had beaten Rollie Rhoades in a fair gunfight—and it felt good seeing the outlaw with a slug in his chest. The pleasure would be even greater when he gunned down Crazy Water Benedict.
But what about Audrey? He had loved her with all his heart and soul. She had never cared one whit for him. She saw him as a sucker to be fleeced and nothing more. Her time with Rhoades in Chicago and with Benedict for who knows how long had turned her heart into cold, black stone. In spite of that, Luke doubted he had the nerve to return the favor she had shown him. Pulling the trigger if he had the drop on her wasn’t in the cards.
When Sarah returned, he felt good enough to be embarrassed by his lack of clothing. He had shed everything down to his long johns, and then had peeled away the torso to reveal all his wounds. After he healed, there’d be an army of scars crossing over his side and especially his chest. He probed the wicked red wound just above his diaphragm where the derringer had exploded. The groove left by the bullet after the pistol discharged was hardly more than a rope burn, but that didn’t mean he felt no pain. He winced as Sarah touched it.
“I can fix that. I found some salve.” She slathered on some. He almost passed out as pain drove like a knife into his body. “Sorry, Lucas, so sorry. I’m no good at this. I should have volunteered with that Clara Barton lady and learned how to be a nurse.”
“You’re doing fine.” Light-headed, he wobbled about. She supported him. How he had a chance against Benedict in his condition posed a question he dared not answer. He had to go.
>
Mal Benedict. And his wife. Luke had to go before they reached the gold cache and disappeared for good. He had an idea where they rode now. If they got to Canada or anywhere else, finding them would be a matter of pure chance. He had the feeling that he had used up all the good luck for a lifetime.
“Now to wrap some bandages around you.” Her hands lovingly caressed him. If the situation had been different, the temptation to lie and claim he was her dead husband could easily have overwhelmed his sense of right and wrong. She was thin and had worn the wedding dress so long it had become a part of her. He had scraped off his blood-soaked clothing. Her dress clung from years of sweat and grime. They both needed a change of clothing after all they’d been through.
He sucked in his breath as she pulled the bandage tight. Where she had found them mattered less to him than what he said next.
“I have to leave, Sarah. You need to stay here. Or better yet, ride and find the posse. They’re out there somewhere.”
“I’m not leaving you. Never again, Lucas!” She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him off-balance. It took all his strength to keep from falling over.
“It’s going to be dangerous, and I don’t want you hurt.”
“I won’t ever let you go anywhere without me.”
For a waif as emaciated as Sarah Youngblood, she had what felt like a death grip around his neck. Prying her loose wasn’t possible until he agreed to let her ride with him.
“I’ll take real good care of you. I will, Lucas, I promise!”
“Do you have a horse?” Everything about her riding off with Marta Shearing came to him in fuzzy patches.
“I do. That bossy woman found me one. She ordered me around, so I left. I came back here to you.” She got him in a headlock again. It wasn’t any easier prying her arms loose a second time.
“So Miss Shearing wasn’t hurt? What did she do after you left?”
Tin Star Page 21
