The Accidental Guardian

by Mary Connealy

  As if that were a good thing.

  “Yep. Are you ready to move on? I’ve been going slow, holding us back, but now we need to push hard.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “It’s your turn to ride, Deb.” Gwen, the blonde, pretty as a picture and with a sweetness about her that seemed to draw the children, finished with the diaper and quickly dressed the little boy. She seemed to do more of the care of the children while Deb did everything else. And looking at Gwen and those young’uns, a body’d be excused for thinking she was their ma. They all had nearly white blond hair. The two little ones had blue eyes, and Gwen’s were a different shade, more greenish, yet the three looked like a matched set.

  “I want to walk a little farther, Gwen.”

  “You’ve been walking all morning.” Gwen scowled.

  Deb smiled and slid an arm around Gwen’s waist. Sisters. For the first time Trace could see the resemblance when they stood close. The dark hair against the light fooled a man, but they had those same bright eyes and pretty oval faces.

  “You know the children behave better for you, and they’ve just had a long nap. Ride with them for an hour or so more, then I’ll take a turn with them when they’re sleepy. You’ll be working harder on that horse than I will walking.”

  Gwen’s eyes narrowed. “Deb, I’m not riding all day while you walk.”

  Trace could tell these two had similar battles often as they tried to share the work.

  Deb laughed and it was such a sweet sound, Trace found himself leaning closer to her. He straightened away as soon as he noticed what he was doing.

  “I’ve walked all the way across this huge country, Gwen, and done it mostly carrying a chubby little boy. Walking all day isn’t much of a problem.”

  “I know.” Gwen smiled.

  Ronnie said, “Mama? Where Mama?”

  The smiles on both sisters faded.

  Ronnie started crying and clung to Gwen’s neck and repeated “Mama” against it in a muffled voice.

  “Where Auntie Dee ’n Unca Abe?” Maddie Sue asked from her perch on Trace’s shoulders.

  Trace’s big hands on those little-girl legs tightened slightly. He knew about a parent dying. Knew too much about it. He thought again of The voice of one crying in the wilderness. It reminded him of some crying he’d done years ago when he was alone in the wilderness.

  Gwen held Ronnie tight and rocked him. Deb didn’t try to explain it.

  Trace’s mom had died when he was about Maddie Sue’s age, and he had no memories of her at all. If no one ever spoke of the Scotts again, would these children soon forget they’d ever existed? Ronnie would for sure, while Maddie Sue might hold on to dim memories.

  Gwen and Deb shared a somber, worried moment. None of them knew what to say. Try and explain death? Distract the young’uns and move on? Which was right?

  Gwen said quietly, “I’ll ride with the children. At least for now.”

  Nodding, Deb stepped up to Trace and reached for him in a way that made his heart start pounding. Deb reached on higher and lifted Maddie Sue off his shoulders.

  He felt a little dizzy once he realized she hadn’t been reaching for him; his mind had just gone wild.

  He helped transfer Maddie Sue and got everyone mounted up on Black, hunted up his hat, and they set out.

  “I’m going to walk just as fast as we can, Deb. Let me know when you need to slow down, but by my figuring we’ve only come about five miles up that trail, and with my tracking we made mighty slow work of it. We have to cover a lot of ground. The temperature out here drops at night, and we’ll be walking well after dark even if we make good time and don’t stop very often. We’ll be sorry to be caught out.”

  “As I said, Trace, I’ve walked across the bulk of this whole country. Let’s move fast and try to beat as much of the cold as we can.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  They turned south at the fork in the trail and walked along in silence for a time, Trace setting a fast pace with his long legs and Deb keeping up without a word of protest.

  She didn’t want to make this one bit harder on him than it already was. The man was saving their lives plain and simple, and she’d do her best to make that as easy as possible. He was already taking a twenty-mile walk when he could be riding.

  Trace led the horse. Deb listened to Gwen and the children’s lighthearted chatter about everything—the trees, the horse, the dog, the sky. No such simple conversation sprung up between Deb and Trace.

  It reached a point, though, when they’d settled into a comfortable walk and had put an hour of the trail behind them that the silence began to bother Deb. And it didn’t look like he was ever going to break it.

  “Tell me about your ranch, Trace.”

  “Uh . . . well, it’s a ranch.” He lapsed back into silence. It was possible he was walking faster, too. “With cows and such.”

  Cows and such? Well, Deb had interviewed people for her newspaper and heaven knew they weren’t all eager to talk.

  “You’re back from a cattle drive? Didn’t you say that? Where’d you take the herd?”

  “Sacramento.”

  Silence again. Taking the direct approach, she said, “Don’t you want to talk to me? Is that it?” She couldn’t see why he wouldn’t, but then her father had been a talker of the highest order. In fact, the man never shut up. And he’d talked himself into a heap of trouble, so Deb couldn’t fault a quiet man. She saw a faint blush on Trace’s cheeks. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to embarrass you or make you uncomfortable.”

  He shrugged. “I-I’ve . . .” His cheeks got purely pink now. Well, not pink exactly because he was so tan, but it was undeniable that under the dirt of a deeply tan cowboy who’d been on the trail for days, he was blushing.

  She waited. Wolf ran back and forth across the trail, sniffing and studying everything in complete, almost eerie silence. The horse quick-stepped along, led by Trace. The children chattered quietly, and Gwen spoke as if she didn’t want any loud voices to disturb the horse, so Deb didn’t try and listen to them.

  “I’ve . . . that is, you’re the f-first woman I’ve . . . I’ve practically ev-ever talked to. Ever. In my whole life.” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “There was a woman who brought me food in the diner in Sacramento. And one behind the counter in the general store where I bought some new trousers and shirts and a new hat. I said what I wanted to eat, later ‘thank you’ to the waitress, and she said I was welcome. And at the store, the woman behind the counter asked me if I had a list and I said—”

  “You are speaking literally? With those two exceptions, you have never spoken to a woman?”

  “There was one or two on the wagon train when I came out. But I fought shy of them.” He looked up at the riders. She didn’t think he was trying to evade her question, he was just a watchful man.

  “I have no memories of my ma. Pa said she died when I was near three years old. Pa and I lived on a farm in the hills of Tennessee, and we were a long ways out. There were other men there but no women. My grandpappy lived with us and betwixt him and Pa, if someone needed to head for town, leaving me behind was always simple. I preferred it anyway. A town sounded like a strange place to me.”

  “Towns aren’t strange. Well, not exactly.”

  “Sacramento was big, though we stayed at the edge of town with the herd, and I didn’t go in and explore much. And no one seemed to like Wolf, nor my horse. I’d call it strange.”

  “There isn’t a town around here anywhere?”

  “Dismal is about thirty miles past my place. It’s a frontier town with some of the men who got fed up with mining the Comstock Lode. It’s mostly men. There’s some law there, but it’s no place for women and children alone. I can’t take you there and leave you. It wouldn’t be fitting.”

  “Well, if you start doing a cattle drive every year to Sacramento, there are lots of women there, so you’ll get some practice talking to them over time.”

  “I reckon
.”

  “So how’d you end up out here from Tennessee?”

  “Grandpappy died the year I was ten. It was a hardscrabble life on a piece of poor dirt that stood more on its side than laid flat.” He paused and looked around as if maybe he realized he hadn’t changed things much because these mountains didn’t have much flat about them.

  “Pa thought we could do better and we headed west.” He quit talking as if that were the whole story.

  Deb was struck again by the quietness of the man. Her father never had a quiet moment in his life. The quiet was comfortable, and yet at the same time she wanted to know more. “So you came out here when you were ten?”

  “Nope, just to Missouri.”

  More silence. “When did you come out here?”

  “The Missouri land was in the Ozarks and no better’n what we’d left. I think Pa stopped there because one of our horses came up lame and the huntin’ and fishin’ was good, so he stayed. I liked it and figured I could live there happy enough forever, and Pa was mighty good in the woods and taught me everything he knew.”

  He was actually talking now. Deb didn’t say a word that might make him notice what he was doing.

  “But Pa wanted farmland, and it was true enough that he spent all his time trying to carve himself out a few acres, cutting down trees, grubbing out trunks and roots, picking up rocks, and fighting the woods that wanted to swallow up the little land he could tear open. So after a few years there, we headed farther west and caught up with a wagon train that’d come out of Saint Louis.” He fell silent again, only this time it was as if he was exhausted from that long spate of words.

  Deb didn’t push. She figured she’d hounded the poor man enough for now.

  He surprised her by taking up his story again. “We weren’t really with the wagon train. We were on horseback, and we caught up to it. Pa signed on as a scout, and he did a lot of hunting to keep fresh meat around for all the travelers and checked the trail ahead for trouble. I stuck by his side and helped out plenty. Learned even more about life in the wilderness on that trip. Good thing I did.”

  Trace fell silent once more, though it had a different quality to it now. She had to work up the nerve to breach it, but before she could, a sharp yip from Wolf cut the air.

  Trace whipped out a gun so fast it shocked her. He shoved the reins in her hand.

  “Get off the trail.” He jabbed a finger to his right at a pile of boulders that would easily hide riders on horseback. “Take everyone behind that jumble of rocks over there. Stay quiet. Keep watch.” He took off running after his dog.

  Head spinning at the suddenness of the change in Trace and the possible danger, Deb didn’t think of disobeying. She turned off the trail toward the rocks.

  “What’s happening, Deb?” Gwen asked.

  “Shh! Keep the little ones quiet if you can.” Deb led them behind the boulders, then peeked out. Trace had sprinted away, vanished.

  If it weren’t for the horse, it would have been easy to believe he’d never been here. A ghost she’d made up in her fear at being stranded in the mountains. She saw both children were asleep again. How long had they been walking since the last break—several hours possibly?

  It was her turn to ride, but she wasn’t the least bit tired and wanted to talk more with Trace.

  “I’ll stay up here until he comes back so as not to wake the little ones,” Gwen whispered.

  Deb was impressed with her sister for not asking questions. Of course, there were no answers Deb could provide, and maybe that was what held Gwen back.

  Deb tied the tall black mustang to a stout limb that somehow grew right out of the middle of the pile of boulders. She pulled her gun out of the pack she’d been carrying since they left the wagon train this morning and checked to make sure it was loaded.

  “I’m going to see if I can tell what’s going on.”

  “Be careful,” Gwen whispered. “And don’t shoot Trace by accident.”

  Nodding at the excellent advice, Deb cocked the gun, aimed it at the sky, and edged forward to peer out from the rocks. She’d taken very little with her west. The Scotts’ wagon was already full to bursting when Deb and Gwen got included. But this gun had come along and plenty of bullets. She was heading into a wild place, and there’d be no sheriff to summon for help.

  She studied the trail Trace had run down.

  Nothing. No one. Where had he gone?

  What if he never came back?

  The thought was as wrenching as how she’d felt this morning when she realized the wagon train was destroyed and all those with it were dead. Once again she was with her sister and the little ones, in the wilderness, completely and utterly alone.

  Trace was completely alone.

  Alone not counting his dog. And the dog counted for a lot. He trusted Wolf more than he trusted himself, and it was the critter that’d warned him there was something, or someone, out here. Trace would put that dog up against any tracker or mountain man or Indian scout he’d ever met, and he’d met a few.

  Wolf wheeled and darted into the underbrush along the trail, silent as a ghost.

  Sprinting to the spot Wolf had entered the woods, Trace slipped in. He knew how to be quiet himself. It wasn’t a skill just for dogs.

  He couldn’t hear a sound out of his dog, and he hadn’t expected to. But there were tracks, stretched out, the dog moving with speed and ease in this rugged stretch of woods. Trace was on an uphill slope, and the way got more treacherous. It took him a while to notice, but Wolf was following a whisper of a game trail so faint that Trace would’ve never seen it himself.

  Trace moved as fast as the dense woods and rocky climb would allow. He was mindful of the trail, the woods that were around him, and what lay behind. Though he trusted Wolf, Trace knew his own skill in the woods and he used his own eyes and ears and nose.

  No one was lurking along the trail.

  Suddenly, Wolf appeared ahead of him, coming back down the trail, trotting, tongue lolling, calm as could be.

  “What is it, boy? What did you smell?” A distant rumble distracted Trace from talking to his dog. He looked up and saw on the far western horizon the first glimpse of a gray cloud. A barely visible bolt of lightning reached for the ground.

  It was miles away, probably not coming right at them, but they had one more high peak to get over before they started the long downhill slope to Trace’s cabin. He was way too high. Lightning up in the peaks was a terrible, violent thing. He had to get moving or they might all be caught in it.

  The dog took one more long look in the direction he’d come from, then turned and went on past Trace, heading back for the women. Trace looked in the direction Wolf had come from and itched to go on, to investigate. But Trace didn’t do it, not with lightning on the way. He’d left the women and children behind, and he had to get back to them and lead them out of here. He picked up his pace, running with an ease that was second nature to him.

  “Deb, I’m back,” he called and then emerged from the woods. He didn’t want to sneak up on her.

  She stepped out from behind the boulder pile, gun lowering. She returned it to the bag she carried with her. It lifted his spirits to think she’d been ready to fight.

  He reached the trail just as she did, leading Gwen and the children.

  “We’ve got to move fast, Deb. There’s a storm coming, and up this high it could get fierce.” Trace looked at the horse, then down at her. With sudden moves, he reached up, unstrapped the pack on his stallion’s back, and strapped it onto his own. It was everything he’d carried from his travels, besides all they’d scavenged from the wagon train. The pack weighed a hundred pounds or more, but he needed to set a faster pace, and to do that he needed everyone else to ride.

  “Black can carry all four of you at least until we get over the next peak. He’s a strong animal, and we’re going to let him do more of the work now.”

  Deb sputtered, “I can walk. I’m not tired.”

  “I’m going to r
un.”

  That quieted her down.

  “I do plenty of running on these trails and can keep it up a long time, and I want to get us off this trail. Whatever bothered Wolf must’ve moved on, but that storm isn’t moving anywhere but right at us. I don’t want to be out here when the sky opens up.” He thought of those tracks he’d wanted to follow north and almost growled with frustration. This could be snow, but the lightning meant it was probably rain. Those tracks were going to wash out. He had plans to hunt those men down, and if rain passed over, Trace would have a harder time finding them.

  He heard a distant crack of thunder and quit talking. He didn’t wait to ask for permission from Deb. That was time he didn’t want to waste. He caught Deb around her trim middle and swung her awkwardly up onto the mustang’s back behind Maddie Sue. Black stepped around a little.

  Deb squeaked and grabbed around Gwen with Maddie Sue asleep between them. She was sitting too far back on the horse, and the poor critter wasn’t used to any of this.

  But Trace had a firm grip on the reins and controlled Black until he calmed down.

  “Hang on. I’ll start out walking, then trotting and that’ll jiggle you all up some. But I’ll try to move fast enough we can get Black into a slow canter.”

  Trace moved out, silently apologizing to his overburdened horse. But even all four of them up there weren’t too heavy of a load, and the pack Trace had put on his back had been most of Deb’s weight, so Black could keep this up if he didn’t get cranky. Trace gave the threatening sky a hard look and hoped he could keep it up, too.

  It didn’t take long for the trot. Trace hoped he’d be in time to catch anyone who fell off. Yet they hung on, and finally Black broke into a canter so slow he was surprised the horse could manage it. Maybe Black was getting tired of bouncing around with all that weight on his back—the riders certainly were.

  Trace’d lived awhile out here with only the old horse he’d been riding on the day Pa was killed. He’d learned to travel well on his own and could run for hours at a decent speed. Now he was going to test his endurance.