by Pam Crooks
It was why he was born. To defend and care for his people in Canada.
He couldn’t bear to think what his papa would say if he could see him now with his hair long and unkempt; his once carefully trimmed moustache lost in unshaven bristle; dirty fingernails and a stench on his body from too many days without soap and water.
Boone flung the mirror against the far wall. Shards of glass scattered over the packed dirt floor.
Papa wouldn’t like it any more than he did. But as a respected buffalo trader and leader of their people in Manitoba, he would understand what his son had to do for the sake of the Revolution.
Yet what of the great Louis David Riel? How had he suffered?
Boone’s lip curled. His boyhood friend lived a pampered life as Charles Renner. Far away in civilized society, in the fine bustling city of Minneapolis. Every day he wore his fashionable suits and ate tasty meals on cloth-covered tables. He drank fine wines and smoked expensive cigars.
All in the name of the Revolution.
The jealousy which came all too often of late seethed in Boone’s blood. It wasn’t fair. When they lived as Alexandre and Louis David, they were like brothers. They’d attended the same school, become fine scholars of philosophy, languages and science, of music and poetry. All of it, they did together.
More important, they were both born Métis and proud of the blood they bore—a mix of Indian, French, Scottish and English. They shared a fierce love for their people and an equally fierce hate for the Anglo Protestant settlers who were squeezing them out of their native lands in the north.
Together, they’d planned the Revolution. To save their heritage, they would defy the Canadian government by establishing their own provisional government.
Boone couldn’t deny Charles had been the mastermind. He’d possessed the vision to make the Revolution happen, laying its groundwork under the cover of their disguises, to protect them from the shrewd Canadian agents determined to see them hang.
But it was Boone who provided the bravery to finance the cause.
It was Boone who turned outlaw, robbing trains and stagecoaches to funnel the money into secret accounts set up by Charles.
It was Boone who lived with the danger, who’d taken all the risks.
He had suffered the most.
And he’d had enough. The time had come to act on his own. To make decisions in his own right.
Starting with Jack Hollister and Grace Reilly.
Thinking of them eased his fury. The jealousy cooled. His mind cleared, and his heart lifted with renewed zeal.
Jack was trouble he couldn’t afford. Boone had been stunned to learn through the underground that Sam Ketchum’s son had drifted north to Montana Territory, cleverly changing his name to his mother’s when he went to work at the powerful Wells Cattle Company.
Boone understood revenge. He understood, too, how Jack would burn with it to even the score when he found out what Boone had done to set up his father for ambush. Boone had to get rid of him as soon as he could.
And Grace?
She was the reward for his suffering.
The thought of her heated Boone’s loins. Until somewhere outside, a horse blew and vanquished his fantasies. Instantly uneasy, he went for his revolver, strapped to his hips. He pressed his back against the wall, out of sight of the shack’s tiny window, and stabbed a sharp glance through the opening.
He recognized the horse trudging up the snowy trail. The man sitting in the saddle with his body huddled tight from the cold.
Carl. Alone.
Boone spat an oath and whipped the door open, uncaring of the frigid air that swirled into him.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
Carl pulled up at the cabin’s hitching post. “Still at the boardinghouse.”
The news sparked new fury in Boone’s blood. “Did you talk to her? Give her my missive?”
“’Course I did.” Moving with the stealth of an old man, Carl dismounted. Ice crystals covered his unruly moustache. “She didn’t give a rat’s ass about either one of us.”
His mood fouled again. The pompous bitch. “Did you tell her I wrote the missive?”
“Had to.”
Boone glared. “I told you not to.”
“You think she’d come with me not knowing who I was taking her to see?” His gloved hands worked awkwardly to tie the reins. Boone understood how cold Carl would be, but he made no move to help him. “Besides, she doesn’t know you from a hole in the ground.”
Boone gritted his teeth. It was likely the truth. She would better recall him as Alexandre Thibault, a political associate of Charles. She’d met Boone only once before, when Charles had introduced them back in Minneapolis. Boone had never forgotten how appealing she’d been that night. A blue-eyed beauty with a flair for photography…
Again, Boone chafed at being forced to hide his true identity, the name he hungered to take again. What woman would want him as he was now? A filthy, unkempt outlaw?
Even so, he couldn’t risk his alias being known. Not when he was wanted for robbing the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway train. There was a price on his head for it. A posse on his tail, too. Both he and Carl had to keep laying low until the heat of their crime cooled.
“I got tired of waiting on her,” Carl muttered, heading for the open door. “So I came on home. You got any coffee on?”
Home? He considered this pathetic shack a “home”?
Boone ignored a bite of disgust, followed him inside and latched the door. “Did anyone see you with her? Or hear you two talking?”
“No. I was careful.” He picked up the empty coffeepot and shot Boone an accusing glance. “How come you let this go dry, Boone? You knew I’d be half-froze when I got back.”
“I was busy.” Boone turned back toward his precious papers stacked in neat piles on the tabletop.
A moment passed. “You been working on those stupid letters this whole time?”
“I was.”
“When I told you you needed to go out and bag us some game?”
“Yes.” He carefully gathered his writings together, sorting them in proper order for mailing.
Suddenly the coffeepot clattered onto the table and landed on its side. A dribble of black brew leaked out from the spout, staining the wood and narrowly missing his papers.
“Damn you, Boone. We ain’t got nothing around here to eat. You expecting me to go out and do the hunting for us, too?”
Unaffected by Carl’s whining, Boone moved the coffeepot to the table’s far corner, out of reach. “I don’t care what you do.”
“You don’t care about nothing but yourself, y’know that?”
“I’m leaving.” Boone grabbed his fringed coat from its hook and pushed his arms into the sleeves. “I won’t be gone long.”
“Yeah?” Carl glowered daggers of hostility. Boone ignored them, too. “Well, bring us back something to eat. Y’hear me? Else we’re both gonna starve to death up here.”
Boone made no promises.
He didn’t expect Carl to understand how some things were more important than others. He’d never confided his true identity to the man. Never once trusted him to know the content of his letters, the true purpose of his work.
No one knew except Louis David. Alias Charles Renner.
Boone pulled his flat-brimmed hat onto his head, tucked the bundle of papers into his saddlebag and headed outside. He set his sights on Great Falls, sprawled at the base of the hill, and thought of the unfinished job Carl had left for him.
The beautiful blue-eyed woman ripe for plucking.
Jack strode into the police station and found the chief officer engrossed in paperwork.
“Looks like I’m interrupting,” he said, quick to shut the morning cold out with a firm latch of the door.
George’s surprise at seeing him registered on his ruddy face. He pulled his reading glasses from his nose. “Thought you’d be on your way back to the WCC by now.”
�
��Soon.” Jack headed to the potbellied stove and held his hands out to the radiating heat. “Just needed to talk to you first. When you get a minute.”
“I’ll make time for you. What’s on your mind?” George leaned back on two chair legs, and the wood creaked from the strain.
“You know how we just spent a week freezing our asses, looking for Boone?” Jack left the stove and strolled toward a straight-backed chair in front of George’s desk; he spun it around and straddled the seat.
“Hell, I’m still not thawed out.”
“Nothing but a waste of our time.” Even now, Jack could hardly believe it himself.
The police chief frowned. “How so?”
“Seems Boone and Carl have been hiding out right here, under our noses.”
The chair landed on all four legs with a loud thump. “The hell you say!”
“I’m guessing in the hills, not far outside of town.”
George leveled him with a stern glare, the same one that had struck dread in more than one recalcitrant soul. “You’d better start from the beginning, Jack. And don’t leave a single detail out.”
Jack obliged, telling him everything he knew, from the moment Grace had been accosted outside of Margaret’s Eatery to just a few minutes ago, when Jack discovered the man who had delivered the note—Carl—had slipped away from behind Lindell’s, leaving only a confusion of prints in the snow as proof he’d been there at all.
“I’ll be damned,” George breathed after he’d finished. “The ‘Charles’ in the message must be tied to the stolen library money since Boone and Carl were the two hooligans who took it. The same ‘Charles’ Paris is convinced is guilty of involvement in the whole embezzling scheme.”
“I’d bet my right arm on it.”
“If Charles has been in contact with Boone and Carl about the loot, it’d explain how they knew Grace. By her affiliation with the Literary Aid Society.” The lawman fell deep into thought, as if he filed all the information Jack had given him into a special police file in his brain.
“But it doesn’t explain why Boone would want to lure her away.” The outlaw had tried twice now. What would happen when he tried a third time? The possibilities chilled Jack’s blood. “Why involve her at all? Not once has Allie given us an indication that Grace is anything but innocent of any part of their scheme.”
George’s glance sharpened. “So what do you think? Is she?”
“Innocent?” And wasn’t that the million-dollar question? He shrugged. “Not sure yet. But I was there when Boone tried to kidnap her. She fought him like a hellcat.”
“And yet she seemed to be different with Carl. How long do you figure he waited for her, out behind the boardinghouse?”
The police chief raised an interesting point. Carl had been alone with her in her sleeping room when he delivered her trunk last night, just as he’d been with her earlier, back by the woodshed. Neither time had he attempted to hurt her.
More important, she hadn’t been afraid.
Unlike with his accomplice, Boone.
Jack rubbed his jaw. “I can’t figure it.”
“I have something to show you.” George pushed his glasses back into place and shuffled through the papers on his desk. “Paris sent this information from Minneapolis. I think you’ll find it most informative.” He pulled out a photograph, then peered over his lenses at Jack. “Might be hard for you to see it, though. It’s a picture of your pa’s gang.”
Of all the things the police chief could’ve shown him, a picture of the Ketchum gang was the absolute last thing Jack would’ve put on the list.
Dread coiled through him like a rattlesnake, finding every vulnerable spot Jack had buried deep inside. He didn’t think about the old man much these days. He considered himself as healed from a father’s sins as a son could be.
Seemed he was wrong.
“Sorry, Jack. If you’re not up to it, I’ll understand.”
As far as Jack knew, only three people in the territory knew he carried outlaw blood in his veins. Mick and Trey Wells. And George Huys. When Jack hired on at the Wells Cattle Company, this close to Great Falls, he’d figured it prudent to let the police chief know who he really was, lest the man read something illicit into why Jack had changed his name. Jack relied on his reputation as a former lawman himself to get George to trust him.
It worked. George had taken Jack’s explanation into confidence and not once looked back.
But Jack knew the man never pegged him for a coward. Jack didn’t like feeling like one, either.
“Let me see it.” He reached across the desk and snatched the photograph from the police chief’s grasp.
He forced himself to look, and though there were four faces staring back at him, only one felt like it lifted itself right off the paper and grabbed him by the throat.
His skin turned clammy. Damned surreal to see his father looking back at him, wide-eyed and smiling, very much alive and as cocky as ever.
But he was dead.
Jack had killed him.
“The photograph was Black Jack’s,” George said quietly. “Found in his effects after his hanging. Looks like the gang found some time to show off their egos at a studio in Fort Worth, according to the stamp on the back.”
“Paris sent this?” Jack turned the photograph over, noted the date written in pencil. About eight months before the deadly shoot-out in New Mexico Territory.
“Yes. He’s working with a private detective agency. Based on the description his daughter gave of one of the train robbers, they’re hoping the photograph will help with the investigation on our end.”
Jack flipped it back again. This time, he studied his uncle’s image. Irrational grief for what would never be welled up, but he promptly swallowed it. Black Jack had made a lifetime of lousy decisions; each one had hurt his family in some way. There was nothing more Jack could do for him now.
His scrutiny slid to a third member of the gang. Smaller than the rest. Unsmiling and scrawny-looking with his hat low on his forehead, and his clothes disheveled. Jack didn’t recognize him.
The fourth man, standing on the end, turned Jack’s blood cold.
The man who had accosted Grace in the alley.
Piercing black eyes. Strong, prominent cheekbones. Tall, long-haired and dark-skinned, he was of a different ethnic descent than the rest.
But it was the fringed coat that cemented a memory dredged up from over a year ago—and left Jack stunned to his toes.
“It’s him,” he breathed.
“Who?”
Jack’s pulse pounded in disbelief. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. The past held him in its choking clutches, throwing him back into New Mexico Territory, deep in the Sierra Grande Mountains. The night he’d been taking his turn as watch while the rest of the posse slept.
“Boone,” he growled.
“Are you sure?”
The man who sought him out on the mountain, who had used Jack to set up Boone’s own gang for ambush.
His lip curled with hate. “I’m sure.”
As sure as any lawman could be when he had nothing else to go on but his gut.
Jack might never be able to prove it. He never saw a face or heard a name. The night had been dark, the man too shrewd, too careful, to give Jack a clue to his identity.
But Jack had gleaned enough from the shadows to remember the hair and the coat. Together, they weren’t unusual, yet the photograph was all the proof Jack needed to connect Boone with the Ketchum gang.
And his father’s death.
I gotta know…who set me up.
The words landed hard in Jack’s thoughts.
Find him for me, y’hear? Will you do that…for your ol’ man, Jack?
Suddenly restless, he tossed the photograph onto the desk and pushed himself out of the chair.
“Jack? You all right?”
He strode to the window and stared past the gold block letters arranged across the glass. Across the street, the lights shone i
n Margaret’s Eatery, inviting hungry customers to come in and warm their bellies.
Maybe time had eased the pain from all the wrongs Sam Ketchum had done in his life.
Maybe time had cooled Jack’s anger, too, and let in the need for forgiveness.
And maybe, just maybe, the time had come for him to start acting like a son.
George’s chair creaked. His footsteps scraped the floor. “Jack?”
Jack realized he had to end the terrible chapter of his father’s death. With answers that demanded to be found.
“How do you suppose Carl fits in with all this?” he mused roughly.
“Hard to know. My guess is he hooked up with Boone later. After the Ketchum gang was killed.”
“My guess, too.”
Who had they been working for?
Charles. Charles. Charles.
Jack’s brain pounded with certainty.
One more thing Jack knew for sure. He intended to shatter Charles’s game of illusion and deceit by exposing every illicit card he played.
And Grace would be the ace up his sleeve.
Chapter Eight
An investigative trip to the train station proved futile. Jack accompanied the police chief there to glean any information they could on Carl and how he’d found a way to deliver Grace’s trunk to Lindell’s. No one could recall who claimed her baggage. Seemed one minute it was there, the next it wasn’t. In fact, they didn’t even know there was a problem until George inquired.
“Suppose he’d been watching her?” Afterward, George paused on the station’s platform to light a cigarette. “Then just helped himself to the trunk when he saw her heading to the boardinghouse with your mother?”
“Maybe.” Jack squinted in the bright sunlight and thought of how easy it would be to keep track of a woman who was new in town. And alone. “He worked fast, regardless.”
Which only made Jack more impatient to get back to her. She’d be an easy mark now that Carl and Boone knew where she was staying. Jack had a strong need to get her out of town and on her way to the Wells Cattle Company where she’d be safe, right along with Allie.
“Where’re you headed next?” he asked, moving toward the boardwalk.
