Grandsons . . . The word hammered inside Samantha’s skull.
Lee was one of John Creel’s grandsons. Lee was with the cattle drive. The drive that Nick had sent a gang of vicious rustlers and killers to raid.
She turned away, unable to listen to any more. She had already heard enough to shatter her world. Her brother an outlaw. The man she loved marked for death. It was all too much for her to bear.
She had taken only a couple of steps when everything came crashing down on her and the shadows around her grew even darker, black and hungry enough to swallow her whole as she collapsed silently.
CHAPTER 25
A dank coldness had settled over Samantha, chilling her to her very bones.
That was the first thing she was aware of as consciousness seeped back into her brain. She began to shiver.
That motion warmed her up slightly. Her sluggish blood began to course faster through her veins. She realized that the temperature wasn’t really all that cold.
It was all the things she had heard her brother say that had turned her insides to ice.
She was lying on the ground, huddled near the wall of the house where she had collapsed when she fainted. That was what had happened to her. She was convinced of that, even though she had never fainted before in her life.
She had never heard Nick talking about murdering someone before, either.
Especially not Lee Creel.
Samantha pushed herself to a sitting position. Her hair was loose and tangled around her shoulders. She pushed her fingers through it as she tried to figure out what she should do.
How long had she been unconscious? She didn’t know. The night was quiet, no one moving around as far as she could tell, so it might have been a while.
She could go to her father’s room, wake him up, tell him what she had overheard Nick and Owen McNamara saying.
But would he believe her? She knew how stubborn Ned Fontaine was. He had faith in Nick; otherwise he wouldn’t have entrusted so many details of running the ranch to his oldest son in recent months. He wouldn’t want to accept that Nick had allied himself with a gang of murderous rustlers and intended to destroy the Creels any way he had to.
No, Samantha realized, even if she told her father everything, his most likely reaction would be to tell her that she was imagining things, or that she had fallen asleep and dreamed the incriminating conversation.
At best, he would call Nick in and ask him about it, and Nick would lie. Samantha was sure of that.
And then Nick would know that she was aware of his plans. Such a possibility shouldn’t have frightened her . . .
But as she felt a stab of cold fear in her heart, she knew it did.
Maybe she should ride into town and tell Marshal Jonas Haltom about it.
Haltom didn’t have any jurisdiction outside the settlement of Bear Creek, though.
The county sheriff was all the way up in Hallettsville.
The idea that hit her next was so far-fetched for a moment she couldn’t bring herself to grasp it.
The cattle drive had left for the coast several days earlier. Lee and the other men from the Star C were dozens of miles away by now. But a herd like that could only go so fast.
A lone rider on a good horse could travel a lot faster.
A day, maybe two, and she could catch up to the drive, Samantha thought. She could take Sweetie Pie and another horse, maybe the big paint called Scudder, and by switching back and forth between them she could keep up a fast pace. She knew she was a good rider, even though she had never attempted anything like what she was thinking about now.
Nick and McNamara hadn’t said anything about when the Palmer gang was going to hit the herd, only that Holland would return to the ranch when the deed was done.
Holland wasn’t back yet. That didn’t mean the rustlers hadn’t already struck, but at least it was possible they hadn’t. There was a chance Samantha could carry a warning to Lee and the rest of the Creels in time.
In doing that, she asked herself, would she be betraying her own family?
No. The answer rang hard and flat in her brain. Once Nick crossed the line into lawlessness, he wasn’t family anymore. He was just an outlaw to be stopped.
Deep down, Samantha knew she didn’t fully believe that was true. But if she kept telling herself that, she could use it to justify her actions.
Besides, there was Lee to consider. Wild idea or not, what she did next might be the best chance of saving his life.
She pushed herself to her feet, went to the side door she had used earlier, and tried it. Thank goodness no one had come along and locked it. The door opened, and she slipped inside.
Once she was back in her room, she practically ripped her dress off and pulled on one of her riding outfits. She would be in the saddle for long hours, so she needed to be comfortable.
She wouldn’t take any extra clothes. She didn’t want to weigh the horses down with anything that wasn’t necessary.
Food was necessary, though. She knew that quite a few biscuits had been left over at supper. Being careful on the stairs so that the treads didn’t creak underneath her, she went down to the kitchen and put all the biscuits in a canvas sack. If she ate them sparingly, they would last her until she caught up with the Star C cattle drive.
She wished she could say good-bye to her father and even to Danny. If she woke either of them, though, they would want to know what she was doing. They would stop her from leaving. She couldn’t take that chance.
Still moving as stealthily as possible, she went into her father’s study where the gun rack was and took down the Winchester ’73 carbine she usually carried when she rode out on the range. She took a box of .44-40 cartridges, as well, stuffing it in the sack with the biscuits.
That wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
Using the side door again, she left the house and headed for the barn. Everything was quiet and still around the place. Peaceful, as far as anybody could tell by looking and listening.
They wouldn’t be able to see the evil underneath. Samantha didn’t want to, either, but the knowledge of it had been thrust upon her.
It was better this way, she told herself. Better for her to be heartsick and disillusioned than for Lee to die at the hands of those rustlers.
Sweetie Pie bobbed his head and whickered softly in greeting as Samantha began getting her saddle on him. She put halter and reins on Scudder, too. She tied the sack of food and ammunition on the saddle, slid the carbine into the boot. She got a couple of canteens she could fill at the creek and slung them on the saddle, as well. Then she led both horses out of the barn.
She worried that someone in the bunkhouse would hear her and come out to see what was going on. The cowboys must have all been sleeping soundly, though, because no one raised an alarm. She walked and led the horses for a couple of hundred yards before she swung up into the saddle on Sweetie Pie’s back.
Then she took a deep breath, told herself that she was doing the right thing, and rode away from her father’s ranch, heading southwest into the night.
When everyone got up in the morning and found that she was gone, would they guess where she had gone? She didn’t see how they could. Nick believed that his plan was still a secret.
They could try to track her, but there were so many hoofprints around the barn and the ranch yard that she didn’t think anyone would be able to.
No, she decided, her only real enemy was time.
And every minute that ticked past might be a minute closer to death for Lee Creel.
The next morning, Nick was roused from sleep by an angry bellow from his father.
“Nick! Nick, get up! Your sister’s gone, damn it.”
Nick sat up in bed and cursed. He had consumed nearly an entire bottle of whiskey the previous night, after talking to Owen McNamara on the porch. He was drinking more and more these days.
That seemed to be the only way he could get his brain to slow down enough for sleep to overtak
e him. Otherwise he tended to lie awake in bed at night thinking about all the things he would do once the Rafter F was the largest, richest, most successful ranch in this part of Texas.
There was no reason he couldn’t use that success as the basis to expand even more. Why settle for being the biggest in this area? Why not the biggest in the entire state?
That level of power and influence would open doors for him he never would have dreamed of otherwise. Why not Senator Fontaine, maybe? Or even Governor Fontaine?
Right now, though, he was just sleepy and hung over and irritated by his father standing just inside the door of his room, yapping at him like an annoying little dog and causing any pleasant thoughts to evaporate.
Nick raked his fingers through his tangled hair and said, “What the hell are you yammering about, Pa? What’s that you’re saying about Samantha?”
“She’s gone,” Ned Fontaine snapped as he advanced a couple of steps into the room. “I can’t find her anywhere.”
Nick glanced at the window. He could tell by the quality of the dim light coming through the gap between the curtains that the hour was fairly early. The old man had always been one to get up at the crack of dawn.
Nick had never minded his father being an early riser and insisting that everybody else should be, too, unlike Danny who preferred to carouse until all hours and then sleep until noon. There were always plenty of chores to do around a ranch.
Today, though, Nick didn’t feel like it, so there was a snarl on his face as he threw the covers back and swung his legs out of bed.
“Samantha’s bound to be around somewhere,” he said as he stood up and reached for his trousers. “Did you check the barn? She’s always fussing over those horses of hers.”
“I looked out there,” Fontaine said. “Sweetie Pie and Scudder are gone.”
“Sweetie—What?” For a second, Nick had trouble wrapping his foggy brain around what his father had just said. “Wait a minute. Those are her horses. Aren’t they?”
“Sweetie Pie is the white, Scudder is the paint,” Fontaine confirmed. “They’re both gone. And Jed Clemons said they were gone when he first went out there this morning.”
Jed Clemons was the old cowboy who served as the Rafter F’s main horse wrangler. Nick knew he was always in the barn well before the sun came up each morning.
“She’s gone riding,” he said with a bleary-eyed frown.
“In the middle of the night? Taking an extra horse with her?”
Son of a bitch, Nick thought. Something definitely was odd here. Maybe the old man was right to be worried about Samantha after all.
This mystery couldn’t have anything to do with his own plans, though, Nick assured himself. His sister didn’t know anything about those.
Hurriedly, he pulled his clothes on. As he stomped into his boots, he asked his father, “Have you talked to Danny?”
Ned Fontaine made a disgusted noise and said, “Danny never knows anything about what’s going on unless it has to do with whiskey and shameless women.”
“Yeah, most of the time. Samantha probably talks to him more than she does to either of us, though.”
Fontaine didn’t argue with that. They weren’t a close, demonstrative family by any stretch of the imagination.
Nick led the way down the hall to his brother’s room. He pounded a fist on the door and called, “Danny! Wake up in there!”
There was no response.
Nick shouted through the panel again, then disgustedly gripped the doorknob and twisted it. The door wasn’t locked. He threw it open and stalked into the spacious, well-appointed room that somehow still managed to look and smell like a pigsty because of Danny’s filthy habits.
It wasn’t unheard of for Danny to pass out in some whore’s crib or spend the night playing poker in Bear Creek, then come dragging back to the ranch in the middle of the day. Nick halfway expected to find him gone, too.
But there was an ungainly lump of tangled sheets in the middle of the bed, and raucous snores came from it. Muttering a curse, Nick stepped over to the bed, grabbed one end of the sheet, and heaved.
As the bedclothes unfurled, Danny came flying out of them. He landed on the floor with a heavy thump and let out a howl of surprise and anger.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded as he glared up at Nick. If anything, his eyes were even more bleary and red-rimmed than those of his brother.
“Getting your lazy behind out of bed,” Nick replied. “Do you know where Samantha is?”
That question made Danny look more confused than angry. He said, “What are you talking about? She’s in her room, I reckon, or maybe out at the barn.”
Nick shook his head. His father had followed him into the room and was sucking at his teeth, making worried sounds that grated on Nick’s nerves.
“She’s not either place,” he told Danny. “And two of her horses are gone. The white and that big paint. She rides them more than any of the others.”
“Well, there you go,” Danny said with a wave of his hand. “She’s out ridin’.” Then he frowned and went on, “Wait a minute. You said two of her horses are gone?”
“Yeah. That doesn’t sound like she’s just gone for a short ride, does it?”
Danny grabbed hold of the bed to steady himself as he climbed to his feet. He wore only the bottom half of a pair of long underwear, and Nick’s nose wrinkled at the smell coming off him. It was a mixture of whiskey, vomit, and the sort of cheap toilet water soiled doves drenched themselves in to cover up the fact they hadn’t had a bath in a while.
If sin and degradation had a smell, Danny Fontaine’s current aroma was it.
But that didn’t matter now, and it wouldn’t matter in the future, either, Nick thought. Once he was governor, he would make sure to keep Danny out of the public eye. The kid could do whatever he wanted, as long as he was discreet about it.
“Did you talk to your sister after supper last night?” Ned Fontaine asked.
“Naw,” Danny said. “I went into town—”
“I reckon we know that,” Nick said dryly.
“And I didn’t see her before I left,” Danny snapped. “Or after I got back, for that matter.”
Something occurred to Nick. He turned to his father and asked, “Had her bed been slept in?”
“I . . . I don’t remember,” Fontaine said. “I didn’t really look that close . . .”
“Let’s go look now,” Nick suggested.
The three of them went down the hall to Samantha’s room. Nick opened the door, and it took him only a second to see that the covers hadn’t been pulled back on the bed. They looked like maybe Samantha had sat on the bed for a while, but it didn’t appear that she had slept in it.
With a curse, he turned away from the door. His father caught at his arm and said, “What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna go find her, of course,” Nick said.
He questioned every man on the ranch. None of them would admit to having seen Samantha since the previous day, and Nick figured they were all too afraid of him to lie. He sent the hands to look for her, ordering them to spread out all over Rafter F range.
The best tracker on the ranch was a middle-aged Mexican named Gomez. Nick thought he was part-Indian, which would account for his skill at following a trail. Gomez found some tracks he thought might belong to Samantha’s horses. He and Nick followed them to Bear Creek.
Nick reined to a halt on the bank and stared across the stream at the Star C range. Why in blazes would Samantha go over there? He couldn’t come up with a good reason.
For that matter, it was impossible to be sure that the tracks he and Gomez had followed actually were those of Samantha’s horses.
Gomez nodded toward the Creel ranch and asked, “You want me to go over there and take a look around, boss?”
Nick pondered the question while mentally cursing his sister. Whatever Samantha was trying to pull, why had she had to go and do it right now? Nick had too much
on his plate to worry about this. And if Gomez crossed the creek and ran into any of the Creel punchers and got into a fight with them, it would just stir up trouble that Nick didn’t need.
“No,” he said. “We’ll go back and see if any of the others find her.”
Gomez nodded, as stolid as ever. He and Nick turned their horses away from the creek.
When Samantha came back—and Nick was sure that she would, sooner or later—she needed to have a strap taken to her, he thought. There was a time when their father would have done exactly that.
These days, Nick wasn’t sure that Ned Fontaine cared enough to do such a thing. If that turned out to be the case, then he’d have to take care of it himself, he mused.
He was the head of this family now, and by God, the sooner the others understood and accepted that, the better!
CHAPTER 26
Bo, Scratch, and the others pushed the herd across the Guadalupe River without incident the next morning after the near-disastrous encounter with the farmers. They continued southwest the rest of the day without running into any more trouble.
As they got ready to make camp late that afternoon at a spot Alonzo Hammersmith had selected, Lauralee rode up to Bo. She was covered from head to toe with a thick layer of grayish-brown dust and looked miserable.
“I hope you’re satisfied with yourself,” she said. “You told me to ride drag just so I’d get filthy, didn’t you?”
“That never crossed my mind,” Bo said, which was stretching the truth a mite. “It’s just a job that has to be done. Somebody’s got to push those stragglers back to the herd.”
“You didn’t give me the dirtiest job there is so I’d change my mind and go back to Bear Creek?”
“Nope.”
As a matter of fact, he had thought that she would be less appealing with trail dust all over her, and therefore it would be easier for him to resist the temptation she represented.
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