by Carol Arens
“I could help,” she said.
“I reckon seeing you waiting for me will set fire to my heels.”
Rebecca was not idle in her waiting. Taking off her shoes, she wriggled her lovely long toes at him. Next she plucked off her garters, rolled down her stockings and tossed them.
By the time she had opened the front of her dress and bared her chemise, he had finished the feeding.
With a whoop and a leap, he landed in the straw beside her. She laughed and he whipped her beneath him, rucking up her skirt as he did.
A sudden gust of air blew his hair and rippled the back of his shirt.
“Boone Walker, stand up slow and easy,” a voice, deep as a bear’s growl, ordered. “Back away from the woman with your hands in the air.”
Hell! Hell! Hell and damn! Sheriff Johnson stood in the doorway of the barn with his rifle across his chest and his long beard being tossed by the wind.
Standing beside him, the mayor of Coulson stared open-mouthed at Rebecca, who was quickly buttoning her dress. He could only take pride in the fact that her fingers were not trembling.
He stood up. A second later Rebecca was standing beside him, holding his hand.
“You’ve made a mistake. This is not Boone Walker,” she pointed out. “This is Lantree Walker...Boone’s twin brother.”
“So he says,” Smothers said, his voice a snarl.
“Got any proof of that?” Johnson asked, pointing his rifle barrel at the ground then leaning on the butt.
“I have proof,” came a small voice from behind the sheriff and Smothers.
Both men spun about in surprise.
Lantree stifled a curse, seeing Melinda leaning on her crutch, her skirt blown about in the wind and tears dampening her pretty blue eyes.
With a great sigh she tried to close the barn door but it fought her.
“Sheriff Johnson?” She appealed to him with an irresistible pout of moist, pink lips.
He couldn’t imagine the man who could resist being Melinda’s champion.
Then again, judging by the scowl on Smothers’s face, he reckoned he’d just found that man.
Johnson closed the door and was treated to Melinda’s grateful smile.
“What’s your proof, young woman?” The sheriff must have only been half-smitten with her because his voice still sounded full of gravel.
“Why, I’m married to Boone Walker.” She blinked wide. “I do know the difference between the men...most of the time.”
“She’s lying!” The breath exploded from Smothers with a snort. He turned an unhealthy color.
“Would this be a time you know the difference, Mrs. Walker?”
“Oh, indeed.” Melinda stepped close to the shaggy bear of a lawman, lifted her shoulders in a shrug. She whispered, but loud enough to be heard by them all. “It’s not difficult when they have their clothes on.”
“Arrest this man!” Smothers sputtered.
Melinda nodded her head with vigor. “Arrest them both, I say...but sadly, Lantree Walker is not guilty of any crimes...crimes that might get him arrested, that is.”
“Where is your husband, ma’am, if this is not him?”
“If I knew that I’d lead you to him myself.”
Melinda stroked the tears from her eyes. Unbelievably, Lantree felt Rebecca tremble in repressed laughter.
He frowned down at her. This was a serious situation and she seemed to be amused by it. He couldn’t help but wonder what kinds of trouble the girls had wriggled their way out of growing up.
He reckoned he ought to speak up for himself, but he wanted to know where this was leading.
“I’m afraid you gentlemen have come at a difficult time.” Melinda looked at Rebecca.
“The very worst, I’m afraid,” Rebecca agreed.
“I’m sorry to say,” the sheriff said, “there rarely is a good time for an arrest.”
“This would be an excellent time, if only a crime against society had been committed.” Melinda took a step closer to Johnson. She laid her delicate fingers on the rough, gnarled skin of his hand. “But the crime has been against me and my cousin...and she’s a newlywed.”
“Don’t listen to that harlot,” Smothers said, but Johnson ignored him. “The three of them are in cahoots. Lock them all up, I say.”
“If I am a harlot, it is not by my own choice.” She cast a glare at Lantree that made him feel guilty of—something. And what that was, he feared he was about to find out.
Johnson was treated to a blush of rose-petal cheeks.
“As I said a moment ago, it’s easy to tell them apart when they are clothed, but otherwise they look exactly alike. They even... And last night—”
“Last night!” Rebecca exclaimed, shoved Lantree in the chest then turned her stricken gaze upon her cousin. “You and I on the same night?”
All at once Melinda pushed past Smothers and the sheriff to embrace Rebecca.
“What if we’ve both conceived?” she wailed. “What will our children be?”
Melinda turned to Smothers. She swished her ruffled skirt toward him and let the tears slide down her cheeks unchecked. “Perhaps you know, Mr. Mayor, will they be siblings or cousins?”
“Bastards,” he announced.
With a squeal, Melinda launched herself into Johnson’s arms. His gun thumped to the barn floor. His arms came about her while she wept into his beard. He patted her back one time.
Lantree jumped, startled when Rebecca poked her finger at his nose.
“You low-down vile fornicator!”
Had the women rehearsed this skit before, or were they just that good?
“Arrest him, Mr. Johnson,” Rebecca ordered. “I insist. If you think about it, they look the same. What difference would it make? You’d still have a criminal.”
“I’m here to arrest a murderer, ma’am, not a fornicator. Until I get to the truth we’ll all spend a cozy afternoon right here. I ain’t in no mood to go back out into that devil of a wind, as it is.”
All at once Smothers’s expression shot back and forth between Rebecca and Melinda. The cold calculation in his narrowed gaze turned every muscle in Lantree’s body tense in anticipation of plowing the mayor into the barn wall.
“I imagine you want to find out the truth without the ladies present,” he said, suddenly and deceitfully, appearing the gentleman that his fancy clothing said he was. “I’ll just escort them outside.”
“Take me to Coulson, Johnson,” Lantree said quietly while he held his hands out for cuffing. “I’ll go easy as long as the mayor goes with us. You ought to know that there’s bad blood between him and me. He’s not here to help in an honest arrest. He’s here to cause trouble and for no other reason.”
Smothers focused his attention on Rebecca, some kind of wicked lust-revenge expression twisting his face. He could only hope that Johnson saw it, as well.
“I’ll just slow you down,” Smothers said. “I’ll stay and protect the ladies from this violent weather while you make your way through the lies.”
Smothers let the word violent cross his lips a little too slowly.
“You want a peaceful arrest, Sheriff, you’ll leave here with the both of us.”
Johnson looked him up and down, his gaze hard. By reputation, this was not a man to rile up.
Still, there was no doubt that Lantree was, at this moment, threatening violence. Hippocratic oath or not, he would do harm to Smothers before he would leave Becca and Melinda alone with him.
All of a sudden, Smothers reached for Rebecca’s arm. Rebecca balled her fist and swung it at his face but missed. Melinda, shrieking in outrage, delivered her boot to Smothers’s crotch.
He collapsed into a whining ball, rolling about on the barn floor.
Rebecca
ran to Lantree and wrapped him in an embrace, even as Johnson handcuffed him.
“Get up, Smothers.” Johnson poked him in the behind with the barrel of his shotgun. “I only got one pair of cuffs, but until we get to the truth of who is who, I’ve got my weapon pointed at your butt.”
“Get back to the house, Becca.” Lantree kissed her cheek. “I’ll be home in a week.”
“Or hanged.” Smothers’s words came out of him as a wheeze while he got to his feet.
“We’ll escort you ladies to the house,” Johnson said. “We’ll be on our way once we know you are safe inside.”
“By the saints, that will not do. I’m going,” Rebecca insisted, as Lantree knew she would.
“Me, too!” Melinda decreed. Of course, he was not half-surprised at that, either.
“I can’t keep you safe, not like this.” He held up his cuffed hands. “If something happens to me, you’ve got to be here for your grandfather.”
“Well...” Melinda sighed, apparently seeing the wisdom. “That makes some sense...but more than that, Becca, we can gather everyone we know and march on Coulson!”
“Truth in numbers.” He could see Rebecca mulling this over.
“You ladies talking a mob?” the sheriff growled.
“Oh, certainly not!” Melinda cast a spellbinding glance at Johnson. “It’s just that it’s a wonderful thing to see justice done...the law at work to protect the innocent. I just know everyone in these parts would love to see their lawman at his very finest.”
“Humph!” the lawman grunted, but under the dirty beard and bushy brows, Lantree thought he saw a blush of pleasure pulse in Liver-Eating Johnson’s cheeks. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Fifteen
Rebecca stood on the porch of the big house watching Lantree until she could no longer see his long confident strides and the erect posture of his broad shoulders in the thick growth of trees beyond the house.
Lengthening shadows of midafternoon lashed across the flower beds in the wind. Branches creaked. Some splintered and crashed down, littering the yard.
It wasn’t safe for him to be out in this blow. And to make things worse, the temperature was falling. He’d been taken from home without a coat or hat.
“I should take him a blanket. If I hurry—”
“Becca, you can’t and you know it.” Melinda looked up at her, her expression serious. “That wicked little man means you harm. You won’t want Lantree to be using his efforts watching out for you when he needs to be figuring a way out of this mess.”
“But I can’t stand the thought of him being cold.”
“As much as we want to, there are some things we can’t do for a man.” Melinda’s expression brightened again. “And there are some things that we can.”
“March the neighbors?”
“Exactly. We’ll send Jeeter to rally them as soon as the weather changes. With all those witnesses to vouch for his identity, your man will be free in five minutes.”
“I dread going inside and telling Grandfather what has happened.” Rebecca bit her bottom lip, agitation making her feel like a butterfly trapped in a mason jar. “I’d rather cut out my tongue.”
“I know that’s just creative speech, but let’s go do some slicing and get this over with.”
Inside, the house was quiet, which for this time of day wasn’t so odd, but something felt off. The quiet was different.
Normally the clink of pots would announce that Barstow had begun to prepare dinner. He would be speaking with Kiwi Clyde about the menu.
The bird was on his perch, not in the kitchen.
“Something’s wrong,” she said even though Melinda would have already noticed.
“The rifles beside the door are gone. So are the ones over the fireplace.”
“Do you think they’ve gone after Lantree?” She felt suddenly sick. Agitated men and guns could easily end in bloodshed.
“We’d have noticed. Unless they went another way and plan to get ahead of Johnson.” Melinda shook her head. “But I don’t think so. The timing doesn’t seem right to me. How could they have discovered the trouble, organized a plan, got away so quickly? Lantree’s only been gone twenty minutes.”
“When you came out of the house everything was normal?”
“Grandfather was napping in his chair, Barstow was kissing Kiwi Clyde. Jeeter was... Oh, my, he was pounding up the steps shouting something as I was going out. I paid him no attention because he’s always in a high spirit over something, and I’d just seen the sheriff and the mayor go into the barn and I knew you and Lantree had gone into the barn and knew that you wouldn’t be, um, prepared for visitors.”
Melinda screwed up her face in her thinking expression. Rebecca knew from experience that the more compressed her cousin’s lips and the more lines crinkling the corners of her eyes, the harder she was thinking.
Luckily Melinda had an excellent memory. Just as soon as the line creeping up her forehead reached her hairline, she would recall what Jeeter had been shouting.
“Rustlers!” she exclaimed, her blue eyes popping wide open.
“Cattle or trees?” It made a difference.
“Trees...near the river and not far from home.” Melinda glanced about in frustration. “The guns are gone. How are we to help?”
“We don’t know how to shoot anyway.”
“We wouldn’t have to shoot, only look like we meant to. They wouldn’t know that we’re not a pair of Annie Oakleys.”
By the saints! They didn’t need Annie when they had Medusa.
“How would you feel about wearing snakes in your hair?”
“Dead or alive?”
“There are a bunch of skinned rattlers hanging on the wall in the tack room in the barn. I’ll meet you there. I’m going to put on a brown dress and grab my violin.”
“You have a brown dress?”
“I do and it is practical on occasion,” she called, dashing out of the house. She leaped over a fallen log then glanced back at Melinda, who was already hobbling toward the barn. “Be careful!”
* * *
Lantree felt the grit of a two-hour hike coating his teeth. He swallowed, but the cursed wind had dried out the inside of his mouth. Unless it was urgent, he refrained from speaking.
The same could not be said of Smothers, who had not ceased to complain about everything from leaving the horses such a distance from the ranch, to the rip in the knee of his suit, to the injustice of Johnson confiscating his weapon...and that he was tired.
That last did seem a concern. In Lantree’s medical opinion, and he could only admit that for the first time in a while it did feel good to have one, the man did not look well.
“I gotta rest, Johnson,” he panted. Maybe this was for show and maybe not. His high coloring said maybe it wasn’t.
“If we stop every time you feel winded, Smothers, we won’t make it back to Coulson before Christmas.”
“By observing him,” Lantree spoke up, “I’d say his body is under some stress. Heart, lungs maybe, can’t be sure just by looking, though.”
“Never met a hardened killer that knows medicine,” Johnson said.
“And you haven’t now, either,” Lantree replied then eased down on a rock beside a stream. “I became a doctor after the shooting involving my brother. And in the interest of truth, Sheriff, I was there when the killing happened. It was self-defense with a lying witness thrown into the mess.”
“Where’s your shingle, Doc?” Smothers said, his color improving now that he was sitting down. “Can’t recall that you’ve treated a single person in Coulson.”
It was true. Maybe he ought to have. For the first time in years he wondered if distancing himself from healing had been the right choice. While he’d been caring for ailing livestock, had
he failed in his obligation to folks in need?
“I’m going to hunt up some grub for dinner. If either one of you move your asses a hair out of place I’ll shoot you where you sit.”
Lantree leaned against a tree, then slid down to sit with his knees bent. He anchored his cuffed hands about his knees and stared at Smothers.
“This arrest is about my wife?” he asked.
Smothers laughed, but it was an ugly sound. “About making her a widow, more to the point.”
“Even with me out of the way, you’d never be able to handle her.”
“I’ve found that women generally come to understand who is boss at the end of a balled-up fist. The giant would be no different.”
“Just to make this clear, I won’t let you even breathe on her.”
“This time tomorrow I’ll be doing a whole lot more than breathing on her, and you won’t be able to do spit about it.”
“I’ll do spit and more. Count on it.”
“Not after you’ve been shot to death trying to escape.”
“I’m keeping my butt planted right here.”
“Only because you don’t know the trouble happening at the ranch as we speak. Pretty clever how I got you out of the way.”
His stomach lurched then hit bottom.
“You stunned to silence, or just too yellow to ask what’s happening?”
“I reckon you are trying to take what isn’t yours, and just now I’m studying a way to keep you from doing it. Might be a sight easier if you tell me what you think is happening at the ranch.”
“I know what’s going on. I made the plan, hired the men. They’re cutting prime trees near the river, to rile the old man as much as anything. Once all is said and done, I’ll decimate every damn hunk of wood on the place. But all I need for today is to get rid of you and old man Moreland.”
“You’re in bad health, Smothers. I wasn’t making that up about your heart and lungs. What are you going to do with all that property when you’re dead? Seems to me that it will go right back to Rebecca and you will have gained nothing.”
A gunshot echoed from close by. After a moment, footsteps crunched over twigs that the wind had shaken loose from the trees.
