“No fire,” Joaquín ordered, after they’d unsaddled their horses. So they sat beside the spring, eating more hardtack and jerked meat. This time, though, they had plenty of icy sweet water from the spring. When no one seemed ready to retire, Bart pulled out a bottle of rye whiskey and splashed a measure into each cup. Before she finished her drink, Priscilla felt the weariness of the day’s ride slough away, leaving her relaxed and a bit mellow. Finally, she found the courage to ask a question that had bedeviled her all day.
“How long have you known my parents, Mr. Ellisor?”
“A while, Miss McCain. A while.”
She studied him by the dim light of the moon, wondering why he would evade her question, since he and her parents were obviously old friends. The nature of his work, probably. Before she could decide whether—and if so, how—to question him further, Will changed the subject.
“I’ve been thinking about your case, Joaquín.”
Joaquín glanced up. His eyes were hard. Since leaving the Kid’s hideout, his cynicism had deepened, a fact that disappointed Priscilla. She knew it had a lot to do with their destination—Spanish Creek.
“I may’ve found a way to clear you,” Will was telling Joaquín. “Victorio claims those horses belong to The People and to Charlie. If that’s true, maybe I can work out a deal.”
“No deals for me, white eyes.”
“Sit tight and hear me out. I need a little more information, like why the horses are unbranded, which, by the way, will work in our favor, if things go as planned.”
“Things never go as planned.”
Priscilla spoke up. “The horses are unbranded because they’re…well, The People consider them sacred.”
“How does Charlie fit into all this?”
“Victorio gave him use of the horses. For some reason he trusted Pa not to abuse the privilege. No one was to ever speak of them. That’s all I know.”
“Then how can Charlie prove he owns them?”
“He can’t.”
Will persisted, but Priscilla shrugged, uneasy about revealing in front of Bart the secret that had been kept for generations.
Then Bart himself joined the conversation. “I may be able to shed some light. Victorio gave Charlie the horses, trusting him to use them only in times of need, in repayment for Charlie’s help in that Rodrigo Suárez affair.”
“What affair?” Priscilla wanted to know.
“It happened after Kate and Charlie were stranded in that snowstorm.”
“Snowstorm—” Suddenly Priscilla recalled Nalin’s tale and the drawings on the wickiup liner.
Bart cocked his head, obviously as hesitant to discuss the past with Priscilla, as she had been with him. “If you haven’t been told all this, I’m not the man to—”
“I’m sure it was an oversight, Mr. Ellisor.” She scrambled to piece together the story Nalin had told her only days earlier. “I mean, I know my parents were lost in a snowstorm and Victorio’s people found them and saved their lives.”
“Our lives,” Bart commented, half to himself.
Priscilla’s breath caught. Details of Nalin’s story bombarded her. “You’re the other man!”
Bart held her gaze across the distance.
“The other man in the drawings,” she explained. “I have it. That’s what that roll of hide is. The wickiup liner where Nalin’s husband recorded the story.”
“The story?” Clouded with ominous overtones, Bart’s reply sent a shiver down Priscilla’s spine. “Part of it, perhaps.”
Her curiosity won out. “What’s the rest?”
Instead of responding, Bart took a long drink from his cup, then pointedly refilled it, this time with straight rye whiskey.
Will refilled his own cup. “If you can shed some light on Charlie’s ownership of the horses, Mr. Ellisor, I’d appreciate it. Joaquín here’s been charged with stealing some of them. If I can prove they belong to Charlie McCain, that’ll go a long way toward clearing him.”
“Oh, they belong to Charlie, all right. It happened a few months after the snowstorm. You know how Apaches are, they don’t set prisoners free, not white men, at least. But Victorio and his band were being harassed by a group of unsavory white traders, and I happened to have the good fortune of killing a couple of them. Since I’d done them that service, they patched me up and freed me.”
Pausing, he drank, his mind trained on some distant memory; again Priscilla sensed something ominous, or, at the least, melancholy.
Bart turned his attention to Priscilla. “Your mother pleaded Charlie’s case with ol’ Victorio, and they set him free, too, on the condition that he bring them the ringleader of their enemies.”
“Rodrigo Suárez,” Priscilla whispered, “Jessie’s husband.” She was mesmerized by the tale now, and by the way Pa’s and Nalin’s and Bart Ellisor’s memories dovetailed. Again, she was filled to brimming with questions. How could she have spent nineteen years with her parents and remain so ignorant of their past?
“Jessie Laredo’s husband,” Bart confirmed. “To make a long story short, Victorio repaid your father by giving him limited use of some horses that had inhabited a canyon somewhere in New Mexico, undetected by any white man since the time of the Spanish explorers.”
“Spanish Creek Canyon,” Priscilla acknowledged.
Shrugging, Bart refilled his cup. Priscilla began to wonder how a drunk gentleman outlaw would act. But Bart Ellisor didn’t show signs of inebriation. Likely his kind imbibed strong liquor with more frequency than others.
“As soon as we reach Spanish Creek,” Will was saying, “I’ll talk to Charlie. With his help we may be able to wrap this thing up.”
But Priscilla’s questions were a long way from being wrapped up. “You said you’ve known my parents a long time, Mr. Ellisor?” He had sidestepped the question once, so she quizzed him tentatively. She hated to prod an outlaw of his caliber, especially after her blunder at Billy the Kid’s hideout.
“Indeed, I have Miss McCain. And it would give me great pleasure if you addressed me by my given name, Bart.”
She smiled at his formal request. “Of course…Bart. I’ll be happy to, if you’ll call me Priscilla.”
“Priscilla, a beautiful name, for a beautiful woman, if I may be so bold.”
“Or you can call her Jake,” Joaquín offered. “Most folks do.”
“Jake?”
That seemed to amuse him, so the tale followed, told by Joaquín, Priscilla, and even Will. As the discussion progressed, Joaquín lost some of his cynicism, and Priscilla was delighted to learn that Will recalled a good deal of the story. Then she remembered the pistol.
“The pistol that started it all,” she reminded Will, “the one I shot at those tin cans. That was the pistol I found in Pa’s trunk, the one similar to yours.”
“The pistol…” Will’s voice drifted off. He stared out into the black of night.
“I found it in an old trunk in the barn,” she explained to Bart. Then turning to Will, she added, “The day we left on the cattle drive, I looked for it, but it was gone.” She shrugged. “Pa doesn’t even remember it; that’s how long ago it was. So I’m probably wrong. It may not have been like yours, after all.”
Will held her gaze. “Like I told you, Miss Priss, you’re usually right.” It was the kind of teasing thing he generally said, accompanied by a broad smile. This time he didn’t smile, in fact, he didn’t even sound lighthearted. But of course they’d put in a hard day’s ride.
“I’m ready to turn in,” she told the group. “It’s been a long day.”
“We have a couple more ahead of us.” Joaquín rose and headed for the far side of the spring. “I’ll take first watch.”
“Wake me for second,” Bart offered. But his eyes were on Will. Priscilla suddenly realized that he was frowning at Will, as if he were disturbed about something.
“Will Radnor,” Bart mused. “Wouldn’t happen to be from Philadelphia?”
She watched Will stif
fen. His response was curt. “That’s right.”
“William Penn Radnor.” Bart enunciated each syllable. “Knew a man by that name, a lawyer, like yourself—heard about him, rather,” he corrected. “Wouldn’t happen to be kin of yours?”
Will studied the outlaw for such a long time, Priscilla decided he wasn’t going to reply. Something hard and large thudded in the pit of her stomach. She watched Will extend his hand to Bart, in a strange, wary sort of way, as if the two men were only now being introduced. “William Penn Radnor IV, Mr. Ellisor.”
He emphasized Mr. Ellisor in a way that gave no hint of familiarity, and Bart did not offer the courtesy he had extended to Priscilla only moments earlier.
“Your father?” she whispered. “Bart knows—knew—your father?”
“So it seems.”
Priscilla looked from one man to the other. They glared at each other like two bulls squaring off in a pasture. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see their feet pawing the earth.
“Well,” she said too blithely, “isn’t that a coincidence?”
Bart was the first to recover. He turned to Priscilla with a thin-lipped smile. “Coincidence? Scratch the surface of a coincidence, Priscilla, and nine times out of ten, you’ll uncover a well-devised design.” Rising, he took her hand, bent over it, and brushed his lips across her skin in a gentlemanly salute. “At least that’s been my experience.”
Fourteen
By the time they arrived back at Spanish Creek two days later, Priscilla had learned a sad fact of life: Love and commitment don’t always go hand in hand.
Will loved her. He had admitted as much. But he was a long way from being committed to her. Blast him. In admitting he loved her, he had also admitted that he hadn’t intended to tell her so.
Blast him! One side of her wanted to hate him, argued convincingly for that end. But another side felt sad and lonely and very much in sympathy with this man who rode for the most part now, aloof.
Since Bart’s challenge—that’s what it had sounded like, Priscilla realized—Will had withdrawn into the indifference she’d had to wheedle him out of time after time during their short-lived relationship.
Was another try worth the effort? she wondered. Certainly, before she went to all the trouble of lifting his spirits yet again, she should face the fact that Will Radnor’s personality needed a drastic overhaul. Bart startled her out of her reverie.
“What did Charlie and Kate have to say about you riding off into the mountains with Will Radnor?” He spoke from her side, where he had stationed himself as a symbolic guardian since his and Will’s run-in. Actually, it probably wasn’t symbolic, given his occupation.
That thought worried her. “I left without telling them,” she admitted a bit uneasily. “Jessie offered to ride out to the ranch and break the news.”
“You struck out on your own? How long have you known Radnor?”
His question skirted some unnamed difficulty and raised Priscilla’s already tested hackles. “If you have something to say about Will, say it.”
Bart didn’t reply immediately. They rode across a long valley and up a grassy hillside in silence. Finally he approached the same topic from a different angle. “Your mother’s probably fit to be tied, and your father, too.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“There wasn’t a choice, Bart. The Haskels were about to lynch Joaquín—”
“Why didn’t you leave his rescue to Radnor?”
The idea stunned her. “To a greenhorn?”
Bart’s left eyebrow shot up. She grinned, sheepish.
“You’ll understand, once we get to the ranch. I wasn’t reared in a conventional manner.”
He laughed at that. “Anytime a girl as pretty as you can convince her father to turn her into a cowboy, no, I wouldn’t say she was reared in the conventional mores of the day.”
“Pa didn’t raise me to be a cowboy. Truth known, he fought it every step of the way. Until…”
“Until?”
“Until he realized I’d managed to become what I set out to become, a real help to him on Spanish Creek.”
“And your mother? How does she feel about it?”
“She tried to turn me into a lady, but, as you see, she didn’t get very far.”
“On the contrary, Priscilla. You’re a lady of the first caliber—lovely, well-mannered, considerate, charming…” He studied Will, who rode just beyond earshot. “…with poor judgement where men are concerned, like many a lady I’ve known.”
Priscilla felt her face flush. Bart, too? she thought. What was this obvious flaw in Will Radnor which everyone but she herself seemed to notice. Or did everyone else look at him and see a city-slicker and look at her and see a cowboy, and assume they were unsuited to each other? Was she the only person who looked beneath the surface and glimpsed the man Will really was? The man she loved.
Lamely, she changed the subject. “You sound as if you’ve known my parents a long time.”
“I have. A long time.”
“How did…I mean, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you meet?”
He stared into space for a while. When he spoke again, it was quietly. “I’m your mother’s stepbrother.”
“Stepbrother!”
He nodded.
“I didn’t even know. Why haven’t I heard this before? You’re…you’re my…my uncle.”
“Not necessarily. One isn’t required to claim step relations.”
“How absurd.” Priscilla laughed. “We’re certainly not in a position to be choosy. I mean…” She stopped, abashed at her bad manners; he’d barely finished commending her deportment, and she—
“You mean you’re in such dire need of relations, even a washed-up old outlaw might have a chance?”
“More than a chance. Besides, you’re not washed-up. You’re not even old. I’d guess you and Pa are about the same age.”
“Near enough.”
“Oh, this is wonderful! Mama’ll be so happy!”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Bart responded under his breath.
Priscilla was sure she hadn’t heard right. A stepbrother was a brother. And an uncle. She’d gone through life without an extended family; now a real uncle had showed up. Not that Uncle Sog and Uncle Crockett would count less, now that she’d found a real uncle, but…A real uncle.
She glanced to Will, eager to share her happiness. He was looking at her, staring, rather. He looked apprehensive, then she realized that it was just his habit of staring through her, rather than looking at her.
Will was the first to turn away. One of the many knots that had tied his stomach as tight as a hangman’s noose relaxed. She didn’t know…yet.
He’d listened to the drifting inflections of Priscilla’s and Bart’s conversation with a goodly measure of dread. Bart Ellisor knew. He knew what had happened to Will’s father, he knew who was responsible, and he knew why Will had come to New Mexico Territory. Will had seen it all in the outlaw’s expression the first night out.
And every time Bart had caught his attention since. Stay away from Priscilla, the outlaw seemed to shout. You can’t use her to accomplish your destructive ends.
It was a silent, unspoken warning. But Will hadn’t needed even that much. Bart’s probing had brought home the magnitude of his mission. No longer was he able to hide the ugly truth beneath his passion for Priscilla. And that fact fueled him with an urgency to be done with the dastardly deed and leave the country.
All day he had wrestled with an inner debate—he should ride ahead, reach the ranch first, finish his own business, and be gone.
On the other hand, he owed Joaquín his expertise. But that was a shallow excuse; there was no denying the truth. Even though Priscilla would soon look at him with loathing and anguish, instead of pleasuring him with beckoning glances like the one he’d just received, he couldn’t leave her.
Not until he was forced to. For, damn his hide, i
n some small part of his stupid brain, he held out hope. Hope that there was a way, a future for them. A future filled with happiness and love. Her laughter trilled down his spine.
“Will! There it is!” She had sprinted to his side and now kept pace.
He followed the line of her outstretched arm. They’d come upon Spanish Creek headquarters from the northeast, the rear. The path down the mountainside was thickly populated with fir and aspen. When he reined his horse to a halt, Priscilla drew up beside him.
“Joaquín has already scouted the trail,” she reminded him. “No Haskels on this side.”
He looked at her, a mistake.
“I have the most exciting news, Will.” She glanced over her shoulder to where Bart trailed twenty or thirty yards behind. “He’s my uncle.”
“What?”
“Bart Ellisor. He’s Mama’s stepbrother.”
“And you didn’t know it?”
She shook her head, pensive for a moment. “I hope it isn’t because Mama and Pa are ashamed of his occupation.” Her joy bubbled forth again, contagious even in Will’s melancholy state. “Wait till they see him,” she cried. “They’ll be so surprised. Now it all makes sense. Of course, he would pledge to come to Mama’s aid. He’s kinfolk.”
Will listened with half an ear. The other one, and his entire head, buzzed with something much less wonderful—losing this magnificent woman. As if she understood, she caught his cheek in her palm.
“Don’t be sad, Will. I know Bart’s questions reminded you of your father’s death. I know it still hurts. But just wait. As soon as we run the Haskels off Spanish Creek, I’m going to sit Pa down, and Mama, too, and tell them about us. It won’t be anytime before they’ll love you, too. We’ll be so happy. All of us. You’ll have a family, then. They’ll be your—”
He stopped her the only way he knew how, with his lips. Disregarding her self-proclaimed outlaw uncle who approached them from the rear, Will reached over, clasped Priscilla behind the neck, and pulled her face to his.
Reluctant Enemies Page 26
