Rocky Mountain Marriage

by Debra Lee Brown

  “That was the general idea.”

  “It was you who kept bringing the picture up from the basement and hanging it up again each time Tom and me took it down.” Jim grinned from ear to ear. “Who would have thought, eh, Tom?”

  Chance didn’t have time for explanations. He would make time, however, to speak with Gardner. “Got a minute?” he asked.

  The banker came around the bar. “I don’t mind saying now that it’s all over, I sure was worried, Mr. Wellesley, er…Chance. I didn’t think you were going to believe me, that I wasn’t the man—or men, as it turns out—you were after.”

  He took Gardner aside, out of earshot of the others. “I’m sorry. Truly. I…wasn’t thinking clearly, but I am now.”

  “I owe you an apology, too. I had no idea you worked for the Secret Service. No wonder Miss Dora thinks so highly of you. I don’t know what to say.”

  He locked gazes with Gardner. “She didn’t know till an hour ago, but that doesn’t matter. You’re the one she needs now, not me.” He fished the newsprint and the tortoiseshell comb out of his pocket and handed them to the banker. “Give these to her. Tell her her father did leave her something, that her future’s secure after all.”

  Gardner frowned at the comb, then looked at the newsprint.

  “See that she reads it. She’ll know what it means.” He unclipped Wild Bill’s watch fob from the chain hanging from his belt and placed it into Gardner’s hands. “Give her this, too.”

  “You’re not coming back, are you?”

  Forgetting his shoulder, Chance ran a hand through his hair. He winced in pain.

  “Don’t do it,” Gardner said. “Wait for the doctor and the marshal.”

  He held the banker’s steady gaze. “I…can’t.”

  “You’ll bleed to death if you ride out now.”

  “I expect I can hang on till I find them.” He nodded at Lily. “When Max gets here, tell him what happened. He’ll know what to do with her. And put the money in your vault. Max’ll deal with that, too.”

  “You mean to kill them, don’t you? The Hargus brothers. You’re going to hunt them down and kill them.”

  Chance didn’t answer. He yanked the silver star from his chest and tossed it on the bar. He turned toward the door then paused, looking back at Gardner. “You’ll take care of Dora, see she gets this place sold and gets that school in town she wants so bad.” It wasn’t a question, it was a demand.

  Gardner looked at him for a long moment, then nodded.

  “Chance?” Delilah called after him as he strode toward the door.

  Jim followed. “Where you goin’?”

  He hit the swinging doors at a solid clip and stepped into the cold spring morning. The mist had cleared. Silas stood saddled and ready where he’d left him, grazing under the oak by the well.

  Chance mounted up, pulled the brim of his hat down low over his eyes, then rode east into the sun toward Denver.

  “It was you?” Dora stood at the bar, her fists balled at her sides, as the marshal motioned for his deputies to take Lily Hargus away.

  Lily took one last, bitter look at the stacks of money on the bar—more money than Dora had ever seen in her life—then shrugged. “It wasn’t his, it was ours. Your daddy had no business hiding it from us.” Her Southern accent was milder than her brothers’, but unmistakable now that she wasn’t hiding it. How had they ever missed the connection?

  “So you killed him,” Dora said.

  Lily gave her a cool look. “What did it matter? He was old. Would have died sooner or later.”

  Dora went for her.

  John grabbed her around the waist and held her back as the deputies dragged Lily outside.

  “Good riddance,” Delilah said.

  Columbine chimed in with an unflattering remark that Dora thought quite fitting under the circumstances.

  “Go on,” Delilah said to her and the rest of the girls. “Get back to work.” She handed Rose a broom. “Customers’ll be arrivin’ soon.”

  “You okay?” John led Dora to one of the card tables and pulled out a chair. “Why don’t you sit.”

  “No, I’m fine. I—” She drew a deep breath, tried to gather her thoughts, then she looked at him. “I owe you an apology, John.”

  “You’re the second person who’s said that to me this morning.”

  She knew who the first person was. Chance.

  “Did he say anything before he left?” Her gaze drifted to the Persian carpet, focused on the dark blood.

  “He’ll be all right.” John reached into his coat pocket and produced a small bundle. It was the tortoiseshell comb wrapped in newsprint. “Here.” He placed it into her hands. “He said to give you this. That you should read that newspaper article, that you’d know what it meant.”

  “Oh.” She remembered she’d left the comb on the bar when she’d fled the saloon.

  “There,” Tom said. “Good as new.” The piano player had cut away the rest of the burlap backing the canvas. He and Jim righted the portrait, then leaned it up against the only intact row of glass shelving behind the bar.

  “She sure is pretty,” Jim said, admiring the nude.

  Delilah smiled, ran a lacquered nail across the fine brushstrokes detailing the woman’s fiery red hair.

  “She certainly was,” Dora said, approaching her. “But she’s even more beautiful now if you ask me.” She unwrapped the tortoiseshell comb and offered it to Delilah. “This is yours, I think.”

  Jim and Tom looked at them, stunned. Along with John, they studied the painting, then stared at Delilah as if seeing her for the first time. The evidence had been under their very noses all along. Only the marshal seemed unsurprised. He grabbed a cup of coffee from behind the bar and watched them, amused.

  Jim was the first to speak. “You were Wild Bill’s favorite…er, well you know.” He flushed all the way up to his bald pate.

  A half smile graced Delilah’s painted lips. “I was once, but that was years ago.” She turned to Dora and said, “You knew.”

  “I suspected from the beginning that you and my father were somehow linked. He left me the comb so I’d find you.”

  “There’s things you don’t know,” Delilah said, and cautiously met her gaze. “Things your pa should have told you, but didn’t.”

  “You tell me, then, but later. After all this is over.”

  Delilah’s smile warmed. “I’d like that.”

  They stood there for a moment looking at each other, then John cleared his throat, uncomfortable with the turn in their conversation. “But the comb led you to the money.” He nodded at the marshal who was stuffing the stacks of bank notes into one of Jim’s old carpet bags.

  “That, too.” Dora approached the painting. “Look at the hair. See this?” She ran her finger over brushstrokes that, to an unschooled eye, looked like auburn highlights.

  Tom looked closely at the painting, then shifted his gaze to the tortoiseshell comb Delilah had placed in her hair. “It’s the comb!”

  “Well, I’ll be.” Jim studied the fine oil detailing. “He’s right.”

  Delilah laughed softly.

  “I discovered it last night,” Dora said. “But then the Hargus boys returned, and…well, you know the rest. I’d thought the comb might be more than just a connection to Delilah. I thought it might be a clue.”

  “Clue?” The marshal looked at her strangely.

  “I guess I should explain.” She withdrew her diary from her pocket, slid her father’s letter from between the pages, opened it and began to read.

  “…Rest assured, your financial future is secure. I’ve left you something at the ranch. Something only you, seeing as how smart you are, will recognize.”

  “The comb!” Tom said. “Bill wanted you to find the money.”

  “I don’t think that was his intent. My father knew the money wasn’t his and would have to be returned to the government.”

  “But you made the connection to the portrait all the same,�
�� John said, “and the money was, indeed, there.”

  “That’s right.” She reflected on the fact that Chance had known its location all along.

  “I’ll wire the Secret Service in Denver first thing tomorrow,” Max said as he struggled to close the carpet bag.

  “But if the money’s not what Bill left you…” Jim scratched his bald head. “What is?”

  Dora glanced at the newsprint she’d left, forgotten, on the bar and which all this time she’d used merely as wrapping paper for the comb. Picking it up, she turned it over. Her heart stopped. “Good Lord!”

  John read over her shoulder. “I don’t understand.”

  She spread the newspaper article out on the bar. They all crowded around her to read it. Even the marshal was intrigued. The girls stopped their clearing up and joined them.

  Dora read the headline. “Rare Chinese Artifact Lost in Poker Game.”

  “That ain’t a Colorado paper, is it?” Jim scrunched up his face.

  “No,” Dora said. “It’s from San Francisco.” She pointed to the top. “The News Call Bulletin, July 8th, 1881.” The article, which her father had used to line his safety deposit box, was nearly three years old.

  John read the first paragraph to them aloud, then together they peered at the tiny drawing at the bottom. Dora’s breath caught.

  “What is it?” Tom said.

  “Looks like a birdcage.” Jim’s face scrunched even more. “Seems to me I remember an old birdcage Bill brought home from one of his trips. Was painted red, I believe. Thought it was just junk. You don’t think…?”

  “Says here it’s made of gold.” Delilah narrowed her gaze on the words. “From the Fourth…”

  “Dynasty,” John said. “It’s worth… Great balls of fire, it’s a fortune!”

  “Where is it?”

  Jim scratched his head. “Don’t know. Haven’t seen the danged thing in years.”

  “I know where it is.”

  That got their attention.

  “In the secret room. The one in the basement.”

  “Secret room?” Delilah and the others exchanged befuddled looks.

  “Yes. My father’s watch fob…the one he gave to Chance before he was—” The pain was still too raw. His murder hadn’t seemed real to her until she’d looked into Lily Hargus’s glittering eyes.

  “You mean this?” To Dora’s astonishment, John pulled the watch fob out of his vest pocket.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Chance gave it to me to give to you.”

  “He did?” She weighed the pewter fob in her palm, wondering why Chance hadn’t waited and returned it himself. An uneasy feeling gripped her.

  “What’s that old trinket got to do with the birdcage?” Jim’s question brought her back to the task at hand.

  “I’ll show you.”

  A few minutes later they all crowded into the secret room Dora had discovered in the basement. Tom held up a lantern, illuminating the birdcage, while Jim used his pocketknife to scrape away the red paint.

  “It is gold,” Delilah said. “And there’s jewels, too. Look!”

  Dora fingered the watch fob that her father had deliberately given not to her, but to Chance. He’d called it the key to her future. She knew by heart the rest of his letter. One line stood out above all others. It’s the Chance of a lifetime, Dora. Take it.

  The word Chance had been purposely capitalized.

  “How long until Agent Wellesley returns?” she asked the marshal.

  “Depends on how long it takes him to catch up with the Hargus boys and bring ’em in.”

  “You knew who he was all this time, didn’t you?”

  Max shrugged. “It’s my job to know.”

  John fidgeted on his feet and lowered his eyes. His discomfort was so apparent Dora couldn’t help but notice it. “There’s, uh, something I think you should know.”

  “What?” Her uneasy feeling returned.

  “You’d best come upstairs.”

  She followed him up to the saloon along with the marshal, but the others remained in the secret room, captivated by the golden birdcage.

  “What is it?” she said to John. “Tell me.”

  He appeared uncomfortable with Max’s presence, but the marshal’s pointed interest in what he had to say made it clear he wasn’t going to give them any privacy.

  John forged ahead. “I know you’re in love with him, with Chance.”

  She didn’t deny it, and knew her face told all. Despite a successful history of controlling her emotions, Dora was an open book where her feelings for Chance Wellesley were concerned.

  “He’s a good man, Dora. He deserves your love, and you deserve to be happy. All the same, he, um…asked me to take care of you.”

  She gripped the pewter watch fob so tightly it dug into her palm. “What?”

  “Doesn’t surprise me none,” Max said.

  She looked from John’s somber expression to the marshal’s and knew right away they knew something she didn’t. They knew the one dark thing Chance had kept from her.

  “Go on,” she said to Max.

  “Them Hargus boys been at this counterfeiting scheme for a spell. Got involved with Chance’s pa about two years ago. Chance never knew.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Jack Wellesley had a cattle ranch near Denver. He was also the local judge. He and Chance had some kind of falling out, so the story goes. That winter Chance went west. Stayed away a year. By the time he got back, his pa had already had a couple of runins with the Harguses. He never told Chance who they were, just that they were swindlers of some sort. One day Chance came home and…” Max looked away, ran a hand over his face.

  “And?” Dora’s heart was in her throat.

  “Dickie had burned the ranch,” John said. “Hung his father. Murdered his mother and sister, too.”

  Dora closed her eyes.

  Max continued. “Chance went kinda crazy after that. Dropped outta sight for a while, so they say. I met him about six months ago, when he showed up here in town decked out like a riverboat gambler. I knew what he was right away. He asked me to keep it quiet, so I did.”

  “He joined the Secret Service so he could hunt them down.” Dora drew a couple of deep breaths, trying to get a hold of her racing thoughts and unstable emotions.

  “Seems he already knew your pa. Don’t know how. Took up residence here at the Flush and…well, you know the rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” John said.

  She felt as if the world as she knew it was slipping out from under her. “Sorry?”

  “He, uh, said I should look after you.”

  Dora shook her head. “No, he’s coming back. He said he would. He promised.”

  But he hadn’t. He’d said nothing in response to her plea. Worse, she’d recognized the look in his eyes when he’d mounted Silas and disappeared into the fog. She’d seen that look before, in men who’d come back from war and were never the same.

  “He…took this off and set it on the bar before he left.” John produced the silver star she’d pinned on Chance’s coat in the street barely an hour ago.

  Too clearly she recalled the hard set of his jaw, his lackluster eyes when he rode off. It was the look of a man with a death wish.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After two days of pleading, Delilah finally told her where to find him. Dora revealed to only one other person she was leaving. John Gardner. She knew he’d try to talk her out of it. She’d have thought less of him if he hadn’t. It was a dangerous action for her to take, a desperate one, too, but she had to try.

  After missing the morning stage out of Last Call, she rode all the way to Garo to catch it. The next day in Colorado Springs she checked with local physicians to see if any of them had treated a man who’d been shot in the shoulder. None of them had. But by the time she reached Denver, she’d spoken to half a dozen people who’d seen the Hargus brothers, who remembered Lee’s smile and Dickie’s cool blue eyes.
>
  “Just another couple of miles,” she said to the horse she’d hired in the small town east of Denver where Chance’s father had once been a circuit court judge. “I think.”

  It turned out to be farther. It was dark by the time Dora turned onto the weedy, rutted lane marked by a broken gate sporting a brand confirming she’d arrived at her destination. JW. “Jack Wellesley. This is it.”

  She dismounted, tethered the horse to a fence post just inside the property, and made her way on foot toward what remained of the house. There wasn’t much. A burned-out shell and a pile of toppled brick from where the fireplace once stood. The barn was still intact, but its roof was caved in. Several other outbuildings were in disrepair.

  There were no other horses in sight, no signs of life at all, except for the chirping of crickets and the sounds of rodents scurrying among last year’s rotting apples, which had fallen from the tree in what had once been a fine front yard. The smell of burned timber lingered, turning Dora’s stomach as she thought about what had transpired here eighteen months ago.

  With a sigh, she realized her journey had been for nothing. Chance wasn’t here.

  Delilah had shared with her the information written on the scrap of paper she’d recovered from Lee Hargus’s jacket, the same information she’d shared with Chance just moments before he’d left the Royal Flush in search of the two brothers.

  Earlier that day, Dora confirmed in Denver that the title to the Wellesley ranch had passed by way of a lien against the property to one Lily Sugrah, also known as Mary Hargus, after Jack Wellesley was found murdered. Chance thought the Hargus brothers would come here, and Dora herself had discovered the two men had actually lived here early on, in the months after Chance had left.

  There was a lot one could learn in a small town while hiring a horse.

  She took one last look at the eerie scene, gone silver under a moonlit sky, and was glad she hadn’t arrived any sooner. She didn’t think she could take seeing the place in the light of day. What had happened to Jack Wellesley and his family was too terrible to contemplate. What details John and Max had refused to part with, she’d learned on her own a few hours ago at the local livery.