by E. R. Slade
“That looks mighty fine, Miss Hooper,” he said, smiling down at her. “You sure are a good cook.”
She turned her face away, suddenly appearing upset. Jeremy couldn’t figure out what he’d said that bothered her.
“How are you?” she asked, as though she was worried about it.
He stepped back and forth from one foot to the other, grinning down at her until her warm brown eyes turned up to him again.
“Not too bad, considering,” he said.
She winced a little when he said “considering,” but she didn’t turn away. Her eyes became earnest.
“Mr. Waite,” she said, “do you still have your Bible?”
“Well ...” He tried to think of a way to hedge, so as not to disappoint her; but he couldn’t figure any way to get around it. “No,” he said. “I was rescued, and there wasn’t time ... you know.”
“Oh, I see.” She swallowed. “Would you like another one?”
“Why, sure, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.” He smiled on at her. “That’s real nice of you.”
Watson, waiting to close the cell door, commented, “You wanted that Bible, allst you needed to do was reach through the bars and pick it off the floor in t’other cell, where you left it.”
All eyes turned to look, and sure enough, there it was. Jeremy felt a good deal irritated with Watson.
He turned back to Sarah. She looked a little hurt, but all she said was, “I guess I don’t have to bring you one, then.”
“No,” he said, “I guess not. I never noticed it was there,” he added helplessly.
“If you read it,” she said meekly, “I think it will help you. I know it will.” She was searching his face earnestly.
“Well, maybe I’ll do that,” he said. Reading the Bible had always seemed like work to him, but for Sarah Hooper he thought he might do most anything, just to make her smile.
And she did smile.
“Give him the platter and let me shut the door on them crooks,” Watson said to her. “I don’t want folks saying how I let one of the Ladies’ Charity Circle ladies get hurt by a hardcase.”
Sarah did not seem impressed with this favorite little refrain of the sheriff’s, not this time. Jeremy returned her smile. “You’re a mighty fine little lady, Miss Hooper.”
She glanced down and away, reddening slightly. She pushed the tray into his hands and left.
Watson smiled thinly at him, slammed the cell door shut, made sure it was locked, and followed her out. He closed the door into the office after him, and the place was dark.
“You’re a mighty fine little lady, Miss Hooper,” Leanda mocked. “Mr. Waite, do you still have your Bible? Mr. Waite, you big strong outlaw, you’re my heart, my all, my great tragedy in life, and I will cry when you are hanged and keep a locket of your hair forever and ever and never marry another soul, or even look at another man in all my life, Mr. Waite.”
Cork slapped his knee and roared drunkenly.
“You’re not half the lady she is, I’ll say that,” Jeremy defended hotly.
“I should hope not,” Leanda said tartly.
Jeremy had the feeling he’d somehow gotten the wrong end of that exchange and ought to have a comeback, but he couldn’t think what to say.
He and Cork, working by feel, separated out the food on the tray and sat at either end of the board to eat. Jeremy could hear Leanda slurping her way through her stew.
“So that’s why you were smiling,” Leanda said between slurps. “I don’t understand why you men fall all over yourselves about weak little nothings like that. I just don’t understand it at all.”
More slurping, then, “I guess men just like women with no backbone. Then they have an easy time bossing them around. Not me, friend. I’m not going to let some man tell me what to do. I got my own life and I’m going to live it.”
“That’s my niece,” Cork said, and laughed. “Got a will of her own. Take quite a man to tame her, I’ll wager.”
“No man’ll ever ‘tame’ me, as you call it,” she said. “I’m not the taming kind.”
To Jeremy, sitting there in the dark thinking about Leanda’s perky curves, the idea of her not being the taming kind didn’t seem quite right somehow. Went against nature.
Well, it don’t make a difference to me, he thought.
Then he thought: Guess I could tame her if I wanted to. But it wouldn’t be worth it. She’s a good deal too ambitious for a woman.
Chapter Sixteen
Sarah Hooper and Watson came again the next morning to bring breakfast.
“Mornin’, Miss Hooper,” Jeremy said, smiling at her. He had remembered to pull the Bible into the cell, and this morning he’d even tried to read in it a little, all about how this fellow begat that fellow, who begat another fellow, on and on. It didn’t seem very interesting reading to him, but he decided he wasn’t going to let on to Sarah.
“Good morning, Mr. Waite,” she said, returning the smile, though she looked a little careworn by daylight, maybe hadn’t gotten too much sleep.
Jeremy noticed Leanda turning up her nose and rolling her eyes at the ceiling, but he didn’t care about that.
Watson didn’t let Sarah stay and talk. He saw the meals delivered, and then shooed her out. He came back from the office bringing a chair. Seated, he rested one ankle on the other knee, leaned back, folded his arms, and watched them eat.
“So what’re you looking at?” Leanda demanded, as this went on for some time.
“I figure you’ve talked it all over by now, and you know what I want. Waite knows that unless I get what I want I’ll hang him. I can hang Cork just as easy, and maybe if I try real hard, I can even see you hanged too, Miss Leanda Dupree.”
She was fairly cool, you had to give her credit for that: she didn’t pause in her eating but long enough to say, “First you’ve got to figure out what to charge us with.”
“Assisting a prisoner to escape, horse thieving.”
“Horse thieving?”
“Sure. I looked at the brands. Those are Bar FV ranch horses. Filmore Vicker was to town this morning and he said they’d been stole, not sold. Horse thievin’s a hanging crime.”
So that was where they’d come from. Jeremy had wondered, then carefully not wondered, about that.
But Leanda wasn’t bothered a bit. She said, “Well, then I guess you should have arrested Courtland and his boys, shouldn’t you?”
“That’s a whole other story,” said Watson. “What you got to think about is that you were the ones riding the horses, and they was stolen. That makes you horse thieves. They might even hang a woman over that.”
Watson sat on, watching them finish up their breakfast.
Finally, he got up. “Well,” he said, “if you’d rather swing, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
He took their trays and left.
“So you stole them horses,” Jeremy said to Leanda.
“We found them running loose.”
Jeremy didn’t believe her, but let it go. He was more interested in getting put of this place and going back into the mountains to tackle Blue, get his hands on the gold.
“So what kind of a wagon is it in?” he asked Leanda. “The gold, I mean?”
“Oh, just a freight wagon. The usual kind. But it’s braced up quite a bit.”
“And it’s full of gold?”
“Pretty well full.”
“Must weigh tons.”
“It makes the wagon creak, I can tell you that.”
“What is it, just gold bars stacked in there?”
“Yes, bars, in crates branded with the name of Courtland’s mine: Star of Mexico.”
“You think Blue might have unloaded it and hidden it someplace?”
“That would be a lot of work. But he might have.”
Jeremy savored the image of so much gold that unloading it was work.
“He’d have to have opened every crate and carried the bars out one by one,” she said. “And if he want
ed to move it, he’d have to load them all up again.”
“But suppose he’s put it in a bank? How do we get it then?”
“It’s not in a bank, I guarantee it. If anybody put that amount of gold into a bank it would be known all over. We’d have heard about it. And no bank around here is safe enough to trust with so much gold. Bank robbers would come from everywhere to try to get hold of it. It’d it be a whole lot safer to just park the wagon someplace out of the way up some canyon in the mountains, and cover it over with little trees and brush and so on. Chances are, nobody’d ever find it.”
“How do you plan to get him to show us where it is?”
“We’ll ask nicely first. If that doesn’t work, you’re going to threaten to shoot him.”
Jeremy was still not sure why she and Cork really needed him. They could threaten to shoot him just as easily as he could. So, why?
“This fellow Blue, he ain’t a fast draw or anything, is he?”
Leanda looked at him speculatively. “You said you could use a gun. Can you or can’t you?”
“Sure I can,” Jeremy said. “Just trying to get an idea what we’re riding into.”
“He’s killed ten men. Two of them were Barney Olin and Louis Lemieux.”
“That so,” Jeremy said noncommittally. Those two names landed in the bottom of his stomach like a pair of bricks. Olin had a reputation all over the West as a top gun. You were always hearing how he’d been hired by some cattleman to clear off the sheepherders, or how he’d gunned down two or three men in a saloon someplace. A while ago, he’d dropped out of sight, nobody knew where to. Louis Lemieux’s reputation was at least as lethal. Jeremy hadn’t heard that he’d dropped out of sight, but then again, he couldn’t remember hearing anything about Lemieux shooting up anybody recently either. The odd thing was that Jeremy had never heard of Blue Yanuk. If he’d shot those men, he must have done it in the dark of night, with no witnesses. That sounded more like a back-shooter than a fast gun.
Leanda had been looking at him closely.
“They were fair-draw fights,” she said, as though reading his mind. “I saw him shoot Lemieux myself.”
But Jeremy was thinking about gold again and hardly heard her.
He was still dreaming of riches hours later when Sarah and Watson came in bringing victuals. Sarah’s presence broke the spell.
“How do, Miss Hooper,” he said eagerly, but Watson broke it up quickly and sent her packing. Jeremy was annoyed at Watson, but pleased to see she didn’t much like him interrupting either. When she was gone, Watson sat down in his chair again, folded his arms, and watched them eat.
“I been talking to Lawyer Nolan, and he tells me hanging women’s been done before, and likely’ll be done again. Cork, you want to see your niece hanged for horse thievin’?”
Cork glanced at Jeremy and then at Leanda. Jeremy gave him a warning look, but that was for Watson’s benefit: they’d worked out just how this was going to go. Leanda’s eyes narrowed at her uncle and stayed fixed on him in a way that made your throat muscles tighten up involuntarily.
Cork shrugged, said nothing, looked at the floor. He was no slouch of an actor himself.
Watson’s eyes brightened up as he took it all in, and Jeremy tried not to smile his pleasure at fooling the sheriff.
“No need of you hanging,” Watson said to Cork. “Anybody talks, goes loose.”
“Well ...” Cork started.
Jeremy jumped in: “Never mind Watson. He can’t hang anybody without a jury convicting us first. And nobody’s going to convict us without evidence.”
“But the horses,” Cork said. “By golly I don’t know but what he will hang us.”
“Them horses ain’t evidence,” Jeremy told him. “Takes more than that to hang a man.”
“I don’t know,” Cork said.
“I’m not telling this guy anything,” Leanda said to her uncle. “Not that there’s anything to tell,” she added pointedly, looking at Watson. “So don’t you go making up some story that’ll get us in worse trouble than we’re already in.”
Cork looked at the floor. He looked very sober and stooped and old. “I just don’t know,” he said, shaking his head slowly.
Watson said, “You care about your niece here, don’t you, Cork?”
Cork glanced up at him long-faced, said nothing.
“Course you do. I’ll tell you what. Even if she won’t talk, if you tell me what I want to hear, I’ll let you both go, how’s that?”
“You want to know where the gold is, don’t you?” Cork said bluntly.
“Uncle Ham!” Leanda said.
“Shoot,” Jeremy said, making it as disgusted as he could.
“Now you’re talking!” Watson jumped up and came to the bars of the cell. Jeremy almost made a lunge for Watson’s pistol, but decided that all things considered it would be better to be patient instead.
“I don’t know,” Cork said, shaking his head some more. “I just don’t know.”
“Think of seeing your niece hanging, Cork. Think about that hard before you decide to keep your mouth shut. It’ll happen unless you tell me where the gold is.”
“Lemme think about it a while. I just don’t know.”
Watson looked for a moment like he was going to come back hard with something, but then he relaxed, smiled a little, and said, “All right. You think about it. But remember, in this town we hang horse thieves, and you and your niece are horse thieves.”
Watson went out.
They heard the street door of the office close.
“Perfect,” Leanda said. “Now about tonight ...”
Chapter Seventeen
They saw nothing of Watson until suppertime. After sending Sarah away, he sat in his chair, the lantern at his feet, and as he liked to do, watched them eat. When they were finished, he said, “Cork, I think you ought to come with me for a few minutes.”
Cork looked worried, on cue, and Jeremy and Leanda both gave him warning glances.
Watson opened the cell and motioned Cork out. They went into the office and shut the door.
Voices were indistinguishable. Time went on.
“Hope there was enough of that stuff left,” Jeremy said.
“Enough to kill Watson, if he drinks all of it,” Leanda said. “Doesn’t take much. You’re a tougher man than you think. I’ve seen men sick flat on their backs for weeks after one good sip.”
Jeremy looked through the bars at Leanda, smiling a little, wondering just what she meant by that. It was true that in spite of everything, there was something about Leanda that got to him.
“Can you tell what’s going on out there?” Leanda asked presently.
“No,” Jeremy said. “All I hear’s mumblings.”
Leanda commenced to pace her cell. Jeremy propped himself against the bars and watched her. He noticed she moved like a mountain lion, silent and flexible and ready to pounce. Dangerous.
Although he was a bit edgy about what was going on in the sheriff’s office, he found himself thinking more about Leanda—about whether she was straight with him or not, and about whether he liked her or not, what with her taking hold and running things so much and being so standoffish.
There came a strangled sound from beyond the door, and sputtering and coughing. Leanda stopped pacing. Jeremy held his breath.
A chair went over, feet shifted; afterwards a low mutter, and then silence.
Jeremy and Leanda looked at each other; then the door opened and there stood Cork, grinning sardonically, holding a pistol in one hand, a ring of keys in the other.
~*~
They rode all night, Leanda and Cork aboard horses from the livery paddock—she said they were Courtland’s—Jeremy aboard his old gelding because he couldn’t bring himself to horse thieving despite Cork’s objection that it would slow them down. They went south to the first creek, then a few miles east, splashing down the bottoms, then south again to the next creek, and followed that west without coming out of it u
ntil they were in the foothills. Then they just rode west without worrying about their tracks, until the eastern sky began to lighten up. They made camp by a little trickle of a stream, lit no fire, had some smoked beef and dried apples they’d lifted from the storeroom at the back of the grocery, and then Jeremy took first watch while Leanda and Cork turned in.
After noon, they rode up through the foothills and made camp for that night under the loom of the mountains. They had been carefully watching their back trail and thought once they’d seen a horse and rider—at least Leanda said she had, though Cork said not, and Jeremy wasn’t certain. After some discussion they decided not to light a fire. But it was a cold place they’d picked to camp, and in the morning Cork complained so much about his poor old bones that Leanda finally gave in and they hunted kindling.
When Cork’s bones were up to an acceptable temperature they kicked dirt over the fire, mounted and rode on, Leanda leading the way up in a long, northerly traverse of the mountainside. The trees began to get short, twisted, and more scattered. The sun waxed hot and the horses lathered.
So did Jeremy. He had been keeping a close eye on the back trail, worrying about when somebody would have found Watson and how close he might be, and also beginning to worry a little about Blue. Pretty soon it began to seem intolerably hot work.
But then Leanda headed down into the trees again, none too soon for Jeremy, since his canteen was nearly empty. They stopped at a step-over-sized creek that went splashing down the steep mountainside from pool to pool with merry abandon. They had lunch.
“How far now?” he asked Leanda.
“A ways.”
“Get there today?”
“You’ll know when we do,” she said.
Jeremy was annoyed, but figured there was no use pressing her about it. They rode on through the afternoon, going slightly downhill, but mostly sideways along the mountain. The timber got heavier and thicker and they were so little in the sun that Jeremy began to feel cool.
