“He’s a what?”
The gears in Gus’s head were starting to turn again, but it was just easier to come clean. “Jacob’s after the reward being offered by Abigail’s father. He heard the shot that took me down, followed it to its source and saw the men hauling me off to Fort Verde. Since he seems to know a lot about Smythe and the rest of those kidnappers, I figured it might be better to keep him close than to leave him be.”
“So,” Doyle said in a surprisingly controlled tone, “he’s a bounty hunter?”
Gus’s eyes snapped toward the campfire. Although he and Doyle were far enough away to talk with a bit of privacy, they suddenly didn’t seem far enough. “Yeah,” he finally replied, “that’s what he told me.”
“Is he anything like that bounty hunter you talked into helping us root out the Swillen brothers?”
“You remember that, huh?”
Doyle grinned and nodded. “Hell, yes, I remember. That was a fine piece of work. You got that bounty hunter convinced to track down them Swillen boys so’s we could kill ’em and he could drag in their sorry hides for the reward. You just forgot to mention Roy and Jack Swillen were sittin’ on a strongbox full of cash that was worth ten times that reward.”
“In some regards I suppose this is a bit like that time,” Gus admitted.
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because you nearly killed that bounty hunter three times before he could get the job done. I didn’t want to take a risk on the same thing happening here. We’ve come this far and everything nearly got ruined by me getting bushwhacked. I needed to track you down quick and I . . . I couldn’t. . . .” Gus gritted his teeth as if pulling out his next words was akin to pulling an arrow out of his leg. Looking Doyle in the eye, he spoke in a rumbling voice that barely caused his lips to move. “I was in a condition where I could barely ride. Lord only knows if I could have caught up to you without someone leading the way. I was in a hurry to get away from that place, so I had to take what I could get. Jacob was the first likely prospect I could find.”
“In case you forgot, that bounty hunter woulda shot us both in the back if he had half the chance,” Doyle reminded him.
“Which is why we won’t give this one half a chance. And, in case you forgot, that letter I sent to Thomas Swann said we’d be bringing his daughter back in one piece to that little town southeast of Prescott. If we make him wait too long, the rest of his hired guns may just burn down the two known outlaws with his daughter before we get a chance to explain ourselves.”
Doyle’s face took on the qualities of frozen rock. “This idea of yours just gets worse and worse, Gus. How many different sets of hired guns are gonna be after us when it’s all said and done?”
“That’s why we could use someone else on our side. After tangling with us twice already, Smythe will think he’s got us all figured out. Just one more man on our side could tip the balance back in our direction.”
“Sure, but only if you know he’s on our side.”
“He is,” Gus assured him. “He came this far to find Abigail and now he knows we’re all working to that same end.”
Doyle looked toward the campfire to see Abigail and Jacob talking to each other. “Looks like he’s doin’ his best to get awful close to her awful fast.”
“Which is fine by me,” Gus replied. “That just means he’ll do his best to make sure she stays safe. He ain’t stupid, so he’s got to know that he’ll do better with partners than on his own. How else will he pull down the bounties on Smythe and them others?”
“Just as long as he don’t expect a piece of the reward money bein’ offered by Abigail’s father.” The silence coming from Gus along with the look on his face wasn’t encouraging in the slightest. “He doesn’t think he’s gonna get any of that reward does he?”
“If he works with us and holds up his end, he should get a cut.”
Although Doyle may have been suspicious before, hearing that made him mad enough to spit. “You can’t promise money that ain’t yours.”
“Yeah? Well Smythe’s got more hired guns working for him and they’ll all be comin’ straight for us. We’ll need the help and there ain’t no reason why Jacob won’t step up. We’re all workin’ to the same end.”
Doyle ground his teeth together as if he was literally chewing on what he’d heard. Finally, he glanced over to the camp and said, “He may earn his keep just by keeping the lady occupied.”
Gus looked over there as well and found Abigail still sitting beside Jacob, talking in hushed tones. Every so often, Abigail would reach over to pat Jacob’s arm. Each time she did so, she kept her hand on him for a little longer.
“Say what you want about that bounty hunter,” Doyle said, “but I don’t know him from Adam. He ain’t getting a weapon until he proves himself to me.”
“I’ve got no problem with that.”
“That’s funny. You don’t have problems with a lot of things anymore.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gus asked.
“Last time I checked, you were the sort of man who’d string a man like Jacob along until you got out of that fort and then put a bullet through his head.”
“So what would you suggest?” Gus asked. “You wanna shoot him?”
“Not straightaway,” Doyle said, “though I might have done that if I’d been the one to meet him first. What bothers me is why you would take a chance like that, Gus. Why would you risk trusting a bounty hunter when you’re trying to escape with your life?”
“I didn’t know how long I been knocked out or how far ahead you might have gotten. I knew he’d set his sights on me and the last thing I wanted was to allow Jacob to follow me, so I got to him first.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” Doyle mused. “Ain’t that peculiar? I seen you kill a man with yer bare hands because he may have been a lawman. Remember that?”
“Yeah. I was drunk.”
“But you were the Gus McCord I known for all these years. Now you ain’t. Maybe yer gettin’ soft.”
The more Doyle spoke, the more his voice resembled an animal’s growl. “After you got close enough to spot the signal fire, you could have killed that kid and left him for the coyotes,” Doyle said. “Why didn’t you? Would that be one death too many?”
Gus must have had a nervous twitch or two of his own, because Doyle’s eyebrows perked up as if he’d spotted a tell on the face of a rich man sitting across from him at a card table. Doyle nodded and said, “Abigail told me all about how noble you become and how you’re sick of all the killin’ and such. I wanted to tell her all about the blood you spilled and all the lead you’ve thrown all these years, but thought it might just break her little heart.”
For a strange reason, Gus felt a tighter knot in his belly than when he’d been forced to rely upon Jacob to catch up to his partner.
“I didn’t tell her none of that, though,” Doyle continued. “That make you feel better, noble man?”
Gus straightened his back until he could glare defiantly into his partner’s eyes. “I’m through with fretting about why I do what I do. If I wanted to answer to someone, I’d earn my daily bread doin’ chores for some man in a suit or farming someone else’s ground. I don’t answer to anyone and that includes you!”
Gus’s voice quickly rose above the whisper he’d used to keep from being heard by the couple near the fire. Because he made sure to keep the other two in the corner of his eye, he knew Abigail and Jacob had halted their own conversation. He could feel their eyes on him, which didn’t slow him down in the least.
“So maybe he is a bounty hunter,” Gus said. “And maybe I didn’t kill him when I got my first chance. Maybe I am sick of getting blood on my hands. What the hell is that to you?”
“I’ll tell you what it is to me!” Doyle snapped. “It could be the difference between me havin’ a lilylivered tenderfoot for a partner or havin’ the old Gus McCord. Havin’ one of those men at my side could get me rich and the other co
uld get me killed. You know what happens to tenderfeet in our line of work, Gus? They catch bullets and they catch them right quick!”
Stepping up to Doyle until he was nose to nose with the other man, Gus snarled, “Who’s gonna send that bullet my way, Doyle? You? If you think I don’t have the sand to kill you no more, then go ahead and reach for that gun at yer side. You think I’ve gone soft? Make a move and see what happens.”
For a moment, Gus was certain Doyle would take him up on that offer. In his mind, Gus was thinking about every possible thing Doyle might do to put an end to him and every possible thing he could do to prevent it. He didn’t show any of that to his partner, however. Gus’s face may as well have been a solid unreadable slab of stone.
In a matter of seconds, Doyle backed down. “I don’t wanna fight you, Gus,” he said as he relaxed the arm that had previously been drifting toward his gun. “Things are bound to get ugly before they get better and I just wanna make certain I ain’t goin’ into it alone.”
“Smythe nearly killed me and the only reason he didn’t was because he took too much time enjoying himself while beating me to a pulp. Nobody does that to me,” Gus vowed. “I may be getting tired of killin’, but I ain’t about to let Smythe and the bastards workin’ for him get away with what they done.”
“So the lady wasn’t lying?” Doyle asked. “You really had your fill of all of this?”
“Every man’s got his limit. I suppose I reached mine.”
Doyle stared at Gus as if he couldn’t decide whether he was going to shoot him or shake his hand. In the end, he did neither. “I suppose some extra help on this job could do us some good. But if he steps out of line,” Doyle said as he jabbed a finger toward Jacob, “he’ll be dead where he stands. Agreed?”
“Agreed. And after this job is done, I’m through.”
“You really think we stand to make enough money to retire on?”
“It should hold us over for a while,” Gus replied. “Maybe a good, long while.”
“Then I’m still in,” Doyle announced. He extended a hand, and when Gus accepted it, Doyle added, “Think long and hard before you try to be all respectable, Gus. It may not be as easy as you think.”
“I know.”
With that, Doyle reached out with his free hand to pluck the .32 that had been tucked beneath Gus’s gun belt. “Here you go, bounty hunter,” Doyle said as he walked toward the campfire and tossed the gun to Jacob. “You’ll need this if yer ridin’ with us to Prescott. But if I think you’re about to aim that pistol at the wrong man, I’ll see to it you die real slow.”
Although Doyle grinned when he spoke, the warning didn’t lose one bit of its sharpness. It was plain to see he would have been just as happy for an excuse to put the bounty hunter down. For the moment, Jacob merely held the gun in both hands as if the iron was burning his skin.
Abigail looked at Doyle for a moment and then looked at Gus. Her eyes inevitably returned to Jacob, and when they did, they were wide and eager. “You’re a bounty hunter?” she gasped. “How interesting!”
Chapter 24
Twenty miles southeast of Prescott
With the two horses Gus had stolen in Fort Verde, there were enough for each member of the group to have his own. Even so, Abigail stayed so close to Jacob that she might as well have shared a saddle with him. There was no mistaking the way she looked at him. Her blond hair may have been matted from too many days without being properly washed, but she’d fussed with it enough to keep it presentable. Every time they’d stopped to water the horses, she’d used the opportunity to splash her face and clear away as much trail dust as possible. When they finally made it to a spot where they could spend the night at a hotel, she’d practically jumped for joy. The town’s name was Killebrew.
“I’ve never heard of it,” Abigail said as the other three led the way down the street.
“I’m not surprised,” Gus grumbled. Ignoring the well-practiced scowl she showed him, he added, “But we can still rent a room here. That is, if there’s one to be had.”
“Of course there’s one to be had. I can see the hotel from here.”
“I can see the whole town from here,” Doyle said as he nodded toward the battered collection of weathered buildings that was overshadowed by a single structure that had a second floor. “That’s why it’s perfect.”
Jacob and Abigail looked down to the sign that bore the name of the town, along with several bullet holes, a few knots and splintered edges that had been chipped away by too many birds using it as a perch. Actually, from what they could see, the rest of Killebrew wasn’t a whole lot better.
“Why are we even stopping here?” Abigail asked. “We aren’t that far from Prescott, are we?”
“Probably a day’s ride or less,” Jacob said.
Abigail’s eyes lit up even more than usual when Jacob spoke. “There you go! We can be in Prescott today!”
“That’s a day’s ride from here,” Doyle corrected. “Most of the day’s gone already.”
Although she obviously wasn’t happy with the situation, Abigail knew all too well that it was useless to argue with the two outlaws. Rather than try her luck, she declared, “Then I’m going to that hotel and I’m having a bath. I won’t spend one more day smelling just as bad as the rest of you.” With that, she snapped her reins and was off.
In the time he’d spent riding with the two outlaws, Jacob had learned to keep his mouth shut and his head down. So far, that had served him well enough to get this far without more than a few cross words passing between him and Doyle every so often. This time, Jacob merely flicked his reins and rode through the cloud of dust Abigail had left behind.
Killebrew felt like a settlement through and through. Some folks had settled for that spot and were too lazy or too tired to find a better one. Even the couple of mangy dogs hunkering along the sides of the street seemed to have settled for that spot as a place to catch their breath until they could find a better place to go.
Upon reaching the hotel, Gus found a register lying open upon a spotless desk. The last name scrawled upon that page had been put there nearly a month ago. For that reason, the clerk tried to charge them triple the normal rate of any other hotel. The skinny fellow in the dark brown vest didn’t hold up long under the angry stares of the three filthy men standing in front of him. Even Abigail looked at him as if she was about to cut his throat.
“You folks seem like good sorts,” the clerk sputtered. “Why don’t we make that the price for two rooms instead of just one?” When the silence grew even heavier, the clerk quickly added, “And breakfast! It’ll include breakfast as well. Will that do?”
“That’ll do nicely,” Abigail said as she replaced her sneer with an angelic smile. “I’ll need a bath as well.”
“That’l . . . ummm . . . that’ll be extra, I’m afraid.”
“Perfectly reasonable,” Abigail chirped. She looked to her three companions and waited. Jacob was the one to step forward and give the clerk an extra few coins, which pleased her to no end. As soon as the fee was paid, she all but skipped toward a staircase that looked like it could barely hold her weight.
“We’ll settle the rest of the bill when we leave,” Doyle said.
Squirming under the cold gazes from the outlaws, the clerk nodded and replied, “As the lady said . . . perfectly reasonable.”
Gus may have been through with being a murderer, but he wasn’t above stealing a free night and breakfast from some scrap heap of a hotel. When Doyle promised to settle up a bill that way, it meant skipping out of town before the clerk had a chance to corner them for his money. Right now, all Gus wanted was to sit down on something other than a saddle and kick his feet up. If Doyle wanted to save a few dollars the old-fashioned way, that was just fine.
Killebrew’s stables were even sorrier than its hotel, so the horses were watered, fed and hitched to a shady spot under an old tree. Gus got the rest he was after once he found a rocker on the hotel’s front porch tha
t looked as weathered as the rest of the town. When he sat in it and felt the creaky wooden slats bend to conform to his backside, Gus thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
Doyle and Jacob were chatting like old friends as they stepped onto the porch. While Jacob seemed relieved to be treated as something close to a partner, Gus knew that was only Doyle’s way of keeping the bounty hunter close enough to watch him. All things considered, the situation could be a whole lot worse.
“I suppose we should ride in to Prescott sooner rather than later,” Jacob said. “We might want to pay Mr. Swann a visit before we just waltz up with Abigail at our side. Since Smythe’s probably got someone watching the family, it might be better if I—”
“We won’t need to pay him a visit,” Gus muttered. “He’ll be comin’ here.”
Jacob looked at Gus as if he’d just sprouted horns.
“How do you know that?” Jacob asked.
“Simple,” Gus replied. “I invited him.”
While Jacob looked confused, Doyle was about to bust. “You mean we invited him. Gus mailed the letter but it was our idea.”
“It was mostly my idea,” Gus corrected.
“What idea?” Jacob fumed.
Folding his hands over his belly, Gus said, “Me and Doyle intercepted a letter from the kidnappers that was bound for Thomas Swann. I put in a letter of my own telling him to keep watch on this town for his daughter to arrive.”
“So you knew about this place?”
“Sure!” Doyle replied. “Little holes like this are perfect for lying low. This one’s real close to Prescott and there ain’t even any law here to speak of. At least, there wasn’t any the last time we were here. Hopefully, Swann knows where to find it. When did you tell him to get here?”
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