Thunder on the Plains

by Rosanne Bittner

  She watched Vince’s eyes widen at the words. “Oh, yes, my loving brother, Blaine did a fine job on me. I still have nightmares about it, still thank God he didn’t decide to go upstairs and finish his anger on little Bo. But that is water over the dam. There was a time when I probably should have given up my share of our fortune to get you off my back. Colt and I even discussed that, believe it or not. But Colt told me that to give it all up would be to let you win. He said that together we could fight all outside forces, that neither of us would have to give up what we love just to be together. There was a time when giving up my fortune might have let me have the only true love of my life. Now it’s my increased fortune that will defeat you, Vince. You can’t touch me now. The only sad part is that it’s probably too late for me. But it isn’t too late for my son to grow up knowing the truth about his father.” She looked at Stuart. “I want you to help me find Colt, Stuart. Check with the army forts farther west. Maybe he’s scouting for them, what with all the Indian trouble. I want someone to check out Indian Territory. Colt is part Cherokee. Maybe he went back there. Check with the Texas Rangers. Have someone talk to some of the railroad workers. Someone has to have some idea where he is.”

  Vi decided not to mention Billie White. Out of her own curiosity she had looked for the woman herself, but the saloon where she used to work had been torn down and replaced by a church. She found only one person who had known Billie, but that person didn’t know where she had gone.

  Vi was glad Sunny was finally doing what she should have done two years before, but Sunny was right about one thing. Finding Colt Travis would be like chasing the wind. After all that had happened, holding him might be even harder.

  Chapter 29

  Late April 1869

  Sunny finished scanning the latest reports from New York, then signed a few letters, trying to get as much work done as possible before leaving for Utah. It was time to head west for the joining of the rails, expected to take place by mid-May, perhaps even sooner. She put down her pen and rose, walking to a window to watch the busy streets of Omaha, much more a thriving city than it was twelve years ago, when first she came here. The railroad was mostly responsible. She realized now that the railroad was responsible for many things that had taken place in her life. It was what had led her to meet Colt, and ultimately it had driven them apart.

  From where she stood she could see the U.P.’s already-busy depot and the stockyards that lay beyond it. In spite of her bitterness over what she considered a kind of betrayal by the father she had loved so dearly, she knew that Bo Landers’s dream had been very real, and so had his love for her. Vince had not been able to destroy that memory, and now that the railroad was nearing completion, she decided it was time to remember how important this had been to her father, remember the passion, the higher goals. She had promised on his deathbed that she would help finish the dream, and she had held true to that promise, but it had cost her so much.

  She had never been able to bring herself to hate her father or to believe that he had not truly loved Lucille Madison. She certainly would never believe he had not loved his daughter with utter devotion and near worship. Now it seemed only fitting that she should be at the final ceremony for the Union Pacific, and she knew that on that day Bo Landers would be with her.

  Someone else should also be there, but she had been unable to find Colt. The only thing she had salvaged from all these years she had loved him was their son, and now the dream of finishing the railroad took second place to her dream of finding Colt again.

  She walked back to her desk to sign a few more letters. In just a couple of hours her train would be leaving, taking the entire family to Utah. Each member of the family would have their own private car, and Sunny would take Bo and Mae with her. Stuart and Vince were both bringing their wives and children. Sunny had decided to set aside her hatred for Vince for the time being, for the sake of his children, who were excited and eager to see the “Great American Desert” and be among the first to travel all the way to California by train.

  Nineteen-year-old Vince, Jr., would not be with them. He was at Yale studying law. But sixteen-year-old Joyce, twelve-year-old Linda and eleven-year-old Mary were coming along. Stuart and Vi’s daughter, Diana, now thirteen, as well as their ten-year-old son, Robert, and eight-year-old Sarah would make it a full family affair, and that was how Sunny intended things to be from now on. She would not have her son growing up in a family of hatred and back-biting. All the children had been told as delicately as possible who Bo’s real father was, and as far as Sunny could tell, only Vince’s eldest daughter, Joyce, who was beginning to closely resemble her mother in looks and personality, seemed to look down on her for it. The rest of the children were not particularly upset, although some were too young to truly comprehend what they had been told. Whether they liked it or not, Sunny was determined there would be no more secrets that could come out later in their lives and hurt them. And she was also determined that the family would become closer, even if it meant being civil to Vince. Bo was going to be raised in an atmosphere of love. In spite of his wealth, he was going to understand compassion and caring. Greed and malice would not be a part of his life, at least not while he was young. And even if Vince and Eve’s participation was only out of fear of being financially destroyed, she figured that was better than Bo having to grow up with those two hating him and constantly attacking him as it had been for her all her own life.

  The door to her Omaha office suddenly burst open, and Stuart came bounding in, his face showing his excitement. He carried a newspaper in his hand. “Sunny, look at this! All our work and expense trying to find Colt, and a damn newspaper article leads us right to him!”

  Sunny felt the sudden, nearly painful tightness in her chest. She wanted so badly to find Bo’s father; yet she desperately feared how he might react to her. To see him again and know he hated her would be a worse torture than anything she had endured so far. “What did you find?”

  Stuart laid the Omaha newspaper in front of her. “Read that,” he said, grinning excitedly and pointing to a headline.

  Cheyenne Shootout Leaves Four Dead, Six Wounded

  “A battle over water rights between two cattle ranchers outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, led to a major shootout inside the city limits four days ago,” Sunny read aloud. “Men from both ranches got into a brawl at the Sundance Saloon after heavy drinking, and the fistfighting led to a gun battle outside in the street that was joined by a third party, that of Sheriff Rex Andrews and his deputy—” The name suddenly stuck in Sunny’s throat.

  “Colt Travis,” Stuart finished for her. “Now, why am I not surprised that he’s a deputy sheriff? Hell, he’s done everything else.” He took the paper from her. “Isn’t this just the way you would expect to find him, shooting it out with a bunch of cattlemen in some wild western town?” He laughed lightly, but Sunny just sat in her chair, stunned.

  “After nearly an hour of gunfire,” Stuart continued for her, “the sheriff and his deputy, who was slightly wounded in the melee—”

  “Wounded?” Sunny looked up at him. “Colt was wounded?”

  Stuart sat down on the edge of her desk. “It says only slightly. You know Colt. You could shoot his arm half off and he wouldn’t think much of it. I’m sure he’s okay, Sunny.” He turned back to the article. “Let’s see—the sheriff and his deputy…slightly wounded…arrested fourteen men, including those who had been wounded.

  “A circuit judge is being called in to settle the water dispute and to determine who will pay for extensive damages to the Sundance Saloon. It is expected, as the West becomes more settled, that troubles over water rights will spread throughout Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana as well as other west and southwest territories where water is scarce.

  “It is obvious from the shootout at Cheyenne that the West might be growing, but it is far from tamed. It is rumored that a novelist from New York C
ity was present during the gunfight, and that he plans to write a book about it. More trouble is expected in Cheyenne from those men from both warring ranches who have not yet been jailed. Soldiers have been called in from Fort Laramie to help keep the peace.”

  Stuart laughed again, getting up and rolling the newspaper in his hand. “Doesn’t that sound just like Colt? Right in the middle of things—a deputy sheriff. I wonder how he landed a job like that.”

  “He probably welcomes the danger,” Sunny answered. She rubbed her temples, her head suddenly aching from a surge of joy mixed with dread. It was hard for her to breathe, and her hands were shaking.

  Stuart sobered, walking back to her desk. “Sunny, we know where to find him now. You should be happy.”

  She let out a halting, bitter laugh, putting her head back then to face him. “Oh, I am,” she answered. “I just don’t know what he’ll do, Stuart, what he’ll say. I want things to be like they were before, but I know they can’t be. In a way I was almost hoping we wouldn’t find him.” Tears sprang into her eyes. “God, Stuart, he’s going to hate me. I don’t know if I can stand to see the look I know will be in those eyes when I see him.”

  Stuart came around the desk and put a hand on her shoulder. “Well, you won’t know for certain unless you see him, will you? And you know damn well you can’t not see him now that you know where he is. Come on, Sunny. You’re the one who was so determined to do this. Just be strong about it like you are when you face Vince.” He handed her a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket.

  “Facing Colt and facing Vince are not at all the same,” she answered, wiping her eyes. “Colt can completely undo me with one look. My God, I love him so much, Stuart. I’ve loved him since I was fifteen years old. To see him again and have him hate me, to know he’ll never hold me again, love me like he did before, it’s going to be the worst thing I’ve ever faced.”

  “He has a son, Sunny. He can’t hate the mother of his child.”

  She stared at the papers on her desk. “He can when he realizes that if not for Blaine’s death, he might never have known.”

  “You did that to protect little Bo. He’ll understand once he has time to think about it.”

  “I can only pray he will.” Sunny rose, sighing deeply to control her tears. “I don’t want him forewarned that we’re coming,” she said. “He won’t know about Bo, and if he hears I’m coming, he just might bolt and run, figuring he’s better off never seeing me again. He might not even know Blaine is dead. Either way, he’s much too hard to find when he doesn’t want to be found, so I’ll just have to surprise him.” She shivered. “I’ve faced a lot of powerful men, Stuart, but this one scares me more than anything I’ve faced till now. No decision I’ve ever made, even if it involved millions of dollars, has been as challenging as this one will be.”

  Stuart took her arm. “Come on. The train leaves in less than two hours. Get yourself home and finish packing. We have a trip to take, and little Bo is going to meet his father. It’s all going to work out, Sunny. Sometimes I think I have more confidence in Colt than you have.”

  “Is that so?” She looked at the man and smiled affectionately. “You certainly have changed since marrying Vi. I’m glad I have one brother who cares about me.”

  He shrugged. “Vince cares too, Sunny. He just has a poor way of doing what he thinks is best for people, and he’s a rotten judge of character. Besides, he doesn’t have Vi for a wife.”

  They stopped near the doorway, and Sunny turned to him, more tears coming. “I need someone to hold me before I fall apart,” she told him.

  Stuart grinned a little bashfully. “Well, with the big salary you pay me, I guess I have to be good for something, don’t I?” He put his arms around her, and Sunny couldn’t help the bitter sobbing. She could not remember a time in her whole life when one of her brothers ever embraced her. She clung to him, and Stuart felt a tightness in his own throat.

  “Hell, Sunny, I love you,” he told her. “I’m sorry I never told you before.” He kept a tight hold on her, praying Colt Travis was the compassionate, forgiving man he would need to be to handle what was to come. He hated the thought of Sunny’s heart being broken into any more pieces than it already was.

  ***

  Colt tilted back the wooden chair outside the sheriff’s office, putting a foot up on a railing. A group of cattlemen herded several hundred head past the end of the street, stirring up a cloud of dust that carried on the wind and made him turn away and rub his eyes. He had long ago gotten used to the smell of Cheyenne, with its dirt and a generous amount of horse and cow manure. He supposed the smell would get worse every summer, as more and more cattle were brought in to meet the trains heading east to the slaughterhouses in Chicago. Here it was only the first of May, and the real heat of summer was still ahead.

  He lit a cigarette, nodding to a local farmer who drove a wagon past the office. He glanced at the cattlemen at the end of the street again. Since the judge had come and determined two men from the shootout should hang, and had set boundaries that allowed both warring ranchers involved to have access to a stream that ran between the two properties, things had not settled much. One rancher threatened to dam up his end of the stream, which was where the flow came from, and the judge warned that if he did such a thing, he would be arrested. A few more fistfights had broken out, but so far there had been no more gunfights.

  Two young women walked past him on the boardwalk, one the daughter of a banker, the other the daughter of a blacksmith, both no more than eighteen years old. They stopped to say good morning to him, a look of invitation in their eyes. Colt grinned and greeted them, knowing full well their interest in him as a suitor. Both were pretty in their own way, but at thirty-two, they seemed too young to him now, and neither of them could compare to Sunny. He told himself he was a fool to always be comparing other women to one he could never have. He wanted very much to be able to love again, but he wasn’t sure if he could. He watched the young ladies turn to each other and whisper and giggle as they walked away, watched the sway of their dresses, imagined how nice it would feel to have a decent woman love him and give him children again, like LeeAnn, like Sunny might have done.

  He knew from simple instinct that several available women in Cheyenne could be his for the asking, especially since that damn writer had been spreading it around that he was going to write a book about the shootout. He and Rex were being made out as heroes, but Colt’s natural modesty and aversion to too much attention made the whole thing embarrassing for Colt. He kept trying to tell the pesty writer that he was just doing his job.

  His side still ached from where a bullet had skimmed across a left rib during the shootout, nicking a piece of bone away, and he wondered how many more scars he would carry before going to his grave. Most of the soldiers were gone now, except for a small squad that remained to help keep an eye on things for a while. Colt felt bad about having killed one of the ranch hands himself, but when bullets were flying, a man had to do what he had to do. He could have predicted problems over water, seemed to remember mentioning that to Sunny once when they had talked about how the railroad would change the West.

  Change it, it had. It had changed more than the land. It had changed a whole way of life for some people, especially the Indians. He thought how different everything was now from when he used to ride and scout with Slim. He was a different man himself from the twenty-year-old kid who took on the job of scouting for Bo Landers. Twelve years had passed.

  He let out a whistling sigh of amazement, setting his chair back on all fours and rolling himself a cigarette. Twelve years, he thought. I’ve loved her all that time. What a fool he had been. Loving Sunny openly had led right smack into the disaster everyone had warned him it would. He lit the cigarette, finding it incredulous how much could happen to a man in twelve years, loving and losing a wife and son, living among the Cheyenne, fighting in
that hideous war, spending time in a southern prison, going to work for the Union Pacific.

  He could hear another train rolling in now, its whistle sounding throughout the city and to the mountains beyond. He took a deep drag on the cigarette, thinking how for two short days he had thought that maybe, just maybe, he had found the happiness for which he had searched for years, had finally won the love of his life, would be rid of all the loneliness and the one-nighters with whores who didn’t really give a damn about him, except for Billie.

  He smiled sadly, leaning back in the chair again and thinking what an unusual wife Sunny would have made if they had ever been able to marry. She would certainly not have been the conventional woman who would be waiting for him in a cozy little house every day, bread baked, clothes scrubbed. But then, what the hell? He could have lived with the businesswoman Sunny Landers, because the woman who came to his bed at night would have been completely different, as giving and loving and open as the best of them.

  He angrily rose then, chiding himself for thinking about her. She had loved him with fiery passion, almost violently; but she had hurt him just as violently. Did she realize how shattered he had been, how empty his life had been since then, how hard it was for him to take an interest in another woman? There she was, lying in Blaine O’Brien’s bed, and he was still visiting prostitutes, waking up with just as empty a feeling as when he fell into their beds the night before.

  He leaned against a support post and watched the street with experienced eyes and ears, always ready for trouble. He had learned early on that a lawman couldn’t be too careful. In spite of the growing civilization, most men figured it was all right to take the law into their own hands, something he still believed himself in some respects. He could think of one man he would have killed if he could have gotten him somewhere out in those hills beyond town. Killing Vince Landers slowly would have been a pleasure.