Until Tomorrow
Rosanne Bittner
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1995 by Rosanne Bittner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition May 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-285-7
More from Rosanne Bittner
Full Circle
The Bride Series
Tennessee Bride
Texas Bride
Oregon Bride
Dedicated to Beth Lieberman, an editor who has been with me through two publishers and many books, and who has taught me to accept criticism with all the good intentions every editor has to make her writer the best she can be. No matter how many books a writer produces, each one is a learning process, and the editor is the teacher. Thank you, Beth.
To my readers …
Of all the places I have visited out west, I enjoy the still-preserved old mining towns most, especially those high in the mountains of Colorado. Seeing places like Cripple Creek, Blackhawk and Central City is like stepping into the past, and many of the original buildings still stand today, well preserved by citizens who appreciate the rich history of their towns. The aura of excitement and romance in such places lingers, and that is why I chose Central City as the setting for this story (which at the time was called the City of Central). It lies in the mountains west of Denver, in an area once called the “richest square mile on earth.”
Central City is certainly far from a ghost town today. It is alive and growing, its former saloons and businesses now converted to gambling casinos. The quaint buildings, such as the Teller Hotel and the Central City Opera House, as well as sur rounding mountains peppered with abandoned mines, give the town a “Wild West” atmosphere that creates visions of America’s once-booming gold towns.
Although my characters are fictitious, I hope they come alive for you as they did for me. Certainly people just like them existed in the Old West!
Take me with you,
Though we are strangers.
Still we share heartache,
Loneliness,
A need to love again.
They call you desperado,
An outlaw.
But I see something more.
Take me with you
To a place where we can start anew,
Under western skies.
I will be your woman,
And we will find a new life together.
Don’t say we must wait
Until tomorrow.
There may be no tomorrows …
There is only today.
One
June, 1867 …
Addy waited in line, her heart racing a little faster every time she thought of the reason she was withdrawing her precious savings from the Unionville Bank. Loneliness engulfed her, again trying to destroy her self-confidence. She had to do this, and she told herself that wherever she went, even to a wild gold town in a place too far away to think about, she would surely make new friends, and they would be people who would accept her for who she was, not judge her because of choices her family had made during the war.
She had lived in this same small town in southern Illinois all her life, but she could no longer endure the loss of family to death, the loss of friends to misunderstanding, the insults, the coldness. It could be years before she was allowed to teach here, and she had to get on with her life. It was time to start over. She would take her money and go someplace where she was wanted and needed. When she had answered the ad for a schoolteacher in the city of Central, Colorado, there had been no questions about where her sympathies had lain in the war, no questions about which side her male relatives had taken. They wanted only her age and education and her marital status.
Widow. That was her marital status. Her own family had been torn apart because of the war, a father and husband fighting on the Confederate side, both killed. Her mother was also gone now, dead of a broken heart, she was sure. Her sister was like a stranger to her, married to a Union man. She had deserted the rest of the family because she didn’t want to be associated with Confederate sympathizers living in a town where most hated the southern cause. It was not a firm belief in the Union cause that had driven Harriet away. She had simply taken the easy way out. It had always been like that with her sister, and Addy had no respect for her. Harriet had married a wealthy Union man, and she had abandoned their mother in her hour of need.
Addy looked down at her own simple yellow calico dress. Harriet wore only the best and latest fashions now, enjoyed flaunting her wealth.
“Next?” The teller’s voice interrupted Addy’s thoughts. She stepped forward, handing the man her bank book.
“Hello, Mr. Tully. I would like to withdraw all my savings.”
“All of it?” Ned Tully peered at her over the top of his wire-rimmed spectacles, his eyes showing his own lingering irritation over her father’s choice to fight for the Confederacy.
“You say that as though it were thousands,” Addy answered. “I don’t believe that withdrawing four hundred dollars is going to close your doors, Mr. Tully. I am leaving Illinois and I need the entire savings.” Thank goodness the people who had hired her to come to Central had paid for her transportation. She had been told by letter that all she had to do was give her name at the train and stage stations and come to Central on the date proposed, which was only a couple of weeks away, and everything would be taken care of.
“Leaving Illinois, huh?”
Addy caught the relief in Tully’s words, as though a hated enemy were leaving town. “Yes. I am taking a teaching job in the city of Central, Colorado.”
The man’s eyebrows arched as he opened her bank book. “Colorado! Is it one of those wild gold towns?”
Addy’s eyelids closed over her green eyes for a moment in impatience. “I have no idea how wild it is, Mr. Tully. I only know that there are families there with children who need teaching. I do have a degree in teaching, you know, and since I can’t teach here, I will go someplace else to do it. Please get me my money, will you? And make it in big bills so I don’t have a big wad of it to carry around. I will be traveling alone.”
Tully shrugged his thin shoulders and squinted at the figures in her savings book. “Stay right there. I’ll have to go into the safe for all of it.”
He left for a moment, and Addy glanced at an old woman at the next teller’s station. It was Sara Webster, who had been a good friend to her mother … before the war. Sara glanced at her in return, then quickly looked away, an obvious signal she did not want to speak. Heaven forbid that she be seen talking to a Confederate sympathizer. It was a brand Addy carried, even though her personal sympathies had been for the Union; but her father and husband had both marched off to join the Confederacy, and by then she was home from school to help her ailing mother while her father was gone.
Many of these people had lost sons, brothers, husbands, in the war. It didn’t seem to matter to them that she, too, had suffered terrible losses. Mrs. Webster had lost two sons, so she had stopped speaking to Addy and her mother. The old woman’s co
ld shoulder only reaffirmed Addy’s decision to leave.
Ned Tully returned with a little canvas bag. “It’s all in here,” he told Addy. “Would you like to count it?”
“I certainly would,” she answered, taking the bag from him. She’d decided that if Ned Tully was going to be rude to her, then she would be rude to him. She dumped out the money, mostly bills, some coins. She quickly counted it and shoved it back into the little bag, along with her cancelled savings book. “Thank you, Mr. Tully. I—”
The outer door suddenly burst open, swinging back and hitting the wall so hard that the glass in the door shattered. One woman screamed, and Addy gasped when she turned to see four men barge into the bank, two waving rifles and also wearing six-guns on their hips; the other two aiming six-guns on everyone inside. All four wore long dusters in spite of the warm weather.
“Nobody move!” one of them shouted. He was a burly, heavy-set man with dark, piercing eyes and a gruff voice. “Hand over your money, jewelry, anything of value!” The man glanced at one of his cohorts, a young man with long, dark, unkempt hair. “Start collecting, Ted!”
Mrs. Webster put a wrinkled hand to her chest in alarm, looking ready to faint. The younger man began walking to each customer, holding his six-gun to their necks and demanding their valuables. Addy grasped her little bag of money tightly and moved it behind her skirt as she slowly stepped away from the teller’s window.
One of the men holding a rifle approached Ned Tully’s cage, resting the barrel of his rifle on the shelf. He was tall, and it was obvious he was well-built underneath the coat he wore. “Let’s have everything in your drawer and in the safe, mister,” he said in a deep, steady voice, “and be quick and generous.” Tully started to protest when a booming crack shook the bank. Richard Wyman, the teller next to him, was shot by the heavy-set robber when he tried to argue.
Addy’s eyes widened in shock as Richard slumped to the floor, and Tully began scrambling to gather everything that was in his drawer. The heavy-set man ordered yet another robber, called Cal, to go in back and see what was in the safe. Cal hurried around back, brushing past her and causing her to stumble sideways. Her first reaction was to reach out, exposing the little canvas bag that held her money. Her movement caught the eye of the tall man robbing Ned Tully, and he glanced in her direction, noticing the bag.
Addy could not help staring. The man’s eyes were an amazing blue, outlined by dark eyebrows and dark lashes. He was a handsome man, but she could feel only contempt for him, and her heart raced when she realized he had seen the money bag. She wondered why he didn’t ask for it. All he did was stare at her for a moment, in that way men had of looking at a woman they thought was pretty. His blue eyes raked her body before he turned back to Tully and reached out to grab a bag of money the man handed him.
“Let’s have it, lady.” The one called Ted had reached Addy, and he placed his six-gun at her throat. “How much you got in the little bag there, huh?”
Addy suddenly felt like crying, but anger replaced the urge, and she glared right back at the young outlaw. “This is all I have, and some of it is from my parents’ savings, from a business they worked hard for and lost because of the war. I have already lost so much. Haven’t people suffered enough from the war? Why do men like you have to come and take what little is left?”
The tall man with the blue eyes looked her way again. “Lady, you don’t even know the meaning of the word suffer,” he told her.
For a quick moment Addy saw a great agony in those blue eyes, but there was no time to contemplate what could have caused him to make such a remark. Ted pushed the barrel of his gun closer against her throat. “Let’s have it, woman!”
“Let her be,” the blue-eyed man told him threatingly.
Ted looked up at him. “Like hell!” He turned and yanked the bag out of Addy’s hand, then stepped back, shoving her own little bag into a bigger bag slung over his shoulder, into which he had put other people’s money and valuables.
Everything had happened in less than a minute, and now the man with the blue eyes was asking Ned Tully where Howard Benedict was. Benedict was the owner of the bank, and Addy wondered how the outlaw knew that.
“He … he’s not here today,” Tully answered.
“Too bad,” the blue-eyed man answered. “I meant to kill him. You tell him Nick Coleman paid him a visit, and I’ll be back to get him someday soon!”
Nick Coleman. So, that was the blue-eyed man’s name. Why would he give it out so easily? Why did he hate Howard Benedict so much?
Coleman ordered Tully out from behind his cage. The teller came to stand beside Addy, and the fat man yelled to Cal, still at the safe in back, telling him to hurry. “The law could show up any minute!” he hollered. He, Ted, and Nick Coleman held their weapons on everyone in the bank lobby, some of whom had crouched to the floor. Coleman kept glancing at Addy, almost as though he knew her. He looked her over with apparent pleasure, yet Addy caught little hints of regret in his eyes, as though by his look he was trying to apologize for Ted taking her money.
Ted hurried to the door, then quickly came inside looking panicked. “The sheriff is coming!” He moved his eyes to the fat man. “This is your fault, Jack! You never should have fired that shot! Now you’ve killed a man and they’ll be after our asses for sure!”
“Shut up, you little bastard!” the fat man answered.
Just then Cal burst into the lobby with a gunny sack full of money. His hat had fallen off, exposing a head of thick, dirty blond hair. “Let’s go!”
Nick Coleman swung around and headed for the door. While his back was turned, the fat man, who Addy now knew was called Jack, headed for Addy. Before she realized his intentions, he grabbed her arm and jerked her forward, then wrapped a powerful arm around her throat from behind. “We’ll take a hostage!” he growled. “The sheriff won’t dare shoot at us with this pretty lady along.”
Coleman whirled. “What the hell! Let her go, Jack!”
“Like hell! We need her, and if you’re gonna take a hostage, take a pretty woman, I say. They’ll be even less likely to shoot at you! Let’s go! Ted’s got the horses ready by now!”
“Goddammit, let her go!” Coleman demanded.
“You’ve been a burr in my butt for a while now, Coleman!” Jack growled. “You’re either part of this gang, or you ain’t!” Suddenly he fired his six-gun before anyone realized he would do such a thing, including Nick, who lurched backward with a bloody hole in his left shoulder. People screamed, including Addy, whose ears rang from the gun being fired so close to her head. Coleman sprawled on the floor, his rifle flying out of his hand, and Jack dragged Addy out the door, telling her he’d blow her brains out if she put up too much of a fuss. By then the sheriff and his deputy were shooting at Ted and Cal, who were ducked behind a wagon. Jack shouted from the bank doorway to hold their fire. “I’ve got a hostage!” he yelled. “I’ve already killed two men, and I’ll kill this woman if you don’t let us ride out of town!”
The firing stopped and Jack moved outside. Addy’s heart pounded with fear that bullets would fly again and she would be killed, either by the outlaws or accidentally by the sheriff.
“You won’t get far!” Sheriff Page answered. “I’ll have a posse after you low-lifes! You hurt that woman and you’ll all hang!”
For the moment Addy decided she was wise to cooperate with the robbers. Perhaps she would find a way to escape later, when there were not so many guns pointed in her direction. Jack dragged her to a horse and ordered her to get on, and she realized it must belong to the blue-eyed man inside, who for some strange reason had tried to defend her.
Ted and Cal quickly mounted their own horses, as did Jack. Ted grabbed the reins to Addy’s horse and rode off at a hard gallop. Cal and Jack whirled their horses and fired more shots toward where the sheriff and his deputy were hiding behind barrels, then charged after Ted and Addy. Addy heard a few shots being fired at them, felt two b
ullets whiz by her, much too close for comfort. She ducked down, hanging on to her horse’s mane for dear life, and suddenly the four of them were well out of town. She prayed the three men who had taken her hostage would let her go soon, that she had only been taken as a way to get out of town, not for other purposes that she did not even want to think about. That hope dwindled when the three men slowed up for a moment.
“Should we let her go now, Jack?” Ted asked.
They all stopped their horses and looked her over. Jack grinned through yellowed teeth. “Hell no. Look at that pretty red glint to her hair, and look at them pretty green eyes.” He raked her hungrily with his gaze. “And the rest of her. Round in the right places … and a pretty face to go with it. Let’s take her to the cabin. If we high-tail it, any posse the sheriff manages to round up will never find us.”
“What happened to Nick?” Cal asked.
Jack sniffed. “That sonofabitch has been contradictin’ me too many times lately. He’s gonna’ cause us to get caught one of these times. So I shot him.”
Ted’s eyes widened. “You shot Nick? He’s our best gun!”
Jack whipped out his own six-gun. “Not any more. You got somethin’ else to say about it, kid?”
Ted swallowed. “No, Jack. I just thought … well … Nick’s a good man to have along.”
“He’s tried to tell me what to do too many times now, so I got rid of him. Now let’s get ridin’ before the sheriff gets a posse together!” He shoved his gun back into its holster, and the other two looked at each other. Addy could tell they were upset by what Jack had done, but they were not about to argue about it.
They rode off again, and Addy wondered what kind of horror awaited her. Her mind began racing with plans of escape … and she wondered why on earth she was upset over the fact that the man called Nick Coleman might be dead. Why on earth should it matter? Perhaps because she felt that if he was along, he would not let the other three men harm her. Now she was at their mercy.
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