Hawk glanced up at her, pointedly narrowing one eye. “Would you really? Would you have felt safe knowing three rapists were roaming these hills?”
“I would have taken extra precautions to avoid them next time.”
“And what about the next beautiful woman they ran into? What if she didn’t know what they’re capable of?”
“Mr. Hawk,” Regan Mitchell said, her voice pitched low in shock at his attitude, “what you did was against the law. It’s called murder.”
“Are you going to turn me into the authorities? If, that is, there were any authorities to turn me into out here.”
She lowered her gaze to the arm he was continuing to clean with the cloth. “No. Of course not. But the point is . . .”
“Then you’re a party to murder.” Hawk raised his eyebrows at her and, removing the cloth from her arm, which was thoroughly cleaned, leaned back in his chair.
She returned his look, suddenly indignant. “That’s taking it rather far, isn’t it?”
“When it comes to killing savages,” Hawk said in his low, resonate growl, “I believe in taking things to the extreme. Those men would have taken turns raping you, Miss Mitchell. And when they were finished, they probably would have cut your throat and tossed your naked, bloody body into the same ravine in which they’re lying now, awaiting the carrion eaters.”
She turned her head away sharply, closing her eyes, her beautiful face bleaching. Hawk stood and rummaged around in his war sack once more, returning to the table with a small ball of clean white gauze wrapped around a stick. He set the linen onto the table, then fished a barlow folding knife out of the pocket of his black denim trousers, sat down in his chair once more, and cut off a three-foot length of the gauze.
She’d crossed her arms on her chest, draping her long fingers over her shoulders as she stared blindly at the cabin wall to Hawk’s left, where there was nothing but a five-year-old feed store calendar. He held his hand out to her.
“Your arm—” Hawk looked at her. “It is Miss Mitchell, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know many married schoolteachers—do you?” Her voice was low but clipped, cold. She lay her arm on the table again, turned so that the abrasions faced upward. “Who are you, Mr. Hawk? What are you doing out here? Obviously, you’re not a cowpuncher.”
Holding her hand with his free one, Hawk wrapped the gauze around her arm, starting at her elbow, overlapping it neatly.
He grinned. “I’m your new lawman, Miss Mitchell.”
She stared at him, lines of incredulity cutting into her forehead. “You must be joking.”
Continuing to wrap her arm, he said, “Sheriff Gideon Hawk. At your service.”
6.
“THAT’S INSANITY, MR. HAWK”
HAWK set her arm on the table, then pressed the end of the gauze firmly against the underside of her wrist, tamping it secure.
“Oh, no,” Regan Mitchell said, holding her injured arm in one hand and sinking back in her chair, giving Hawk that horrified stare once more. “This is terrible.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” He got up and returned the gauze to his war sack.
“The town council’s fliers. You’re answering one of those, aren’t you?”
“I reckon you could say that.”
“Have they hired you?”
“Not yet. My interview or whatever you want to call it is tomorrow.”
She stared at him but at the same time her eyes darted this way and that in their sockets, and her face turned even paler than before.
Hawk came back to the table, sat down, and splashed some whiskey into his half-empty coffee cup. He held the bottle up. “Join me?”
“No, thank you,” she said with a distracted air. She glanced at the pot suspended above the fire. “The stew should be ready.”
She walked over to the fire and grabbed the rawhide pad.
“Here,” Hawk said, rising. “Let me do that.”
“I’m fully capable—”
“I’m sure you are.”
Hawk took the pad out of her hands and looked down at her, towering over her. She stared up at him with those liquid brown eyes, and he tried to ignore the tug in his loins.
Christ, what a beautiful woman. And she was all woman. He had another mental image of her long legs and creamy round rump beneath the skirts shoved up around her waist, but a quick, fiery jab of shame shouldered the image aside and put a damper on his carnal hunger. God, he was little better than the men who’d attacked her. . ..
“But, please,” he said. “The pot’s heavy, and”—he glanced at the arm that she’d now covered with the sleeves of her dress and sweater—“you’re not at full strength.”
She let her eyes drop from his face and they seemed to stray of their own accord across his broad shoulders and thick, wind- and sunburned neck around which a green bandanna—almost the same green as his eyes—was knotted.
Quickly, she turned her head away from him and said in a sharp, sarcastic tone, “Have it your way, Mr. Hawk.”
She went back to the kitchen, plundered a couple of shelves for two tin plates and some silverware, and set them on the table. When Hawk had set the steaming pot down on the table’s end, she refilled their coffee cups.
Hawk lifted the lid from the pot and gazed down at the chunks of meat and potatoes swimming around in a rich, dark gravy glazed with small pools of copper-colored fat. The smells were heavenly, and it reminded Hawk of the supper aromas wafting around his once intact and happy home, Linda shuffling stove lids around while his boy, Jubal, set the table and jabbered about fishing or school or the little horses he carved from wood.
“You bring the rabbit from Trinity?”
“I shot them just today, on my way back from Fairfield.”
She reported this with a faintly haughty air, sitting down in her chair while smoothing her skirts against her legs. She glanced at the old Spencer rifle leaning against the wall behind her. It was an old, rusty carbine with badly weathered fore- and rear stocks; Hawk had assumed it had gone with the cabin.
“Two rabbits. You must be a good shot.”
“My father taught me well.” She used a large spoon to dish the stew onto her plate.
“A hunter?”
“No.” She shook her head, kept her lips primly pursed, making sure that while they were having a civil conversation, she did not care for him nor approve of his new job in her hometown. “He was a wild-horse trapper. A mustanger. I grew up in eastern Colorado, where we hunted all our food. I was the only child, and after my mother died it was up to me to provide for the table.”
Regan slid the steaming pot toward Hawk and finally looked at him from beneath her pretty, thin brows. “And town was a two-day ride from the ranch.”
“You did right well for yourself, then. And your father.” Hawk had dished himself a plateful of the aromatic stew spiced with salt, pepper, and wild onions. “And tonight, for me.”
She glanced at him quickly, with faint suspicion in her eyes.
“I meant only the stew, Miss Mitchell.”
She flushed and looked down at her plate as she speared a chunk of the rabbit meat with her fork.
“Tell me, Mr. Hawk,” she said after they’d eaten for a while in silence, swallowing and looking across at him, “are you what one would call a ‘town tamer’?”
Hawk glanced from beneath his brows at her. “I reckon if Trinity needs taming, I’ll tame it. Why do you ask, Miss Mitchell?”
“My father had the gyspy in him, so we’ve bounced around the frontier a bit. I’ve run into town tamers before. I don’t mind telling you that I care nothing for the breed at all.”
Hawk continued to eat, letting her continue without prompting.
She swallowed a bite of food, sipped her coffee, and wiped her hand on the cloth she was using for a napkin, her eyes crossing slightly, beguilingly, as she gazed across the table at him. “The towns I’ve seen that needed taming were much worse off after the so-ca
lled ‘tamers’ had moved in and gotten a so-called handle on things. The way they handled the lawlessness was merely to add to it. Unsanctioned killings by both the gun and the hang rope.” She shook her head in disgust. “It was vigilantism run amok.”
“To my way of thinking,” Hawk said as he continued eating, “vigilantism run amok means that innocent people were killed. The right kind of vigilantism should merely punish the guilty whom the traditional law for whatever reason was unable to throw a loop around. Usually, it’s because of bureaucratic loopholes or the squeamishness of the traditional lawman that this happens. Or the sheer number of the badmen in relation to the good.”
He looked up at her. She was staring back at him, holding her fork midway between her plate and her mouth, which hung partway open in awe of what she’d heard.
“Rest assured, Miss Mitchell.” Hawk sipped from his coffee and wiped his mustache with the back of his shirtsleeve. “When the number of badmen has been reduced in Trinity to the point a traditional lawman or lawmen can keep the lid on, I will be very happy to turn in my sheriff’s badge, and ride on.” He sipped from the coffee cup that he held in front of him with both his large, weathered hands. “I certainly do not intend to ‘run amok.’ ”
She set her fork down and kneaded her temple. “What you are so casually trying to rationalize, Mr. Hawk, is lawlessness upon lawlessness. The two do not add up to lawfulness . Besides, it’s the most grievous of transgressions against the Constitution.”
“What do you hold more dear—the rights scribbled on a scrap of paper, or the rights of individual Americans who are trying very hard to live decent, respectable lives but who’ve fallen prey to untamable brigands who kill our lawmen and laugh at the laws those men were trying to uphold?” Hawk shook his head. “It’s a far different country out here, Miss Mitchell, than the one in which the Constitution was penned. You were raised out here, so you know that as well as I do.”
“That’s insanity, Mr. Hawk. I find myself sitting here, listening to a madman.”
As though he hadn’t heard that last—he had, but only vaguely, not having allowed himself to hear clearly and to think about it, because he’d suffered such doubts about himself before—Hawk set his cup down and picked up his fork. “I do, however, admire your ideals.” He raised his eyes to hers and smiled. “Romantic as they are.”
She shook her head again as she sank back in her chair, leaving a good bit of food on her plate, her coffee cup steaming weakly before her. Absently, she rubbed the arm that Hawk had wrapped for her. “Blue Tierney and that son of his have brought more trouble than Trinity even realizes. . . .”
“What happened there?” Hawk asked, setting his fork down on his empty plate, feeling a faint prickling at the small of his back.
“You don’t know?”
“Only that the sheriff was killed when he was trying to hang some prisoners, and that the mayor of the town and the town council need someone to regain control before another permanent lawman can be seated.”
When she only looked at him, puzzled, he splashed some more whiskey into his coffee cup and held the cup up in front of his chin. Regan looked down at her plate, considering it for a time, then, apparently deciding that she could not let good food go to waste, picked up her spoon and began eating. She ate quickly, the way a man would eat, though she was far from mannish, as though to get it out of the way.
“Blue Tierney, head of the Two Troughs gang, and his men rode into town that morning,” she said, dabbing at her mouth with her napkin between bites. “I wasn’t there but I heard later, saw the blood around the gallows.”
She swallowed a mouthful of food as though with difficulty. “Tierney’s men shot the sheriff, Deputy Freeman, and the hangman. They left Pastor Hawthorne alive . . . because he’d dropped to his knees and lost control of himself. Sobbed and begged for his life, poor man. I hear he’s been only half a man ever since, resigned his position in the Lutheran church, and now frequents one of the saloons.”
She swabbed the gravy from her plate with a last chunk of potato and popped it into her mouth, casting Hawk a look, one brow arched, that said she was finished.
Hawk sipped his coffee. His hands shook faintly. Probably, she hadn’t noticed. He swallowed the lukewarm liquid heavily spiced with whiskey and ran his hand across his mustache. “What else?”
Regan beetled her brows at him. “You mean . . . the sheriff’s wife? Janelle?”
No, Hawk thought. Ah, shit. No. It hadn’t been merely a grisly false rumor that had made its way to Cheyenne on the lips of bored drummers and wandering punchers.
Hawk took another sip of coffee, felt his gut tighten, and swallowed. He dipped his chin weakly.
“I guess that’s the most tragic part of all this,” Regan said softly, sadly, using the pad to lift the coffeepot.
She offered the pot to Hawk, who shook his head, impatient to hear the dreaded story, then refilled her own cup and set the pot back down between them. Absently, she raised the wick of the lantern in the middle of the table, against the deepening night shadows that seemed to grow like malevolent living creatures from the walls trimmed with stretched animal hides.
“Killed herself.”
“How?”
She looked at him, her perplexity deepening, then canted her head to one side, brown eyes boring into him. “You heard?”
“Tell me how the sheriff’s wife killed herself.”
Regan flattened her hands on the table, on each side of her empty plate, and stared down at the left one as if seeing something hideous there in her knuckles. Her voice thickened; her eyelashes fluttered and grew wet.
“The morning after her husband’s funeral, she suffocated their little boy with a pillow.”
She paused, keeping her eyes on her left hand. Her upper lip quivered for a moment, and a single tear, golden in the lamplight, slid down from her eye and across her smooth right cheek. “Then she walked up to the business district in her nightdress and hanged herself from the gallows that had been built for her husband’s prisoners.”
There was a sudden clank. It took a quarter second for Hawk to realize that he’d let his cup slip from his hands. It bounced off the edge of his plate, spilling coffee and whiskey, and rolled off the edge of the table where it hit the floor with another, duller clang.
“Shit,” he wheezed, staring dumbly down at the cup where it rolled to rest about four feet from the table.
He heard a gasp. He looked across the table at Regan, who’d leaned back in her chair and covered her mouth with one of her hands. She stared across the table at him, her eyes bright and sharp as javelins.
“Oh, no,” she breathed, her soft, even voice belying the horror in her gaze. “You’re that Rogue Lawman from Nebraska!”
7.
THAT ROGUE LAWMAN FROM NEBRASKA
HAWK drew a deep breath of the cool night air as he pulled the cabin door closed behind him and blew it out at the stars guttering like sparks from a blacksmith’s forge in the velvet black bowl over the canyon.
He hadn’t started out to be that Rogue Lawman from Nebraska. Just a workaday lawman, albeit a federal one, with a beautiful young wife, Linda, and a boy to raise. “Three-Fingers” Ned Meade had taken all that away from him, starting with the boy whom the lunatic outlaw had hanged one stormy Nebraska night from a tree topping a hill just outside of Hawk’s hometown, near the creek where Hawk and his young son, Jubal, had fished summer nights and weekends.
Hawk stepped off the stoop and into the yard. His breath frosted in front of his face. He walked a little ways out, absently kicking stones and looking around, making sure all was quiet, that no other riders from the Two Troughs had shown up. When he’d circled the cabin, he went over to the barn and checked on the horses, two of which were down on their sides, asleep, while two others stood head to tail, still as statues. Hawk’s grulla stood off in a rear corner, facing the low, ragged-topped ridge to the north where several coyotes were having a yipping contest.
/> There were also the occasional, distant, eerie wails of a stalking bobcat. The horse flicked its tail every time it heard the screech. Horses hated bobcats, their fiercest enemies.
Hawk watched the horse for a time, standing there by the corral with one hand absently draped over the butt of the horn-gripped Colt .44 holstered high on his right hip. He had a silver-chased Russian .44 positioned for the cross draw on the opposite hip. Two hand irons often came in handy in his line of work.
Which was?
He chuffed caustically at the question. Killing was his line of work. Anyone and everyone who found themselves in the lamentable position of being the bereaved father turned Rogue Lawman’s prey. It had been that way since the prosecuting attorney had taken a bribe and turned Jubal’s killer free. Hawk had hunted and killed the attorney. Then he’d stalked and killed Meade’s outlaw gang, saving “Three-Fingers” Ned for last. And then he’d just kept right on hunting because that’s what he was good at. Sometimes, for his own private satisfaction, he wore his old deputy U.S. marshal’s badge upside down on his chest.
To him, that’s what the laws of justice on the frontier had become. Topsy-turvy. Upside down. When badmen ruled, all bets were off. Sometimes, good lawmen just had to turn rogue to do any good. And while Hawk had gotten a lot accomplished in the past few years, there was still much work to be done.
And that flier he’d seen in Cheyenne had pointed him to his next job. A good lawman had died. His wife had killed herself—hanged herself—and their boy was dead. She might have pressed the pillow to the boy’s face, but it was her husband’s killers who’d really killed the child. Killed her, too.
Killed them all.
Now, it was Blue and Brazos Tierney’s turn to go down hard. . . .
Hawk ground his jaws together angrily though he felt a comforting sense of firm resolve as he checked out the barn, inspecting the place by match light, then went back into the yard. He righted the overturned rain barrel, sat on it, hiked a boot on a knee, and dug into his coat pocket for his makings sack.
He could smell the piñon pine wafting from the cabin’s brick chimney. The woman had stoked the fire to heat water for a sponge bath. That’s when Hawk had decided to make himself scarce, give her time to bathe and get into bed.
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