“With her,” Cadwell said. “That’s Joe, as in Josephine.”
That morsel of information took a minute for Nate to digest. “The leader of the Krugar Gang is a woman?”
“The most unscrupulous lady I’ve ever encountered.”
The word “unscrupulous” to describe any outlaw, whether man or woman, agreed with Nate, but “lady” was another matter. For Cadwell to have called her one suggested his acquaintance with her was more than casual. “Care to tell me what you know about her?”
“She’s dangerous, she’s cunning, and that’s everything you need to know.” Cadwell’s bluntness suggested that was all the information Nate was going to get.
“What do you suspect she’ll do with Hattie?”
“I suspect Josephine’s going to use her as leverage.”
That wasn’t a good thing to hear, but what Nate asked next was even worse. “Why would she put so much stock into a saloon girl?”
“Josephine’s not stupid,” Cadwell said. “She’s figured out that Hattie’s role in all this was staged and that she’s valuable to the town.” He turned to Nate. “This wasn’t a very good plan. I wished they’d have listened to me.”
Nate kept from spouting out his agreement.
In no time, the outskirts of Ramsden came into view.
Cadwell tied the covering back over his face. “I’ll need my horse.”
It was a peculiar mask, and Nate couldn’t help staring at it for a moment before surrendering the animal.
Cadwell mounted.
“You’ll have to walk from here,” Cadwell said. “I’ll slip the horse we commandeered back into the livery so it can go back to its rightful owner next time the stagecoach is back in town. I hope you can come up with a good plan to get Hattie back. It’ll be a challenge to outsmart Josephine. She’s already outsmarted the sheriff. Which, by the way,” Cadwell added, savvy to Nate’s opportunity to gloat, “you shouldn’t be too smug about. Josephine’s getting the upper hand this time, since she’s been outfoxing sheriffs, Texas Rangers, bounty hunters, and even U.S. Marshals for eight years now.”
“She must be quite a lady,” Nate said.
The odd cover over Cadwell’s face, with only his eyes peering out, covered up his response.
“Speaking of better plans,” Nate said, staring at Cadwell’s mask. “Is that a doily you’re wearing over your face?”
“It’s a—dresser scarf,” Cadwell said. “I didn’t want anyone to recognize me, and—it was the only thing handy at the spur of the moment.”
Had Hattie not been in danger, Nate would have had a good laugh. “You look like a harem girl.”
“I’ll find something that looks a bit more—intimidating—in the future. Godspeed, Nate.” He was about to ride off but turned. “There’s one thing I want you to do for me.”
“And that is?”
“Do whatever it takes to get Hattie back. But as for Josephine, leave the little vixen for me.” He spurred the horse and was off.
~*~
A long walk into town allowed Nate to clear his mind. Even if he didn’t have a plan, he had a destination.
The sheriff’s office was crowded with six uneasy men.
A pacing Zachariah stopped short when Nate entered. “What are you doing back here?”
Nate would do whatever it took to rescue Hattie, even if it meant eating crow from Zachariah. But Nate could serve some up as well. “I’m here to get Hattie back, since you failed so miserably to protect her. I warned you about that gang. How could you let this happen to her?”
“She’s my concern, not yours,” Zachariah barked.
“Strong words,” Nate retorted, “for a hired hand.”
“No, Nate.” In an unusual fit of rage, Zachariah barged toward him. “Strong words for a sheriff. And don’t you forget that. But most of all—” He thumped his chest, his face in Nate’s. “—don’t you forget you’re not the only one who cares about Hattie.”
“We’re all worried about her, Nate,” Clayton said.
The other men chimed in, diverting Nate’s attention away from Zachariah.
“Nobody can figure out what to do,” Clayton said. “We’re at our wit’s end, and time’s running out. Got any ideas?”
Nate reeled in his temper. “What do you mean time’s running out?”
“The gang left a message with the Reverend that we got until five o’clock this evening to bring them the money. If we don’t, they’re threatening to kill Hattie.”
The words made Nate’s heart race. Consulting his watch brought him close to a panic. “It’s past four o’clock now.” How was he supposed to come up with a plan and implement it in less than an hour? If only Zachariah hadn’t sent him away...
Nate wanted to lunge at him. And then what? Get held down by a half-dozen men and end up in jail again where he’d be no use at all to Hattie?
He had to think rationally not emotionally. And thinking rationally began by swallowing an unsavory helping of humble pie. Nate needed to be filled in on everything. He turned to Zachariah. “All right, Sheriff.” Saying that didn’t taste as bad as he thought it might. “Let’s begin by you telling me everything you know.”
“First of all,” Zachariah said, “I want to know how you found out she’d been captured and how you got back here.”
Discussing Cadwell’s puzzling dual identity wasn’t an option, as past efforts had already proven it futile. “What does it matter how I found out?” Nate had to get Zachariah’s feet on the same road. “Fifty minutes doesn’t give us enough time for a hundred questions. So let’s try this again.” Sensibly spelling it out to Zachariah also helped Nate to get a foothold on his patience with the man—and to stay focused on what needed to be done. “For me to come up with a big plan in so little time in order to save Hattie’s life, I need you to tell me what you know.” There. He’d spelled it out, urgency and all, clear as spring water.
Zachariah clamped his jaw and then relaxed it for an uneasy truce. “We spotted four riders, three men, one might have been a boy.”
Nate kept it to himself that the “boy” was Josephine.
“We closed the businesses and cleared the streets,” Zachariah said.
Nate didn’t say anything but noted the “closed” sign hanging across the street on a door in the middle of the day probably tipped Josephine off that the town knew they were coming. Yet another mistake in this chain of catastrophes.
“Since we wanted to capture them, we didn’t want to start firing and scare them off, so we waited for Hattie to do her part. She was standing in front of the saloon, and the next thing we knew…” Zachariah hesitated. “They had her.”
Easy as that? It was hard to believe, because Hattie was a fighter. “They may have out-muscled her onto a horse,” Nate said. “But how’d they keep her from jumping off?”
Zachariah swallowed. “They knocked her out cold.”
Nate wanted to punch the daylights out of Zachariah. But he clenched his teeth and paced instead.
“The gang went between the buildings, riding single file, but they put Hattie on the last horse, so I couldn’t get a clear shot at them. Not without risking hitting her. They fired a few rounds and hit Malachi. He’ll be all right. He’s with Doc. Right now we’re getting together a posse.”
“A posse of what?” Nate said. “Merchants, blacksmiths, and a telegrapher? You’ll have a half-dozen fledglings firing at Hattie. No offense, Clayton.”
“None taken,” Clayton said. “He’s right, Zachariah. You’re the only one here handy with a rifle.”
“So what do you propose we do?” Zachariah asked, his gaze on Nate. “They want us to bring ten thousand dollars to the ravine. We can’t come up with that kind of money.”
That amount raised Nate’s brow, initially with the shock of the amount—and then with an easy solution to the problem. “I have the money at my bank.”
Clayton perked. “I can wire it in.” He shot out the door toward the telegraph o
ffice with Nate following.
Ten minutes later, Nate told Clayton to stop tapping away at the telegraph. “There’s nobody at the bank. It closes at five, and—”
“And Boston’s ahead of our time.” Clayton threw up his hands.
It was back to the sheriff’s office but with ten minutes wasted. The men inside were discussing the problem.
“There’s four of them and six of us. I’d say we just go after them.”
“In that ravine?”
“They’ll not be in the ravine, they’ll be hiding somewhere along the top.”
“And that’s the problem. We’ll never find them. The ravine’s a good mile and a half long. It’s full of places for them to hide. They’ll gun every one of us down.”
“But what else can we do? We’ve got to at least put up a fight, because if we can’t give them what they want, then Hattie’s good as—”
“Don’t say it.” Standing at the doorway, Nate was compelled to speak up. “Maybe if we can get Tilly to cooperate just a little…”
“How little?” Zachariah said.
“Ten thousand dollars’ worth?” Nate asked. “A loan. I’ll pay him back myself.”
“It’s no use,” Zachariah said. “He wants no part of this, and we’ve already wasted the better part of the afternoon trying to talk him into it.”
“If he wasn’t the only banker in town,” Clayton said, “he’d have no part of me.”
“Me, neither,” the others agreed.
“So all we’ve got is what’s in our accounts as well as what’s under our hats, and it doesn’t even add up to a thousand dollars,” Clayton said. “Wait a minute.” His wrinkled brow creased more as he walked behind the desk. “Hattie dropped something off this morning for me to give to Zachariah to hold on to. I suspected it might be some money, so I put it in the drawer, and with everything going on…” He retrieved a sealed envelope and handed it to Zachariah.
Hattie knew the plan would be dangerous, so why did she go ahead and do it? That was another dart to throw at Zachariah, but they had to stick to the matter at hand. “Even if it is all her money, how much can she possibly have?”
“Won’t hurt to check.” Zachariah opened the envelope and fanned two stacks of legal tender notes with Ben Franklin’s face on them. “It’s full of hundreds.” He counted the money. “She’s got two thousand dollars here.”
“Where’d she get that kind of money?” Clayton asked.
“I’m guessing her father gave it to her before he left,” Zachariah said.
“That’s a lot of money.” The other men’s faces filled with hope that Zachariah snuffed out.
“It’s still not ten thousand dollars.”
Nate rubbed his jaw. “Two thousand might still be enough.”
“If we give them less than they want, we’ll put her in danger,” Zachariah said.
“So will doing nothing,” Clayton added.
But Nate kept rubbing his jaw. Time was ticking away fast and with no plan and being short of money…could the scheme work? Could he outsmart the notorious Josephine Krugar?
He checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes left to go. They just might have enough time and resources to pull it off. “We may not have enough money, but you’ve got paper in this town, don’t you?”
Clayton’s eyes lit up. “Now that’s something we happen to have plenty of.”
“Why?” Zachariah straightened in his chair. “What do you have in mind?”
“If we can’t outgun them, and we can’t give them what they want,” Nate said, “we’ll have to outwit them.”
29
Hattie gained consciousness on the dirt floor of a musty mine, her head throbbing. She sat up, touched the tender spot on her head, and discovered it was wet and sticky because it was bleeding.
“She’s awake now,” said a ferret-like voice. “Want me to tie her up?”
“You’re a little too eager, Mel. I’ll do it myself.” The second voice was slow and businesslike, and it gave Hattie goosebumps.
A rusty lantern illuminated a tall man with a bony face and shadows beneath his eyes. Hattie shielded her eyes from the brightness as he carried the lantern over to her. He reeled her around with undue roughness and tied her wrists behind her back with an itchy rope. Two men scurried up like rodents to ogle the creamy mounds that her low-cut dress boasted.
“We got plans for you,” Mel said to Hattie, and then he grinned with brown-crusted teeth. The other man was even uglier, with a spray of thin hair, patchy beard, and greedy eyes. They both stank like polecats.
A slight figure wearing a man’s shirt and trousers, belt cinched in at the waist showing an hourglass figure, stepped into the light. She pushed back a lock of flaxen hair from her ivory face and exposed her ice-gray eyes.
How did I get here? Hattie remembered strutting in front of the saloon, hanging onto her nerve as four riders rode up and one stopped, and looking up to find that the face beneath the hat was a woman’s. Oh, yes. And meeting, up close and personal, the butt of her rifle.
“A woman as beautiful as you can handle any man, can’t she?” The woman had snatched the idea out of Hattie’s head but spoke with elocution as fine as Nate’s. “Mel and Bill, stop gawking at her.”
Mel started, “But she’s just a—”
“You say that word, and I will personally carve out your tongue.” Her voice was a tranquil river—a trickling, almost melodic flow—but her eyes were a tempest. “Tom, get these dolts away from her.”
The two polecats scurried away before Tom had a chance to oblige.
Storm-cloud eyes stayed on Hattie as the woman approached. Though she wore trousers and a plaid shirt, she moved with the poise of a lady carrying a parasol and wearing the finest of dresses.
“My name is Josephine. What’s yours?”
Hattie didn’t answer, because she saw in the beautiful face that this was the calm before a storm. Instead, she prayed for strength.
“Pretty.” Josephine knelt by Hattie’s side and, with soft fingertips, turned Hattie’s face toward hers. As beautiful as Hattie was, this woman was her blonde equal. “Very pretty. But you’re no fille de joie. I can tell by your eyes. You don’t have that hard look. So, who are you?”
Hattie jerked away. “I’m nobody.”
“Oh, you’re precious to someone. So I’ll call you Pearl.” Josephine’s voice was smooth as the satin ribbon that pulled back her wavy hair. “A woman doesn’t just waste away by herself in a town full of men. He must have been worth your while, rich—” Her cold eyes found the scars on Hattie’s arms. “—and mean.” She turned her back to Hattie and lowered the shoulder of her shirt to show several welts, like red earthworms, healed into her back. “But I’ve got some scars of my own, so don’t expect any sympathy from me, dearest.” She buttoned her shirt. “But the worst scars are the ones a man leaves on your heart. Have you ever been in love, Pearl?” Perhaps, as Josephine spoke in a dreamy voice, she hungered for female company.
“Haven’t we all?” The rope cutting off the circulation in Hattie’s hands was a good reminder she was captive female company.
“What was yours like?” Josephine asked as though they were sipping tea together.
“Like yours, I reckon.”
“You ‘reckon’? How charming.” Josephine came to her full height, slim, stately, and thoroughly out of sorts with the homely men. “There never was, nor will there ever be, a man like Jake.” Her eyes softened, but hardened again. “So my question is, is your ‘somebody’ ten thousand dollars’ worth of rich?” Josephine sighed at the blankets and pans strewn beneath the beams and the cobwebs. “I’m tired of living in places like this.” She nodded toward the men. “And with vermin like that. And as for you, pretty Pearl, I’m sure you’d like to live.” Two storm cloudy eyes, heavy with thunder and hail about to break lose, lingered on Hattie.
And a torrent would erupt from this woman, because all the people left in Hattie’s life could never come up wit
h that much money. “Nate,” she groaned.
Josephine’s interest roused. “Who’s this Nate?”
It would destroy Nate if he ever knew what became of her. “My ‘somebody.’”
“So you do—”
“And my Jake.” Hattie added, “So you’ll not get one red cent for me.”
Josephine’s heart-shaped lips curled at the edges. “Well, let’s play this hand out anyway.” She laid light fingers on Hattie’s shoulder. “I’m willing to take bets on you, Pearl.” Josephine’s voice became terse. “Tom, you did deliver the ransom note. Am I correct?”
“I had Mel do it.”
Josephine shot him a gaze. “I told you to do it.”
“I thought you—”
“I didn’t tell you to think, I told you to do, because the last time you ‘thought,’ you brought back a couple of men who have the intelligence of two mules. If I had wanted Mel to do it, I would have told Mel to do it.”
“Mel ain’t that stupid,” Tom said. “And I didn’t want to chance getting caught.”
Josephine snorted a laugh. “Apparently I gave Mel more credit than his intelligence warrants. And you put that kind of responsibility on him?”
Mel whined, “I delivered the note. Tom said to leave it at some business, so I left it over at the church.”
“You left it at the church?” Josephine’s voice arched. “I wanted someone to find it today. People only go to church on Sundays. You’re not only a heathen, you’re a fool.”
Mel spurted, “But I saw a preacher inside. I’m sure he found it.”
“For your sake, he’d better have.” Josephine covered her hair and the ribbon with a fedora. “All right, boys. It’s time to go.” She looked down at Hattie. “Pearl, you’re riding with me.” Again, the butt of Josephine’s rifle smashed into Hattie’s head.
30
“Whew.” Clayton waved a hand in front of his face to shoo away an odor. “They sure smell strong. And they look too neat. It wouldn’t convince me one bit.”
It didn’t convince Nate either, but they’d run out of time and there were no other options. “This will have to do,” Nate said.
Divided Heart Page 17
