by Maggie James
Alarm prickled. “What do you mean?”
“I was talking to one of the other racers while we were waiting to start, and he said he’d talked to the man who really owns that fine horse of Chester’s. Chester paid him to let him say it was his to make folks think that’s why he’s putting on the race—to show off his own horse. The truth is, Chester is always pulling stunts like this to put on a show.”
“Well, what difference does it make as long as he pays the purse?”
“I’m wondering about that now.”
Tess stiffened. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe because I heard he’s bet a lot on that horse. So the question is—if we win, will he have two thousand dollars left over after he pays his gambling debts?”
“He better,” Tess said menacingly, the double holster she was wearing suddenly heavy around her waist. If she had to use a gun to scare an unscrupulous promoter into paying up, she would not hesitate.
And this time, she would not need Curt Hammond to help her do it.
Excitement was at fever pitch as the horses lined up for the final race.
Tess climbed up on a water barrel in order to be able to see out over the hordes.
All around, people were talking about their bets, and she could not help feeling a twinge of worry to hear that everyone seemed to favor the quarter horse claimed by Chester Arthur. But after all, she reasoned, who wanted to bet on a horse that had just completed a race? Saber had to be exhausted. Not a half hour had passed since he had run.
“Ready…” came the starter’s cry.
Tess was clenching her fists so hard her nails dug into her flesh and drew blood, but she did not notice as the gun fired.
One horse bucked wildly at the report, lunging about in every direction.
Saber took off, with Chester’s horse right beside him.
But not for long.
Saber quickly pulled to three lengths in front.
Then four.
Then five.
The crowd was screaming—but not for him. Their wagers were on the horse running second and falling farther behind with each lunge of Saber’s mighty legs.
Tess leaped down from the barrel, pushing her way through the stunned crowd to get to Buck and Saber as they came across the finish line, dimly aware that a scattering of people were near hysterical screaming with joy. They were the ones who had dared bet on Saber…the ones who would collect vast winnings from those they had wagered with.
“You did it, you did it, you did it,” she cried, throwing her arms around Saber’s neck as he pawed the ground proudly.
And then Buck was grabbing her and swinging her around in triumph. “He not only won,” he exulted, “he made the others look lame.”
Tess glanced about for Chester Arthur. She wanted the two thousand dollars, wanted to get it to the bank to put it with the rest she had on deposit so it would be safe until she made arrangements to purchase land. Then she was going to buy the biggest steak in Dallas for Buck. In the morning, they would set out to look for land, and—
“He’s over there,” Buck said abruptly, knowing she was looking for Chester. “And damned if it don’t look like he’s leaving.”
“Not with my money, he isn’t.” Tess turned in the direction he pointed, and sure enough, Chester Arthur was in a buggy, about to head out of town.
She charged straight to him and demanded, “Where’s my two thousand dollars, Mr. Arthur?”
His face was pale and drawn, and his hands were shaking. “Now…now we need to talk about this,” he began, coughing to clear his throat and glancing about nervously. “I…I have some problems, but if you’ll give me some time, I know I can get them straightened out. And you will get your money, I promise.” He tried to offer a reassuring smile but did not quite make it, for his lips were trembling too hard.
Tess tersely declared, “My horse won the race fair and square. You owe me the money. You also made a lot of money on entry fees. So pay up.”
“I also bet a lot of money,” he said, desperate to make her understand. “I thought my horse had the only true chance of winning because he was fresh, so I bet all the money I had on him.
“Including the prize money,” he finished lamely.
Tess cried, “You were crooked as hell to put on a race like that, and we were all crazy to let you get away with it. You owe me the money, by damn, and you aren’t leaving here till I get it.”
And she meant it. Too much was at stake, for suddenly all her dreams for the future seemed now or never.
“I…I’ll give you an IOU,” he stammered, fishing in his satin vest beneath his bright red coat for pencil and paper. “And I’ll pay you as soon as I get the money. I have it. I swear to you that I do. I’m really a wealthy man. You’ve just caught me in a very embarrassing situation.”
“No IOU, Mr. Arthur. I want my money.” Tess slowly moved her right hand to the butt of her gun on her left side. She was not going to shoot him, but he did not know that.
His eyes went wide, and he dropped the reins to throw both his hands in the air as he pleaded, “Now…now, there’s no need for any of this. I…I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a deed—to some land I own.”
He saw the interest that sprang to her eyes and began to talk faster. “It’s good land, too. South of here. Near the Shawnee Trail. I won it in a race a while back. Haven’t known what to do with it. I’m a promoter. Not a rancher or a farmer. But it’s yours if you want it. I’ve got the deed right here. We’ll go to the bank and make it nice and legal.”
Buck, standing a few feet away, wanted to know, “How much land are you talking about?”
Chester nervously looked from Tess to Buck, then back to Tess. “Fifteen thousand acres. Has a watershed. Good ranchland. It’s yours. What do you say?”
Tess cut her eyes to Buck, the corners of her mouth twitching as she tried to keep from grinning.
Also holding back a smile, he nodded his approval.
“All right,” she said to Chester. “Let’s do it.”
Fifteen minutes later, Chester Arthur left town in a cloud of dust, running from the rest of his gambling debts he had been unable to pay.
And Tess and Buck were in a saloon staring at the deed and toasting to their good fortune.
Word spread, and everyone wanted to congratulate Tess for having made Chester pay up.
She was basking in the glory of it all as she watched Buck kicking up his heels with one of the saloon girls to the music from a tinny piano.
Unused to drinking, her head was spinning a bit from the sangria she had been sipping to celebrate, and when the man spoke, right at her ear, she was sure she had not heard right.
“You’ve got something of mine.”
“What—” She whipped about to look at him, and that was when she knew she had to be drunk.
She could not be staring up into Curt Hammond’s angry face.
But she was.
“I said—” he spoke with teeth clenched and jaw set—“that you’ve got something of mine.”
He nodded to the deed.
She shook her head to try to clear it, but the room had started spinning faster. “I…I don’t understand.”
“I heard how you and your sweetheart got Chester Arthur to deed you that land, but he had no right. It’s mine.”
He threw a piece of paper on the table.
“That’s an IOU from him to me.”
He slapped his hands on the table and leaned down in her face so close she could feel the heat of his breath.
“I won that goddamn land in a poker game over a month ago…and I aim to have it.”
Chapter Eighteen
“That’s crazy. You’re crazy.”
Tess gripped the edge of the table and wondered whether it was the wine making her feel dizzy or the fact that she was looking up into the face of Curt Hammond, whom she had alternated between hating and loving all these months.
“
No. You’re the one who’s crazy if you think I’m not going to fight for what’s mine. And what the hell are you doing here, anyway? Damn it!”
He slammed his fist on the table so hard her wine sloshed over the rim of the glass.
“I almost didn’t recognize you with your…your”—he gestured—“hair all chopped off. Why didn’t you go home like I told you to?”
Tess felt like someone had struck a match to her feet, setting her on fire, the flames slowly creeping upward to ignite her whole body in a flash of white-hot rage.
“How dare you ask me anything? I’m the one with the questions, mister—like where’s my money you stole?”
“I didn’t actually steal it. I just wanted to upset you enough to make you go back. The first chance I got, I sent it to your address in Philadelphia.”
“Ha.” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned back in the chair. “Likely story.”
“Hell, I don’t care if you believe me or not.” He threw an annoyed glance at Buck, who was still dancing. “But if you didn’t want to leave, how come you didn’t take up with that officer back at Fort Whipple instead of tying up with a rowdy cowpoke?”
“Buck isn’t rowdy. He’s a good man—not that it’s any of your business. He also happens to be my foreman.”
“Your foreman,” he sneered. Pulling out a chair, he sat down and signaled for a drink. “Whiskey. Make it a double.”
Tess snapped, “I did not tell you to sit down.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Well, we have nothing to say to each other. And you’ve got a lot of nerve. If I were a man who’d stolen a woman’s money and abandoned her, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to face her.”
“I told you I returned the money, which you probably know and won’t admit. As for me abandoning you, as you call it, you seem to forget I wasn’t obliged to drag you around with me, anyway.”
“You didn’t drag me. I did my part.”
“Your part?” he hooted. “You damn near got me killed, woman. What if those Indians had been quicker? It could be me out there rotting in the desert instead of them.”
“Nobody hates what happened more than me,” she cried. “And it would never happen again. Not now.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll bet you’re real brave.” He took the glass of whiskey the waitress brought and downed it in one gulp, then eyeballed Tess again. “I thought when I left you and took half your money, you’d realize the only thing for you to do was go back where you came from. So what the hell are you doing here?”
“That’s none of your business. Nothing about me is your business.”
“I think it is. You’ve got the deed to my land. And where did you get a horse like that, anyhow? I know quarter horses, and he’s one of the best I’ve seen.” His eyes narrowed, and the corners of his mouth twitched as he goaded, “But I guess you’re an old hand at stealing horses now, aren’t you?”
“Saber was a gift.”
“A gift? A horse like that? Why, I saw the one Captain Richard King was said to pay six hundred dollars for, and the one your lover rode to victory today is every bit as fine.”
“Buck is not my lover,” she said with teeth gritted as she wrapped her shaking hands around her glass. “And I don’t care whether you believe me or not. That horse was given to me.”
“In trade?” Curt sneered. “You must have learned a lot since you were in bed with me, honey, ’cause you damn sure weren’t good enough to be worth a horse like that.”
“You low-life bastard,” she whispered.
Slinging the wine in his face, she leaped to her feet, knocking the chair over with a clatter.
When she stood, the first thing Curt noticed was her holster, crossed, with the guns backward. Since he didn’t have time to figure out what it meant, he was taking no chances and grabbed her wrists with the speed of a rattlesnake.
“Let me go, damn you.”
“You might try to shoot me—if you can figure out which end of the gun to hold on to,” he added with a chuckle.
“Oh, I know which end, all right. Let me go, and I’ll prove it.”
No one was paying any attention to them, for it was Saturday night, noisy and wild, and an argument going on in a shadowed corner was not noticed.
Maneuvering to grasp both her wrists in one hand, Curt picked up her chair and righted it, then slung her roughly into it.
“Draw against me,” he warned with a finger to her nose, “and I’ll treat you like any other foolhardy gunslinger, Tess.
“And by the way,” he said as he wiped his face with his sleeve, “You’re a little plumper than you were, but not enough for me.”
He settled back as she glared at him with cheeks puffing from breathing so hard in her fury.
“I don’t care what you think of me. If I wanted to shoot you, you’d already be dead. I’ve learned a lot these past months, and I warn you—I’m damn good with a gun.”
“You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and wearing your guns like that could get you killed. I’m surprised your sweetheart lets you do it.”
“He’s not my sweetheart,” she said again, adding, “And no man tells me what to do, anyway. I’m on my own and doing real well, thank you. Now leave. I don’t want anything to do with you.”
“I’ll leave when you agree to sign that deed over to me.”
“I’ll tell you again—you’re crazy.”
“I have a legal claim to that land.” He reached in the pocket of his leather vest and took out a folded paper and held it so she could read it but not snatch it away.
“I was in a poker game in Abilene a few weeks ago,” he began. “Playing for real big stakes. So was Chester Arthur. It came down to me and him in the end. Everybody else dropped out. They couldn’t stay with us.”
Tess had read the note but continued to stare at it, lips slightly parted. Tiny beads of perspiration began to dot her forehead as she wondered what would happen now. The note was definitely an IOU for the land described in the deed Chester Arthur had signed over to her.
Curt refolded the note and put it back in his vest pocket. Taking a gulp of the drink just set before him, he continued, “Actually, the stakes were too high for me, but I knew Arthur would eventually up the ante with land that he had won some months back.”
Flippantly, Tess remarked, “So you’re still trying to win your ranch in a poker game. Well, that’s none of my concern, but you should have known better.”
“For your information, I have a ranch.”
She managed to keep her face expressionless, wanting to appear neither surprised nor interested. She wanted, by God, to give the impression she did not give a damn about anything concerning him.
“My ranch happens to border the land Arthur won. That’s why I wanted to play poker with him and was so determined to win. I’d heard about him, how he’s a reckless son of a gun, and I knew if I could beat him down, he’d wager that land because he didn’t have any use for it, anyway. That’s the reason he was so quick on the trigger to deed it over to you, so he could get you off his back and get the hell out of town.
“From what I hear, he owed a lot of people,” he went on to say. “I don’t think he even had the two thousand for the prize money. That’s why he was charging an entry fee. That way, he could cover the stake and have enough left over from his winning to make a killing.
“Only he didn’t figure on you happening along with a horse that could outrun everybody else,” he finished with a grim smile.
Tess held up her hand to the waitress to bring her another glass of wine, feeling a sudden, desperate need for something strong.
Curt waved the woman away. “She doesn’t need it.”
“What?” Tess exploded. “You don’t tell me—”
“Shut up and listen,” he growled. “I want to get this over with so I can get the hell out of here. I just got back from a four-month trail drive, and I’ve got work waiting for me back home. I don’t have time to hang around
and argue with you.”
“So why are you?”
“Listen, every time I sat down at a poker table, my heart was in my mouth. I was betting my savings and would either walk away with a little more money than I came with or wind up with nothing. It wasn’t easy, but I finally had enough to buy a nice place south of here.”
“Probably with my money,” she quipped with an airy sniff.
He slammed his fist on the table again. “Listen, I told you I sent your money to your address in Philadelphia, and if you’d been there to get it, you’d know I’m telling the truth. But I don’t care about that. What I do care about is the fact that when I drew four aces in that last hand to beat Chester Arthur’s three kings, my biggest dream came true, and you aren’t going to take it away from me.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Tess threw up her hands. “If what you say is true, why didn’t you have the good sense to have him deed it over to you like I had him do for me? It’s not my fault you didn’t have the good sense to think about how worthless that silly piece of paper really is.”
The nerve in his jaw twitched, and Tess saw that now his hand was shaking, every so slightly, as he lifted his glass to his lips and downed the rest of the whiskey.
“Out here,” he said tightly, evenly, “whether you think it’s silly or not, a signed IOU is good as gold. However, I only agreed to hold it till the next morning, when the bank opened. It was nearly four A.M. when we finished the game. We’d been playing since noon the day before. We were both bushed. I went to my room to get some sleep. Chester said he’d meet me at nine. He never showed. I went looking for him and found out he’d left town, probably before my head hit the pillow. I’ve been trailing him ever since, and when I got to town this morning…”
“So that was you,” she murmured.
He did not hear her and continued, “…I decided to let him run the race, because I figured he had a good thing going and I wanted to win a little myself. Only you ruined it.”
“You keep blaming me, damn you, and—”
“And you’ve picked up a nasty habit of cursing.”
“Which is also none of your business.”
