Then, in typical Ace Corrigan fashion, he started barking orders. “Henry, take Emilio into Sage Flat and see if you can scare up someone to doctor his arm. Flap Jack and Tex, get these horses rounded up. You’re taking them back to the ranch.”
Chapter 17
At dawn, the only signs left of the last few days were the remains of fence sections, large patches of trampled dirt, and a cloud of rolling red dust in the distance.
Brett and Annie’s gazes met, then darted away, both acutely aware that this was their first time alone since that day on the trail. Ordinarily Brett wasn’t at a loss as to what to do in the company of a beautiful woman. He’d charm her with a smile; whet her appetite with a look, a gesture; serenade her with his touch.
But this was no ordinary situation, and Annie no ordinary woman. She still didn’t trust him—was probably wise not to. Brett didn’t entirely trust himself around her. Despite every attempt to forget that kiss on the ledge, it remained etched in his memory, as clear as the day it had happened. If he’d known today would not be the end of their working relationship, but rather the beginning, he wouldn’t have surprised her with the bath and added agony to torment.
Yet he’d given his word. He’d keep his hands to himself even if it killed him.
“Annie. . . .” Brett paused and searched for the right words. “I just want you to know that I appreciate you not giving me any guff about Dogie.”
“Believe me, if I hadn’t agreed that sending him back to the ranch with the men wasn’t in everyone’s best interest, you’d have heard about it.”
His chuckle seemed to break the spell of awareness. “I’m sure I would have.”
“He’ll settle down. Just give him time.”
Brett was glad she had so much confidence in the boy.
Annie clapped her hands together. “Well, boss man, how do you want to do this? Ride the ridge or follow the floor?”
Brett squinted up the canyon walls. “Seems to me we’d have a better vantage point from up top.”
“Then let’s hit the trail.”
“Keep your eyes peeled for renegades,” Brett advised, swinging into the saddle. “Tex said he found a cold camp about twenty miles south.”
“How does he know it’s Comanche? It could just as easily have been outlaws or buffalo hunters.”
“It could, but apparently Quanah Parker has been on the rampage. Rumor also has it Santana has joined up with him.”
“The Kiowa are joining up with the Comanche?”
“Frightening thought. The Army is ready to pull their hair out. Someone is supplying guns and they can’t trace the source.”
Annie fell quiet, and a troubled frown wrinkled her brow. Brett couldn’t help wondering if her Indian husband were somehow involved in the conflict between red man and white. It would explain why she refused to talk about him. It would also explain why he’d left her to fend for herself. Women with no means of support often turned to avenues they wouldn’t have dreamed of before. He’d seen it happen during the War Between the States: genteel women reduced to becoming laundresses, harlots . . . thieves.
By midday they still hadn’t spotted a traversable path to take them to the crown. The sun beat hard upon their backs. Hooves sank into rich, rolling earth thick with clumps of yellow ama-ryllis and vibrant orange Indian paintbrush. Tall shade trees clustered together beneath an overhang of clay. As they drew closer, Brett noticed a curious mound between the trunks. The mound took clearer shape, becoming a pile of timber banked by abutting . . . walls?
An abandoned homestead? It sure looked like it.
He studied the ground. Here and there, verdant grasses grew up and over chunks of blackened wood, and he thought he saw the remains of a stone border around various cacti and thorny bushes, almost as if someone had been cultivating a flower garden.
“There’s a creek about a quarter mile from here,” Annie said. “Beyond that is a decent trail. We can rest the horses before making the climb.”
Brett barely heard her, fascinated by the signs of neglect. A few hundreds yards further, away from the grove, hewn slats cracked by the weather hung perilously to leaning posts by rusted nails. Beyond the grove a full-structured building came into view. It was obviously a stable, and still in moderately good repair. A new roof, definitely. Possibly some erosion at the foundation, but nothing a bit of local wood and a few nails wouldn’t fix.
“Who would leave this place to go to ruin?” he asked, envisioning the possibilities of the land.
“Someone who didn’t want to be here any-more.”
He found it hard to believe anyone wouldn’t want to be here. The land was enviably fertile, with a grove of cottonwoods to the west, and a score of acres to the north rich in grasses. Perfect pasture land. He imagined paddocks much like the one Annie had built for the herd replacing the broken-down fencing, a comfortable home of stone harvested from right here in the canyon sitting atop the site of the rubble.
The more he thought about it, the stronger the temptation gripped him to locate the owner and persuade him into selling. Not that he needed another enterprise to worry about, but it seemed a pity to let the land go unused.
As they left the homestead behind, though, he discovered that initiating talks with the owner might not be possible. From amidst the flowered stalks, a worn cross jutted up from the ground. Brett craned his neck to read the inscription: “Beloved.”
Someone very special lay there, he realized. From the size of the grave and the epitaph, he assumed an adult. A wife, maybe. Or a husband.
Flashes of conversations suddenly seized his mind.
“They used to live south of here. . . .”
“When she wasn’t getting into mischief she was runnin’ with the herds.”
“Heard she married up with some breed.”
“Found her with a herd of stolen horses . . .”
Brett felt as if a stake had just been driven through his gut. It couldn’t be—Annie’s land? What were the odds?
He shot a glance at her, riding beside him. The tight posture, up-tilted chin and ghostly pale complexion told him that he’d guessed correctly.
Who was in the grave? Whoever lay there had meant something to Annie, that was certain. Her grandfather? Her husband? He’d heard some-where that many tribes feared being buried, though. Was it just wishful thinking on his part?
They reached the creek, the banks as stony as the silence between them. While the horses drank, Brett and Annie crouched at the water’s edge to quench their own thirst and fill their canteens. Annie’s movements seemed as mechanical as the clock on his mantle back at the Triple Ace.
Brett wet his kerchief and swiped it across his damp brow, then his jaw. “That’s your land back there, isn’t it?”
She didn’t have to answer. He knew he’d guessed right when her hands stilled.
“You should have told me.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I would have gone around the land.”
She face him, her eyes blazing. “Did I ask you to?”
“You wouldn’t ask. You’d rather torture yourself.”
She gathered her canteen and started to rise.
Brett grabbed her gently by the arm, preventing her from escaping yet again. “Don’t run from this, Annie. Whatever you’re holding inside, let it go. Share it with me.”
The compassion in his husky voice pinned Annie to the spot more firmly than if he’d just clapped shackles around her ankles.
She wanted to let it go; it amazed Annie how much. She hadn’t talked to anyone in so long. There was always the danger of being discovered, of being betrayed, of winding up like her granddad. Even now the two threats existed, closer than they’d ever been before.
“Does it have anything to do with the bounty on your head?”
She closed her eyes. “So you do know.”
“That you’re Mustang Annie, horse thief extraordinaire? Since the beginning.”
Her ey
es snapped open in surprise.
“It didn’t matter then; it doesn’t matter now.”
“It should.”
“I don’t see why—unless you’re planning on stealing my horses. I’d have to take that personally.”
His attempt at humor brought a wry grin to her face. “I’d be lying if I told you the thought hadn’t occurred to me once or twice.”
“Yet you haven’t,” he pointed out. “Look, Annie—I’m not the law, I’m not a bounty hunter; I’m just a horse trader willing to do whatever it takes to save his ranch.”
“Why? You could buy a hundred ranches.”
He leaned back against the tree, stared up at the clouds scudding across the sky, and sighed. “Haven’t you ever wanted to prove someone wrong? Haven’t you ever wanted a second chance to make things right?”
Her lips parted, then pressed tightly together again, trapping whatever words she’d been about to speak.
Brett sighed. “I spent over half my life cheating and conning and lying to get ahead. The Triple Ace is the first thing I ever won fair and square. No palmed cards. No weighted dice. No marked decks. A fair and square triple ace deal. I’ve sunk over half of everything it took me years to amass into that ranch, and I’m not about to let it go without a fight.”
“Not everyone is in your position.”
“No, they aren’t. Talk to me, Annie. I can’t help you if you won’t be straight with me.”
“Why would you even want to?” she cried.
“Besides the fact that I don’t want to see that pretty neck of yours in a noose? Because you never fail to amaze me. You can’t bring yourself to laugh, yet you’ll fight to shelter an old man. You take on extra chores to lighten the load of a kid. You run from the law, yet you stand up to me. Someone with that mix of gumption and mercy doesn’t become a fugitive without cause. And they don’t leave a paradise like this without a reason.”
Before Annie could stop the words, they spilled out. “It was my granddad’s land.” She sat down beside him, brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. “He’d settled on it years ago, and when my father died, my mother and I went to live with him. But when I was ten, my mother died. Granddad refused to leave me. He tried raising sheep, but what disease didn’t kill, the drought did. Then he started leaving home a lot. Some-times he’d be gone for weeks at a time. He was so busy tending to business that I think he forgot I even existed.”
“Did you know he was stealing horses?”
“I suspected, but I didn’t know for sure until I was thirteen. He came home one day to find a half a dozen Comanche sitting in our kitchen.” Annie couldn’t quite bring herself to reveal Sekoda’s part in her life at that time, how he had brought them into her home. “They were harmless, but from then on he refused to go anywhere without taking me with him.
“One day we’d gone to the Tongue River to do some trading. A couple of his ‘friends’ weren’t too happy with him for dragging a kid along, and told him that if I could rope and ride a particular horse, that they’d not give him any trouble.”
“And you did?”
“I had no reason not to. I didn’t know at the time what kind of people they were.”
“If you had?”
Annie shrugged. “I probably would have done it anyway.” She plucked a blade of grass and scored it up the center with her fingernail. “They devised a scheme. I’d hire myself on to a ranch and break the boss’s horses. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t get paid. Ranchers must have figured they didn’t have anything to lose, so they’d let me join their outfit. A couple weeks after the horse was settled, I’d go back in and steal it. Once we had a good-sized herd, we’d take them down to the Tongue River and sell them.”
She glanced at Brett to gauge his reaction. He simply stared at the rocks across the creek, seeming not to be surprised.
“And Mustang Annie was born,” he said.
“Not exactly. That’s just when she became so well known.” Annie turned her attention to the water. Her reflection stared back at her, yet it wasn’t a twenty-four-year-old fugitive she saw, but a wide-eyed young girl who would have walked on water for the man who had raised her.
“Granddad and I lived well enough on our share, but he was getting on in years and started worrying about what would happen to me if anything happened to him. He started pulling side jobs.” She swallowed hard. “He got caught with an iron. He hanged. They let it happen—they made it happen.”
“What do you mean? How could his friends have made it happen?”
The betrayal felt as fresh now as it had the day she’d seen him strung up from the branches of an old oak tree. “They set him up. Ike said he knew of a place—”
Brett’s head swung around, his mouth agape, his eyes stunned. “Ike?”
“Ike Savage. Do you know him?”
“Are you kidding me? Ike Savage was part of your gang?”
Annie laughed. “He wasn’t part of the gang, he was the gang. He called all the shots, arranged for the trading, divided the money . . . hell, you name it, he did it.”
“Why didn’t the law go after him?”
“Ike was the law—an elected official of Seymour, Texas. Crooked as a bucket of horseshoes, but he had more ranchers and businessmen in his pocket than you could shake a stick at. No one could ever prove he was involved in any of the rustling.”
“They could if you testified.”
“It would be my word against his. You’ve got to remember I was little more than a kid. Even if I could convince someone to believe me, it wasn’t worth seeing other members hang.”
“Like Henry?”
“You know about Henry?”
“I’ve had my suspicions that he was involved in some shady dealings, but to my knowledge, he hasn’t ever committed anything illegal while he’s been on my payroll.”
“That’s because he’s been out of it for years. He’d already been getting slow by the time I got mixed up in the whole mess. He wound up taking a bullet in the leg when they went after some horses up in Oklahoma Territory.”
“So that’s why he walks with a limp.”
“He was lucky he survived at all. Shortly after that, he hired on with Levi Durham.”
“And Savage let him go? Just like that?”
“I think they had an arrangement. Henry would never snitch and Savage wouldn’t kill him.”
“Your grandfather didn’t get off that easy, though.”
“No, he didn’t. Ike was furious when he found out Granddad was rustling on his own. So he gave him a tip on some unmarked quarter horses, then waited for him to show up.”
Annie didn’t think it was necessary to reveal the details. Corrigan was smart enough to figure them out on his own.
“Afterward, I had no choice but to stay with the gang. I pulled a few jobs for them, tried to figure out how to get off the paddlewheel. Then, they started . . . looking . . . at me.” Bile rose in Annie’s throat, and she rubbed her arms to ward off the chill of those slimy brown eyes following her every move. “That’s when I knew I had to get out.”
“But you didn’t, did you?”
“Actually, I did.” Her gaze was drawn to the land behind them, to the forlorn cross invisible at this distance, but manifested in her heart. “For a while.”
“Who’s buried in the grave, Annie?”
It was along time before Annie could speak over the lump in her throat. Then she looked him directly in the eye and gave him the only answer she could. “Me.”
Chapter 18
Dumbly, Brett watched her emotions suddenly close up and her vivid blue eyes lose their luster.
“I don’t want to talk about this any more,” she stated, gathering herself together as efficiently as she collected her gear. “If you want to help me so damn bad, then help me track down that stallion so I can get paid.”
Brett remained crouched beside the water after Annie walked away. I killed Mustang Annie four years ago.
He could almost believe Savage’s claim, and he couldn’t say which impulse was stronger—the urge to shake Annie to life, or pull her into his arms. She’d trusted him with this much, why not the rest? Why did she continue feeding the riddles surrounding her?
But Brett knew if he prodded and poked, she’d crawl so deep back inside herself she might never again come out.
Patience.
Patience.
In time, she’d tell him. Hopefully then he could figure a way to get her out of this mess.
Right now, it was all he could do to absorb the fact that Ike Savage lived a dual life, that his foreman once rustled horses for a living, and that the woman he was falling in love with lay in grave not five hundred yards away.
The realization slammed into Brett like a load of buckshot. “Oh, my God.” He brushed his hand across his head and closed his eyes. How had his feelings for her changed so drastically in such a short span of time? Why hadn’t he seen it coming?
Shaking hands slipped into his shirt pocket and withdrew a cheroot. After a moment, he drew out a second one, approached Annie, who was looping her canteen over Chance’s pommel, and handed her the smoke.
She cast a startled look at his face, then slowly reached for the cheroot, her long, slender fingers shaking as badly as his. He watched her as if he’d never seen her before. The plait of her braid had loosened. There was smudge of red dirt on her cheek, and circles under her eyes. Sweat and dust stained her shirt. And still she was so damned beautiful she took his breath away.
Gratitude sped across her face with the first pull. “God, I needed that.”
He closed his hand into a fist to keep from touching her cheek, her lips, her hair. “Annie. . . .”
Long, sweeping lashes lifted to reveal the question in her eyes.
Suddenly he didn’t know what to say. I love you? Stay with me? I won’t let anything hurt you?
Brett swallowed. Words he’d uttered a hundreds times before into feminine ears in the throes of passion now seemed somehow cheap. He managed a weak smile. “Let’s get going.”
The rest of the afternoon passed in somber silence as the horses picked their way up the trail and out of the canyon. The difference between below and above was so incredible that to Brett it felt as if they had stepped into another world. Blue skies and amber grasses stretched as far as the eye could see, with not a tree to relieve the banality, not a creek to gurgle in the distance. Just wind and grass and the two of them.
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