A Lady of the West

by Linda Howard

  Victoria slipped into the library intending to get the Major’s guns, but stopped abruptly when she saw him sitting at the desk. He looked up, his eyes so bloodshot they reminded her of the pictures she had seen in church of Satan’s eyes. He had made an attempt at shaving that morning, at least, but had missed several patches. Still, he got to his feet and said heartily, “Did you want a book, my dear?” in a ghastly echo of his former pompous manner.

  “Yes, I thought I’d read for a while this afternoon,” she said. She controlled her disappointment.

  “Take what you like.” He waved his hand. “Didn’t think there was much here that would interest a lady, though.”

  She pretended an interest in the few books that lined the shelves, but she didn’t even see the titles.

  Behind her, McLain began to chuckle. Victoria darted a look at him and found him staring at her with gleeful malice. “Yep, you’re a real lady. I got what I paid for. You’re so starched and proper I’ll bet even your drawers are stiff.”

  Victoria whirled and started for the door, but McLain kept laughing. “But them stiff drawers won’t do you no good when Sarratt gets his hands on you. You thought you were too good for me, didn’t you, you little bitch?” His breathing quickened as mirth faded and his malicious resentment came to the fore. “You didn’t want me humpin’ you, but what you want won’t make a damn to Sarratt, he’ll just shove it in no matter how hard you fight. But it ain’t ladylike to fight, is it? No, you’d just poker up and lie there as stiff as a dead person … just like a woman who’d been shot in the head….”

  She bolted, closing the door on the vile stream of words that continued even without an audience to hear them. Her heart pounding, she ran up the stairs to her room. He was mad! But even knowing that didn’t prevent the chill of fear that he was right. They had never found the bodies. Someone had shot at her. It was possible that one of the Sarratt boys had survived and returned twenty years later.

  It took her a minute before she calmed enough to realize that it didn’t matter. She would be leaving soon, with Emma and Celia, so it didn’t matter if McLain was right. He would be the only one here.

  She needed those guns, but she didn’t get them that night. McLain sat in the room all night talking to himself and occasionally laughing, the bright lamps keeping the knife-wielding shadows away.

  The next day Garnet came to the house and smiled like a wolf when he saw her. “How’s that pretty sister of yours?” he asked, smirking because he knew he held the upper hand now.

  Victoria looked through him and walked away without answering, but she was terrified.

  She didn’t have an opportunity to get the guns that day, either.

  Before they went to bed, Emma hissed, “Maybe we should just forget about the guns and leave.”

  “We can’t. You know what it’s like out there.”

  The two young women stared at each other, at the stark mask of desperation and fear each wore. The task of getting to Santa Fe by themselves seemed almost impossible, yet they were driven to try it. Without any means of self-protection, it would almost certainly be suicide.

  She couldn’t get the guns on the third day, either.

  On the fourth day a hot wind began blowing from the southwest, off the desert, eating at everyone. The men quarreled and three fights broke out, Lola and Carmita snapped at each other, Celia hid all day long, and the red stallion, Rubio, killed the Mexican Emma had spoken to the day Jake left.

  The unfortunate man had become careless while putting the stallion back in his stall after laying down fresh hay. He turned his back just for a moment and the big animal attacked with his lethal iron-shod hooves, turning on the man with burning hate shining in his eyes. He reared again and again, the sharp metal cutting into the soft, twitching body, a thousand pounds of hate unleashed in destruction. The Mexican was unrecognizable when the stallion finally calmed enough for the other men to get a couple of ropes on him and lead him from the stall so they could get to the victim.

  McLain snorted when he was told. “Damn stupid fool, he shoulda been more careful,” he grunted.

  But on the fourth day Victoria got the guns. Because she didn’t know if they’d be able to leave that night, she didn’t want the absence of their guns to be noticed. She took only one rifle, because McLain kept them lined up in the racks right behind him; one might not be noticed but three definitely would. To match the ammunition, she took one of the bullets out of the rifle and measured it against others until she found the right ones. She then hurriedly shoved the sack of ammunition into her pocket.

  To her dismay she could find only one pistol. It didn’t seem as large as the one Jake had given her the day someone had shot at her. As soon as the thought of Jake entered her mind she pushed it out, because she had found that was the only way she could survive. She repeated her search for matching ammunition and hurriedly left the room with the two weapons clutched in her arms, almost panicked lest someone should come in and catch her.

  But they couldn’t leave that night. Perhaps because of the wind, that hot, irritating wind, or perhaps because they were unsettled by Rubio’s attack on the Mexican, several of the men roamed about restlessly all night. Victoria and Emma sat up in their darkened rooms until dawn, but always there seemed to be a small amount of activity around the barn and stable. There was no way they could leave without someone seeing them.

  Late in the afternoon on the fifth day a cowhand rode in hard and fast, pulling his horse up so sharply that dirt and rocks were thrown in a cloud behind him. “Riders,” he gasped, sliding from the saddle. “A damn big bunch of ’em, coming this way from Parson’s Pass.”

  McLain went white. “Sarratt,” he said in a hoarse voice, and ran for the house.

  Garnet swore sharply. “You goddamn stupid fool!” he yelled at the fleeing man, but he didn’t waste any more time on the Major. He turned back to the rider. “How many?”

  “I don’ know, boss. Twenty or thirty, at least.” The rider didn’t tell Garnet that he could neither read nor count, but merely used numbers he’d heard other cowhands use when referring to a large group. There were, in fact, sixty-three men heading toward the ranch.

  Garnet thought about it. He doubted that the encroaching men were after the cattle; rustlers worked in smaller groups. But a force of twenty or thirty men crossing someone else’s range wasn’t exactly an act of friendship. On the other hand, he had enough men to handle a group that size. He didn’t think for a minute that they might just be passing through.

  But he didn’t want to gather his men and ride out to meet them. For one thing, they might see him before he saw them. For another, the ranch buildings offered protection. Let them come to him. After all, they didn’t know they’d been spotted. He had the advantage right where he was.

  McLain burst into the library and jerked the rifles down from the rack, and made certain all of them were loaded. He didn’t notice that one of them was missing. Muttering to himself, he carried them all up to his room.

  He met Victoria on the stairs and laughed when he saw her. “He’s coming, Sarratt’s coming,” he chortled. “A rider spotted him. Now you’ll find out what it’s like, you high-nosed bitch, and he’ll make you wish you hadn’t looked down on me like I was dirt.” He brushed on past her and slammed into his bedroom.

  Victoria hurried to the front door. Surely he was simply raving again. But outside she saw men hurrying about and her stomach clenched. “What’s happening?” she called out to one man.

  “Riders comin’, ma’am.” He pointed toward the south, toward Santa Fe. “From that way.”

  She withdrew and tried to reassure herself that just because riders were coming didn’t mean any of those riders was a Sarratt. But against her will McLain had infected her with his terror.

  She ran up the stairs and found Emma in her room. “We have to leave,” she said. “Now, right now. Riders are coming. This might be our last chance.”

  Emma jumped up and got t
he pilfered foodstuffs from their hiding place under her bed. Victoria went along to Celia’s room, hoping wildly that the girl was there instead of in some hiding place as she had been the day before. Her prayers were answered when she found her sister at her window, where she’d been standing watching the activity outside. “Why is everyone in such a hurry?” she asked.

  “Riders are coming,” Victoria said in a low voice. “We’re leaving. Right now. Are you ready?”

  Celia nodded, put an old hat on her head, tied a shawl around her shoulders, and fetched her own small bundle of things from beneath the bed.

  Just in the short time that had passed since the rider had come in, dusk had fallen. The women made their way to the barn where their horses were stabled. Victoria carried the rifle, its barrel pointing downward and hidden within the folds of her skirt. The pistol was in Emma’s pocket. Men were still moving around, but none of them seemed to notice the three women who walked purposefully across the grounds.

  If anyone tried to stop them now, Victoria decided, she would shoot.

  They saddled their horses. Sophie nickered eagerly at the weight of the saddle; she hadn’t been out in days. Emma’s gelding was similarly eager and even Celia’s calm Gypsy danced a bit in anticipation.

  They mounted while still in the barn, then spurred their horses forward, ducking their heads to clear the door. As soon as they were outside, Victoria wheeled Sophie to the left and plunged into the darkness, closely followed by the other two.

  “Who’s that?” someone shouted.

  Quinzy, who had sharp eyesight, said in disbelief, “It’s the women.”

  Garnet cursed, then said, “Let ’em go. Hell, they’ll just get lost. We can find them later, when we’ve taken care of these bastards.”

  Victoria reined in to a walk as soon as they were away from the immediate vicinity of the ranch buildings, both because she couldn’t see well in the dark and because she needed to think. If the riders were coming from the south, she didn’t dare go in that direction or she’d ride straight into them. But Santa Fe, their ultimate destination, lay to the south. To the east and north, she knew, were the Comanche. To the west lay hard, unforgiving land. But they would have to go west, at least far enough for it to be safe to turn south later.

  The Mexican scout, Luis, said in a soft voice, “They have seen us.”

  Jake swore softly and Ben spit. “Then we ride,” Jake said. “Now. But we take it slow. Everybody wrap their bits and spurs, I don’t want any jingling to give us away. When we get closer, we’ll tie rags over the horses’ hooves.”

  He looked up at the stars, then swung into his saddle. A savage anticipation welled in him. Tonight. It would be over tonight. McLain would be dead, and Victoria would be his.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The darkness and the strangeness of the land forced the women to keep to a walk when every instinct demanded that they hurry. If there was to be a moon it had not yet risen, and the hot, unsettling wind sent clouds scudding overhead and blocking out most of the starlight. The horses, sensing the nervousness of their riders, were skittish. It took all of Victoria’s skill to keep Sophie under control and at the same time try to pick their way through the darkness. Though they could discern large obstacles well enough, the night obscured those small holes and ruts in the earth that could cause a horse to fall, maybe break a leg or even kill its rider.

  Every sound seemed alien, magnified on the night air. Celia stifled a shriek when a hunting owl swooped overhead, then said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” so pitifully that tears stung Victoria’s eyes.

  She had never before sworn in her life, but she was so enraged at what this had done to Celia that the thought rang in her mind: “Goddamn them, goddamn them all!” She didn’t mean it as a blasphemy but as a curse. All of them—McLain, Garnet, all of the gun men at the ranch who had looked at them as if they were nothing but sides of beef, even Jake, for he had left them to face this on their own—she cursed all of them.

  Celia would never be the same again. Her lighthearted innocence was gone and could not be recovered. When she looked at men now it wasn’t with childlike faith that they would protect her; it was with full knowledge that there was evil in the world and the very ones she had always thought were her champions were instead those who would harm her.

  Celia should have, in a few years, fallen in love with a strong, gentle man, married him, raised a family with him, and died at a very old age having known nothing but devotion from her husband. It was a dream of perfection which Victoria realized few women achieved, but it was the life Celia should have had. It wouldn’t happen now. She had seen the ugliness the human spirit was capable of, and it had changed her.

  War hadn’t touched her, but the bitter, violent atmosphere of the West and Kingdom Valley had.

  Sophie stumbled and quickly recovered herself. Victoria leaned forward to pat the satiny neck and murmur encouragement.

  “Should we go on or wait until daylight?” Emma asked.

  They couldn’t have gone far, having been restrained to a walk most of the time, but Victoria felt as if they were a million miles from civilization. She started to say she thought it would be all right to wait until morning when the sharp retort of gunfire rolled through the night air.

  It wasn’t just one shot. It was a multitude of them, the sharp cracks of pistols, the deeper thunder of rifles, and it went on and on.

  They all three looked back in the direction of the ranch, though there was nothing to see.

  Emma spoke first. “It sounds like a war.”

  “It is. The ranch is under attack.”

  “But who?”

  Victoria could barely speak, her throat was so tight. “The Major said it was Sarratt.”

  “It can’t be. Why would someone wait twenty years for revenge?” Emma tried to sound soothing, but her own throat was tightening.

  “Because the Major waited that long to get married,” she answered, and swung Sophie’s head around. She was so terribly frightened, but she had to stay in control. If it was Sarratt, would he bother coming after them? He wouldn’t even know where they’d gone unless some of the men talked, if anyone was left alive to talk.

  The Major had infected her with his maggot of fear, she could no longer convince herself that it was all just in his mind.

  “We’ll have to keep going,” she said. “For as long as we can. The farther we are from the ranch come morning, the safer we’ll be.”

  They didn’t hit the ranch like a bunch of cowboys hoorahing a town, riding in fast and loud, shooting up the place. They left their horses back a piece and went in silently, on foot. Since it was going to be close fighting they all tied their handkerchiefs around their left arm for identification, so they wouldn’t start shooting each other. It would identify them to McLain’s men, too, but that couldn’t be helped.

  It started when one of the ranch hands stepped around the end of the barn and came face to face with one of the Sarratt men. The ranchhand reached for his gun and the Sarratt man’s big Sharps rifle slug took most of the man’s chest with it when it exited his back.

  Jake and Ben fought their way side by side toward the house. It was hard to tell, but Jake didn’t think any shots were being fired at them from inside the house and that gave him hope that the women weren’t in immediate danger. His attention was centered on McLain, on finding him and killing him. It had to be; he couldn’t afford to worry about Victoria until he’d taken care of McLain.

  Someone shot at them with a rifle from the barn loft, the bullet zinging so close to Jake’s head that he felt the heat from it and dived to the side. He looked around, saw Luis, and yelled, “Get that bastard in the loft!”

  Luis grinned, his white teeth visible in the dark, and started his snaking run toward the barn.

  All around them men were dead, wounded, or dying, and still the gunfire split the night from all directions.

  “Where’s Garnet?” Ben muttered.

  “In a ho
le somewhere. He won’t take any risks.”

  Wendell Wallace rose up from behind the hitching post where he’d been hugging the ground and drew a bead on Jake. Ben fired and Wendell fell back, his finger tightening convulsively on the trigger and firing a shot uselessly into the air.

  Jake cautiously approached him, his .44 ready. When he reached Wendell, he saw that the man was breathing laboriously, with a frothing black liquid bubbling out of his chest.

  Wendell looked at him and said, “Roper! Jesus Christ, why’d you do that?”

  “My last name isn’t Roper. It’s Sarratt.”

  Wendell blinked, trying to focus on Jake’s face. “Jesus Christ,” he said again. “I thought we’d kilt you.”

  “No, but we’ve killed you. You’re lung-shot, Wendell.”

  Wendell tried to take a deep breath, and the sound rattled in his throat. “Guess so.” His voice was so weak it was almost soundless. “I’ll be damned. Reckon I’m gonna die, then.”

  “Yep.”

  “Better’n gut-shot, anyways,” he said, and his eyes became fixed in death.

  Ben looked down at him. “That was Wendell Wallace?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember him. He taught me how to whittle. Then he threw in with McLain and tried to kill us.” “Yeah,” Jake said again.

  They rushed the front door together, entering in a low crouch, hammers cocked and their fingers on the triggers. Nothing happened, no one moved. The lamps still burned serenely.

  Ben’s face was rigid. It was the first time he’d been inside his home in twenty years. He looked at the tiled floor where his mother had died.

  They methodically searched the first floor, and found Carmita, Juana, and Lola huddled together in the kitchen. Carmita gasped when she saw Jake.