All I Need Is You (19 page)

I
t was the middle of the following afternoon by the time Damian reached Bucky Alcott’s farmhouse outside Sanderson. To reach that town so quickly, he’d gone with very little sleep. The house was located about a mile out of town, just where Bencher had said it was.

There was the possibility that Alcott would recognize him right off, despite the bruises he was wearing on his face and his having one eye nearly swollen shut. But Damian didn’t care.

Smoke coming out of the chimney indicated Alcott was home, so he simply rode up to the narrow front porch, dismounted, and knocked sharply on the door. If Bucky had seen him coming and fetched a gun, well, he guessed they’d be having a shoot-out. Damian would just have to make sure he didn’t kill the man until he had his answers.

The door opened. The man standing there wasn’t holding a gun. He was middle-aged, not very tall, but exceptionally thin. Brown hair that was fading and brown eyes went with a weath
ered face. And he had the peculiar bowed legs that some people developed from spending too much of their lives on the back of a horse.

He didn’t recognize Damian either, at least not right off. Damian must have caught him cooking, because he was wearing a full-length chef’s apron, seriously stained, and had smudges of flour on one cheek. He was also wiping flour from his hands on the lower half of the apron.

What Bucky did recognize, however, was an aggressively held rifle. He was frowning as he said, “It’s bad manners to go knockin’ on someone’s door with a weapon in hand, mister. Gives the wrong impression in most cases.”

“Not in this case,” Damian replied, then asked, just to be sure, “Bucky Alcott?”

Bucky nodded, but his frown got much deeper as he inquired in turn, “Do I know you?”

“Since you tried to kill me a few days ago, I guess that qualifies as a yes, you do. Now, you tell me what happened to the kid before I—”

“Whoa, there!” Bucky exclaimed. “Someone’s led you up the wrong creek. I got no idea—”

Damian backhanded the man, sending him sideways to trip over a crate of rubbish parked by the door. He moved into the room to stand over him, in no mood to deal with denials again before he got at the truth.

“My knuckles are sore from beating your name and address out of Elroy Bencher,” he said, rubbing the scabs on those knuckles. “I really don’t want to have to do the same with you—but I will if you insist.”

“Now hold on there, mister,” Bucky said, rais
ing his hands defensively. “I don’t know no Elroy Bencher. Whoever he is, sounds like he lied to you about me, just to tell you what you wanted to hear so you’d leave him alone. If you think about it, why would he tell you anythin’, let alone the truth? Just ’cause you beat him up a bit?”

It sounded logical, too logical, and, dammit, too sincere as well. Damian was beginning to have some real doubts now. A harmless-looking middle-aged man like this, a hired killer? A man who was apparently very serious about his cooking, a hired killer?

The man was a farmer, for crying out loud. Damian had seen the barn as he rode up, the chicken coop next to it, the pigpens, though no nearby crops, but this
was
a farm. And Bencher, that belligerent bear, he
could
have lied there at the end, said anything just to get Damian to leave his house—and his broken ribs—alone.

Damian took a step back. If he’d been led wrong, and it looked like he had been, then he was seriously out of line here, having just accosted someone who appeared to be an innocent man.

He was about to apologize, and profusely at that, when he happened to glance down at that old crate of rubbish next to Bucky—and noticed a blue denim pant leg, splattered with blood, hanging out over the edge of the crate.

Casey’s denim jeans…

His rifle came up immediately and aimed at Bucky’s head. It was all he could do to keep from pulling the trigger right then and there, he
was that furious over how easily he’d been gulled.

“Those are
her
clothes in that pile of rubbish you just fell over,” he told the now cowering man. “You’ve got five seconds to tell me what the hell you were doing taking off her clothes. And then you’ll tell me exactly where she is. If you even think about lying again, you’ll be left here to rot—quite dead. One…”

“Wait! Wait! Okay, mister, I give up. It won’t be the first time I didn’t finish a job I got paid for. And considerin’ I lost two good friends on this one, I don’t feel a bit obliged to return the blood money.”

“Two…”

“I didn’t take her clothes off! Hell’s fire, what kinda fella do you think I am?”

“Three…”

“Will you stop with the countin’? I’ll tell you everything I know. I
helped
her, for cryin’ out loud. I didn’t want to kill no young un, even when I thought she was a he. I certainly don’t kill no women.”

Damian didn’t lower his rifle yet. “And just how did you find out he was a she?” he asked doubtfully. “It’s not something she goes around mentioning.”

“The heck she didn’t. She told me, and she was plumb indignant about it, too, for me callin’ her a boy. That purely ticked her off.”

“You’re lying again…”

“I’m not, I tell you! It was like this. She got shot in the head. The wound wasn’t all that bad, but because of it, her memory went fishin’. She couldn’t rightly recall nothin’ ’bout herself, and
I guess that included why she was pretendin’ to be a boy.”

Damian sighed at that point, his own suspicions confirmed. He lowered the rifle, then said, “She’s really lost her memory?”

Bucky nodded, adding, “She was a mite upset about it, too. Understandable, though. Think I’d go crazy myself if I couldn’t remember my own name.”

“You said you helped her. How?”

“I was gonna try and talk her into leaving the area; that’s why I brought her here. But when I figured out she didn’t know why she’d been shot, well, I fetched her some clean clothes, helped her get all the blood off her head, and put her on the train headin’ back east.”

“What?!” Damian exclaimed incredulously. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“’Cause it ain’t safe for her around here. And ’cause she wanted to find out who she is.”

Damian was about ready to shoot the man again, this time for his idiocy. “And how is she supposed to find out who she is on a damn train, not knowing where to go or who to talk to to ask?”

“Sheese, mister, I didn’t send her off blind,” Bucky said indignantly. “She’s headin’ over Waco way, to the K.C. Ranch. Her horse comes from there, leastways that’s where it got its brand from. Figured someone there might remember her, or at least remember the horse, fine-lookin’ as it is, and they’d be able to tell her who she is.”

Very well, so the man wasn’t a complete idiot, but still…

“It didn’t occur to you that I could do that? After all, we
were
traveling together.”

“Mister, with the kind of men that are after your head, I didn’t figure you’d be alive long enough to help anyone. And I didn’t want that little lady involved in the hornet’s nest you stirred up. So I sent her lookin’ for answers where she might find them and not get shot at in the process. And hopefully, if she gets her memory back, she’ll be smart enough not to come back here.”

Damian sighed. There was no point in berating the man further, when all he’d done was try to help her in the end. He couldn’t have known that Casey’s father had given her that horse, nor would she have had the memory to point that out. And there was no telling whom her father had bought the animal from, or how many owners it had passed through before that. Casey was off chasing needles in a haystack.

And all Damian could do was follow…

I
t was a frustrating dilemma, whether to chase down Casey immediately or finish with Curruthers first. Curruthers was only a day away, just needed a final confrontation. But Casey, there was no telling how long it would take Damian to catch up with her.

And where would she go after she reached Waco and found no help there? Would she even think to come back to Sanderson to find her answers? Or had she lost her amazing deductive reasoning along with her memory?

The train schedule decided the matter for him. The next eastbound train due to depart Sanderson wouldn’t be leaving for another four days. Damian could finish his business here in that amount of time. He could even catch up on some much-needed sleep before heading north to Culthers in the morning, which was what he did.

He should have skipped the sleep, however. Timing turned out to be more important than he’d figured. If he had only gotten back to
Culthers a few hours sooner, he might have been able to prevent the gunfight he arrived to witness—and the all-out battle that followed…

Entering Barnet’s Saloon in Culthers dressed as she was wasn’t a good idea. So Casey waited, and sure enough, Jack and his
campaign crew
filed out of the saloon around lunchtime to head to the restaurant across the street.

A few minutes later, Casey entered the same establishment and took the table next to theirs. Only two of them even glanced her way when she came in, one dismissing her, the other showing some male interest. But they were too busy joking around and teasing the biggest member of their group about his busted nose and general sorry condition to pay her too much mind.

That had to be Elroy Bencher, the one who liked to throw his weight around. The teasing was understandable. He looked like he’d been stomped on by a horse and then stomped on some more. She couldn’t imagine another man doing such damage to him, big as Bencher was, but one of his disgruntled remarks led her to change her mind.

“Least I gave as good as I got. He ain’t lookin’ too pretty now either. If I hadn’t tripped and broke my ribs, he wouldn’t be a problem no more.”

Which led Casey to wonder if they might be talking about Damian…

After stopping the train that Bucky had put her on, much to the engineer’s chagrin, she’d come straight back here, hoping this was where Damian would have headed. And he
had
been
here, according to Larissa the schoolmarm. Thank goodness. Her largest fear had been put to rest—he hadn’t died that day. But he’d already left Culthers again, looking for her. It sounded like they had missed each other by only a few hours.

But she was sure he’d return, and in the meantime, she had decided to see what else she could discover about Jack Curruthers. The plan, hasty and not well considered, she had to admit, was to see if she could get to know the want-to-be mayor on a personal level, and the quickest way to do that was as a woman.

She had Larissa to thank for the clothes she was wearing. She’d bought the schoolteacher’s last unaltered outfit from back East, one the woman claimed was too fancy for these parts anyway. An abundance of lace and bows wasn’t Casey’s style, but was suitable for her purpose, which was to look as different from the
kid
as possible.

After a few more minutes, she managed to catch Jack’s eye and smiled at him. That was all it took to gain his full attention. He wasn’t exactly a ladies’ man, after all, being too short, too nondescript in his looks, and he was twice her age as well, so it wasn’t surprising that it took only a coy smile from a young woman to lure him over to introduce himself.

“You’re new to our fair town,” he said after tossing out his name and pulling up the chair next to her without waiting for an invite. “Just visiting?”

She nodded, aware that his men were also paying her much more attention now, which
wasn’t what she had intended. Too many eyes on her, and at least one pair was bound to see a resemblance to Damian’s sidekick.

“You look somewhat familiar,” Jack remarked thoughtfully, making her groan inwardly. His eyes hadn’t been the ones she had figured would be that discerning. “Have we met somewhere else, perhaps?”

“Well, I am widely traveled, at least here in Texas. You?”

“Very.”

“I’ve stayed in San Antonio recently, as well as Fort Worth,” she told him.

Those two names had him frowning. She knew she was pushing it, mentioning towns that Henry—or Jack himself—had passed through, so she quickly added, “And Waco. Now
there
is a lovely town.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter if I’ve seen you before, because I’m sure we haven’t actually met. That I would remember. And your name, ma’am?”

“Jane” was the easiest name that came to mind, and she grabbed a last name from the condiments before her on the table. “Peppers.”

“And who is it that has the pleasure of your company while you’re here?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who exactly are you visiting here?” he clarified.

“Oh, Larissa Amery. You must know her, since she’s Culthers’s only schoolteacher right now. We went to school together, and haven’t seen each other for the longest time, so I figured we were due for a visit.”

“You’re from the East as she is, then?” He was frowning again. “Strange, but your accent is distinctly Western—Texas, to be exact.”

“Well, I should hope so. I
was
born and raised here. I merely finished my schooling in the East. But since you mention it, you sound like an Easterner yourself. So you’re fairly new to Texas?”

“Let’s not talk about me, Miss Peppers. I’m much more interested in you.”

That had been said to flatter her, but all it did was have her mumbling mentally. This was turning out to be a bad idea, after all. He wasn’t stupid enough to let something slip, especially to a new acquaintance. And two of his men at the next table were watching her like hawks. She was wondering what excuse to use to get up and leave when Jed did the getting up and came over to whisper in Jack’s ear.

The little man shot to his feet immediately, bellowing obscenities. Casey didn’t have to wonder why as she caught the look of outrage that he turned on her. She stood up. It was automatic to reach for her gun—which wasn’t there.

She did have a gun, though, in her large reticule, one she had bought as soon as she got to town, since her holster had been empty the day Bucky had carted her off. Her holster was in there, too. The problem was, how could she get to it now.

But none of the six men were wearing guns either. And this was a public place they were in. There were other customers present, employees—witnesses. Running for public office, Jack wasn’t
going to do anything stupid like have her killed on the spot. His style was to send out lackeys to do his killing, and in less than honorable ways—just as Henry had done with Damian’s father.

So Casey tried extricating herself from the confrontation. After all, Jack hadn’t revealed anything to her. No harm had been done. Just because six men were all looking as if they’d like to get their hands around her neck didn’t mean she really had anything to worry about.

“I believe I’ve lost my appetite,” she said as she reached down for her reticule.

A hand clamped to her arm, preventing her from getting it. “You’ve got some nerve, lady,” Jed said. It was his hand, and he wasn’t letting go.

“Really?” Casey replied. “And here I thought I was just hungry, and this was a likely place to find some vittles. Or is there a law against having lunch in this town that I wasn’t aware of?”

“Lippy-mouthed—”

“That’s funny—”

Jack cut off the comments of his men with a whispered hiss. “I know exactly what you tried to do, girlie, and that
is
a crime in my book.”

He then glanced at Jed, and Casey didn’t need much intelligence to interpret that look. It plainly said, Take care of her and see to it personally this time. When she felt the pressure on her arm change, as if she were about to be dragged out of there, Casey figured she’d better start worrying—and change her tactics.

So she blurted out, “Okay, which one of you is going to take me on?”

“Take you on?” It was Jed who asked, giving her a blank look.

“In a fair fight,” Casey clarified.

Elroy smirked. “I will.”

“In a fair
gun
fight,” Casey clarified further. “Or are you all too cowardly for that?”

There was a chuckle before someone said, “Don’t think she knows who she’s dealing with.”

“Oh, I do indeed,” Casey replied contemptuously. “Ambushing is more your style.”

That remark produced a few red faces. Then the one sucking on a candy jawbreaker said quietly, “I’ll take her on.”

“No, I want to,” the youngest among them put in eagerly. “Let me, Jed. I don’t mind killin’ no woman—if she is a woman,” he said with a derisive sweep of his eyes down her body. But then he continued with a chuckle. “Guess the undertaker will find out for sure afterwards, won’t he?”

“Just take it out into the street,” Jack said fastidiously. “Gunsmoke lingers, and I’d just as soon not smell it while I’m eating.”