Dance With A Gunfighter (35 page)

"Sure enough, the rustlers came after him one night,
and I killed two. There was only one left. The rancher, me, and everyone else
on the ranch assumed he’d run far and fast. I took the money the rancher gave
me and went into town to celebrate. There, I learned the truth. The so-called
rustlers had been a family of four brothers who had owned a small ranch near
that of the cattleman I was hired to protect. The brothers had a few head of
cattle. The cattleman stole their water, stampeded their herd, and did
everything he could to destroy them. The first brother who was killed had been
trying to get back the cattle that had been lost to them in the stampede, those
that belonged to them as could be seen by the brand they were wearing. He was
culling his own cattle away from the cattleman’s herd, and trying to drive them
back to his own land when he was killed."

"My God," Gabe cried.

"Now, I have to tell you, I knew better than to
believe the kind of men who’d hire a gunman. I knew they weren’t the cream of
society, and for the most part were nothing but lying bastards themselves. But
the ones on the opposite side were just as bad. This time, though, I had
allowed my gun to be used against a family who sought revenge for the murder of
their brother, and I had killed two of them."

"You were hired to protect, and you did," Gabe
said, trying to defend him even against himself. "The brothers didn’t have
to take revenge on their own. It was their choice. Just like I’m making my
choice."

His eyes had turned dull, his face drawn. "It gets worse,"
he whispered.

She bowed her head, afraid to heard what she sensed was
coming.

"In town," he continued, "when I heard this
story it made me sick, disgusted with mankind and everything about it. I
decided to leave. I walked out of the saloon onto an old warped boardwalk. Mesa
Verde’s just a small town. It makes Jackson City look like a thriving
metropolis. I remember how quiet the streets were. On the opposite side of the
street, a young woman was looking in the window at the mercantile. With her
were two little kids--they must have been hers because they both had her
butter-yellow hair. One was a little girl, and she carried a baby doll wrapped
in a blanket. The other was a little boy. He had a wooden pistol and he was
running around his mama shouting ‘Bang, bang.’ The first time I heard him, I
jumped half out of my skin and reached for my gun. Then I saw that it was just
a kid and relaxed my guard.

"Maybe that’s why what happened, happened. I’ll never
know."

Gabe held her breath, waiting.

"My horse was hitched to the post in front of the
saloon. When the little boy saw me step onto the street toward the horse, I
became his target. He ran into the street, yelling ‘bang,’ much to the dismay
of his mother, who began shouting for him to stop. I saw a movement from the
corner of my eye, and coming around the corner, behind the mercantile, was the
last surviving brother. He raised his gun, pointing it at me. I shouted for the
boy to get back, but it was too late. The bullet hit him." McLowry shut
his eyes, as if trying to stop the vision before him. "I fired back at the
brother, emptying my gun into him. The little boy died there on the street, his
mother screaming as she held him. The bullet he took...it was meant for me. It
would have gotten me if he hadn’t run in front of it." He shuddered.
"It’s my fault he died, Gabe. I should have been the one to die, not that
child."

His anguish chilled her to the center of her being.

"The little girl stood alone, watching her mother. I
went up to her and put the money I’d been given by the cattleman into the
blanket and then wrapped it up again around her doll. I told her to take good
care of it, and then to give it to her mother the next day. She nodded. I can
only hope she understood."

"I’m so sorry," Gabe cried.

"Then I rode back out to the cattleman’s home. I
killed him. After that, I just gave up. I didn’t want anything to do with
anyone, or anything. I wanted to die--I waited for it. I drank, I drifted, I
played cards now and then to get enough money to buy more liquor. As far as I
was concerned, the sooner this life ended the better." He met her gaze.
"Until I decided to take a mountain pass around the town of Bisbee to
avoid a hanging, and everything changed."

"Oh, Jess," she whispered. She stood and wrapped
her arms around him as he sat. "I didn’t know." She kissed his hair,
his forehead. "I didn’t know, Jess."

He drew her closer, kissing her stomach, her breasts.
"I want you, woman, here beside me on this ranch. As my wife, the mother
of my children. Choose life, Gabe, and forget about this revenge. The toll is
too high."

She couldn’t speak. She shut her eyes, allowing herself
only to feel the things he was doing to her body, only to think about the love
she felt for him, of the way they needed each other. But warring with her
determination, in the deepest recesses of her mind, thoughts of Will Tanner
lurked like a cancer, evil and malignant, a constant reminder of the need for
revenge, and of her guilt.

She swayed from the force of the battle raging within her.
He stood and pulled her closer to him. She put her arms around his neck, her
kisses desperate. As he picked her up and carried her to her bed, then lay down
beside her, she prayed for a way to believe that staying on the ranch with Jess
and Chad would be all right, and that justice--for Pa, Henry, Roy Flint and all
the others--just didn’t matter.

o0o

Gabe barely slept at all that night for thinking about
Tanner and Murdock in Tombstone and whether she should try to find them and to
have justice, or to give up and live her life as if nothing had happened. The
next night, she faced the same torment, and again the night after that. During
the days, she stopped eating. The fourth morning, she arose from another night
of agony and vomited a watery bile. Each day found her weaker and more tired.

Jess was worried about her. He asked time and again what
was wrong, but she always made the same reply, "Nothing." He looked
skeptical, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about Tanner and Murdock
in Tombstone. She knew what his reaction would be, and she couldn’t face
another argument.

Even Chad noticed something was wrong, although he was
lost in missing Susan, and feeling foolish for doing so. He was twenty-two,
after all--and confined to a wheelchair--and she was only sixteen.

Gabe saw how bothered he was and one afternoon, as she
baked bread and Chad sharpened her kitchen knives and scissors, she said,
"Sixteen can be plenty mature."

"What brought that on?" he asked with a frown.

"You did. By the look on your face," she
replied. "I think Susan knows exactly what she’s all about. You have two
years to figure it out."

He slid the knife against the whetstone. "So you
regard this as my problem and not hers?"

"I regard you as the more unsettled of the two,
yes," she admitted.

"Unsettled? How much more settled can I be than here
in this damned chair! I know exactly where I’ll be in two years--going from the
house to the stable or the barn." He put down the stone. "It’s not enough
for me, Gabe. How can Susan imagine it would ever be enough for her?"

She remembered how, when they were young, Henry was the
one who had planned to own a ranch someday. He loved ranch life and loved
cattle herding. He also loved Louisa Zilpher and had from the time he was
twelve years old and she was nine and hit him in the face with a dish of ice
cream.

Chad was quite the opposite. He had wanderlust. He wanted
to see the world, to go to school and to make something of himself. A whiz at
his schoolwork, he once wrote an article about the need for a more active
school board that was published in the Jackson City Star--which came out every
two weeks, give or take a few days. Everyone had assumed Chad would go far. And
now, he couldn’t even go from the ranch into town without help.

Confined the way he was because of his legs, and yet with
his head and his heart as adventurous as they’d always been, had to be torture
for him.

"You’ll come up with the answer, Chad. I have faith
that you will. You’ll come up with what’s right for you and Susan
both--whatever it is. Just be sure you give it lots of thought, and lots of
time."

He pondered her words a moment, then nodded. He picked up
the whetstone and another knife, and began to sharpen it.

Her gaze settled on Chad, sitting in the kitchen with her
sharpening knives instead of being out on the ranch with Jess, riding Thunder,
and enjoying his life and the wonderful possibilities ahead. As she watched
him, her heart hardened further against Tanner and his ilk, and she knew sleep
wouldn’t come to her again that night.

o0o

Two days later, Jess rode out to the back pasture to move
the cattle. Gabe stood on the porch and watched him go. He’d be gone all day.
If she wanted to, she could leave now for Tombstone and would have a ten or
twelve-hour start before he learned she’d gone.

If she wanted to...

She didn’t want to. To leave Jess, Chad, her ranch...that
was the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

Her head had a strange buzzing sound she couldn’t shake.
Last night, exhausted though she was, again she could only sleep a couple of
hours. She had gone into the barn to join Jess in his cot--he had told her many
times such skulking around was silly, that they should just marry or explain to
Chad what was going on, but she wasn’t ready to do either. After he fell
asleep, she got up and stared at the stars. At dawn, she went back to the house
and her own bed.

During those awake hours, she worried over whether she had
waited too long and Tanner and Murdock had left Tombstone. She imagined that
she went there only to discover they had disappeared once again...that they
were lost to her once again.

And that they had killed once again.

Another girl’s father, like Roy Flint or Pa.

Or a young man, like Henry.

Or a gunfighter, like Jess.

That morning when she got up, she vomited again. It was
worse this time, and left her even more weakened. She could see Jess’s worried
frown as he watched her. He offered to take her to the doctor, and thought that
perhaps he shouldn’t leave her that day.

She almost told him, then, about Tanner and Murdock being
in Tombstone, and about all that torment she was feeling. But in the end, she
merely sent him on his way.

She didn’t need a doctor, she needed to be able to rest,
to stop seeing Will Tanner’s face every time she closed her eyes...or every
time she looked at Chad in his wheelchair, or at the flappy-tongued saguaro
where Henry had played, or at the rock cistern her pa had built. There was only
one way she could ever find peace.

She blinked hard, trying to stop the ringing in her ears,
the light-headedness that dogged her from the time she’d heard the stagecoach
driver say Tanner was in Tombstone.

Waiting for her...

Swaying slightly, she went into the kitchen and got
day-old biscuits, jerky and dried apples and put them in her saddlebags. She
loaded her pockets with cartridges and picked up her rifle. Before leaving the
house she wrote a note to Jess and Chad. There was no harm in it, she decided.
She would have a ten-plus hour start. By the time anyone caught up with her,
one of three things would have happened--the men she sought had already left
Tombstone, she had killed them, or she was dead.

Chapter 27

Rumor had it that the famous actress, Lotta Crabtree, would
make a surprise appearance at Tombstone’s Bird Cage Theater in about two hours.
Men and women from all over the territory were in town to see her, despite the
theater management’s insistence she wasn’t coming.

Gabe couldn’t care less if Miss Crabtree showed up or not.
Will Tanner was the one she hoped to see. Like one sleepwalking, she wandered
through the crowd searching for him or Luke Murdock. On the ride to town, she
didn’t allow herself to rest, or think, or feel. Especially not feel. Because she
knew what it would mean when Jess discovered she’d gone. She could only pray
that once her revenge was complete, once she had finished what she needed to
do, that he would find it in his heart to forgive her.

A thick, boisterous crowd milled around the Bird Cage
Theater. Hopefully, someone would be gossiping about Tanner and give her some
idea where to find him. Gabe squeezed between two men, and one of them shoved a
whiskey bottle in her face. "Want to join me, little lady?"

She jerked out of his reach, and stumbled over a woman
with a long turkey feather in her hat. "Get off my foot!" the woman
shrieked, giving Gabe a push into an old cowboy who was so drunk he didn’t even
notice.

A loud roar went up and all eyes turned toward the west end
of the street as a dark-haired woman wearing an emerald green satin dress
appeared. The woman stopped, terrified, and clutched the arm of the man who
escorted her.

"You sow-kissin’ mule heads!" An old,
wrinkle-faced man’s voice cut through the crowd. "That ain’t Lotta
Crabtree. That’s the new hotelman’s wife."

The crowd turned surly, cursing and shoving.

As two hours slipped by and Miss Crabtree didn’t appear
the air crackled with anger. More exhausted than ever, and a little dizzy, Gabe
continued to make her way through the crowd, listening for talk of Tanner. To
her dismay, she heard nothing. She feared that in the time lost waiting for a
chance to leave without McLowry noticing, Tanner had traveled on.

She stood still and ran her hand over her brow, trying to
shake the lethargy that weighed her down. Maybe, finally, she could go home
again. She had tried. She may have failed... again...but at least she had
tried.