Dance With A Gunfighter (5 page)

She glared at him as if ready to make another sharp
retort, but no words came. He watched her harsh expression slowly crumble,
watched her eyes fill with pain. "It makes..." Her voice broke,
losing its anger and suddenly sounding young, young as the girl he met at a
desert dance. "It makes all the difference to me," she whispered.

A jolt drove through him as the memory bloomed in full of
the girl-woman he had once met. Which little cow town he had been in, he wasn’t
sure. But for some reason, the memory of this girl was clear and sharp, made
all the more acute by the change in her, the look of sadness and despair that
marked her now. She was certainly older, perhaps a bit taller, and maybe even a
little shapelier than he remembered, but the change ran deeper still.

"Tell me what’s wrong, Gabe." He let go of her
arm and waited.

Her breathing was strained and heavy as she struggled to
reign in her emotions.

"Gabe?" He reached out to touch her shoulder.

"No." She shrugged his hand away and stepped
back, turning to look down at the dead man again.

She’s still scarcely more than a child trying to act
tough, he thought. The idea of this girl pointing her rifle at that man...of
how she would have felt if she had shot him...

"I hope I didn’t hurt you," he said softly.

She flinched, but he didn’t know if it was because he had
hurt her or due to something else, to whatever it was she wouldn’t tell him
about.

"Look at me." He wondered if she would snap and
snarl again. Her bottom lip trembled and she bit down on it, as if trying to
hide her weakness, to hide the hurt that so obviously filled her.

Something within him clutched and pulled at the sight,
something he hadn’t believed was there anymore. She seemed so forlorn, so
completely alone. A fleeting memory of the openness and trust she had greeted
him with in...Jackson City, was it?...came back again; a memory of the time she
took his hand without fear or condemnation for what he was, and of how he had
felt when she had done it. He remembered, too, the spirited good will that had
seemed to fill her.

He wondered what had happened to bring her to this. How
could her father, so obviously protective, have allowed her to come here alone?
Where was he?

She walked over to a large rock, tossed her hat on it and
then sat, her palms butted together, and her hands between her knees. "I’m
sorry, Mr. McLowry."

He could see her struggle to gain composure, to raise a
shield against her pain. He moved her hat and sat beside her, his legs spread
wide and his forearms resting on his thighs. "I think when you hit, swear
at and dance with a man, you can call him by his first name. If you remember
it."

She regarded him a moment and a bleak smile touched her
lips. "I’m sorry, Jess."

She stared out over the valley. He touched her arm, but
she wouldn’t face him again. Finally, he dropped his hand. As much as he wanted
to learn why she was angry enough to kill a man, he wasn’t sure he wanted to
hear it. He might learn enough to make him care. Or feel. And he didn’t want
that.

Yet he couldn’t help but ask. "Will you tell me what
happened?"

Her dark eyes were haunting. "It’s a family
matter."

"I don’t see any of your family around here helping
you."

Her face drained of color. "No," she whispered.
She became so still he could have heard the wind touch a sand pebble.

He began cautiously. "The man who was hanged, had he
hurt you?"

"Me? No. He never touched me."

"Good," he whispered.

Her lips tightened. Her hands pressed hard against her
knees and he saw the desperate loneliness in her face, and the grief.

A cold, prickly fear went through him. "Who died,
Gabe?"

Surprise filled her eyes that he knew, but then she
nodded. He was a gunfighter. He had seen the sorrow, the shock, the anger that
sudden, violent death brings to the victims’ families. He had recognized that
pain in her.

A long time passed before she could speak, and when he
heard her whispered words, he almost wished she hadn’t. "My pa. My brother
Henry. And Chad--" Her voice broke.

"It can’t be." He hadn’t even realized he had spoken
aloud until he saw her stiffen. Her eyes flashed with a hot, furious anger for
an instant before a staggering agony seemed to fall on her again. "Can’t
it?" she murmured.

He could see the words bottled up inside her like
gunpowder ready to explode. Her fisted hands shook, and he knew then how much
she needed to talk to someone, even if only to a broken down gunfighter.

 "Gabe," he said in a voice he barely
recognized, "I’m sorry."

Again, she walked to the edge of the cliff and peered down
at the mining town. "The man who was hanged today, Sly Colton," she
said finally, "was one of five men who came to our ranch." She looked
back over her shoulder at Jess. "I wanted to kill him myself."

So that was it. Sly Colton. He knew the man. Knew he was
the kind of human garbage that preyed on innocent people for money, food and
sport. His mind flooded with the possibilities of what might have happened to
her if a jackal like Colton had gotten his hands on her. "At least Colton
was strung up for what he did."

"But he wasn’t! He was hanged because he killed a man
in Bisbee! The sheriff in Jackson City said he had no evidence against Colton
or the others. Just my word. But I saw them; I saw what they did. And later,
when I saw their pictures on Wanted posters, I was able to put names to the
sickening faces of the filth that came to our ranch that day."

She folded her arms tight against her stomach before
continuing. "Despite all that, the sheriff wouldn’t listen to me. No one
in that town would listen; none of them would help. The sheriff said I was
hysterical, and young, and a woman." She tossed back her head with fierce
determination. "He’s afraid of them; the whole town is afraid of them. But
I’m not. There’s only four left now."

The enormity of her plan hit him. He stood, too.
"Gabe, you can’t."

"Can’t I?" She picked up her Winchester and
hoisted it to her shoulder. "Do you see the broken stalk on that
cholla?"

The bristly, pale green cactus with branches like deer
antlers was farther away than most men could shoot. He nodded.

She fired. The stalk was cut in two. Defiance filled her
eyes. "Now tell me I can’t."

He looked out over the land, then to the townspeople
drifting away from the gallows now that the excitement was over. "It’s
different," he said flatly, "shooting a man."

Her eyes hardened. "My pa told me you were a hired
gun, that you’d killed lots of men, and if you ever came to Jackson City again,
I should stay clear of you. I want to kill only four.
Only four
."

Yes, he wanted to tell her, he had killed...too many. But
no more. He had made that vow after seeing a little boy die in Mesa Verde. No
more. "It’s not the same, Gabe," he whispered.

"I guess not." Her voice sounded old and weary.
"I want justice, while you were paid for killing. And none too well, from
the looks of you." As her eyes raked over him, for the first time in an
eternity he thought of the changes she was seeing--the unkempt hair, ragged
clothes, the smell of whiskey on his breath.

He let her barb pass. "Your pa wouldn’t want you to
do this."

"Well, you know what, gunfighter? He’s not around
anymore to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do!" She lifted anguished
eyes to him, eyes that once had looked upon him as something more than a hard,
callous gunfighter. She seemed to expect his understanding, but no matter how
much he understood, no matter how much he, too, had felt the bitterness and
heartache she was feeling now, he couldn’t agree to her plan. It would be
agreeing to her suicide.

He made no reply. Disappointment dulled her eyes. Her voice,
when she spoke, was hushed and raw. "I know what I’ve got to do."

She put her big man’s hat on her head, the soft, wide brim
falling forward around her face like a bonnet, and began to walk away from him.
He took her elbow, stopping her. A small, detached part of him cried out not to
get involved in this, warned that she wasn’t his problem or concern. He had
only met her once before, after all, at a pathetic little town dance. She was
nothing to him. Nothing.

Yet he couldn’t forget the girl he had met under the
desert moon, or the smile she had given him while they danced. To see her now,
eaten with hatred and grief on a blind, self-destructive mission, was more than
he could ignore.

"Who are these four men? Where are they?"

He watched a shudder ripple through her small frame,
watched her struggle to compose herself, to pull her emotions tight within her.
"All I know are their names. Will Tanner was the leader."

McLowry’s stomach felt as if it had been knot-fisted.
"Are you sure?"

Her gaze studied his. "You know him?"

He didn’t answer for a long moment. "I hadn’t heard
he was this far south. You’re sure it was Will Tanner?"

"You sound like the so-called law!" She spat out
the words with disdain. "They didn’t want to believe me either."

Tanner led a gang of outlaws, but McLowry had never heard
of the gang attacking a family for no reason, at least, not until now.
"Who was with Tanner?" he asked.

She raised her chin. "Blackie Lane, Tack Cramer, and
Luke Murdock--along with the newly departed Sly Colton. I’ll kill them, one by
one. But most of all, I want Will Tanner."

He knew the men she named, and knew they had been
connected with Tanner from time to time. McLowry’s throat felt dry at the
danger she faced. "The odds are stacked against you. More than you could
ever imagine." He suspected his words stung, but she had to face reality.
Every one of those men was a cold-blooded murderer, and she was an innocent
girl.

"I’ll find my chances," she said, lifting her chin.
"Sneaking up on them is one way."

His voice was soft. "Men like them stay alive because
people can’t sneak upon them."

She stiffened. "You seem to know a lot about these
men, gunfighter."

His lungs seemed to empty. "I know their type. If I
didn’t, I wouldn’t be alive either."

"Then I’ll just have to learn, won’t I?"

The thought of her going after Tanner and his men gnawed
at McLowry, even while he admired her courage.

She picked up the rifle that had slid a little way down
the rocky hillside, then her hat.

"Where’s your horse?" he asked finally.

"Around the ridge." She pointed up ahead.

"Mine’s on the trail," he said, damning himself
for a fool as his words fell from his lips. "Wait for me."

A long silence fell between them. "Why?"

"I’m going in your direction," he replied
simply.

Her eyes fastened onto his with shock and the slightest
hint of hope, before she lowered them, as if unwilling to let him see her
weakness. "You don’t know where I’m going."

"Sure I do. You’re going to find Tanner," he
said. "And until I can talk you out of it, so am I."

Chapter 4

The promise of a hot bath and soft bed in Bisbee wasn’t
the reason Gabe finally had agreed to stop there with McLowry. It was his
suggestion that the other men in Tanner’s gang very likely had come to town to
watch Colton hang, and that they still might be there. She had to agree they
were the sort of rabble who might well be drawn to such a scene.

He led her along the trail over the hills behind Bisbee to
enter on the side of the town far from the gallows. She figured he had done it
so that she could be spared the scene of Colton’s hanging. He needn’t have
bothered. She had welcomed seeing Sly Colton dead--had rejoiced in it, in fact.

Her eyes settled on McLowry’s back as his sorrel walked
along the trail up ahead. Once upon a time, in the fairy tale life that had
been hers before Tanner’s gang ripped it apart, her wildest hope, her fondest
dream, was that someday she would meet him again. She had lost her heart to him
that night at the dance. Through the years of helping her father and brothers
run the ranch, do the cooking, and take care of household chores, she hadn’t
forgotten him. No one else had ever caused her head to spin, her skin to
tingle, or her heart to melt the way he had. How ironic that he had scarcely
recalled meeting her, while she would have remembered him to her dying day.

Over the past year or two, a few young men had come to her
house with hopes of courting her, but they had seemed like brown wrens pecking
at grub after she had soared with an eagle. Nothing they did could compete with
her memory of the handsome stranger.

She wasn’t bothered by not having a fellow, though,
because her pa and brothers had needed her help with the running of the ranch.
Situated in the foothills, an arroyo cut through it. Dry most of the year, at
times it overflowed from rains or flash floods. The water nurtured the oaks and
pinyon and juniper to shade and cool the earth, and the scrub and grasses so
vital to raising cattle in the territory. While some people, especially those
from the north, complained that this land was far too hot and dry and spindly,
to Gabe it possessed a rare and vital beauty in the sculpture of its red and
granite rocks, in the brightness of its sky, and in its very stillness on a
summer’s day.

She had been raised with the idea that one day she would
grow up and marry and leave the ranch. Instead of filling her with joy, she had
always been saddened by it. Now, she didn’t know what the future held, if
anything. Nor did she care.

Her throat tightened and she focussed her thoughts away
from her family and back to the gunfighter.

He had changed. Where his clothes had once been sleek and
polished, they were now scruffy. Where his demeanor had once been one of
smooth, polished deadliness, it was now as hard and blunt as rough-hewn stone.
His face was thinner and more angular and weathered chestnut brown by the
desert sun. But his firm mouth was the same, as was his straight nose, and his
eyes were still so blue they must have made heaven jealous.