Heart of the West (74 page)

"Hell, I know that."

"And expect me not to have changed."

She felt his gaze move over her like a touch, though she wouldn't look at him.

"I don't see as how you're any different," he said. "Still starchy and prickly as a boiled shirt."

Which showed, she thought, how little he knew her. But then, neither of the men she'd loved had ever really known her.

He worked the pump handle for her while she washed the birth blood off her hands. A moment ago she had caught the head of a calf as it emerged from its mother's womb and laughed aloud as it took its first breath. A year from now she'd be sending it off to slaughter without a pang or a thought. "There once was a time when I couldn't even bear to watch a baby like that one get branded," she said, speaking the tail end of her thought out loud.

A muscle pulled at the corner of his mouth, deepening the slash in his cheek. But it wasn't a smile. "I never once said you weren't game."

She looked at him. She wanted to touch the hard edges of that mouth with her fingertips, feel them soften and part, feel the heat of his breath—

She swung her head around sharply at the sound of pounding hooves. A pinto gelding galloped wildly down the road from town with Sarah and Daniel mounted double on its back.

Her children rode old Gayfeather back and forth to school every day, and Clementine hadn't known the animal still had it in him to go that fast. She saw that her incorrigible daughter was once again not wearing her bonnet, for her hair flew loose behind her like a Gypsy's child. Then she saw the blood on Daniel's face.

She ran back out into the yard, her heart thundering with fear. Sarah already had helped her brother to the ground, her hands on his shoulders to steady him. The blood ran down the side of his head and neck and dripped onto his shirt, staining it scarlet.

"It's only a little graze," Sarah said, her voice unnaturally loud, and Clementine caught the sharp warning in her daughter's eyes. Daniel still suffered from lung spasms, and one of the things that could trigger a bad breathing spell was hysteria and fear. Sarah squeezed the boy's shoulders. "He isn't scared, are you, Daniel?"

"Uh-uh," Daniel said. His lower lip trembled a little, but his breath came slow and steady.

"No, of course he isn't scared—a little scratch like this," Clementine said, forcing her voice to sound calm. She tilted her son's head up the better to examine the wound, feeling dizzy at the sight of so much blood. It was more than a little cut; it was long and ragged, but not dangerously deep. She put her arm around his bony shoulders and led him up onto the gallery and into the chair where she sometimes did her churning.

Little Zach came banging out the kitchen door, followed by Saphronie. The boy was wearing a ring of chokecherry jam around his mouth, and he held a milk cracker dripping with the stuff in one sticky fist. For a moment the syrupy sweet smell of the jam rose up and almost choked Clementine. "Saphronie," she said, "will you fetch my remedy chest, please."

"Oh, heaven preserve us." Saphronie's hands gripped her apron. "Oh, heavens..." She cast an imploring look at Rafferty, then lifted her skirts and ran back into the house.

"Wow, Danny, you're bleedin' like a stuck pig!" his little brother exclaimed.

"Zach, you hush up," Clementine said. She noticed that Rafferty had pulled her youngest up against his legs as if to protect him, and the boy had allowed it. Her children had taken to the man as if they'd known him all their lives. Even Saphronie didn't bother to cover up her tattoos around him.

Clementine made herself look more closely at the gash in her son's head. The blood seemed to be thickening on its own, although the wound still looked ugly. "Sarah, you will tell me now how this happened."

Sarah's wide, serious gaze shifted up to Rafferty, as if he was the only one she deigned to answer to, and Clementine wanted to shake her. "They're logging again on our land—those Four Jacks men. We only rode up for a closer look at what they were doing, and they shot at us. We didn't mean to sneak up on them... well, not exactly... but I think we kind of surprised them when we rode out from behind the madwoman's soddy."

Four Jacks men... A cold, engulfing wrath swelled in Clementine's chest. The Four Jacks. First they poisoned the air and stripped her land of trees, and now they were shooting at her children.

Saphronie appeared at her side with the remedy chest. "Thank the Lord Mr. Rafferty's come home," Saphronie said in a low voice. "You can let him take care of them Four Jacks men."

Clementine said nothing as she bathed the cut in her son's head with witch hazel. Her hands shook as she thought of how much worse it could have been. She cast a sharp look up at her daughter. "Sarah McQueen, you disobeyed me by not riding directly home from the school-house, as you know you're supposed to."

The look Sarah gave back to her was typical of the child— wide and still and edged with contempt. Her daughter, who was so fearless and independent, and unmerciful to those weaker than she.

"Those are our trees they're cutting down," Sarah said.
"Somebody
should make them quit it."

Clementine finished dressing the gunshot graze with aloe vera gel and comfrey. "Saphronie, you take the children on into town this afternoon just like we planned," she said. "Stop by Doc's and see if Danny needs this cut stitched up. We'll all be staying the night at Hannah's."

Saphronie lowered her voice to a bare whisper. "You really are gonna do it, then? What you all decided the other day at the whiskey party?"

"I said I was, and I am. Only now I'm going to make a little detour on the way."

"Oh, mercy. Take Mr. Rafferty with you," Saphronie said, but Clementine was already on her feet and striding into the house to fetch the jacket to the riding habit she was wearing, and the Winchester rifle. The man she'd loved all her life could come with her or not.

When his dun pulled up alongside her, Clementine urged her own mount into a flat-out gallop. They tore down the road toward town, their horses' hooves making sucking, squelching sounds in the spring mud. She felt frantic inside, as if demons were chasing her and she dared not stop.

She eased up after a few minutes, though, when she realized he intended to keep up with her. She wouldn't look at him.

"Are we riding out to kill someone?" he said.

She breathed to ease the ache in her chest. "I would like to, truly I would."

"You gonna tell me what this is all about?"

"Sarah just did. The Four Jacks Copper Mine is logging our land, and somebody has to stop them."

The loggers had set up their day camp on the west slope of the coulee, near the ruins of the madwoman's soddy. Once, the surrounding hills had been thick with yellow pine, alder, cottonwood, and larch. Now whole acres of trees had been shorn down to bare shale earth or reduced to slash piles. In the coulee that had been so dry the summer of the drought a creek now flowed three feet deep from the recent rains and the runoffs in the mountains.

One of the picket horses whinnied, announcing their arrival, although they had already made noise enough as their horses' hooves popped and sucked through the soft slough where the melted snow had run down from the buttes and foothills into the coulee. The loggers were all busy farther up on the hillsides. Only two men remained in the camp, standing around a small cookfire.

Clementine's gaze went first to Percivale Kyle, superintendent of the Four Jacks Copper Mine. As usual, he was dressed like an escapee from a Wild West show: white Stetson, fringed jacket, and a white leather vest with a braided horsehair chain looped from a buffalo-horn button to his watch pocket. He was a fair, elegant man with a spade-trimmed blond beard and winter-gray eyes.

Clementine had seen him a few times packing a silver-plated revolver with a pearl handle. But today, like most days, he was unarmed. The Four Jacks liked to present itself as a peaceful, law-abiding company.

But one look at the Mick, she thought, changed that impression. He always wore a tam-o'-shanter over his big bullet-shaped head, and he kept his mustache clipped short and stiff, like a boot brush. The skin on his face hung loose and his eyes were beady, making him look mean. Clementine didn't know his real name; she'd only heard him called the Mick.

For a moment all was silent but for the click of the horses' teeth on their bits. Then Percivale Kyle took a step toward her, his own teeth showing in a smile.

"Mrs. McQueen. Somehow I knew that little accident we had here would bring you hotfoot after us." He had a strange way of talking through his nose while barely moving his small pink lips. "Please believe me when I tell you that no one regrets more—"

"Which one of you polecats shot at my son?"

Neither man volunteered, but no one had to. Not only was the Mick the only man wearing a gun, but Kyle's gaze flashed over to the Irishman, all but pointing a finger at him.

In one quick smooth motion, Clementine brought the Winchester up to her shoulder, sighted, and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot punched through the air, its echo muffled by the rain-heavy clouds.

Her horse had danced sideways at the sudden explosion of noise, its ears back and its eyes showing white, but she easily kept control of it with her thighs and knees. She swung the barrel onto Percivale Kyle and levered another cartridge into the breech.

From behind her, she heard a click as Rafferty cocked his revolver. "Don't," he said softly, and the Mick, who had started to reach for his gun, changed his mind.

A bright red stain had appeared on the sleeve of the Mick's buff wool coat. He touched his arm and then stared in astonishment at the hand that came away bloody. "Christ, she shot me! Did you see that, Kyle? She shot me."

"And I will do so again if you ever harm another child of mine. Only you won't hear the next one." She raised the rifle barrel until it was aimed between the dandy's eyes. "They say you never hear the shot that kills you. Isn't that true, Mr. Kyle?"

Percivale Kyle lifted one elegant blond brow and spread his hands out at his sides to show that he was unarmed. "You've made your point quite adequately, Mrs. McQueen. But as I attempted to explain to you, the wounding of your little boy was an accident. One that will not be repeated, I assure you. The Four Jacks doesn't make war on innocent women and children."

"No, only on innocent trees." Another shot smacked through the air, and Kyle's pristine white Stetson went sailing backward off his head with a gaping hole in its big crown. Even Clementine was a little surprised by how close she'd cut it—she'd missed putting a crease in the top of the man's head by the width of a fiddle string. "Get off my land," she said.

Kyle kept his hands spread wide at his sides, but his pale eyes narrowed and a muscle bunched along his jaw. His voice, however, remained calm. "Now, now, ma'am, be reasonable. The court has determined the ownership of this parcel to be in dispute between the Four Jacks and the Rocking R, and until a final ruling can be made we have sanction to continue cutting."

"From
your
court,
your
judge."

"The law is the law. However, we both know that if you were to accept the generous offer the Four Jacks has made and give up all claim to the parcel in question, then any legal suit would become a moot issue." Kyle had been slanting glances at Rafferty ever since they'd first ridden into view, and finally he could stand the suspense no longer. "Who the devil is he?"

Rafferty's saddle creaked as he leaned forward. He rested his left wrist on the cantle, but his right hand still held his Colt trained on the Mick. "He's the devil who owns the Rocking R."

Percivale Kyle's surprised face swung back to Clementine. "I thought you owned it."

"I do," she said. And she pulled her horse around and heeled him into a trot, leaving Rafferty to follow. Or not.

She waited until they were well clear of the coulee, and then she reined in and gave him a long, penetrating look.

She could read nothing of his thoughts in his face. Nothing. "My name's still on the deed, Boston," he finally said.

All those hard and lonely years of relying only on herself, answering only to herself, coming to believe only in herself— after living through those years, she wasn't sure she could bear to turn her life and her heart over to any man. And to a man like Rafferty, so wild, so irresponsible, so dangerous...

She had a hard time getting her throat to work. "I don't see as how you have a right to it. Not after seven years."

She looked at him and waited. Waited for him to tell her she was the all and the only of what he had come back for. But what had their love ever really been, beyond a scorching heat and a wild yearning? Many a wild mustang was untamable, and if you tried put a saddle on one, you only risked getting hurt. Or you broke the spirit you were seeking to own.

She waited, and she supposed she was waiting for him to say he loved her, but what he said was "Since when did you become such a dead shot?"

"There are a lot of things you no longer know about me."

"I know there's no quit in you, Boston. I've known that about you ever since that first year, when I tried to chouse you away from here and you stuck like a cocklebur on a blanket. All the way through the first snowfall and beyond... remember?"

For a moment their eyes met with all the hurt and pride and pretense stripped away. And then she hardened her mouth, along with her heart. "But we both know there's quit in you."

She didn't expect an answer, and she didn't get one.

Farther down the coulee, concealed within a stand of pines, Marshal Drew Scully had watched the altercation between Mrs. McQueen and the Four Jacks men. He'd kept his hand on his gun, ready to intervene, although he was relieved when it hadn't been necessary.

He didn't want anyone to know he was out here. And he particularly didn't want anyone to witness what he was about to do.

When he was sure he wasn't being watched, he went down to the new creek that flowed through the coulee. He had a saddlebag draped over his shoulder and he walked stooped over, peering at the rocks that were scattered in the creek bed and along the banks. These were rocks that had been carried, along with the melted snow and excess rainwater down from the surrounding hills and buttes. From time to time he bent over to pick one up, before tossing it away. Finally one caught his attention enough that he fixed a loupe into his eye to study it more carefully.