Heart of the West (84 page)

And she shot him.

The smack of the rifle explosion echoed up and down the coulee. Kyle spun around on his toes like an opera dancer, flinging his arms wide as he fell down into the ravine, taking mud and rocks and branches with him.

Clementine looked wide-eyed at the man lying sprawled on his back over the rocks, his long yellow hair trailing in the rushing muddy water. Then she turned her gaze, and the Winchester, onto her father-in-law. Between them the rain slashed down like a silver beaded curtain.

Jack McQueen clicked his tongue against his teeth, shaking his head. He hadn't even bothered to glance at Kyle. "Damn me, woman, but if you aren't turning out to be a revelation. "'I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness.' Yes, indeedy. Smart as the crack of a whip, you are, and with the guts to go with it. A pure revelation." His lips pulled back from his teeth in a cagey smile. "Why, I'd almost consider taking you on as a partner... if I thought I could trust you."

His one eye watched her with the intensity of two. He took a step.

Clementine tightened her grip on the Winchester. Her stomach clenched and spasmed, and her legs kept wanting to shake. And she was cold, so cold. She kept thinking of that yellow hair floating in the stream, and she felt a terrible need to look at him again, to see if he was really dead. Yet she didn't dare to, couldn't bear to.

Jack McQueen took another careful step. "You've discovered the existence of the apex, haven't you, my dear daughter-in-law. I was afraid you might."

The rifle trembled in Clementine's hands, then stilled. "Don't," she said.

"So now what are we going to do about it?" he said. He took another step.

The crack was so loud Clementine thought it had come from a cannon rather than a gun, and she hadn't even pulled the trigger. The ground gave out beneath her feet, and there was a great thundering rumble as if the earth were splitting in two.

The hillside came sliding down on top of them.

CHAPTER 34

The wet red Montana mud smothered her, burying her alive, even as it carried her down the ravine like so much debris.

She felt as if she were tumbling end over and end inside a great churn that was thick with mud. She was trapped in a suffocating blackness, the weight of the gumbo pressing on her chest, pressing, pressing, pressing her ribs into her lungs, crushing her like a pile of stones.

She clawed at the mud, thrusting, digging, pushing through it, and at last, at last, her head popped free. Still, the mud clogged her mouth and nose and eyes, blinding her, choking her. She pulled one arm loose of its sucking hold and rubbed at her face, trying to clear a way to breathe.

She drew in great drafts of rain and air. And still she was being carried along by the heaving, churning mud. She could hear the wild rushing of the water through the coulee below her and knew that if she hit that rock-filled chasm she would die. A pine tree, too small to be of interest to the Four Jacks loggers, whipped at her face, and she grabbed for it. Needles and branches scraped through her hands as the sliding mud tugged her along with it, but somehow the tree held.

Wasn't holding... for she could feel its roots begin to give way. She stretched out a desperate hand, trying to grasp another, bigger tree that remained just out of reach. And then she saw it, coming out of the rain-drenched sky—a rawhide rope looped into a lasso. She lunged, just as the tree gave way, trusting to the rope and the cowboy who wielded it.

And the lasso swung true, settling over her head and shoulders. She gave a little cry as it jerked hard, tightening and cutting into her flesh, and she was pulled out of the sucking, clinging mud.

She crawled onto blessedly firm ground. A strong arm supported her as she struggled to push herself half upright, bracing her weight on her straight, outstretched arms. She retched and spat the mud out her mouth as her heaving lungs fought for air.

"Lord God, Boston, what the hell were you doing?" He hauled her up against his chest and held her so tight she couldn't breathe again.

Her fists gripped the wet leather of his jacket and she burrowed into him, rubbing her face against his chest. "You left me again," she said. "You left me."

"I thought I'd lost you. Dammit, Jesus Christ, and God almighty, I thought I'd lost you..."

She pushed him away from her, so hard he rocked back on his heels. "You left me without even a 'So long, darlin'.'"

The rain poured over them, mixing with the red mud. He'd lost his hat somewhere, and his hair clung sleekly wet to his head, dripping water. The whole front of his chest and face looked like a mud pie.

"Well, shit," he said, "I didn't get far."

She spat the grit out of her mouth, "What if I don't want you back?"

"You want me." She lifted her hand to push the mud-logged hair out of her face, but he did it for her and his touch was so tender, so gentle. "Quit it. Jesus, we've got to quit this. It's like tempting God or something."

Suddenly she was shaking so hard she had to hug herself. She looked around her. The slope of the ravine where she'd been standing only moments before was now a scooped-out cavity in the earth, and the ravine was now in the bottom of the coulee, damming up the mountain runoff and creating a lake that was drowning the logged-off stumps and slash piles, the logging camp and the madwoman's soddy, and the apex of the Four Jacks Copper Mine.

There was no sign of One-Eyed Jack McQueen.

"Rafferty... your father was standing right in front of me when that hillside went."

He was trying to wipe the mud and water off her face with his bandanna. "I know. I saw him... I only had the one rope."

She touched one corner of his hard mouth with her fingers. He rarely showed what he was feeling; a man like him never did. But she'd lived out here long enough to understand the code he lived by. His father had been killed by the land that he had so callously raped and plundered. A man, if he was man enough, didn't kick about it when it came time to pay the price for what he had done.

He dropped the bandanna and wrapped his fingers around her wrist. He held her hand in place so that he could turn his head and brush his lips across her knuckles.

"I'm scared," she said, and her voice broke with the force of what she was feeling. "You scare me, Rafferty. I love you too much, and you're hurting me."

He smiled, and it was a smile that wasn't like him at all. It was sweet and wistful. "I ain't gonna tell you not to be scared, or that I'll never hurt you again." His hand still held hers, and he was rubbing her palm with his thumb in slow, gentle circles. "Hell, I don't know why I rode out on you this morning, except that maybe I had to try to leave, just so I could understand why I had to stay."

Tears welled in her eyes, blurring his image until he seemed less real than a dream.
You love him,
she thought,
and then you lose him to the wildness in his soul.
Her throat was so tight it hurt to talk. "It shouldn't be so hard—"

He let go of her hand and pressed his fingers against her lips, stopping her words. "It's hard, Clementine. Hard for a man to look into a woman's eyes and see love lookin' back at him. And to know that when she's lookin' at him, she's seeing not what he is, but what he ought to be."

"You are the world to me."

He laughed raggedly. "And you say you're scared." He gripped the sides of her head and stared at her a long, still moment. "I ain't like my brother. I ain't responsible like he was, or godly, or any of those other things that makes a woman a good husband. But I got to hope there's a man like that buried somewhere inside of me if I have the guts to go lookin' for him. I want to become that man, Clementine, if only for myself."

He was looking at her with his heart and his pride naked in his eyes, and she thought of how she had searched so long for those missing places in her own heart, and of how she had found them. "I am the bear," she said.

His thumbs were stroking the sensitive skin behind her ears. His eyes had turned hot and intense in the way they did just before he kissed her. "You're the what?" he said, his voice husky with desire.

She shook her head within the embrace of his hands, smiling through her tears and happiness and hope. "Nothing... I love you."

He lowered his mouth over hers in a kiss that was rough and hungry and desperate. He kissed her forever, and she wrapped her arms around his waist and held on.

His hands fell to her shoulders and he set her back, and she thought it was so that she could see his face and know the truth of his words. "I love you, darlin'," he said. "So much, so much..."

By the time the first shot was fired over the stage driver's head, Hannah Yorke would have committed highway robbery herself if it would have gotten her out of the belly of the lurching, swaying coach.

She'd been sick all the day before on the train and sick all day today on the stagecoach. An hour ago the rain had finally stopped and the sun had come out hot and started baking the damp, mildewy horsehair seats and leather curtains. And Hannah Yorke had bent over and spewed up the oily coffee she'd drunk at the last swing station into the zinc bucket between her legs.

She was still bent over the bucket when the shooting started. "Heaven preserve us, we'll all be killed!" the woman sitting next to her screamed, and Hannah fervently wished this would be so. The woman smelled of old talcum powder and canned sardines.

Although there was a man riding shotgun up on the box next to the driver, the stagecoach slogged to a stop after that first spurt of gunfire. Through a haze of fresh nausea, Hannah heard men's voices raised in consternation and then gruff acknowledgment. The coach dipped as the driver descended, and a moment later the door jerked open.

Hannah pushed the widow's veil out of her sweating face and raised her head and looked with blurry eyes at a whisker-grizzled face. "There's a marshal out here from Rainbow Springs, ma'am," the driver said, giving her a look full of sly curiosity. "Says he's got a warrant fer yer arrest."

"I knew she was no better than she ought to be," the woman huffed to her husband, who was slat-rail thin and smelled of pickled beets. "The hussy!"

Hannah was willing to surrender to Wyatt Earp himself if only she could first set foot on solid ground and breathe some fresh air. She held out her hand for the driver to help her down, then swayed dizzily a moment as she straightened her back. A man sat on a roan horse at the side of the road. The horse was blowing and sweat-foamed as if it had been ridden long and hard.

Hannah raised her head high enough to meet the man's eyes. They had always been the coldest, hardest eyes she'd ever seen.

Marshal Drew Scully kept a tight rein on his horse and his mouth while the driver climbed back on the box and sent the stagecoach along on its journey west without her. The great iron wheels squelched and sucked through the red gumbo, leaving deep ruts in the road, and still he said nothing.

Finally he stretched his legs out in the stirrups and half rose in the saddle as if taking a look at the countryside. "Turned out it wasn't as hard to find you as I thought it would be," he finally said.

Hannah thrust her chin into the air so fast and so high her neck cracked. "Yeah, well, now that you've found me and said howdy, you can just turn right around and ride on back to Rainbow Springs."

He pushed out a slow breath like a sigh and rubbed at his unshaven jaw. "The thing is, Mrs. Yorke, I was prepared to spend years looking."

"You were?" She swallowed hard and tried to quell the shaking that was going on inside her. She didn't want to hope, and knew already that the hope was in her so bad she hurt with it. "The thing is, Marshal Scully, there's something you ought to know before you start laying down conditions or... or making offers: I'm pregnant."

His eyes crinkled faintly at the corners, as if he was thinking about smiling. "That's good, because I've always wanted to be a da. A little girl might be nice, if you could arrange it, Hannah. A little redhead with dimpled cheeks."

A gust of prairie wind buffeted her, whipping at her widow's weeds and clutching at the black net veil of her hat. "I'm forty years old. When you're forty, I'll be fifty-three."

"Aye, and our daughter will be thirteen. Close to being a woman." He drew his eyebrows together in a frown as if at a sudden thought. "Bloody hell. I suppose I'll have to be practicing my quick draw between now and then. I'll put up with no riffraff sniffing around the skirts of my little girl."

The hope was in her now, roaring and gusting like the Montana wind. She wanted to shout to the skies with it. "I've been with dozens of men. Hundreds, maybe."

"So I've heard. And how many men is it, then, that you've been with in the last seven years?"

"Damn you, Drew Scully. You know there's never been anyone but you since that day you took me on my bearskin rug and without even a by-your-leave."

He grinned down at her. "My point exactly."

"I wasn't only a whore. There was a time—I'm not proud of it, mind you. Truth is, I'm bitterly shamed. But there was a time in my life when I was a drunk and a..." She squared her shoulders and lifted her head as high as it would go. "And an opium eater."

"Aye? Well, you've nothing on me, Hannah Yorke. Since we're confessing our sins, I'll be telling you plain—I'm probably the sorriest coward you'll ever live to meet. Near most every day I spewed up my guts and sweated buckets when I went down the shafts, I was that scared."

She stared at him in utter wonderment. "All those years... you worked down in that mine for all those years feeling like
that?"

His mouth tightened and his gaze shifted away from hers. "I knew hearing it would give you the disgust of me."

There was this lump of sadness and joy all knotted up in her throat as big as a turkey's egg. "Oh, Lord, you men... always thinking you have to be so tough all the time. It would be a fine thing for y'all if we women didn't love you in spite of your foolishness."

He turned his head back around and looked at her, and something swelled within her, something sweet and scary and precious. "Do you love me, Hannah?"

She couldn't say it just yet. She was doing it again, dragging out the moment, holding on to the hope of it. She did smile at him, though.

"You told that stagecoach driver you had a warrant for my arrest, Marshal Scully. Just what is it I'm supposed to have done?"

"You broke my heart, Hannah. Leaving me like you did."

The lump in her throat was definitely going to choke her. "I only left you 'cause I loved you. And it's gonna be too bad for you, now that you've come after me, because I reckon you're stuck with me." She gripped his stirrup iron, giving it a rough shake. "Get on down from there, you. If I'm going to accept a man's proposal of marriage, I'll be doing it eye to eye."

He swung off the horse with as much grace as she'd ever seen in any cowboy. He removed his hat with one hand, took her own hand with the other, and got down on one knee in the middle of the Montana prairie. "Hannah Yorke," he said. His mouth was set serious, but those gray eyes of his were as warm as a summer sun. "Would you be doing me the honor of becoming my lawful wedded wife?"

She thought she was going to start crying if she wasn't careful. Land, she was crying. "Oh, Lordy... oh, yes," she said.

He kept hold of her hand while he stood up, dusted off the knees of his britches, resettled his hat, and fished something out of his vest pocket. "This is to keep things looking respectable and permanent until we can round up a preacher," he said. "I'll not be having you forget that I've asked you to marry me and that you've said yes."

Hannah looked down at her hand, where it lay trembling and looking so small in his. And she had to blink hard, so dazzled were her eyes by the sunlight flashing off the gold ring he'd put on her finger.

The oil lamp cast a warm glow over the kitchen where they sat together at the round oak table, a little uncomfortable in the rush-seat chairs but reluctant to move just yet. The night had settled deep and still around them.