Patricia Potter (12 page)

Jake had been gruff, and even rude, but she’d known he was just feeling her out. When he’d asked her to come and visit again, she knew she had passed some kind of test. She’d made several more trips before he’d finally admitted his need, and she’d spent several evenings a week teaching him how to read and write.

It was for his wife, he’d said. She had often read to him from the Bible, the only book he had. She hadn’t cared that he couldn’t read, but now he wanted the comfort of the Good Book. It would bring him closer to her, and he felt that need now that he was approaching old age and death.

Willow remembered her burst of pride when he’d read his first complete sentence. It had been worth all the time she’d spent with him. But then he seemed to sicken and he talked more and more to her about his two friends, Alex and Gar, who now hated each other. He feared dying for what would happen to the two men, yet he wanted to join his wife.

But Willow could prevent it, he sometimes muttered. Willow could somehow breach that schism that he could not. He knew it.

Willow wasn’t so sure. Yet, as he lay dying, she could no more deny him his last wish than she could resist teaching him. Like Jake, she felt there had to be a way to keep peace in the valley.

Now, after the dance, she wasn’t so sure. Some of her confidence had drained from her the next day when nothing had gone right: when her stranger didn’t appear, when Brady and Jupiter didn’t come home, when it didn’t rain and the garden grew more straggly.

And nothing improved on Monday, when the town seemed on the edge of eruption.

Was she doing more harm than good?

She no longer knew.

As she drove home with the twins, she scoured the hills, wanting desperately to see the person whom she had come to believe was their salvation. He had to be someplace. She wouldn’t allow herself to believe that he had been injured worse than she’d thought, or that he’d ridden away. There was a new empty feeling in her, and she knew that only he could fill it. So she looked at every hill and strained her eyes against the glare of the sun.

But she didn’t see him. And she was alone.

A
S BEFORE,
L
OBO
heard the horses long before they came into view.

He had returned from town and doctored his hands before buckling his gunbelt back on. He had forced himself not to delay along the road, not to watch for her. He was no lovesick school kid, and it was time for him to stop acting like one.

He practiced his draw, knowing it was important not to let his hands stiffen up. He tolerated the pain, even took satisfaction in it when his hand proved as quick as always.

Canton was here! The stakes were growing higher.

The last time he’d seen Canton was months before in Denver, where his fellow gunfighter also made his base. Unlike Lobo, Canton cultivated an image. He always wore black and kept his gun highly polished, the notches on its handle evident to all but the most casual of observers.

Although Canton didn’t seek out challenges, neither did he try to avoid them. His presence was always highly visible, which invited trouble, and, once confronted, Canton made sure he finished whatever someone else started. Good for the reputation, he once told Lobo, and the deadlier the reputation the greater the money.

So was the danger. But Canton seemed to care little about that. He was a man who enjoyed living on the edge, who cared not a whit whether he died doing it.

Lobo felt differently. He never drew attention to himself, merely did the job. He dressed indifferently, casually—like any cowhand—for he did not fancy being challenged every time he entered a new town. His occupation was a business; he saw no reason for giving away his rather unique skills for free.

He allowed the legends to grow because they benefited him. A man in fear was a man whose hand shook; terror was an ally in his business.

Because of his background as an Apache warrior, everyone seemed to think he would have dark skin and hair, and he did nothing to dispel those beliefs. Even when a man saw him at work, the legend surrounding him survived. He grew taller, darker, fiercer. It was only when a victim faced him, and saw the light turquoise eyes as cold as death, that he realized who and what he was facing. Some of them ran then, and never talked of it. The ones who hadn’t were dead.

It was a singularly lonely and empty existence, but it had been enough. Since he’d never known any kind of personal warmth, he hadn’t really believed it existed, not for him anyway. He didn’t need anyone, didn’t want anyone, a philosophy that had helped him survive. If he didn’t believe in soft emotions, he couldn’t miss them, couldn’t be seduced by them. Freedom had been his one goal, the only thing that gave him satisfaction. Gunfighting gave him that freedom, as well as the highly desirable benefit of being left alone.

His thoughts were interrupted by two men riding up very cautiously.

“Mr. Newton wants to see you,” one said.

Lobo eyed them coldly.

“I’ll be along.”

“He said now,” the second man replied nervously.

“I said I’ll be along,” Lobo scowled, one hand resting on the gun he’d returned to the holster.

The two men looked at each other mutely, deciding their jobs weren’t worth their lives. “Yes, sir, Mr. Lobo.”

Lobo raised one sandy eyebrow at the strained courtesy, his lips curling in derision. He turned his back to them, as if in dismissal, and he heard the sound of departing hoofbeats. He’d let Newton stew awhile. He didn’t like a man who went after women and children, and yet something indefinable kept him from leaving. He kept seeing the boy, Chad, and little Sallie Sue and the woman’s dark blue eyes. There had to be a way of getting them off the land without violence, but that didn’t seem possible, not with the way the woman was determined to stay and Newton would stop at nothing to have her land.

It was late afternoon before he condescended to approach the Newton ranch.

His new gloves covered his burned hands, his shirt the nasty red welts on his arm. His gun was strapped against his thigh, and his eyes were dangerously bright, like a fire burning deep in their depths.

Newton quickly noted the change. He’d feared the man before when the eyes were icy cold, but now they seemed the eyes of a devil. But, he reassured himself, Lobo was
his
devil.

Lobo watched the fear with quiet amusement. He saw the frustration in Newton’s face that he, Lobo, hadn’t come to heel.

“I expected results by now,” Newton said.

“I told you I would do it my own way,” Lobo said lazily. “If you want me to leave…”

“Can you do it?”

“My way, I can.”

“Am I permitted to ask about your way?” Newton said sarcastically.

“No.”

Newton’s face grew red with fury, but he dared not say anything. Now that Gar Morrow had Canton, Newton needed Lobo more than ever. He had started something he was beginning to wonder whether he could finish.

“I’m hiring more men,” Newton blustered.

Lobo shrugged with indifference.

“Morrow’s hired Canton.”

“So I heard.”

“I want you to kill him.”

Lobo’s lips tightened. “That’s not why I was hired.”

“I’ll give you another ten thousand. He insulted my daughter.”

“That reason enough to kill a man?”

“Are you afraid?” Newton asked, instantly regretting the words.

“I don’t like you, Newton,” Lobo said after a long, menacing silence. “I’m not sure I want to kill a man for you. I agreed to a certain job, and I’ll do that, but no more. Not for the likes of you.”

Lobo turned and left the room, leaving Newton trembling with fear and fury.

7

C
had looked at the late afternoon sun, and then at his work-manship.
He winced.

If Brady really did find Jupiter, the corral would never hold the old bull, not after embers from the barn fire had fallen on the top rails and burned halfway through them.

He had struggled with them all day, trying to replace them with pieces of lumber from the outer fence he had dragged behind a horse. But he couldn’t fasten them securely, not without help, and Estelle had proved to be worse than useless.

Chad finally got the idea of hoisting the rails to the top of the fence with rope and then tying them before nailing them to the posts. He badly wanted it done by the time Willow got home. He wanted to prove himself now that Brady had disappeared.

Chad didn’t want to leave the ranch. It was the only home he’d ever known, and Willow was the only family he’d ever had.

He would protect her with his very life.

Chad knew what was going on, although Willow was trying to protect him and the others by keeping silent about it. However, word spread rapidly, and the other day the twins had come home, bursting with excitement about the gunfighters gathering in Newton. It didn’t take much to figure everything out.

He’d eavesdropped on Dr. Sullivan and Willow, and had heard enough to know how badly Alex Newton wanted the ranch. He knew, from his years in the saloon, that Newton usually got what he wanted.

Well, he wouldn’t get this ranch. Not with Chad there.

He was sweating in the hot July sun. School would be out in another week to recess for several months while students helped with the harvest or with driving cattle up to Denver. Willow would tend the garden as she had last year—if there was anything surviving. The corn was shriveled, the beans dying on the vines.

Chad looked up at the ball of fire in the sky and ran his sleeve across his wet forehead. He could sure use some help. He wished again for the tall stranger, as he had for the past several days. Chad just couldn’t believe he’d disappeared like that. He’d been an…omen. Like Willow talked about in her books.

Chad had never looked up to a man before. His pa had been a drunk, like Brady, and though Brady never hit him, knocking Chad around had been his father’s favorite activity. Chad had hated him, had hated the ragged clothes he’d worn, had hated the one-room shack that was always dirty. He’d hated the saloon where his pa made him work instead of going to school like the other kids. He had been pushed, spit upon, slapped, and laughed at. Then his pa died, and the sheriff wanted to send him to an orphanage.

Chad had heard about such places, and he’d decided he would run away first. He was doing just that when Willow found him in her kitchen, stealing food for his escape. He’d thought she would be at school, but she had dismissed class early to take an ill child home.

Instead of being angry or hauling him off to the sheriff, she had sat him down and fixed him a hot meal. She hadn’t threatened him, or he would have pushed her away and run. She asked him where he planned to go, and how he would make his way with no education.

“I can be a cowboy. They don’t need no book learning.”

“Then how do they know if they’re getting their right wages, or whether someone’s cheating them, or whether they’ve lost some cattle or not?”

Chad thought about the questions. “I’m too old to go to school,” he said finally. “And I won’t go to no orphanage.” Willow, whom he called Miss Willow then, studied him carefully. He was ten years old, small and thin for his age.

“Bet you can learn faster than any of them,” she challenged him.

“I won’t go to school,” he insisted.

“If I teach you here, privately, would you try…would you try to outsmart all of them?”

It was the challenge that did it. He wanted to show those other snobs, those who had called him a dummy and laughed at his clothes and mocked his pa. So he had moved in with Miss Willow and she’d made him understand he was worthy of love and responsibility. He had worked terribly hard with the books as well as at the job she’d got for him at the stable. He loved horses and animals although he’d never had one of his own. The one time he had brought home a kitten, his pa had killed it, and he’d never dared to show interest in a critter again.

Not long after Miss Willow took him in, she also adopted Sallie Sue, then the twins. Her little house was bursting with people. Then she’d inherited the ranch, and they’d moved out there.

Chad had loved it from the first moment. Now he had four horses to help look after, along with Jupiter, and he was hoping that they could eventually build a herd. He had learned to read and write, and Willow said he was almost caught up with other boys his age. He would go to school next year.

But things had changed since then. The fire had been a disaster. The garden, upon which Willow depended so heavily, was dying, and old man Newton was bringing in gunmen to take their ranch away.

Chad tried to balance one of the rails and it started to fall. He grabbed for it, tripped, and the heavy wood smashed his hand, sending blood spurting over his clothes, the wood, and the ground.

Without thinking, he hollered, and the sound brought out Estelle and Sallie Sue, both of whom stopped at the sight of so much blood. Sallie Sue started wailing, while Estelle rushed over to Chad.

Holding his hand, Chad hopped around in agony. Pain sliced through him with a sharp edge as blood dripped steadily. Falling to his knees to the ground, he knew nothing but red-hot heat.