Patricia Potter (3 page)

But the young…like the small girl…

When he allowed himself to think about it, he knew those feelings reached back to when he had been only seven and the Apaches raided the wagon train. He remembered the agonized cries of the adults as they were killed, and those of children too young to travel. Imbedded in his mind were the sobs of the survivors, the children taken as slaves, the way they weakened day by day until only he and his brother survived. And then his brother, broken by lack of food, by exhaustion, by fear, gave up too, and had been left in the desert to die. Lobo would never forget his brother’s terrified cries for him.

Lobo had tried to stay with him, but he had been roughly pulled away by a brave who tied a rope around his waist and dragged him behind a horse until he struggled to his feet. Every step he’d trudged for a mile, he heard his brother crying his name. He still heard that sound sometimes in the night. He’d heard it today when the child fell in the well.

Damn Alex Newton. He would see the man in the morning and tell him exactly where he could stuff his job. And Lobo would keep the two thousand dollars. For his trouble.

He settled down on the blankets, his head against his saddle, and watched. Sunsets were one of the few things that gave him pleasure, and more important, a sense of freedom that had been denied him as a boy and young man. Now he roamed where he wished, answering to no one, setting no rules for himself, no limits.

He stretched, taking satisfaction in feeling each muscle respond. His body was whipcord lean through both conditioning and purpose. No one who lived with the Apaches had excess fat, especially a white slave. By the time he’d left them, he needed little food to survive, and could go days without water. He could run twenty miles without breathing hard, and could ride any horse. He could kill in a dozen ways and do it without regret.

And while he hadn’t sought the reputation that had inevitably come to him, neither did he do anything to soften it. His reputation kept people away. Sometimes just his eyes, the icy-cold blue-green eyes, made them shiver and keep their distance.

That was exactly the way he liked it.

The fire in the sky was being doused now by the softer hues of twilight, and the scene lost its interest for Lobo.

He turned over, but sleep wouldn’t come. He thought of the boy and his offer of cookies. Christ, wouldn’t the…teacher be horrified!

2

“A
nd he could make his horse do anything.
You should have seen him.”

“Slow down, Chad,” Willow said with a smile as Sullivan tended Sallie Sue’s scratches in the small bedroom Sallie Sue shared with Estelle.

It was obvious Chad had a hero.

Sullivan looked up, pronouncing Sallie Sue fine despite the harrowing experience. Then he turned to Chad. “What did he look like?”

“Tall…taller than you, Dr. Sullivan,” Chad said. He’d endowed him with all the heroic features of the gods in Willow’s books. He’d also marveled at how the horse walked back and forth at the sound of words. “You think he’d teach me how to do that?”

“Who is he?” Willow asked with some exasperation.

Chad shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

Sullivan tweaked one of Sallie Sue’s braids. “I’ll fix that well covering before I go. Where in the hell was Brady?”

Chad shrugged again, and Willow was afraid of what that meant. She had hoped—

Sullivan’s voice broke into her thoughts as he continued to question Chad. “Tell us more about this stranger.”

Chad tried to remember, but he could recall only the whole, not the parts. The stranger had been too overwhelming in his entirety, but Chad tried. “Sort of sandy hair, sort of blue eyes…and tall,” he repeated.

Willow raised an eyebrow at Sullivan. The stranger had had to be very tall indeed to make that kind of impression on the usually unimpressionable Chad. The boy had worked in a saloon since he was eight, and he had few illusions about men. He normally viewed the world, including Willow’s Greek heroes, with a skeptical eye.

Sullivan shook his head. “No one I recognize. Could have been a cowhand, I guess. All of them are pretty good with horses and a rope. Or a drifter.”

Chad shook his head. His stranger had certainly been no ordinary cowboy. He took exceptional pride in the fact that he had helped in the rescue, that he had been partners with the man who spoke to horses.

“I wish I could thank him,” Willow murmured wistfully.

“I asked him to stay…even offered him some cookies,” Chad said.

“And he didn’t say anything about where he was going?” Sullivan’s voice was insistent.

Chad shook his head.

Sullivan’s eyes caught Willow’s, and she knew what he was thinking. But that couldn’t possibly be. The only stranger they’d heard about was the gunfighter, and he certainly couldn’t be their Good Samaritan. She tended to believe Chad’s stranger was just that—a stranger who happened to be passing through and was kind enough to stop to help.

Willow hadn’t told Chad about the threat, although she feared the twins probably heard the news at school. Was that why Brady had disappeared? He had intended to go into town for supplies that day. Perhaps he’d heard about the gunfighter.

“You’ll have supper with us tonight?” she asked Sullivan.

He shook his head. “I have to get back,” he said as he turned toward the door. He grinned suddenly. “There’s another town meeting.”

Willow lifted her eyes heavenward. She didn’t have to ask what about. They were always about her.

Chad rushed ahead of both of them through the door. “I’m going to tell the twins what happened.”

Sullivan looked at Willow. “I wonder how tall the stranger’s going to be before Chad gets through telling everyone tonight.”

“He’ll reach the heavens, no doubt.” Willow grinned.

“I wish to hell I knew who he is.”

“Well, he obviously meant no harm.”

“No,” Sullivan said slowly, his gaze lingering on Willow. She was a pretty woman. Not as beautiful as Marisa Newton, but she had a glow that warmed those around her.

A few wisps of auburn hair framed her face browned by the sun. Her vivid blue eyes were always alive and smiling, refusing to see the darkness in life, the evil, even the indifference that was often a part of evil. If she did believe such a thing really existed, she probably felt it could be overcome. This attitude was what frightened him, for she had no idea of Alex Newton’s determination, or his capacity for violence.

“Be careful, Willow,” he warned her, willing her to listen. “Alex is obsessed. I honestly don’t know what he’s capable of now. He holds Gar responsible for Mary’s death, and it’s been eating at him all these years. He sees you as his enemy now that you allow Gar to use your land.”

“But Jake did.”

“Jake once saved Alex’s life.”

“That shows Alex has some honor.”

“I’m not sure, not anymore,” Sullivan said reluctantly.

Willow frowned, her whole face creasing with concentration. “There has to be a way to solve this, to get the two of them together again.”

Sullivan smiled. That belief was the ultimate optimism, and he no longer believed in miracles, not after the war, not after the deaths of his own family.

“You’ll need your Odysseus to solve that one,” he said with a dry smile. The children had told him some of the stories Willow read to them. Odysseus, the warrior who was crafty and wise and brave and resourceful. The whole town needed him now, Sullivan thought. He feared the valley would explode into war if Alex persisted in trying to ruin Gar Morrow.

“perhaps,” Willow replied with a complacent smile as she thought of Chad’s hero.

T
HE STRANGER DID
indeed grow taller during dinner, chasing from Willow’s head all thoughts of the gunman named Lobo.

Dinner was the meal Willow loved best, even when Estelle cooked. It was then she felt the full measure of companionship and warmth and security. She would stay and she would make the ranch work. Drought or no drought. Gunfighter or no gunfighter.

This was her home, the only home she’d ever really had. In Boston, where her father was a schoolmaster, they’d lived in a pair of small rooms in a large hall with boarding students who came and went. Now she owned this ranch, and this was her family, the big family she’d always wanted so fiercely.

They were finally comfortable together. Even Chad, who at thirteen was the oldest of the children. All too grown-up for his age, Chad had become her confidant, friend, and ranch hand, and at last he even permitted her to touch him with affection. In the beginning that had not been so.

Touching was natural to Willow. Her father had been an affectionate man, and she had been raised to express affection openly. But she had understood quickly that touching, for Chad, had meant brutal beatings for most of his life. He had flinched when anyone came close to him, even after his father had been knifed to death during a drunken brawl.

Chad had been ten then. He had never been to school and barely made enough to eat by cleaning the saloon—if his father didn’t find the money first.

When Chad’s father died, the sheriff intended to send the boy to an orphanage in Denver, but Willow knew about orphanages. She and her father had been patrons of one in Boston, and she knew it could well kill what spirit Chad had left. She volunteered to take the boy.

Chad was the first of several orphans to come to her. Willow’s small house, provided by the town for its teacher, had suddenly started to fill up. Two boys, twins, were left with the sheriff by the master of a wagon train. Their parents had died of cholera on the way west.

And then Sallie Sue, who was little more than a baby, came to Willow when the child’s mother died giving birth to a stillborn. The father had disappeared.

Estelle was her responsibility too. She was not a child, but was just as needy. She had been a saloon girl, a prostitute, until one customer beat her half to death, blinding her in one eye. After that she couldn’t stand the touch of a man, and she had no skills. Much to the disapproval of the townspeople, Willow had taken her in.

Brady had been the last. He was one of the town drunks, an ex-sheriff who had fought one battle too many and buried himself in a bottle. Willow had found him half dead of pneumonia in an alley, and had called Sullivan. Homeless and alone, Brady needed someplace to recuperate. By then, Willow had the ranch, and Brady had temporarily moved into the barn, doing chores for his keep.

Willow had to grin now at Chad’s tales of the stranger, which grew more mythical by the moment. At least, they kept everyone’s mind off Estelle’s cooking.

Estelle, an outcast nearly all her life, had wanted so badly to become a part of the family that she had taken over the cooking. No one was cruel enough to point out exactly how badly she fulfilled that function and they all did their best to eat.

With the puckish humor that endeared her to her students if not to their parents, Willow thought that perhaps she should challenge Newton’s gunfighter to one of Estelle’s meals.

Then she immediately felt guilty as she looked at Estelle’s anxious face.

“Is it really all right?” Estelle asked as she had each time she’d cooked for the past month.

Heads nodded. Lies came easier that way.

Sallie Sue was the most vocal, particularly about the gravy and biscuits. “Like my pies,” the girl observed. At three, she was very proud of her mud pies.

A choking noise came from Chad, a gargled sound from one of the twins.

“Story tonight?” Sallie Sue demanded after Chad had completed his fourth recital of the afternoon’s events.

Willow forced another piece of incinerated beef down her throat, and nodded, her eyes twinkling. Stories were usually told on Friday and Saturday nights, so she could work with Chad on his studies during the week. But Sallie Sue’s bruised face was irresistible. “After dinner,” she conceded. “Does anyone remember where we left off?”

“The wooden horse,” Jeremy, one of the twins, said quickly. He was completely intrigued by war and the resourcefulness of Odysseus.

As the daughter of a schoolmaster, Willow had grown up with the tales of Odysseus’s travels, had even taught them in the prestigious Boston boys’ school where her father also taught. As a child, mythology had been her escape, as a scholar her expertise, as a foster mother her gift.

After dinner, Sallie Sue sat, as usual, on Willow’s lap. The other children sprawled on the floor. Willow looked at the corner where Brady often sat in the shadows, an unlit pipe in lieu of a drink. She missed him and worried about him.

“Once upon a time,” Willow started as she always did. Any other beginning brought forth objections from Sallie Sue.

“In an ancient land far away,” she continued softly, “there was a young prince named Odysseus. He was brave and wise and good, and—”

“There was an evil city named Troy,” Jimmy interrupted eagerly.

Willow hoped Homer would forgive the liberties she took with his tales. “And Odysseus knew he could never get his soldiers inside its tall walls, so he and his fellow warriors started building a big wooden horse. It was to be a gift, you see….”