The Man from Stone Creek (34 page)

“Come on,” she said, stashing the clinking sacks in her saddlebags and putting out one hand for what Ben was carrying. “We haven't got any time to waste.”

Ben paused, biting his lower lip. “I gotta make water first,” he said.

Undine's whole body tightened with exasperation. “Well, hurry up about it,” she said. “And give me that gold before you make for the brush.” She stopped, watching him intently. “Don't get any fancy ideas about running away, either. I've got a fast horse here and I'll be on you before you've gone a hundred yards.”

Ben nodded, handed over the gold and slipped into the bushes. There, he relieved himself, both because he urgently needed to, had since Rex had grabbed him, and because he knew Undine would listen for the sound. Then, after he'd buttoned his pants, he bent, picked up a flat stone and tucked it into the back of his shirt. It felt cold and hard against his bare skin.

Undine had already mounted up when he got back to her. She didn't say anything, just shifted one foot out of the stirrup on the left-hand side so Ben could climb up behind her.

“It's hard to believe a woman would be part of an outlaw gang,” he said when they'd ridden a little way. Meanwhile, he was fidgeting to pull out his shirt tail in back and get hold of the rock before it fell to the ground.

Undine laughed. “Is it?” she teased in a mean voice, talking loud so he'd hear her over the beat of the horse's hooves. “Well, land sakes, Ben Donagher, there's more to life than a twelve-year-old-boy can imagine.”

“I'll be thirteen in seven months,” he said.

She turned far enough in the saddle to look square into his face. “Quit that squirming around,” she said. “That gold is deep in those saddlebags, and if you try to get to it, I'll know.”

Ben made himself look meek. He even swallowed, so she'd see. He had the rock in his right hand, but he couldn't bring himself to whack her in the face with it. She might be kin to a killer, and part of a robber gang, but she was pretty, and she'd been kind to him sometimes, in her calculating way.

“I wouldn't do a thing like that,” he assured her, keeping his fist, with the rock tightly clasped in it, back of his thigh. “Steal, I mean.”

“Holier than thou,” Undine said in the kind of voice St. Peter might call up to turn somebody back at the Pearly Gates. “That's what comes of spending so much time with a prude like Maddie Chancelor.”

Ben kept his face still until she turned around. Then he hit her square in the back of the head, not as hard as he could have done, but hard enough.

Undine sagged in the saddle and blood gushed through the back of her hair, which was pinned up just above her nape. After he'd reached around to catch the reins in his left hand, he steered for softer ground and then shoved her off.

She lay moaning in the dirt, face turned to the sky.

“Don't you die,” Ben told her. Then he reined the horse around and rode for town.

 

T
HERE WERE LANTERNS
burning inside the jailhouse and the door was wide open. Terran stopped on the wooden sidewalk, thinking Ben might have come to pay a visit to his pa. Sure, it was practically the middle of the night, but Ben did crazy things like that sometimes. Hadn't he tried to cross the river, walking a slippery log, and nearly drowned himself, along with Miss Blackstone? Hadn't he made a habit of running off whenever the mood took him?

Terran felt a certain relief. If Ben was here, at the jailhouse, he'd take him back to the mercantile. Get him by the ear, if he had to. Then he'd give a yell for Maddie, to let her know all was well, and quick as you could say “Jack Robinson,” he'd be in his own bed again, sound asleep.

He was growing. Maddie said that all the time. And a boy that was growing needed his rest.

He stepped up to the threshold.

Mr. O'Ballivan was there, and Rhodes and Vierra. The big old yellow dog, too. No sign of Ben, though, or Mungo, either.

Mr. O'Ballivan frowned. “What are you doing, roaming the street at this hour?”

If he'd had a father, Terran figured he would have said something just like that. It pleased him a little, hearing it from Sam, and made him sad at the same time. “Maddie sent me to tell you Ben's gone again.”

Mr. O'Ballivan set his mug of coffee aside and approached, still frowning. “Where do you reckon he's gotten off to this time?”

“I thought maybe here,” Terran answered glumly. The way things were going, he'd be lucky if he saw his bed again before morning. Maddie would make him go to school, too, no matter what. “Where's Mr. Donagher?”

Sam laid a hand on Terran's shoulder. Sometimes, when he felt the need, Terran liked to call Mr. O'Ballivan by his first name, inside his head. “Never mind that. You go and tell Maddie that the two of you ought to stay inside the mercantile and keep to the back.”

“But what about Ben?”

“I'll find him,” Sam said. A look passed between him and Vierra, who was seated behind the desk Terran still thought of as belonging to Warren, but it was a look he couldn't make sense of.

“Maddie said—”

Sam's grasp tightened on Terran's shoulder, not painfully but hard enough to hold his attention. “I don't care what Maddie said. Just do as I told you, Terran.”

“She won't like it.”

“I'm not concerned about that, either.
Go.
”

Terran went. He walked along the sidewalk first, then he darted onto the road and ran right down the center.

If Mr. O'Ballivan said they were to go back to the mercantile and keep themselves away from the front, where there were windows, that meant there would be shooting.

 

T
OM
S
INGLETON RODE
at the front, like always, and drew rein when the band reached the little rise overlooking Haven. Rex tried to ride past him, eager to get to his pa, but Tom reached out and grabbed hold of the bridle strap, fair tripping Rex's horse.

He was little, Tom was, but he was strong, and he was mean. Rex looked forward to shooting him in the back one day soon, but it wasn't likely the other men would take Rex's part in a gunfight, should one break out then and there, so he had to bide his time and mind his manners.

Tom had drawn his pistol, and he shoved the barrel tip hard into Rex's temple. There'd be a bruise by sunup—if he lived long enough to greet the light of a new day.

“Hold up,” Tom said, though it was clear to everybody that Rex had already done that. “I know you want to call your daddy to account for what he did to Garrett, but only fools go plunging into a situation where they don't know what's waiting for them.”

Rex put down a suicidal urge to spit in Tom Singleton's prissy-assed, womanly face. He swallowed instead, but a charge went through him, just like he'd gripped a lightning bolt with both hands. His throat went tight and dry as the Mexican desert, and he couldn't get a word past it.

“You're not a fool, are you, Rex?” Tom asked in that croony way he had that made a man's skin crawl up his back like a whole army of ants.

Rex couldn't get the answer out, but it pounded inside his head. No, damn it, he wasn't a fool. Furthest thing from it.

He had his share of the gold, and plans to hightail it north, all the way to Canada, where he'd make up a new name for himself and start over fresh. He planned to sleep, drink and chase women for a while, but in time, he reckoned he'd buy some land and a few cattle and take himself a wife.

No, sir, he wasn't a fool.

“Maybe you ought to wait right here,” Tom said, thoughtful-like, and before Rex had a chance to catch his breath, Tom had cocked a bullet into the chamber of that pistol, and the tip of the barrel bit deeper into Rex's temple. “You're a hothead, Rex, just like that brother of yours.”

Rex tensed. Every time he remembered what happened to Landry, down there in the badlands on the other side of the border, it hit him fresh. Landry was gone. By rights, he should have been riding with the outfit right now, with a share of the gold to show for all he'd suffered. Making plans to head up to Canada, his horse traveling alongside Rex's.

But it wasn't to be, and Tom Singleton was the main reason. Oh, they'd shot off half Landry's foot, the Ranger and that Mexican he was riding with, but it was Tom who'd put Landry down like a crippled cow. Rex knew that for sure, even though the others had made sure he wasn't there to see.

“I got to go with you, Tom,” Rex choked out. Tom and the others were set on killing O'Ballivan and the other man so they could enjoy the fruits of their labors in peace, and Rex wanted to see those two dead more than anybody did, but he had something else in mind, too. He had to tell his pa about Landry, and once he'd done that, he'd put a bullet square between the old man's eyes.

He owed that much to Garrett.

“I don't like that idea,” Tom said pleasantly. “O'Ballivan and Vierra aren't the sort to give up. Track a man to the end of his days, just for the sheer orneriness of it. I mean to see that they stay put for good, and I can't do that if you're going to do something crazy.”

“I won't do nothin' crazy,” Rex promised, his heart hunkered in his throat and expanding so as to burst.

“No,” Tom said quietly, “you won't.”

Rex felt hopeful. Especially when Tom lowered the gun, though a glance downward showed his finger was still on the trigger. In the next instant, though, Tom flipped that pistol end over end and the butt of it came at Rex's face.

A burst of pain blinded him.

His last conscious thought, as he toppled to the ground, was that Tom Singleton had split his skull wide open, like a melon at a summer picnic.

 

S
AM WALKED
the river's edge, picking his way along in the darkness, reminded of Abigail at every step. He called Ben's name, over and over, but there was no response. He checked the schoolhouse, for the second time, and it proved fruitless, as before.

He paused at the door of the shed, where Mungo Donagher lay bound on the floor. “Old man,” he said, “I'm looking for your youngest boy. He lit out from Maddie's place sometime tonight. If you know where he might go, you'd better tell me.”

“Why should I tell you any damn thing at all?” Mungo retorted.

Sam drew his pistol and opened the shed door slowly, in case Donagher was poised to jump him.

Mungo lay curled on the dirt floor, just where Sam had left him.

“Ben's your own flesh and blood,” Sam said evenly. “He's just a kid, and he's probably in danger. Not that I think you've ever paid him much attention, but even you ought to have some idea where he'd hole up.”

“He'd go to his mama's grave, most likely,” Mungo allowed, but grudgingly. “He was always mooning over Elsie, even though he never knew her. I told him she wasn't coming back, that she was nothing but bones by the time she'd been a year in the ground, but he didn't listen.”

“He'd be at the cemetery, then?” Sam was running out of time. He thought back to Garrett's funeral and the spot where he was buried, and hoped to God he'd find Ben there. He was shutting the door when Mungo finally troubled himself to answer.

“Elsie ain't buried in town. She's on the ranch, next to Hildy.”

Sam considered that. Ben had no business wandering abroad at night, but if he'd gone to the ranch, he was five miles or better from Haven. Considering what was coming, he was probably safer there, for all the dangers he might encounter.

“Untie me,” Mungo drawled. “Let me go. I'll take to the road and nobody'll be the wiser.”

“Save your breath, old man,” Sam said, and shut the door.

“I'll see you're paid for your trouble!” Mungo pressed. “Right handsomely, too!”

Sam turned and walked away.

He heard the horses, a dozen or more, just as he rounded the bend in the road, the one that would take him back into Haven. And he knew by the direction that it wasn't the posses coming from Tombstone and Tucson.

Ducking into the brush at the side of the road, Sam bolted for the jailhouse, one hand on the butt of his pistol even as he ran. He got inside just before the first spray of bullets peppered the facade.

“Put out that goddamned lantern!” he bellowed as Vierra and Rhodes scrambled to get ready for the fight.

The lantern flame winked into darkness.

 

T
ERRAN TOOK A MAN
'
S GRIP
on Maddie's hand when the shooting broke out, and she was distracted, for one blessed moment, by his strength. They landed hard behind a horse trough, too far from the store to take shelter there.

“Stay down!” Terran rasped.

It was her instinct to protect him, but something had shifted.
He
was protecting
her.
“What's happening?” she whispered as they clung to each other.