The Ruination of Essie Sparks (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 2) (33 page)

Magically, John, the coat-man, appeared at the door as if he'd had an ear pressed against it.

She stared at Newcastle for a long beat, unsure what to say to change his mind. "Standing on principle is a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. It's true that the ocean can swamp your hopes and your dreams, but the heart is one place the sea can't invade, regardless how far you swim into it. Pride will only hold you afloat for so long."

Even the stubborn set of his jaw was familiar. "I can have one of my men accompany you back to town if—"

"That won't be necessary. Good day, Mr. Newcastle."

His hand was shaking as he turned to pour another whiskey. "Mrs. Sparks."

Chapter 20

In his cell, Cade sat with his back against the brick wall, listening to a growing commotion outside in the street. At first, he'd thought it was just the noise of commerce, but soon shouts moved in the direction of the jail and Sheriff Sampson swung out of his chair and pulled his shotgun off the wall. He checked the load, then pulled his Winchester Repeater off the wall for his other hand.

Cade got slowly to his feet, still bent over from the kicking he'd taken to the ribs. "What is it?" he asked Sampson.

"You don't want to know," he replied.

Sweat instantly beaded on Cade's upper lip.
A lynch mob.
Word had spread about his capture, and likely the false rumor of Essie's murder, too. Daylight had brought out the vultures and they were here to see a show.

"They'll have to walk over me to get you. I can promise you that won't happen unless I'm dead," Sampson told him before opening the door and pulling it shut tight behind him.

Cade climbed up on his cot to look out the small barred window. Even from there, he could see the crowd spilling around the side of the building. All of them against one man. A dead man's odds.

He had nothing to protect himself with. No weapon. Only a locked cell that wouldn't hold them back a minute once they got the key. Some with guns were brandishing them at the sheriff.

Oddly, he thought of Essie. He wanted to see her one last time. Tell her... tell her how he felt. But maybe it was just as well. This wasn't something he wanted her to witness, a mob stretching his neck.

A calmness came over him out of nowhere.

No, not out of nowhere. Out of his thoughts of her. He'd done a lot wrong in his life, but taking her wasn't one of those things. And now that he knew what had come of it with her, he'd do it again. Maybe without the knife at her throat, though. Definitely without the knife.

Outside the door, Jedediah Sampson surveyed the gathering crowd and raised his hands to calm things down. But nobody could hear him over the din of the shouting for the half-breed's death. So he fired a shot into the air and that got their attention.

"You are leavin' here disappointed today," he told them. "There ain't gonna be any hangin' here today. Or tomorrow either."

The crowd swelled and surged toward the front stoop of the jail. "Stop right where you are!" he ordered, pointing the shotgun at the two closest men. "Before I add you to the list of idiots who've tried and failed to back me down."

Tyvan Root stepped forward. As one of Magic City's main builders, he had the ear of many in a town that had been raised practically overnight. Men who'd come West to be shed of things like law and order.

"You, Tyvan?" Sampson scoffed. "You surprise me."

"I got a wife and daughters, too, Jed. I'm in agreement with the majority here. We can't let this pass or it will start all over again. Renegades stealing our women? Where does it stop, I ask you? It stops when we stop it with a rope and a noose, that's where! They need an example of what happens when they step out of line!"

"And lynching is far less than he deserves!"

"Murderer!"

"Rapist!"

Shouts of agreement surged through the crowd of mostly men. A few women hovered at the back, wide-eyed at the spectacle. Sampson spotted Jacob Moran in the crowd, red faced and being jostled by the others. And there, at the back, silent but righteous, stood the good Reverend Dooley, checking his timepiece. To his left, he spotted Mitchell Laddner, enjoying the chaos he'd no doubt churned up. He'd lay good odds on Laddner being the instigator of this.

Jedediah kept two guns aimed on the crowd. "First off, the claim that the prisoner killed that girl is false. Nobody's dead. Mrs. Sparks is as alive as me, and I talked to her yesterday, right here in my office."

"That's a bald-face lie!" another man shouted. "We hear she's butchered up there in the mountains. Raped and butchered. That's what we heard."

"We heard they found her scalp on a Cheyenne lance, stuck up on the buffalo jump. And that there was more of 'em besides that one you got locked up!"

"It's a damned renegade uprising!" a skinny man at the front shouted. "We won't have it!"

Jed fired a shot into the air. "Settle down! All of you! Where'd you get your information? I suppose it was from Sergeant Laddner over there? Yeah,
him
, right behind you, Orem."

Laddner shrugged, glancing around him. "I'm not the one who needs to defend myself, sheriff. I'm the one who brought that heathen in. Besides, these folks here make up their own minds, isn't that right?"

The crowd concurred.

"I can't whip up a whole crowd. They did that all on their own, in the name of justice."

"Yeah?" Sampson said. "Let me tell you all something. This man and Jacob Moran, they got their own reasons for wanting this case settled sooner than later. They're hungry for the reward money and they're usin' you to try to get it.
I'm
telling you Mrs. Sparks is alive and well, and she claims there was no kidnapping and no rape. As for the horse thievin' charge—"

"You claim! Well, where is she?" somebody shouted. "Anybody seen her?"

"I have!"

Sampson turned to spot Ollie Warren pushing her way through the crowd. "I've seen her. And he's telling you the truth."

Ollie had some standing in town, despite her occupation, or maybe because of it. In a population of nearly all men, most of them had at least paid a visit to her establishment.

"Where is she then, Ollie?"

Ollie pushed her way to stand up on the stoop beside Jedediah. "For God's sake, you fools! She spent the night at my place, right as rain. She's... well, I don't know exactly where she is this morning, but I can promise you that she—"

A disbelieving murmur surged through the crowd.

"You're just protecting a murderer, Ollie!"

"No!
Boys
. That's Cade Newcastle sittin' in that jail cell. He's no savage. No murderer. You all know him. He's worked for you, Joey Navrone, cuttin' trees. And you, Cyrus Tomkins. He hauled goods from here to Helena for you for a whole summer. And you, Monty. He worked side by side with your son two winters ago, hauling feed to your cattle during that blizzard."

"That's the past," Cyrus Tomkins shouted. "He's been livin' as a Cheyenne for more'n a year and their savagery must'a rubbed off on him."

The sound of a few more rifles cocking resonated through the crowd.

Jedediah swung his guns toward the sound as the crowd jostled forward. "Anybody here wants into that jail has got to go through me! Now go home. All of you and—"

At the front of the crowd, a shove from behind knocked a man stumbling forward and a gunshot tore through the air! Jedediah Sampson spun around with a grunt of pain and collided with the wall.

Ollie screamed.

* * *

On her way back into town, Essie heard the noise before she saw the crowd surging around the jail. The gunshot, like the cracking of May ice, echoed down the corridor of buildings. And a woman's scream.

Oh, no! No!

Essie slapped the reins across the back of the horse and urged him to a run. She pulled up at the edge of the crowd as she caught sight of a few men shoving their way into the jail, past the fallen sheriff. Ollie was there, too, trying to help Jedediah, but was powerless to stop them.

They had Cade handcuffed and out of his cell and were already dragging him outside by the time she'd pushed through the crowd. Jumping onto the walkway, she screamed Ollie's name.

"Essie! Thank God!" Ollie yelled.

Cade caught sight of her, his face still a mass of bruises, and the look in his eyes futile.

"Stop it!" Essie cried, pummeling with her fist the man who had Cade by the arm. "Leave him alone!"

"Tell 'em who you are!" Ollie shouted.

But she picked up the sheriff's fallen rifle and fired a round at the sky instead. The sound stopped them momentarily and the crowd went quiet. She swung the rifle at the two men who held Cade. "I'm Essie Sparks and this man is innocent. I am not dead, as you can all plainly see. Let him go or I swear there will be a killing here today, but it won't be him. I will shoot one of you holding him, or maybe a few of you if need be."

"How do we know you're who you say you are?" someone shouted at her.

Essie shook her head. "You, who were so ready to avenge my death don't even know what I look like?" Her gaze scanned the crowd of men, who stared at her now as if they were seeing a ghost. "Well, ask that man over there. Reverend Dooley. He knows me. After all, it was him that sent Mitchell Laddner after us to kill us both."

Murmurs rose from the crowd. Dooley looked aghast and blustered, "That's a lie!"

"Is it?" she shouted back. "Or maybe you just looked the other way, while Laddner did your dirty work. Like he always did at the school with those children you buried in those graves out back. The unmarked ones, filled with children you've neglected or brutalized in your hateful little Wages of Sin box, or the ones you simply allowed to die of broken hearts."

Heads turned Dooley's way and he puffed up like a ripe pine cone. Laddner edged backward in the crowd now, calmly trying to make himself invisible.

"Oh, and let's not forget where the pious Sergeant Laddner learned his trade. Murdering innocent women and children at the Powder River Massacre and probably others like it. How does that sit with your opinion of him now?" she asked the crowd. "Oh yes, they were only Cheyenne. Does that make a difference to you?"

"She's a damned liar!" he shouted, but now all eyes were suddenly on him.

"No. I'm not. There was a witness to that murder. It was this man," she said, pointing to Cade. "Cade 'Black Thorn' Newcastle. That's right. He saw the whole thing that morning, when he was hardly more than a boy. Maybe that's why Sergeant Laddner is so intent on seeing him dead. Too late now, eh, sergeant? Your secret's out. What was it you said about glass houses? Something about rocks?"

A few of the men near Laddner turned all their attention to him, shoving him rudely toward the back of the crowd.

"And the rest of you," she went on. "Shame on you! For letting a man like him bend you to his will. I won't change your mind here today about the Cheyenne, about who and what they are—though they were kind to me, up in those mountains. They gave me shelter and the benefit of the doubt, which is more than I deserved after all they've suffered and which is more than I can say for any of you here today. If I say this man—this good man—didn't kidnap me or rape me, or steal a horse, then my word is all you have. And the word of anyone else here, who merely thinks they know what happened, means nothing."

She cocked the rifle in her hands again and swung it toward the crowd, who flinched and backed up a step.

"If you hate him because his blood isn't as white as yours, then look to yourselves, all of you. Immigrants, half of you. Blood mixed from a dozen different cultures and countries. I defy any of you to say your blood is pure
anything
. And if any of you—any one of you—is
half
the man he is, then you will walk away from this lynch mob because you know it's wrong. And if you think that loving this man has ruined me, then I'm sorry for you. I would run away with him a hundred times again for the chance to be with him."

Cade lifted his head, watching her scan the sea of faces out there, his chest swelling with some emotion he hardly recognized. Not gratitude. Nothing that simple. He loved this woman. This brave, crazy woman. And no matter what the outcome, he was glad he'd lived long enough to witness her standing up here against all these men. For him.