Where Heaven Begins (24 page)

“C
lint, give the man a chance to defend himself!” Elizabeth yelled as she ran to keep up with him. “Let him tell his side of the story!”

“He murdered an innocent man who had a wife and three children!”

“You don’t know that for certain. Clint Brady, if you go over there and just shoot him I won’t marry you! I
mean
it! All men deserve a trial by jury and you know it. Roland Fisher has a wife and children, too. Don’t forget that!” She slipped and fell into the snow. “Oh, I could shoot you
myself!
” she blurted out as she straightened and brushed off her skirt.

Clint finally slowed down and turned, letting her catch up.

“Ethan Clint Brady, do you love me?”

He just stared at her with those steely blue eyes.

“Well?
Do
you?”

“You don’t need to ask that.”

“Then don’t
do
this!”

“Why can’t you understand that I
have
to do this? If
you
love
me,
you won’t try to stop me!”

Elizabeth wiped at angry tears. “Fine! Just give him a chance.”

“I never said I wouldn’t.”

“Those guns say different!”

He rolled his eyes and grabbed her arm. “Come on. Just stay out of the way when we get there, understand? For all we know the man will try to shoot me before I open my mouth!”

“I wouldn’t
blame
him, from the look in your eyes, and coming at him with a rifle and a six-gun!”

“Yeah, well, it all comes with the territory.” He half dragged her along, his long strides too much for her.

“Do you have to be in such an all-fired hurry? We’ve been here almost three weeks, and Peter said the man is still here, so a few extra minutes won’t make any difference.”

He stopped again. “Lady, are you going to turn into a nag when we get married?”

“
If
we get married—yes—if that’s what it takes to keep you on the straight and narrow.” Now she saw those blue eyes softening slightly. He actually grinned, but there was still a hardness about him that she hadn’t seen for a long time.

“Well, then, I guess I’d better take that into consideration before legally putting a ring on your finger.” He literally jerked her closer. “If I didn’t want you so bad, Miss Breckenridge, I’d smack you and tell you to go back home and get out of my life.”

She held his gaze boldly. “Go ahead and try.”

They stood there staring at each other until both broke into smiles. In the next instant he was kissing her, a long, hard kiss, as though to brand her. He pulled away and grabbed her hand, pulling her along with him again.

Elizabeth was momentarily speechless. All she could do was pray that whatever happened next would bring Clint the answer he was looking for.

They walked a good half mile, Clint splashing through puddles and mud, on over snow already flattened by people, sleds, horses and such.

“How much farther?” Elizabeth asked.

“Just up ahead. Peter said it’s a cabin with a horse shed right beside it that has a big set of antlers on the front of it. That must be it on the hill there to the right.”

“Well, at least we’re out of town so no innocent people can get hurt if there is trouble.”

He looked at her with a frown. “Oh, so now you admit there could be trouble not of my doing?”

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t be of your doing. If you didn’t go after him at all we wouldn’t have to worry about it, would we?”

Clint frowned before walking a little farther with her, until they were within a few yards of Roland Fisher’s cabin. He
pulled Elizabeth over to a broken-down wagon. “Stay here, understand? Don’t you dare come out until I tell you to.”

With a sigh of disgust, Elizabeth ducked behind the wagon. “If you say so.”

Clint started out again.

“Clint, be careful!”

“Always am,” he answered as he kept walking.

Elizabeth peered over the top of the wagon.
“God, don’t let anything bad happen,”
she whispered, blinking back tears so she could see better.

Clint approached the cabin, rifle in hand. Just then a man wearing a fur-lined jacket appeared from the horse shed. Clint stopped.

“Roland Fisher?” Clint shouted.

The man ducked back inside the horse shed, and Clint went to the ground. A shot rang out, and Clint cried out, shaking his head. He’d been hit! He leveled his rifle then and fired back. Almost instantly they heard a child’s scream, followed by crying.

“Clint! Are you all right?” Elizabeth screamed.

“Creased my head!” he yelled back. “Stay down!”

He took aim again.

“Wait!” Fisher shouted, running out of the shed with his hands raised. “Don’t shoot! My little boy is hurt!” He sounded ready to cry. “Please! Let me tend to him! He’s only two years old!”

“Stay right there!” Clint ordered, getting to his feet and keeping his rifle leveled. “You Roland Fisher?”

“Yes, but I didn’t do what they say I did! I swear I didn’t!”

Elizabeth ran from behind the wagon, as a woman and two other children came out of Fisher’s cabin. The short, round woman also looked Indian, and terror shone in her dark eyes.

“Roland!” the woman screamed. “What’s happening?”

Clint walked up closer to Fisher and made him open his coat. Clint felt for other weapons. He stepped back again. “Why in hell did you shoot at me?”

Hearing her little son’s scream, Fisher’s wife ran to the horse shed to tend to her son. “I heard a rumor you were here but sick. I’ve heard of you! You’ve killed many men! I was afraid you would not wait to let me tell you what really happened!”

“So, you
know
about the robbery and killing!”

“Yes! But it wasn’t me! Please, let me tend to my little boy, and then I will explain!”

Fisher, a round-faced man with dark skin and a mustache, looked pleadingly at Elizabeth, who stepped up to Clint to see blood pouring from a crease across the right side of his head.

“Clint, let’s see what’s wrong with the man’s son.”

“He shot him, that’s what’s wrong with him!” Roland lamented. “I heard you were a killer of men, but not of little boys!” The man turned away and ran to the horse shed.

Clint looked at Elizabeth, and she saw the horror in his eyes. “
Is
that what you’ve become, Clint? You’ve gone after men because of your own little boy’s death. Has that brought you so low as to kill a little boy yourself?”

His jaw flexed in what Elizabeth suspected was a surge of emotional turmoil. He handed her his rifle and wiped
blood away from his right eye. “Hang on to that.” He walked to the shed then, and Elizabeth followed to see Fisher’s wife bending over an adorable, dark-skinned, round-faced little boy who was crying in her arms. The woman sat rocking her son and carrying on in her native tongue.

Fisher knelt in front of her.

“We have to get him into the cabin,” he told his wife.

Mrs. Fisher looked up at Clint with terror in her eyes, tears streaming down her pudgy cheeks. “Please! You have done enough. My husband is not guilty! Just let us take Toby inside and get him some help!”

“I might be able to help him myself,” Clint answered, his voice strained. Blood still streamed down the side of his face from his own wound.

So much blood,
Elizabeth thought.
So much violence. Please, Lord, let this end for once and for all!

Fisher’s other two children, a little girl who looked perhaps four years old, and another boy of about six or seven ran into the shed to see what was happening. Both of them cried at the sight of their wounded little brother.

“Let’s get your little boy inside,” Clint told Fisher.

Fisher, also crying now, took the boy from his wife and lifted him. “I am sorry, Amanda,” the man told his wife. “I should not have shot first.”

Mrs. Fisher looked at Clint. “Blame the
bounty
hunter!” she seethed through her own tears. She grabbed her other two children and shoved them ahead of her, hurrying after her husband.

Elizabeth felt sick inside for the way she knew Clint had
to feel right now. Her feelings were verified when he turned and jerked the rifle out of her hands. To her amazement he retracted it several times to spit out the remaining bullets, then took the rifle by the barrel end and swung it hard, smashing it against the corner post of the horse shed. The rifle broke in half.

E
lizabeth said nothing as she followed Clint into Fisher’s house. She knew she didn’t
need
to say anything. What had just happened said it all. Inside the cabin, the still-screaming little boy lay on the kitchen table, stripped to his waist. His parents were bent over him, trying to stop heavy bleeding at the boy’s left side near his waist line.

“Let me have a look,” Clint asked Fisher.

“Don’t touch him!” Mrs. Fisher screamed at Clint. “
Child
killer!”

Clint shoved Fisher aside and bent over the child, and Mrs. Fisher tried to grab the baby away.

“Let me look at him!” Clint growled at her. “I know how to treat bullet wounds.”

Mrs. Fisher put a hand to her mouth and backed away, pulling her other children with her.

Clint ordered Fisher to get some whiskey. “It’s just a flesh wound,” he told the man. “The way he’s screaming, he’s sure not hurt bad. He’s just scared.”

“What would you know about little children?” Mrs. Fisher spat at him.

Clint seemed to wilt. He grabbed the little boy and pulled him into his arms. “More than you think,” he told the baby’s mother. He picked up what looked like a clean towel nearby and pressed it to the little boy’s side, then carried him to a rocker and sat down with him.

With his left arm around the child’s waist, he held the towel against the boy’s wound with his left hand. He moved his right arm around the baby’s back and held him close so that the child cried against his neck. Clint began rocking and talking soothingly to him.

“It’s okay,” he told the baby. “Everything will be okay. Nobody is going to hurt you. Never again. Never again.” He kissed the boy’s straight hair, stunning everyone else in the room.

Frowning, Fisher looked at Elizabeth.

“He lost a little boy of his own to murderers,” she told the man, struggling against tears that were a mixture of remorse and relief. “He was the same age as your son.” She looked at the baby’s mother. “Mrs. Fisher, Clint would never deliberately harm a child. I know that he’s truly sorry.”

The woman walked closer to her husband and took his arm. “Who are you?” she asked Elizabeth.

“My name is Elizabeth Breckenridge. I traveled here with Clint to find my brother, Peter. He’s the preacher at—”

“We know who Peter is,” Fisher broke in, studying Elizabeth with a frown. “You do not look like the type of woman who would travel with a bounty hunter.”

Elizabeth took a handkerchief from a pocket of her skirt and wiped her eyes. “Mr. Brady was every bit a gentleman all the way here. In fact, we’re going to be married. What happened here…it’s a long story, Mr. Fisher, but it…had to happen.” She looked at Fisher pleadingly. “You should know that before we came in here Clint smashed his rifle in half. I think he’s done with the life he’s been leading the past four years. I hope that when your little boy is better you’ll let us visit…let us explain.”

Little Toby actually stopped crying and fell asleep against Clint’s chest. Clint wiped at his own silent tears. “Tell me your side of what happened, Fisher,” he spoke up, his voice sounding like that of a tired, beaten man.

Still frowning with a mixture of curiosity and disbelief, Fisher walked over and took a chair near Clint. Elizabeth dared to move an arm around his wife, who broke down and actually hugged her. “I thought he’d killed my baby,” she wept.

Elizabeth looked past her at Clint and saw deep remorse in those blue eyes that minutes earlier had been so full of the old, angry Clint. She led Mrs. Fisher to another chair, then went to stand behind Clint while Roland Fisher gave his side of the story.

“I was at that bank,” he admitted. “I’d gone there often. I went down to San Francisco because I’d heard a man
could make good money there. That was two years ago, before the gold rush here. But I am not a man to go looking for gold anyway. A man’s family can starve and die while he’s digging for his pot of gold, you know?”

Clint leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Yeah.”

“So me, I stayed north of San Francisco. I had a good job there at a stamp mill, made good money. I figured to work there another year, saving up my money so I could come back here and afford supplies for my family. We have never had much. I saved my money at that bank, went there often to make deposits, so they knew me well. The day of the robbery, I was there. I was taking out my own money, you see? My own money. I was going to come home because I missed my wife so. She had not even given birth to Toby yet when I first left. I was worried.”

“So you went to the bank. If you got your money out and left before the robbery, how did you even know there had
been
a robbery?”

“But I
did
know. When I got there, I walked in on the bank teller stuffing money into a bag. He looked like he was in a big hurry—looked startled when he saw me.
He
was robbing the bank, you see? I surprised him, and he pointed a pistol at me. I jumped on him to try to stop him from what he was doing, and we struggled. The gun went off and he was shot! I was really scared then. I am Eskimo. He was a bank teller. Probably lots of people in town knew him. He was not the type ever to tell the truth. I knew I would get blamed for trying to rob the bank, and because I am a penniless Eskimo, a stranger not from San Francisco, people would believe him.

“So I—I gathered just the amount of money to match my savings, and I ran! I did not know what else to do! That teller…I did not even know until now that he died. Either way, even if he’d lived, he would not want anyone to know what he tried to do. He must have told whoever found him that I was robbing the bank and that
I
shot him, that the gun was mine. I hoped that once I got back up here to Dawson, no one would bother coming after me.

“I did not rob that bank, Mr. Brady. You check with them. I took only nine hundred dollars. I had a voucher saying that was my savings. I will get it! I can show you. You check with them. They will tell you only nine hundred dollars was taken.”

“My husband has never carried a gun,” Mrs. Fisher told Clint. “All he has is his hunting rifle, and he didn’t even take that with him to San Francisco. And does he look like the kind of man who would carry a fancy little pistol? He told me that’s what kind of gun it was. You check with them. They’ll tell you it was a small pistol that banker was shot with.”

Clint reached up with his right hand to grasp Elizabeth’s hand. “I already know that much, and how much was taken. The teller died after telling the doctor you were the one who shot him and robbed the bank. He knew your name because you had been in there so often.” He slowly stood up. “Where can I lay this baby?”

“Here!” Mrs. Fisher led him to a large, wooden cradle. “Lay him here. Has the bleeding stopped?”

“I think so.” Clint bent down and laid little Toby into the cradle. “He’ll be all right. Just keep that wound clean.
Pour a little whiskey on it. He won’t like it, but you don’t want it to get infected.”

He straightened and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he told Fisher. “I never would have shot back if I’d known there was a child in that shed.”

Fisher stood up. “I was foolish to fire at you in the first place, especially with Toby in there. I believe you when you say you are sorry. The problem is, do
you
believe
me?
”

Clint studied him a moment, then walked closer and put out his hand. “I believe you.”

Roland shook his hand firmly.

“There is still five thousand dollars on your head,” Clint reminded him. “I’ll write the sheriff in San Francisco and explain what happened—get that bounty off your head. They know me well—know I wouldn’t lie about it. If I don’t get it straightened out, someone else might come up here looking for you, so I’d lay low for a while. If you suspect anything about someone, send for me. I’ll take care of it.”

“I am grateful.”

Clint glanced at Elizabeth, then back to Fisher. “No, Mr. Fisher.
I
am grateful. Coming here to find you changed my life in more ways than you could know. Someday I’ll explain all of it. Right now I’ll just leave you and your family alone, but I’ll want to come back and check on your little boy in the next few days.”

Fisher nodded. “You will be welcome.”

Clint looked over at Toby, then leaned down to untie the strap that kept his holster close to his leg, after which he unbuckled his gun belt. He pulled it off and walked over
to hand it to Elizabeth. The blood on the side of his face was beginning to dry to an ugly crust.

“From here on the only thing I’ll be doing with guns is repairing them for other people,” he told Elizabeth, “or maybe some hunting.”

She took the gun belt, saying nothing.

“Let’s go home,” Clint told her. “You have a wedding dress to make, and I have a cabin to build so we can have a place of our own.”

Elizabeth threw her arms around his waist, the gun belt dangling from one hand. “I love you, Clint Brady!”

He sighed, pressing a hand to her back. “Call me Ethan. It’s okay now. Clint Brady the bounty hunter no longer exists.”