The Vigilante's Bride (4 page)
She’d been stunned when Molly told her Luke had grown up here, that he and a little brother who later died had been the only survivors of an Indian attack on his family.
She never would’ve guessed it. He just oozed self-confidence. It showed in the way he moved, the way he talked. If she’d met him under other circumstances, she’d have taken him for a rancher. Not at all like a man who grew up the way he did, the way she did.
She looked up at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you came from an orphanage like me? Instead, you deliberately let me think – ”
“You were in no mood to listen last night.” Arms folded, Luke sat in a chair tipped back against a wall.
“Because I thought you were an outlaw.” Her cheeks heated with embarrassment. “If I hadn’t told you I was marrying Mr. Axel, you’d have left me at the stagecoach. That’s why you took me, isn’t it? You felt sorry for me.” She drew a shaky breath and looked at him.
Gray eyes met hers.
“Didn’t you?”
Their gazes held. “So what if I did? Does it surprise you I did something decent?”
She rose from the chair, her back as stiff as a mop handle. “I don’t need your pity. It wouldn’t have changed anything anyway – ”
“I knew that.”
“What you did was wrong,” she flared, a hand braced on her hip. “I don’t care why you did it, it was wrong. For all I know, you’re lying right now about Mr. Axel.”
“You are the most muleheaded woman I ever met in my life.” The chair legs came down with a thump. Luke stood, took a step around the table toward her.
She swallowed. The man was huge. He hadn’t looked that big last night in the dark. And he looked angry. She backed up, careful to keep the table between them.
Luke raised his hands, then let them fall heavily to his sides. “It’s Bart Axel you have to be afraid of. Not me.”
Back and forth he paced the length of the room. His heavy boot heels rapped the wood floor alongside the bookcases. He muttered as much to himself as to her, “That’s the thanks I get for trying to do you a favor – to keep you from making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“And what kind of favor was that?” she snapped. “You ruined my wedding.”
“I didn’t have time to explain,” he said with a wry smile.
“Because you were too busy shooting up the world.”
He spun around, his face tight. “Once! I shot in the air one time to get their attention. I didn’t plan on hurting anyone – and I didn’t.” He paced the length of the room again, wheeled around at the piano by the windows, and shook his index finger at her. “Bart Axel is dangerous.”
She smacked her palm on the tabletop and flounced across her end of the room. “I’ll tell you what’s dangerous – anywhere you are.” She glared at him.
He made an ominous little growling sound in his throat and glared right back.
“Still, I’m not a fool, not with both you and Molly telling me this. So I won’t marry Mr. Axel until I determine for myself what kind of man he is. Me. I decide. Not you.”
She jerked to a stop, as if remembering something, and looked up. “I have another problem. You see, Mr. Axel paid the Society a lot of money for me – ”
“Slavery went out twenty years ago.”
“Plus my railroad fare. Add that in.” Her voice edged at the interruption. “If I don’t marry him, I have to pay that back, and I don’t have the money.”
“Molly said – ”
“Said I could work here for a little salary and room and board for a while.” She looked down at her hands. “I can teach and I play the piano. I’ll find work somewhere.”
“Doing what? It’s worse for women out here than in Chicago. There’s no work anywhere. No jobs for men, except range work. Maybe you could get on as someone’s hired girl, if you’re lucky.”
A thought streaked across her brain. “The piano! I read music. Maybe I can get a job in a saloon or a dance hall.”
His jaw dropped. “You in a short skirt, kicking up your legs and showing your drawers? Don’t be ridiculous.”
Emily stiffened. “Don’t be evil-minded. The other girls would dance. I’d just play the piano for them.”
Those pale eyes now looked like wolf eyes, and they bored holes into her.
“Somehow, I believe you’d have other duties upstairs,” he said. From her hair to her shoes, his eyes swept down her. “And you, Miss McCarthy, you wouldn’t . . . last . . . an . . . hour.” He threw his hands up. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“I do so. Girls talk. I know all about . . . such things.”
He shot her a skeptical look.
“I’ll lend you the money, and you can go back to Chicago.” His tone of voice and fixed expression said the matter was settled.
“No, I am not going back there. I vowed never to set foot inside another orphanage.” She let out a long, shaky breath. “I’ll work at New Hope for a while if I have to, but only till I find a teaching job in a regular school.”
“Now you’re being sensible.”
She pinched her eyes into little slits. “But as for you, Mr. Know-It-All-Sullivan, I’ll thank you to stay out of my affairs in the future.”
Luke stared at her; his face flushed an angry, dusky red. “Taking you off that stage was the dumbest thing I ever did.”
He spun around, left the library, and slammed the door behind him.
Four miles away, at the X-Bar-L ranch, Clete Wade, ranch foreman, noted the nearly empty McBryan’s whiskey bottle on Bart Axel’s desk. He gave his boss a wary nod. When Bart tippled more whiskey into the glass, Clete shot a warning look to Wes Huggins, the wiry range rider he’d brought in with him. Boss was back on the booze. Bad sign.
Clete lifted his head at the whiff of roast chicken coming from the kitchen. Bart’s Chinese cook had also baked a tall, spicy wedding cake. For the first time Clete could remember, the X-Bar-L was decorated for Christmas. A little tree, hung with a string of tinsel and a few colored balls, stood in the corner, and a pine wreath graced the wall. Fancy candles burned on all the tables, and a preacher napped in the spare room upstairs.
On the sofa, red-eyed from a sleepless night, sat Axel’s banker, Phineas Martin, whose duty was to give the bride away.
Only there was no bride.
“Got some news, boss. She’s over to New Hope,” Clete said.
“New Hope? How in blazes she wind up there?” Bart ran a hand through his gray hair.
Clete turned his hat around in his hands and shifted his feet. “It’s a puzzle, that’s for sure, but there’s only one set of tracks out there,” Clete said slowly, drawling the words out, his eyes slipping to the glass of whiskey in Axel’s hand, then back to Axel’s stormy expression. Bart had been drinking heavily ever since he’d learned of the stage holdup and the disappearance of Miss McCarthy. Every man on his ranch had spent the night combing the stage route from Billings to Repton, the closest town. They found nothing.
“Who told you she’s at New Hope?” Bart demanded.
“We tracked them. Whoever robbed the stage cut down into the Crow reservation. We lost them when – ”
Bart leaned forward and slapped his palm on the desk. “Not what I asked. Who told you she’s at New Hope?”
“Wes knows a woman who works there,” Clete rushed on. Sooner or later, the liquor would fire the fuse to Bart’s temper, and he didn’t want to be around when it did. “She said Sullivan rode in with a girl last night, said Miss Molly told the help that Sullivan found her standing in the road after the stage was robbed.”
“Sullivan – Luke Sullivan?” Axel looked up. Quick anger flared in his eyes. “What’s he doing back here? Last I heard, he was making good money managing Granville Stuart’s place up at Lewistown.”
Clete fell silent at Stuart’s name.
Axel leaned back in his chair again and squared his legs, propping an ankle on the other knee. The silver spurs on his boots were Mexican and held oversized rowels, their spines honed to wicked points. He took no nonsense from a horse. Frowning, he twirled the little wheel with a finger. Well-oiled, the rowel spun with a faint clicking noise.
“What’s the matter with you two? Don’t tell me you believe the nonsense about him being one of Stuart’s Stranglers?”
Clete frowned. “Maybe – maybe not. They never say if they are, but he does work for Stuart.”
Bart flicked the rowel again and waited for it to stop spinning. When it did, he uncrossed his legs and sat up.
“Kind of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say, Sullivan coming back the same night my girl is kidnapped, same night the stage is robbed?” He swiped the back of his hand down each side of a drooping salt-and-pepper mustache.
“Still, don’t see how it could’ve been Sullivan. There’s no way in this world Luke Sullivan would ride into the Crow reservation, not the way that man hates Injuns. You’re sure it was him who took Miss Emily to New Hope?”
Clete nodded. “Had to be. No other tracks out there.”
“And those tracks went right through the reservation, not around it?”
Again, Clete nodded.
“Well, then, our Mr. Sullivan better have a mighty good reason for that,” Bart said, slurring the words. “Otherwise, we just might stretch his neck a little. See how he likes it.”
Wes Huggins spoke for the first time. “Not me. I ain’t messing with him.”
“Wes is right,” Clete joined in. “He’s trouble, boss. Fellow I know in Lewistown says Sullivan wears his guns to church.
What kind of man does that?”
Wes broke in. “A vigilante, that’s who!”
Bart snorted and waved a hand in dismissal. “Vigilantes don’t go to church.”
“This one does. He goes to funerals – funerals he’s caused. Makes me squirm inside just to think it.” Wes turned to Clete, forgetting Axel for a moment. “You ever see him draw?”
Clete shook his head.
Wes talked faster. “I did once, up in Miles City when he got jumped – and that’s plenty for me. One minute he was just a-standing in the street, arms at his sides; the next minute, his gun’s smoking, and the other man’s down. And I swear, I never saw Sullivan move.”
Axel waved a hand and snorted. “Watch yourselves and you won’t have no trouble with him. Stuart and his gang go after horse thieves and rustlers.”
“Maybe you better watch yourself, boss,” Wesley blurted. “From what I hear, he’s as fast with the ladies as he is with guns, and right now the lady he’s got is yours.”
“Shut up, Wes,” Clete muttered.
Bart’s face turned a deep, dark red. With a thin smile he said, “I hadn’t looked at it quite like that, Wes.” He picked up a nickel-plated revolver lying on his desk, a handsome Smith &Wesson Schofield with a carved ivory handle, monogrammed and engraved. Opening a desk drawer, he took out a box of .45 Schofield ammunition. Slowly, he thumbed cartridges into each empty chamber except the one under the hammer. He scraped his chair back and stood up, shoving the revolver into the empty holster as he did.
Adjusting the belt, he let it out a notch over his belly and worked the gun a shade lower on his hip. Spurs chinking, he crossed the room toward a rack of elk horns hanging on the wall.
He lifted off a black felt Stetson studded with a row of silver stars around the brim and turned to Clete. “Get some of the men together,” he said, putting on the hat that cost more than some men’s horses. “And bring the buggy around. We’re going over to New Hope and get me my bride back.”
CHRISTMAS DAY, 1884
Four o’clock. Dark in half an hour. Emily reached for another oil lamp on the sideboard and lit it, trying to do something to be helpful, anything to keep her mind off what had happened with Luke in the library. Her face burned. She was fuming inside, and from the way he’d slammed the door, so was he.
She lit the wick, let the glass chimney clink down onto the base, then set the lamp on one of the long tables in the dining room. A little amazed, she stared at it. In Chicago, they had gaslights, not these old things.
As she reached for another kerosene lamp, her gaze held on the large painting hanging alongside the dish cupboard:
The Good Shepherd
. Jesus carrying a baby lamb. Molly Ebenezer must have chosen it. It was a perfect choice for children, much better than the one at Aldersgate.
There, a large painting of da Vinci’s
The Last Supper
dominated the end of the dining room. Jesus and the apostles at their final meal together might be beautiful, but it was too adult for children and a little scary for some. Besides Jesus, she never could figure out who was who in the painting.
“Hi, Miss McCarthy.” Wearing a Christmas red blouse and a swishy green skirt, a girl in her early teens carried a tray in from the kitchen and began collecting salt and pepper shakers from the four tables in the dining room.
Emily smiled. “You fit right in with Christmas,” she said, and walked the length of her table, scooping up the shakers as she went. Setting them on the tray, she looked at the girl’s green skirt again. If this were the dining room at Alders-gate, both of them would be wearing loose gray and white uniforms.
But at New Hope, not a uniform in sight. She’d hated those ugly gray things and didn’t miss them a bit.
Everything here was different. Aldersgate had ninety-six residents, all girls; New Hope, only two dozen, boys and girls combined. And Molly knew every one of their names. She’d lined them up and introduced them to Miss McCarthy.
As Emily set the last shaker on the tray, the hard clatter of hooves and the rattle of wheels on brick sounded in the courtyard.
She hurried to the window and brushed the curtain aside. A man in a big black hat with stars on it climbed down from a big-wheeled green buggy. Five cowboys accompanying him swung off their horses. As a group they followed the barrel-chested buggy driver up the walk. Her stomach clenched and she struggled to suck in air. Without being told, she knew who he was: Mr. Axel. He’d come after her. She hurried to the dining room doorway and peeped into the hall.
Axel threw the front door open. “Molly! Miss Molly!”
Drying her hands on her apron, Molly appeared in the kitchen doorway at the far end of the long hall. “Evening, Bart. Guess I didn’t hear the bell,” she said, her voice crisp with sarcasm.
Emily shrank back, listening to the voices in the hall.
“You know why I’m here,” Axel said, stripping off his hat and slapping it impatiently against his thigh. “I won’t waste your time or mine. I’ve come for the girl. Where’s Miss McCarthy?”
“In the back with the children, I believe. I’ll go get her.” Molly looked pointedly at a spot above Clete Wade’s eyes. “Is your head cold, Mr. Wade?”
With a sheepish look, Clete swept his hat off.
Molly gestured to the assortment of roughly dressed men, every one of them with a gun on his hip. “There’s no call for this, Bart. You tell these cowhands of yours to wait on the porch. And tell them the next time they come inside this house to knock first and to wipe their boots.” With that, she turned and marched down the hall toward the dining room.
Behind her, Clete Wade waved the men outside with a smirk. “Downright chilly in here, ain’t it?”
Lips pursed, Molly beckoned to Emily, then led her down the hall and into the parlor ahead of Bart Axel. Emily let out a relieved sigh. Luke was already there, down on one knee in front of the fireplace, adding another piece of wood to the fire. It was no accident he was in the parlor, she knew. However much she didn’t like him, she was grateful he was there. Bad as he was, he was on her side.
“Emily McCarthy,” Molly said, “this is our neighbor, Mr. Bartholomew Axel, the man you came from Chicago to meet. He owns the X-Bar-L ranch.”
A broad smile split Axel’s face. Both hands extended, he stepped forward. “Emily, my, my, my. I must say I’m pleased.” He sounded breathless. Though he was nearly sixty, he had the build of a younger man, thick and stocky with shoulders as big as hams and a face that was nearly all jaw. His iron gray hair was parted neatly down the middle and slicked back, like a Spaniard’s. “I had no idea you looked like this. Turn around, girl. Turn around. Let me see what I got to look forward to.” He pointed at the floor and stirred his finger in the air.
A hot flush slid down her neck. He made her feel cheap.
Humiliated, she stood still, making no move to do as he asked.
“I said turn around, girl.”
Luke straightened, a piece of firewood dangling in his hand.
“You think you’re buying a heifer, Axel?” he said, a dangerous glitter in the back of his eyes.
Axel glanced at the wood in Luke’s hand and bobbed his head to Emily. “No offense intended. Get your coat, girl, and let’s go. I’m taking you home.” There was authority in his voice, a kind of harnessed control that said he was used to being obeyed.
Disappointment swam through her. At Aldersgate they’d told her he was elegant looking. Why, he wasn’t at all. His pants bagged in the seat, he was bowlegged, and he reeked of whiskey. Worse, there was a meanness in his voice that set off her alarm signals.
And he’d called her “girl.”
Her mind reeled with thoughts shooting out in all directions. Not right. Her first meeting with her new husband-to-be, and he ordered her around like a servant. She wavered only an instant.
“Mr. Axel, I’m not going with you today. I think it’s best if I stay at New Hope with Miss Molly for a while.”
“What do you mean ‘for a while’?” The tone of his voice dropped.
“Coming here, I got to thinking and decided it would be better for both of us if we . . . if we got to know each other first.” Behind her, Luke let out a quiet hiss of relief. The heated flush in her cheeks slid down her neck. She felt foolish and embarrassed and eighteen years old.
“Nonsense. After the wedding you’ll get to know me. Very well, I expect.” Axel moved to stand in front of her, taking her hands in both of his. “Let me remind you, my dear, you are bought and paid for. Aldersgate has three hundred dollars of my money – ”
“The cost of two horses,” Luke cut in.
Bart’s lip curled in a sneer. “For you, maybe. Not the kind I buy. And where do you fit into this, Sullivan?” Axel fingered his mustache and scowled at Emily. “Or maybe I should ask you that. How did you manage to take up with him, anyway?”
She pulled her hands from his and darted a glance at Luke, but his face was granite hard, his mouth unsmiling. “After the stage was robbed, Mr. Sullivan brought me here,” she said.
“And I’m thinking real hard about that,” Bart said. “I’m also thinking I paid for a wife, and what I pay for, I get. Suppose you go put your coat on and come along. The preacher’s waiting.”
Emily swallowed and tried to speak, but words wouldn’t come. Deep down, a piece of her had wanted so desperately to believe Sullivan was wrong, that Bart Axel was really a gentleman, a man who would make her a fine husband. He’d just crushed that hope himself.
“You hear me, girl?”
“I hear you,” Luke said, “and you’re downright insulting to the lady. Maybe you’d better leave. Come back when you find some manners.”
The men’s eyes locked, as if measuring each other. Although Luke was half a head taller and broad shouldered, Axel outweighed him. Warily, they faced each other. The silence stretched, tension crackling between them like a smoldering fuse.
“Now, now, Bart,” Molly soothed, rushing in to snuff the fuse before it burst into flame. “Be reasonable. Emily hasn’t said no. She just needs a little time to get used to the idea of getting married, I reckon. I said she can work here with me for a while until she does.”
“I understood she
was
used to the idea. Who changed her mind? You, Molly?” He spun around to Luke and planted his legs apart. His mouth twisted. “Or have you been sniffin’ around her skirt?”
Molly shot her hand out and grabbed Luke’s forearm, restraining him. His hand had already balled into a fist.
Emily’s chin tipped up. “Mr. Axel, I don’t appreciate your remarks one bit,” she said coldly. “These people have been kind to me. I think you owe them an apology.”
Bart’s eyes narrowed. “You sound downright disrespectful, girl.”
Calmly, Molly continued. “No apologies needed, Emily. Bart, give her a little time. You’re just a few miles away. Come visit whenever you like. Let her learn for herself what kind of gentleman you are. Or have you forgotten how to court?”
Emily folded her hands tightly together to hide their trembling. The thought of courting this man made her shudder. Kiss him? With those dry lips and that stringy mustache? Never!
Luke moved behind her and rested a hand on her shoulder. His fingers squeezed a warning. “Why don’t you go back to the children, Miss McCarthy? I’ll see Mr. Axel out.”
Without a glance at anyone, Emily gathered her skirts and hurried from the parlor. Out in the hall, a rubbery weakness caught her behind the knees and she stumbled into the wall. Her breath broke on a quiet sob. Bart Axel was bad tempered and bad mannered, and she’d come
that
close to marrying him. If it hadn’t been for Luke, she would have.
The moment Emily disappeared into the hall, Luke reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. Counting off three hundred dollars, he stuffed them into Axel’s hand. “She owes you nothing now. If she decides to marry you, it’s because she wants to, not because she has to.”
Axel’s eyes jumped from the money in his palm to Sullivan’s face and back to the money again. “This is my own money you’re paying me with. You robbed the stage last night. And don’t think I don’t know why. You’re like a dog with a bone. I told you years ago your pa lost to me fair and square. It’s not my fault your old man couldn’t play poker.”
“Last month, just before we hanged him, your rustler friend, Clyde Willis, told me how you cheated my pa, said he helped you cheat a lot of men.”
“Watch it, Sullivan. People get shot for remarks like that.” Axel’s hand moved toward his gun.
“Stop it,” Molly cried, pushing between them. “I won’t have this in my house. There are children here, and this is Christmas Day.”
Bart stared pointedly at Luke’s hip. “Where’s your gun, Sullivan?”
The corners of Luke’s mouth dug in. An hour before – much to his disgust – Molly had cornered him upstairs in his room, taken his guns, and locked them away until after Axel had come and gone. “Didn’t figure I needed one in my own home,” he drawled.
“This ain’t your home.”
“I decide that, and I say it is.” Molly stepped forward. “Now, if you’ve finished your business, I’d be obliged if you’d leave.
And don’t you come back here till you’ve cooled off, either.”
For a long minute, Axel didn’t move, staring from Molly to Luke. Cramming his hat on his head, he turned and strode out of the room and down the hall. He was almost at the front door when he caught sight of two boys in buckskin shirts and long black braids chasing into the kitchen. He spun around, his face a splotchy red.
“Molly, what are they doing here? Months ago I told you to get rid of them Crow brats,” Axel warned. “They ain’t orphans. They don’t belong here. New Hope is for whites.”
“They’re Chief Black Otter’s boys,” she said.
“I don’t care who they are. They’re still Injuns. And to think you’re teaching the red scum to read and write.”
“Bart, they’re little boys, and it’s the law now. It’s right that we teach them.”
“It’s wrong, I tell you. Mark my words, they’ll turn on you.” He moved closer and shook a finger in her face. “They ain’t fit to be around the rest of us. Chief or no chief, you get rid of them kids, or so help me I’ll close this place like
that
.” He snapped his fingers with the word.
Luke brushed Molly aside and stepped between them. “You should’ve quit when you were ahead, Bart. Molly invited you back when you cooled off, but now I’m telling you different. Don’t come back. You’re not welcome at New Hope. Not as long as I’m here.” He yanked the front door open. “Now get out before I throw you out.”
For a long moment, Bart said nothing. Then, touching his index finger to the brim of his hat, he gave a curt nod to Molly, then turned to Luke. “Sooner or later, someone’s going to shut you up, Sullivan. You’re a walking dead man,” he said, and went out the door.
“Bart – ” Molly moved as if to go after him.
“He’s drunk. Let him go.” Luke held her arm.
