The Vigilante's Bride (8 page)

Luke stroked the back of her head, trying to sort out his feelings, his throat so tight with emotion he was afraid to speak. Relieved she was all right, he buried his face in her hair. Briefly, he closed his eyes. She felt good in his arms, and he hadn’t expected that. A minute later, he stood and pulled her to her feet.

“Ow!” Her knee buckled.

“What’s wrong now?”

“My foot hurts.”

Luke sat her down and worked off the boot. Under the black stocking, her ankle was puffed, swelling out over her shoe almost as he watched.

“Here,” he said, scooping her up. “You hold the gun.” Carrying her high in his arms, he started walking.

“It’s too far to carry me. I can make it if we go slow.”

“No, it could be broken.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“And I don’t know for sure, so stop yapping at me.” He shifted her in his arms and hugged her securely against him.

With a little sigh of resignation, Emily snuggled into him. She felt protected and safe, really safe, for the first time since . . . well, maybe for the first time ever. Beneath his jacket, the man was a brick wall, his arms and chest hard. She curved her fingers around his neck. He felt just right, she thought. His skin was warm, and his hair smelled smoky. She buried her face in his sheepskin collar, trying to figure herself out.

“When you shot, you missed that bear on purpose, didn’t you?” she said quietly.

He paused, then nodded.

“Why didn’t you kill her?”

“Because she woke up too early this spring and she’s half starved. And because she has a cub.”

“Is that why she came after me?”

“One reason.”

“One?”

“Grizzlies are just pure mean.”

“Then, you should’ve killed her.”

“I would have if I had to.”

She gave a small huff of annoyance. “If she’d gone after
you
, you mean.”

He chuckled, and for the first time she saw him smile – a mouthful of straight white teeth. Though his manner was casual and amused, there was a wariness around his eyes. He let no one get close to him and kept most people at arm’s length. Ida told her that he’d been a vigilante. Good grief, no wonder he didn’t smile often.

A minute later he dumped her into the wheelbarrow alongside a bucket of sap, saying, “I can’t carry you, a rifle, and five gallons of sap.” He grabbed the wooden handles and shoved the wheelbarrow into a rattling run out of the orchard and across the field, bumping her down the hill.

The sap bucket slid from between her legs and thudded against the front of the wheelbarrow. Sap slopped over the rim. Emily gripped the sides with sticky hands. The wheel jarred into a rock, and she bit her tongue. “What’s the big hurry?” she yelled.

“Got to finish shoeing my horse.”

“Your horse!”

She snapped her jaws shut. By the time they reached the house, her lips were icy white at the corners. Any tender feelings or silly romantic notions she may have been nurturing for one Luke Sullivan had been jounced right out of her.

CHAPTER
7

The bell rang, signaling the end of art class for the day. Emily collected the slates and stood them up on the eraser rail below the blackboard, admiring them. Wiping her hands on a damp cloth, she called to the children, reminding them to clean their hands before they left. It was a mixed-grade class. Anyone under twelve years old was welcome. The children dropped their colored chalk in the tin chalk box and filed out.

“Tim, wait a minute, please.”

Tim Gardner, small and freckle-faced, hesitated, then plopped back onto his bench. He looked up at her as Emily slid onto the bench and sat beside him.

He blinked at her. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

“No, indeed. I like to watch you draw. You’re good at it, and I thought I’d watch to see how you do it.” She laughed. And patted his hand. “My drawings are so bad. Even my sun looks dumb with all those spikes coming out of it.”

She picked up two slates and a handful of colored chalk left on another desk. She handed one to him. She huffed out a breath and then pretended to study her slate.

“What you want me to draw?” Tim asked.

“Anything. I’m going to draw a . . .” Her eyes held on the table by the window with a stack of slates. Tables were in kitchens and kitchens usually had families. It was the family she was after. “I’m going to start with something easy – a table.”

He watched her make a few boxlike lines and then began to draw lines on his own slate.

“Tables are easy,” he said. He leaned over and smudged out an extra line in her picture, and grinned. “Four legs, not five.”

For several minutes they drew together, Tim quiet with concentration. Emily, watching him, drew pieces of furniture she saw in the classroom.

Tim continued to work on one picture. A big room with a curtained window and an open door.

“Yours is better than mine.” She tapped her finger under a table he’d drawn. Remembering breakfast in the dining room that morning, Emily had peopled her picture with little stick figures sitting and holding forks.

Tim’s table was empty. Except for one stick figure. The chairs he’d put in his picture were empty.

“Who’s that?” She pointed to the lone stick figure.

“Me.”

“Where’d everybody else go?” she asked.

He glanced at the window and pointed to the sky. “Up there. In heaven.”

Emily’s heart squeezed tight. It was exactly as she had feared. Tim was withdrawn because he’d lost his parents. He was a hurt little boy.

Orphanages were full of troubled children. At Aldersgate, one of the big universities sent a doctor in from time to time to teach the instructors about painting and art and how it could help ease a child’s sadness.

With a pang she realized now how much she missed the extra instruction she had been given.

The slate had given Tim a way to disclose and unburden what was always in his mind. She swallowed and smiled brightly at him.

“I’ve got an idea! Let’s make this picture New Hope’s dining room and put lots of chairs with lots of people in them.”

Laughing, she sketched a chair at the far end of the table. Then another. And another.

Tim stared at the slate, the solemn little face curving into a smile. With the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth, he swiftly drew in more chairs, crowding them into the picture.

“And that’s me, next to Mr. Luke,” he said, laughing and pointing to another stick figure with big ears in a chair.

“Mr. Luke doesn’t have big elephant ears like that.”

Tim squealed with laughter. “Next to mine they are!”

“You’re right.” Emily leaned over and hugged him.

It was a start.

“Sit down, Clete.” Bart Axel squeaked back in his swivel chair and waved his cigar to his ranch foreman.

His account books were spread out, a ledger opened to a page scrawled in his big, loose handwriting. “I don’t care what Sheriff Tucker says. Sullivan robbed that stage and took the money, and I know it.”

Clete Wade shifted and said nothing. Bart swung the chair around again, his back to Clete. Clete shrugged and sat down. Small, steady sucking sounds came from the other side of the chair as Bart puffed his cigar. A plume of smoke wafted toward the ceiling, and a voice snarled from the chair. “Sullivan’s been out on the range poking his nose in everyone’s herds, rounding up strays. Didn’t say nothing to me about it first, neither.”

“Regulations say he don’t have to, boss. Hunting his own cows – he’s allowed to check all herds for his own brand.”

“He told everyone else. So how come he didn’t tell me?” Slowly, the chair wheeled around. “Suppose you take a few of our boys up there and teach him some manners.”

“You want us to rough him up good?”

“If that’s all you got the guts to do.” Standing, Bart splayed his hands on the desk and leaned his weight forward. His eyes bored into Clete. “I pay you plenty. Any more questions about what I want?”

Clete shook his head.

As the weather warmed and the snow melted, Luke and the men continued looking for N-Bar-H brands. Each day he spotted circling buzzards and followed them into isolated gullies and streambeds. Nearly always he found a few more dead cows and calves frozen in one of the storms. Winter kill, two or three percent, and to be expected. The percentages were right in line.

So winter kill wasn’t the answer.

On the range that morning, Luke pointed to three black specks wheeling high in the sky. “I’ll check them out,” he told Scully and the men, then galloped off before the birds went to ground.

The grassland springing to life underfoot was broken by several small streams and big muddy patches. Gray-green sagebrush pushed upslope to the timberline of white-trunked lacy aspens. The thin, pale green foliage of the trees, full of light and wind, tossed against the sky. The vultures he had his eyes on planed out of sight behind a hillside. He followed them and almost missed it – a narrow ravine, not much more than a footpath between two cliffs.

Luke worked Bugle down a small, pebbled incline and took him at a walk into the canyon, following a trail that curved around boulders. As they picked their way farther in, the canyon widened into bushy meadow walled in by the hills alongside.

He poked through the underbrush and looked for strays. Though the buzzards were nowhere to be seen, he did find one cow belonging to Paxton – dead for months from the looks of it – but none of New Hope’s. He reined Bugle around and started back out for the range again.

On the hillside, a mustang slipped between the trees, its unshod hoof beats muffled by the carpet of pine needles. Silently, its rider slid to the ground. Moccasined feet crept behind a tree trunk. For three miles, Little Turtle had stalked Light Eyes and his gray horse. Hidden behind a tree or lying in the brush, sometimes so close to the white man he could smell him, he’d watched every move Luke made.

Two crows took flight, squawking and flapping off through the canyon. Little Turtle dropped to the ground and froze. Four men with guns walked their horses single-file into the ravine.

Curious as to who else was following the white man, he crept into the brush and watched.

The sounds of a horse approaching carried clearly through the ravine. One of the men raised a hand, warning the others quiet, and all four rode quickly behind a spill of big boulders jutting from the slope.

Head tipped back, Little Turtle cupped his mouth, and the yelping howl of a coyote floated across the gorge, rising and falling.

“Easy, boy, easy.” Luke gripped his knees tighter into the horse’s sides. Agitated, Bugle sawed his head up and down and tongued the bit. Luke remembered a mile back how Bugle had also acted up when they’d passed two big rattlers sunning themselves on a rock. It was May and the snakes were active now, mating.

Trusting the horse’s instincts, Luke reined him in and patted his neck, letting him look around and satisfy himself. Luke scanned the grassy scrub ahead. Nothing.

Then from behind him came a chilling sound, unmistakable: the oiled, sliding clicks of bolt-action rifles. Slowly, Luke twisted around in the saddle.

Four X-Bar-L hands approached him on horseback.

“Get off, Sullivan.”

Luke turned and saw Clete Wade and Wesley Huggins staring at him. The other two of their party, Bud Schmidt and Stu Bronson, rode from behind the rock pile and blocked the way out. All of them worked for Axel.

Clete Wade dismounted. Standing between Luke and the other way out of the canyon, he unbuckled his gun belt and tossed it aside. He made a dusting motion with his hands, brushing them together. “Get off the horse, I said.”

“Why? I’m hunting strays, same as you.” Luke’s senses sharpened, and though he looked straight at Wade, he was aware that the other three men had brought their rifles up and had them resting across their saddles.

Clete gave a nasty laugh. “We ain’t hunting strays. We’re hunting you, Sullivan, and you’re trespassing.”

“I’m not and you know it.”

“Four of us here say you are.”

“Stand aside, Wade. You’re looking for trouble, and I got work to do.”

“It can wait. Mr. Axel thinks you need to learn some manners.” Clete smirked over his shoulder to the men behind him.

Luke lounged in the saddle, his shoulders relaxed. With a tight smile he said, “I’m going out and you’re in my way. I’d rather not ride a man down, but you suit yourself about that.”

Clete’s eyes mocked him. “What suits me right now is teaching you a lesson. You’re a little too high and mighty, if you ask me. You learn that up at Stuart’s with the rest of your hanging friends?” He braced his legs. “Now get
off
that horse.”

A slow burn started under Luke’s collar. In a way, he was surprised trouble hadn’t come before this. He looked down at Clete, feet planted apart. He’d never run from a fight in his life, and he wasn’t about to start. He also suspected riding out of here meant a bullet in the back. He tightened his hands on the reins.

Bugle’s head snapped up. Neck arched, the horse flared his nostrils wide, eyes fixed on the man in front of him as if waiting Luke’s signal to charge.

“He’s bluffing, Clete.” Stu Bronson, big and wide-shouldered in a green plaid jacket, shifted in the saddle and spat.