Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (30 page)

The elephant knelt beside Sarah, and the girl quickly climbed up onto Ruby’s back. She rubbed the elephant’s head. Ruby smelled pleasantly of warm hay and dust, a comforting smell. Ruby strolled around the ring, swaying gently beneath Sarah.

While Sarah studied the audience, the Professor talked and Ruby went through her paces. She circled the ring, reared onto her hind legs, picked up an American flag and waved it gaily overhead, all in response to the Professor’s cues. Sarah was strictly a passenger, with plenty of time to consider the audience as they watched her.

She saw Mrs. Selby, smiling and waving from her front row seat. She saw Helen and Cassidy, standing together at one side of the barn. The rest of the audience was a blur—so many eyes watching, so many hands clapping, so many voices cheering.

At last, Ruby completed her final circuit of the barn. The elephant knelt again. Sarah leapt down and stood beside the Professor. The audience was cheering. “Bow,” the Professor told her, and she bowed.

Finally, she left the stage, running up the aisle between the benches to return to the safety of the hayloft. One of the boys that the Professor had pressed into service had already returned the rope to its place, in anticipation of curtain calls. The Professor wanted her to swing down again, saying the audience would enjoy it just as much the second time.

She wasn’t thinking about that. She was grateful to have returned to the shadows of the hayloft, grateful that the audience was watching the Professor now.

The Professor was doing magic tricks with six apparently solid metal rings. First he showed the audience that he had six rings, each one solid metal, each one separate from the others. At least, that’s what he said he was showing them. Through all his talk, he kept one ring firmly in his hand. He linked the solid rings by magic, he said, but Sarah noticed that the ring that was in his hand was always the same ring and she suspected that it might not be as solid as the others.

But what she suspected didn’t matter. The audience was astounded. He joined the rings together and took them apart, talking all the while. When he was done, the audience applauded.

Miss Paxon brought him a basket for the rings and brought him a rifle. He took the rifle and faced the audience again. “I would like to ask your cooperation in performing my final act. I am going to perform a feat that requires the utmost concentration. In my bare hands, I will catch the bullet, fired from this rifle. If I miss, my life is forfeit. If I succeed, your pleasure is my reward. Now, I need the help of a volunteer, someone who knows how to fire straight and true. A brave man, who will not waver in this task.”

There was a great deal of shouting in one section of the audience. A tall man was being pushed forward by three other men. “Here’s your volunteer!” shouted one of the men. “Sheriff Davis.”

The man shook his head, but the crowd took up the call, shouting for the sheriff. “Hey, Sheriff, if you shoot the magician, who’ll take you to trial?” “Come on, Jasper.” The man stepped forward.

When the tall man stepped from the crowd, Sarah shivered, struck by a sudden chill. The light of the lantern that hung from the rafters shone on his golden hair. Her heart was pounding.

Professor Serunca handed the man a bullet for his examination. After the man had examined it, the Professor loaded the gun. He handed the rifle to Jasper and walked slowly to the far side of the barn. There he held his hands beneath his chin in a prayerful attitude and closed his eyes. Then he nodded.

The blond man lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired. In that moment, as Sarah watched, a memory came into sharp focus. A sunny day by a flowing stream; a cold wet stone in her hand. Mama—her mama—was staring down into the valley, an expression of shock and disbelief on her face. In the valley, a man—this man—lifting a rifle to fire.

Sarah acted without hesitation, her reflexes honed by her years among the wolves. She grabbed the rope and swung down into the ring on a trajectory that would lead her to her enemy.

But Jasper was moving, stepping back and laughing as the Professor displayed the bullet that he had caught in his hands. She landed beside him, her knife drawn, her teeth bared. She was snarling, poised to spring—but for a moment, just for a moment, she hesitated.

What was it that stopped her? She did not hesitate to battle a raging grizzly or face a snarling wolf. From childhood, her reflexes had been trained for fighting. But for a moment, she did not move.

What stopped her? Only this: a scent in the air and the memories that it stirred.

Mingling with the scent of hay, Sarah caught the scent of Jasper Davis, as unique to him as his fingerprints, the aroma that was the essence of the man. A breath and she was transported to another time. She was a child, crouching in a cave among the boulders. She stared from the shadows into the sunlight. There, by a laughing stream, the tall blond man stooped over the fallen body of her mother. The breeze carried his scent—the aroma of terror, of fear, of helplessness. She could not move. She watched as the man stood up, his hands red with blood and overflowing with her mother’s coppery curls.

In that moment, Sarah stared at Jasper Davis, frozen in fear. Then she sprang for his throat.

Her hesitation had given him time to prepare. He sidestepped, catching the strike intended for his throat on his arm and swinging the empty rifle as a club. The heavy stock caught her in the temple, sending her slamming backward into one of the heavy timbers that supported the barn. She fell, closing her eyes, tumbling backward into unconsciousness.

Jasper stood with his hand clamped around his wounded arm, blood welling up between his fingers. “Look to the girl first,” he told the doctor. “I can wait.” Then he swayed on his feet. The Professor and the juggler helped him to a bench, where he watched the doctor examine the girl.

Cassidy and Miss Paxon were clearing the barn, telling people that the show was over, time to go. The crowd was moving reluctantly. Mrs. Selby stood by the fallen girl, tears on her motherly face. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would she attack the sheriff?”

Jasper shook his head, frowning. “I can’t say, Mrs. Selby. But I reckon it was good she attacked me, rather than one of the women or children.” He knew that some of those women were close enough to hear. “I hate to think what could have happened then.”

“She was always very gentle with us,” the Professor said.

Jasper shrugged. “She was raised by wolves,” he said. “Wild animals.”

“She isn’t a wild animal,” Helen said. “She’s a sweet girl, really.”

“Poor child,” Jasper murmured. “I reckon I’ll have to lock her up for the night. In the interests of public safety.”

He shook his head, carefully furrowing his brow in an expression of grave concern.

He watched the doctor kneel by Sarah’s side and thought about how right Mrs. Selby was. It was a wonderful day. Sarah McKensie had tried to kill him in front of a hundred witnesses. He would lock her up immediately. No one could argue with that. He had no choice. And then, when she tried to escape, he would be forced to shoot her. Such a tragedy.

“…virtue has never been as respectable as money.”

—
Innocents Abroad
; Mark Twain

S
ARAH OPENED HER EYES
and saw moonlight shining on a gray wall constructed of roughly fitted stone. She lay on a strawtick mattress on a stone floor. Her mouth was dry. Her head ached, a dull pain that centered in the right temple.

The air reeked of Professor Serunca’s Chinese liniment. Carefully, she touched her head and felt a cloth bandage, wrapped like a turban around her temples. She felt for her belt and her knife. Gone. Her lariat. Her bow and arrows. All gone.

Bad stinks clung to this place. The air held the bitter aroma of coffee, the dull scent of gunpowder; the musky smell of the men who had slept on the strawtick mattress before her. The scratchy wool blanket that had been tossed over her reeked of whiskey and tobacco, of old sweat and fear. The nearby bucket stank of urine.

Under all the other smells, through the reek of the liniment, there was another scent, one that made her heart pound in fear. She could smell the blond man, the sheriff they called Jasper. This was his place—she knew that.

She sat up on the mattress, staring around her. There were three stone walls and a wall of bars that separated the cell from a larger room. In the larger room was a desk, two chairs, some shelves. A jacket hung on the back of one of the chairs. His jacket—she knew by the smell.

She had to get out. His scent brought back memories that made her breath catch in her throat. She had to run. She had to hide.

Her eyes focused on the square of moonlight on one stone wall of her cell. Blinking, she turned her aching head, looking for the source of light. High on another wall, moonlight streamed through a window blocked by steel bars.

She stood up, one hand against the wall for support, cold stone floor against her bare feet. She prowled the limits of her cell, growing stronger with each step. She tested the steel bars that made up the third wall of the cell, but they did not yield to her tugging.

As she turned away from the bars, she heard a sound from outside the window. “Sarah?” a whispered voice said. “Sarah? Are you all right?” Helen’s voice.

The window was above her head, but she climbed the rough wall, her bare feet finding tiny ledges on the uneven stone surface of the wall. The opening offered a view of a narrow lane between the jail and a ramshackle building. The bars on the window were fixed securely in the stone wall.

Helen stood in the lane, looking up at the window. “Sarah! I’m so glad to see your face. Oh, your poor head! I tried to tell the sheriff that he didn’t need to lock you up. I told him you would stay with me. He wouldn’t listen.”

Sarah clung to the bars, looking down at Helen. “He is bad,” she said. “Very bad.”

“Oh, Sarah—what happened? Why did you attack the sheriff?”

Sarah stared at her friend, remembering the things she did not want to remember. “He killed my mama. I remember his scent.” Helen stared at her. “That can’t be. Mrs. Selby said that Indians killed your parents.”

Sarah’s grip on the bars tightened. They were cold in her hands, as cold as the stone beneath her feet when she crouched in the cave, staring out into the sunlight where Jasper Davis stood over her mother. “He shot my mama. He took her hair.”

“Took her hair?” Helen’s voice was faint.

“With his knife. He cut her—took her hair.” She remembered crouching in the darkness and watching as Jasper bent over her mother. The smell of fresh blood mingled with Jasper’s scent, and Sarah was afraid. “Run and hide, Mama told me. I hid so he didn’t find me.”

“He scalped her?”

“I was hiding,” Sarah said again. Her voice trembled.

“Why would he do that?” Helen asked. “Why would he kill your mother?”

“I have to get out,” Sarah said. “He will come and find me. I have to leave this place.” She tugged on the bars, but they resisted her efforts. She reached through the bars, as if she could squeeze through.

Helen reached up and touched Sarah’s hand. “I’ll get help,” she said. “I’ll get Miss Paxon. I’ll get the Professor. They’ll know what to do.”

In the bar of the Selby’s Hotel, Jasper was telling another version of the story to the Professor, Cassidy, Miss Paxon, and a group of his cronies.

“It was a terrible tragedy,” he was saying. “Her folks had made camp on Grizzly Hill, right on Spring Creek. Injuns massacred her parents—scalped them both. I went up there with a half a dozen men from Selby Flat, and we searched for the little girl, but we couldn’t find her anywhere.”

He shook his head sadly. He started to reach for his whiskey with his wounded arm, then winced and used his other arm. The cut was shallow, but the doctor had insisted on bandaging it. He was glad of that. The bandage reminded everyone of her unprovoked attack. She had set up a perfect situation for him. With care, he could emerge from this as a hero.

“Careful there, Sheriff.” Tom Monroe took the bottle and refilled Jasper’s glass. “We can’t have you out of commission.”

Jasper nodded his thanks and continued his story. “Some figured Injuns had taken the girl captive. We searched high and low for Injuns, but never found ’em. Some thought it was Mexicans, making it look like Injuns’ work. We didn’t find them either.” He sipped his whiskey, holding the glass awkwardly in his left hand. “I reckon the story about her being raised by wolves is true. I just wonder how she’s going to do in civilization, having been brung up by wild animals.”

“She did very well with us,” the Professor said.

“She seemed so sweet,” Mrs. Selby chimed in. She had gone to fetch another bottle. Now she stood at Jasper’s side, frowning. “I really don’t see that you had to lock her up.”

Jasper looked at Mrs. Selby with a pained look. “You can’t imagine I wanted to lock her up.” His voice rang with indignation. “Don’t tell me you think that, Mrs. Selby!”

Mrs. Selby bit her lip, still frowning.

“I had no choice. She attacked me, and I reckon that was just as well. I can defend myself. Suppose she had taken after you or one of the women or one of the children?”

Mrs. Selby was shaking her head. “I don’t see why on earth she would. Think of all the folks she’s rescued from the wilderness. Why on earth would she…”

“I can’t say,” Jasper interrupted her. His tone was that of a man frustrated beyond politeness. “I can’t say what goes on in the mind of a wild animal. She’s a wild animal, and I reckon that’s all you can say about it.”

Jasper watched as his friends around the table nodded, looking solemn at this pronouncement. The circus folks looked dubious, but they didn’t matter. No one trusted circus folks.

“If only Max were here,” Mrs. Selby said. “Can’t we just wait until he gets here from San Francisco? He would take responsibility for her.”

“I would be willing to take the girl with me,” the Professor said. “I will take full responsibility for her.”

Jasper shook his head. “Thank you kindly, friend, but I’m afraid she’s my responsibility. Tomorrow, I reckon I’ll take her on down to Nevada City, where the judge will decide the best thing to do for her.”