Come Spring (13 page)

“I never thought about it. We just kept calling her Baby and the name stuck.”

He pulled up a chair across the table from her while they waited for the meat to finish cooking. Buck was staring at her again. He knew it wasn’t proper, but he couldn’t help it. She kept looking away from him, and he could almost see her mind working as she tried to come up with something else to say. It surprised him that she had not asked about Patsy again, and he guessed she was dying to know more but avoided questioning him.

Annika wished he would stop staring. She stood up just to escape his eyes. She crossed the room and paused beside her valise, which he had moved earlier. She opened it and took out her hairbrush and then sat down on the edge of the bed. She had no idea how long he intended to cook the meat, so she began to work the brush through her tangled hair while she waited. As she became intent on the task, she nearly forgot about Buck’s presence. The feel of the boar bristles working through her hair was soothing, so much so that she expressed her relief with a sigh.

Glancing up, she saw that Buck had not moved. Indeed, he seemed frozen in time as he stared at her in the flickering firelight. His gaze was so bold, so heated, that Annika had to force herself to look down. She wanted to be certain her clothing hadn’t just fallen off.

She jumped up abruptly, put her hairbrush back into her valise, and began to pace the small area between the bed and the table. “How old are you, Mr. Scott?” It seemed a safe enough topic.

“Thirty-two.”

She stopped her pacing momentarily. “I thought you were younger.”

“How old are you?” He found her presence irritated him more than he wanted to admit. He was thankful she had not turned out to be Alice Soams, because the last few hours made him glad his plan had not worked out. He’d lived alone too long to adjust to having someone underfoot. Baby was one thing—she was easy to handle. A talkative woman was another matter altogether.

She drew herself up proudly. “I’m twenty.”

“That old.”

Annika immediately turned on him. “How old is Alice Soams?”

“She said she was twenty-five.”

Annika sniffed.

Buck was hard-pressed to hide a smile.

“Do you think that meat’s done yet?” She folded her arms beneath her breasts, saw his eyes follow the movement, and suddenly dropped them to her sides.

“I expect it is.” He made no move to get up. If he was stuck with her until tomorrow he decided he might as well keep her on her toes.

She arched a brow and took on an icy tone. “Do you think we might eat before morning?”

“I thought maybe since I cooked it that you could dish it up.”

“Think again.”

“You used to servants waiting on you, Miss Storm?”

She wanted to snap that, as a matter of fact, she was, but the humble cabin was an all too real reminder of the differences between mem. She said nothing.

Buck picked up a cloth and wrapped it around the handle of the frying pan. “If you plan on eating you’d best sit.” He stabbed a slab of meat with his knife and dropped it on the plate on her side of the table. “Dig in.”

T
HE
lights of Busted Heel shone like yellow beacons through the swirling snow. Kase Storm would rather they had been the lights of his home, but he was thankful enough to reach the outskirts of town before thickening darkness and the dense snowfall caused him to lose his way. He rode straight to the local livery, used the side door that he knew the blacksmith always left open for just such emergencies, and led his black stallion, Sinbad, inside. The warmth in the huge barn was comforting after the ride from Cheyenne, the sounds of the animals bedded down for the night familiar, soothing ones. He saw to his mount, hung the saddle over the side of an empty stall, and let himself out of the barn.

The snow crunched beneath his boot heels as he made hisway down Main Street toward the jail, surprised at the amount of snow that had fallen in so few hours. Disappointment lay heavy on his mind because he knew he would have to spend another night away from his own ranch and Rose, but with the storm as bad as it was turning out to be, there was no way he could go on and chance getting lost in the dark.

He stepped up onto the wooden walk and scraped his boots against the planks before he crossed to the door of the jail and knocked. A lamp was shining in the darkness; he could see it just beyond the window, sitting in the middle of the desk that he once called his own. His short term as marshal of Busted Heel seemed to have been a lifetime ago, but in reality it had only been five years.

No one responded to his knock, so he tried again, louder this time. He heard a muffled curse and smiled to himself. Zach Elliot, his old friend, had taken on the position of marshal when Kase left the job to start his ranch. The only problem was that Zach was past seventy now, just how far past no one knew, and although everyone in town thought he was long past retirement, no one had the nerve to tell the cantankerous old man to quit. They compensated for his slight loss of hearing and occasional forgetfulness by covering up for his mistakes and extricating him from awkward situations.

Not long ago, Zach had misplaced the key to the jail cell—not that there was ever anyone occupying it—but when a drifter decided to shoot out the lights in Paddie O’Hallohan’s Ruffled Garter Saloon, everyone had to help look for the missing key before the prisoner could be locked up.

The saloon owner, Paddie, and Slick Knox, the local gambler-turned-barber, acted as deputies when and if they were needed, which was beginning to be more often ever since Wyoming had become a state.

The door opened a crack and Kase found himself staring down at Zach, who was still half asleep. The old man was as colorful in appearance as the life he had led. The former army scout had lived in Texas where he had married a Comanche woman, fathered a son, and then left the area when his loved ones were killed. He was missing one eye, but thatnever slowed him down. A long thin scar ran down the side of his face. Scar tissue had formed over the sunken hollow where his eye had once been.

Kase never saw the man clean shaven, but the lower half of his face was perpetually covered with stubble. Never a full beard, never smooth shaven. Always stubble.

Zach had taught him to ride, and along with Caleb, taught him to shoot. Zach had been there during the lowest ebb of his life, had helped him patch things up with Rose back when Kase had been too stubborn to admit he loved her. Zach Elliot was as much a part of their family as Auntie Ruth.

“You comin’ in out of the cold or you just intend to stand there starin’ at me?” Zach barked.

“Open the door a little wider, old man, and I will.”

“Shit,” Zach grumbled. But he stepped aside, careful to keep all but his head and shoulders well hidden by the door. When Kase stepped inside the reason became clear. Zach was outfitted in his long red drawers.

A black cast-iron stove in the corner of the room kept the building toasting. Kase welcomed the close heat as he stripped off his gloves and hat and laid them on the cluttered desk nearby. Then he began to brush the snow off his coat. He shook his long hair until the snow that still clung to the ends fell away. “I see you haven’t cleaned this place since I left it,” he said.

Zach countered, “I figured since this mess was here when you were that it was part of the desk.” He walked into the open jail cell where he slept, stripped a blanket off the bed, and wrapped it around his shoulders, then trudged back into the main room.

“I know now why you never arrest anyone.” Kase nodded toward the empty cell. “Where would you sleep if you did?” He rested his foot against the nickel-plated footrail on the stove and held his hands over the top.

Zach scratched his crotch and yawned. “What are you doin’ here anyway? I thought you was pickin’ up your sister in Cheyenne yesterday.”

Kase’s features darkened. “I went to get her, but she never got off the train.”

“She miss it on her end or somewhere in between?”

Shaking his head, Kase said, “Neither. You have any coffee? It’s a long story.”

Zach took a battered coffeepot off the stove and stared down into it for a moment before he shuffled over to a water barrel near the door. Dipping the pot in, he filled it, then set it on top of the small stove. While Kase watched in silence, the old man pulled open the desk drawer, took out a small sack of coffee beans, and spread a handful on top of the desk.

“Pull up a chair and start the tellin’. This’ll take a while.” Zach then walked back into the jail cell, slipped his gun out of the holster, walked back to the desk, and proceeded to smash the coffee beans with the butt of his gun handle. Except for those few that flew off and hit the floor, there was a sizable pile of smashed and broken coffee beans left, enough for Zach to brush them over the edge of the desk into his hand and carry them over to the pot. “It’ll be boiled in a minute.”

“I can hardly wait,” Kase said as he slipped off his coat and hung it over the back of a chair near the stove. “Ever think of buying a bean grinder?”

Zach ignored his question. “So what happened to your sister?” His concern showed in his face if not his manner as he pulled up a chair next to the stove and sat down opposite Kase. Leaning forward, he listened intently.

“When she didn’t get off the train, I found the conductor was already looking for me.” Kase stared down at the toe of his boot. “Actually, he was looking for ‘the brother of Alice Soams, the blond woman from Boston.’ Finally, we realized we were talking about the same woman when I described Annika, but for a while he didn’t believe I was her brother.”

“Well, you don’t look a good goddamn thing like her.”

“It took some convincing. Finally, I had the station master tell him who I was. He told me that Annika had been taken off the train when it broke down not far from here by a man who claimed she was this Alice Soams who’d agreed to marry him.”

“Sounds like a tall tale to me. Wouldn’t the man know his own intended?” Zach rubbed his eyes and shook his head.

“The man didn’t know what his fiancée looked like because he’d never met her face-to-face. He was convinced Annika was lying.”

“Why didn’t Annika tell him who she was?”

“She tried. The man took her at knife point. There was a letter lying on the seat beside her, a letter from this man to his intended. When Annika tried to deny it, no one believed her. They thought she was just trying to get out of her promise to the man.”

“Well, hell, it’s still a free country from what I hear. Why couldn’t he accept the fact that the woman changed her mind—even if she wasn’t the right one?”

“He paid her train fare. I guess he felt that sealed the bargain.”

“You say he paid Annika’s train fare?”

Kase shook his head, exasperated. “No,” he said, raising his voice, “I said he paid this Alice Soams’s fare. And he thought Annika was Alice. When the conductor described the man that took her, I remembered I’d seen him on the platform in Cheyenne waiting for the train.”

“How could the man be in two places at once?”

Kase sighed in frustration. He was nearly yelling when he said, “We were all there waiting for the noon train, but it broke down just outside of Busted Heel. This big trapper took off riding like a bat out of hell when the announcement was made. By the time the train finally came in three hours late, he already had Annika.”

“At least you got a look at him.”

Kase wished he hadn’t seen the man at all. He might have been able to stem his hatred and worry.

“That coffee smells ready,” he told Zach.

The old man got up and picked up two cups from the side table. “I forgot all about it.” He crossed the room, put a spoonful of cold water into one of the cups, went back to the stove, and lifted the pot. He set it on the edge of the desk, trickled cold water down the spout to settle the coffee grounds to the bottom, and then, a moment later, poured them each a cup.

It was a moment or two after he had his first sip before Kase spoke again. Zach respected his silence. Finally Kase said, “He was a big man, taller than me. Had to be six foot three if he was an inch. Long hair down to his shoulders.”

“Indian?”

Kase shook his head and tried the steaming brew. “Buffalo hunter. Long blond hair, beard, blue eyes.”

“Buffalo man, huh?”

Without saying so, both men knew that neither respected the men who had participated in the buffalo slaughter. There had been nothing gallant about the work that had been glorified by the periodicals. The poor-sighted animals had been easy pickings for even the least skilled marksman.

A man was now hard-pressed to find one buffalo where countless multitudes had once thundered across the open prairie. It had been men like the one who had carried off his sister that had helped kill them off. Kase had spent five years searching for any stray he could round up until he had a growing herd of twenty head. He’d felt compelled to save the animals that had been the life source of his ancestors.

“Yeah, a buffalo man,” Kase said again, “and if he hurts her, I’ll kill him.”

“What if your sister ain’t harmed?” Zach asked.

“What if she’s not harmed? What do you think he took her for? To play chess when the nights are long and cold?” Kase slammed the cup down on the top of the stove and stood up. He raked his hands through his hair and walked over to stare out the window. All he saw was his own reflection and turned away. “I’ll find her,” he promised himself and Zach. “I’ll find her and bring her home.”

“You gonna tell your folks?”

“Not yet. I went to the police in Cheyenne and offered a ten thousand dollar reward for her return.”

“For ten thousand dollars I might just get off my butt and go lookin’ for her myself.”

“I’m hoping everyone in Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado will be out looking for her.”

“Anybody know the man?”

Kase nodded. “Everyone on the train heard his name. Buck Scott. The sheriff called in another trapper who works the southern range who thought Scott lived in the Laramie Mountains just northwest of here.”

“I can’t imagine a Storm not standin’ up for herself.”