Shotgun Bride (10 page)

C
onfident that she would win the race against Kade, and thus win the shotgun, Mandy laid her money on the counter of the mercantile, lifted her chin, and looked Minnie, the proprietor and town gossip, straight in the eye. “I want to buy shells for that shotgun in the window.” Now that the brides were busy with their pies over at the hotel, the store was quiet, and Mandy’s words, intended to be private, echoed from one end of the place to the other.

Minnie’s small, eager eyes widened a little. “Why, Sister,” she said, leaning toward her, “what on earth would you want with ammunition?”

“Even a woman of God has to take care of herself,” Mandy said, and then waited for the inevitable lightning bolt. It was a relief, and a bit of a surprise, when nothing happened.

“These are troubled times,” Minnie agreed. “I wouldn’t give you two hoots in Hades for that McKettrick bunch’s chances, for instance.”

Mandy stiffened, perturbed. “What do you mean by that?”

Minnie shrugged her skinny shoulders. She was a painfully plain woman, her flesh pockmarked, her hair wrenched back from her face, slick as an onion skin, but it wasn’t those things that made her homely. It was, Mandy concluded, the way she relished seeing trouble come to other folks. “High and mighty, that’s what they are. Well, now that Mr. Holt Cavanagh has come to live among us, and they’ve got some real competition, they might just take a fall. Long overdue, if you ask me.”

But I didn’t ask you, did I?
Mandy thought sourly. “I reckon you’d be hurting without their business,” she said out loud, holding the other woman’s gaze. “Lots of folks around here would.”

The store mistress had enough decency to color up a little, though it wasn’t likely she’d see the error of her ways and change herself accordingly. In Mandy’s experience, people either stayed the same or got worse.

Minnie took the twenty cents and doled out the shells, slapping them down with a small harrumph sound. “I still can’t reckon up what a nun would need with shotgun shells.”

Mandy smiled. “I suppose you’ll keep on trying to work it out, just the same,” she said sweetly, tucking her purchase into the pocket of her habit.

She got as far as the door.

“Sister?” Minnie called after her.

Mandy sighed before turning back and smiling a smile she hoped was a shining example of Christian forbearance. “Yes?”

“You tell John Lewis that folks are thinking about him.

Mandy felt herself soften a mite. “I will,” she replied, and went out, but as she walked down the sidewalk toward the Arizona Hotel, with the shells in the pocket of her habit, she wasn’t thinking about the stricken marshal, or even about Kade McKettrick, who occupied more space in her thoughts most times than she would willingly have accorded him. Gig Curry, her personal devil, was far from her mind, as were her misplaced and ailing mother and Cree.

On her way, she saw a poster—J
IM
D
ANDY AND HIS
W
ILD
W
EST SHOW
, she read. C
OMING SOON.

Her step quickened, and a warm thrill coursed through her.

T
hey found the cavalrymen at midmorning the next day, a full dozen of them, all dead, and drenched in blood. Jeb’s stomach did a slow, backward roll.

Some of the soldiers had been stripped of their trademark blue coats, as well as their shirts, others of their boots or trousers, and all of them had been relieved of their hair. The horses were gone, and so were the regulation carbines and the side arms issued to every soldier.

The hairs stood up on the back of Jeb’s neck, and like Rafe and the others, he’d drawn his .45 as instinctively as a breath. “Sweet Jesus,” he marveled, averting his eyes for a moment. “Indians?”

Rafe cursed, then spat. The stench from the dead men was all-encompassing, swamping the nostrils and throat, overpowering the other senses as well, and the flies, the flies were everywhere, crawling over every inch of bare flesh, droning in the otherwise echoing stillness. “Maybe they wanted us to think so,” he said with a shake of his head, scanning the quiet countryside around them, in case of an ambush. He drew his bandanna up around his mouth and nose, as Jeb did, though it didn’t help much.

A broken strongbox lay in the middle of the carnage, and for some reason it put Jeb in mind of the Triple M brand burned into the tree on the squatters’ place a few days before. He’d have bet, though he was operating on pure instinct and not much else, that the two occurrences were connected.

“Charlie,” Rafe said through his mask, beckoning to one of the men. “Ride back to that homestead we passed this morning and see if you can borrow a few shovels. Mitch, you head for town. Get a wire off to the fort first thing, and make sure Kade’s told directly.” He paused, scanned the blue sky grimly. “We’re going to have to lay these men to rest right here. It might take the army a while to find us, and the bodies can’t be left for the scavengers.”

Jeb swung down from the saddle, resigned to the grim task at hand, and approached one of the fallen men. He and Rafe and the hands remaining after Mitch and Charlie had gone checked each soldier for any sign of life and found nothing.

By the time Charlie got back, the homesteader jostling alongside in a buckboard, they’d laid the corpses out in a neat row, doing their best to keep the flies away by swinging mesquite branches over them like fans. They’d gotten used to the smell, insofar as that was possible, and lowered their bandannas to hang around their necks. A small heap of personal mementos lay atop a large, flat rock—battered little booklike frames containing images of wives and children, mostly, held shut by ribbons, worn colorless by carrying, a clutch of thin pages torn out of a Bible, letters from home, a watch, somehow overlooked by the killers, engraved with the man’s name.

“Brings back memories of the war,” Zeke Bryant commented, his eyes fixed on a battalion of ghosts. He’d been a hand on the Triple M for as long as Jeb could remember, and he was a tough old soldier, a veteran of the Confederacy, known for solitary ways and playing lonesome strains on a harmonica. “Wish I had me some whiskey.”

“So do I,” Rafe agreed, taking off his hat to shove a hand through his hair. Jeb noticed that Rafe’s gaze kept straying to the strongbox. “There’s work to be done,” Rafe said finally, after another of the long, silent periods of reflection to which he was given. “Let’s get to it.”

They took four shovels from the homesteader’s wagon, and spent the rest of the afternoon burying the dead. Not much was said during that time, but Jeb did plenty of thinking about the fragility of life, and he knew the others did, too.

“It’s a hell of a thing to see folks come to an end like that,” Jeb reflected, as they rode back toward the ranch, with the night bearing down hard and a dozen fresh graves behind them, many unmarked and painfully isolated. The photographs and other leavings were tucked away in Rafe’s saddlebags for safekeeping and would be turned over to the army when the time came.

Rafe set his jaw. “Here’s the worst of it,” he replied. “That might not have been the end. I reckon it could well be a beginning, instead.” He let Jeb ponder that awhile, Rafe did, and then he told Jeb what the loss of that money might mean for the Triple M.

B
aking the pies turned out to be a bigger project than anticipated, fraught with early failures, for two full days had passed when they finally turned up, arranged in a tidy row on Kade’s desk. He’d come back to the office after making the rounds to see that the town was settling down for a peaceful night, and there they were.

He hung up his hat, though he didn’t take off his gun belt, and went straight for the coffeepot. Having set all day, the stuff was beyond even his ability to tolerate, and he started a fresh batch.

He was a mite hungry, so he wandered over to inspect the spread. Each woman had marked her own work in some way, one by stabbing her name into the crust with the tines of a fork. He smiled at that.
Jeanette.
He wondered if she was the redhead.

Using his pocketknife, he cut a wedge of Jeanette’s pie—cherry, it turned out—and raised it to his mouth. No sense in dirtying a plate, especially since he’d be theone to wash it. He was finding his new job tedious, composed mostly of mundane tasks, and so far he’d had no luck catching up with Emmeline. He still wanted to ask her what it was she’d meant to report to John before he fell sick, but since she didn’t seem to consider the matter urgent, he didn’t either.

The pie was a trifle on the sweet side, and he nearly choked when the door crashed open with such force that it slammed into the inside wall.

One of the Sussex boys stood in the gap, and his eyes widened at the sight of all those pies. The kid gulped, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Mitch Wiggins sent me over from the telegraph office,” he blurted. “He made Ben open the place up so he could send a wire to the fort. I’m supposed to tell you that there was twelve soldiers found murdered over east of Horse Thief Canyon.”

Jeanette’s pie turned to ashes in Kade’s mouth. He put the piece he’d been holding down on a wanted poster on the corner of the desk, and swore. The boy’s gaze tracked the pie.

“Help yourself,” Kade said.

“I got a lot of brothers,” the kid replied, but he took one step toward the food, then another, more purposeful one. “One sister, too.” The sister, evidently, was an afterthought.

“I’ve got a couple of brothers myself,” Kade commiserated. “Take as many as you can carry.”

“You mean it?”

“I mean it.”

An enterprising lad, young Sussex proceeded to stack the pies one on top of the other. “Thanks, Marshal. We ain’t had nothin’ like this since Christmas, when the ladies from the church fixed up a basket for us.”

Kade managed a smile. “You be sure and share with the other kids,” he said as the boy hurried out, nimble as a circus juggler, the pies teetering in his grasp.

The coffee was ready, and Kade poured himself a cup, adding a generous dollop of whiskey from John Lewis’s desk-drawer stash. His first impulse had been to send to the livery stable for his horse and ride for the Triple M, but after a moment or two, reason prevailed. Right then, he couldn’t do much but wait. Rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off would serve no purpose.

He was glad to see Jeb when he came in later, even smelling of death the way he did, and watched as his brother helped himself to coffee without a single word.

“Where’s Rafe?” Kade asked when the silence stretched on too long for his liking. He wasn’t used to so much peace and quiet, particularly when it came to Jeb, and it made him uncomfortable.

Jeb’s shoulders sagged a little under his coat. “With Emmeline,” he said, then raised the cup to his mouth and took a sip. He made a face. “Good God,” he exclaimed, “I hope your marshaling is better than your coffee.”

“Sit down.”

For once in his life, Jeb did what he’d been told without quibbling. Things must have been pretty bad out there, Kade concluded. He felt a twinge of sympathy for his younger brother, for all his devious ways, and some guilt because he hadn’t been on hand to take his share of the load.

Jeb set down his coffee, took off his hat and coat, and drew up a chair. “Son of a bitch,” he said, tilting his head back and staring up at the ceiling. “You ever seen a dozen dead men, Kade?”

He hadn’t, and Jeb knew it. He was just talking, and in view of the situation, Kade was inclined to let him run on awhile, get some of it out. He simply shook his head and waited while Jeb chose fresh words.

“I keep thinking that all of them had folks—mothers, or sweethearts, or wives and kids,” Jeb said. “There were pictures in some of their pockets, and a few letters and things like that. We buried them side by side, and marked the places as best we could, but we didn’t know most of their names.”

Kade pulled open the bottom right desk drawer, pulled out John’s whiskey, and leaned over to add some kick to his brother’s coffee. “You did what you had to do,” he said. The high country was wild, and it was brutal. There was no way they could have left those bodies unburied, so they could be collected and returned to their families, or even to the fort. Coyotes and wolves would have scattered the remains over five square miles of territory before the sun rose tomorrow morning.

“This could ruin us, Kade,” Jeb said after another lengthy interval of grappling with his thoughts. “They were carrying nearly fifty thousand dollars in gold and banknotes, payment for the herd we sold the army last fall. According to Rafe, without that money, the ranch might go under for good.”

There had been other close calls over the years. Angus McKettrick was a hardheaded old coot with a gift for turning a profit, and certainly no spendthrift, but the cattle business was full of risk, and sometimes bad luck seemed like the only kind there was. They’d lost hundreds of head to disease, to blizzards, to rustlers and squatters and hungry Indians, and they’d always managed to hold on, but this time might be different. If Rafe was worried enough to confide in Jeb, or in him, for that matter, they were up against it for sure.

Jeb lifted the cup in a weary toast. “It would be a hell of a thing if all this wife-getting and baby-making turned out to be for nothing, wouldn’t it?” He laughed, but the sound was mirthless. “The mighty McKettricks. Maybe we’ve had our day. Maybe there isn’t going to be any ranch to bicker over.”

Kade emptied his coffee mug and then slammed it down on the desktop with enough force to make Jeb start in his chair. “You might be ready to tuck your tail between your legs and quit,” he said, “but I’m not. First thing we’re going to do is get that money back.”

Jeb sat up a little straighter, and some spark leapt into his eyes. “Hell, Kade, this being the marshal is going to your head. By now, those bastards could be halfway to Mexico.”

“They’re not,” Kade said, and he was sure of that, though he couldn’t have said why it was so. It was an instinct, like being in a dark room and knowing someone else was there, watching and ready to pounce.

“You think Holt was involved?”

The question annoyed Kade, though he might have asked it himself, in Jeb’s place. A rush of fury went through Kade. “He might do a lot of things, but I can’t see him killing twelve men in cold blood.”

Jeb considered. “I guess you’re right.” Under any other circumstances, Kade might have had those words carved in stone; he couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard them, from Jeb at least. As the two youngest brothers, they’d done their share of scrapping over the years.

“I figure the army will have a detail here by morning,” Kade said presently, thinking aloud.

“Yeah,” Jeb agreed. “You’ll be writing out reports and answering questions from now till God’s angels descend and build a brothel across the street from the church.”

Kade closed his eyes and wished John Lewis a swift recovery so he could take his damn job back. “Thanks,” he said. Then he refilled his coffee mug, and Jeb’s, and dosed them both with more whiskey. “According to Lewis, Cavanagh’s got a herd headed this way, on top of everything else.”

“That ought to liven things up,” Jeb replied.

The words proved prophetic.

The army showed up while Kade and Jeb were having breakfast in the hotel dining room at around eight the following morning, and the herd arrived before their plates were cleared away.