Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (22 page)

      
“This really isn't a conversation best held in a public hallway.” She nodded regally to the sitting room behind Roxanna.

      
Roxanna stepped aside, admitting her, while her mind raced. In the past five years the woman had confronted her in person only once, although she had made sure Roxanna knew exactly who had smeared her reputation on every occasion. What was Nathaniel Darby's obsessed widow up to now? “Speak your piece and leave,” she said tonelessly.

      
One black eyebrow rose sardonically. “Very well. You always seem to land on your feet, Roxanna. Surviving captivity with savages, the scandal of all the gossip about it—”

      
“You were the one who started the rumors in Denver.”

      
“A pity your San Francisco railroad baron was so squeamish and broke your engagement.”

      
Isobel looked anything but sorry. Roxanna waited, hating the dampness forming on her palms and trickling down between her breasts. She would volunteer nothing more.

      
“But you captured yourself a husband anyway—or was that the old Scot's doing? Getting rid of the embarrassment of a ruined granddaughter by marrying her off to his hired gunman?” She studied Roxanna from beneath lowered lashes as she examined the furnishings in the parlor, touching the lampshade sitting on the side table by the sofa.

      
“Stop trying to make me squirm, Mrs. Darby. If you intend to go to Jubal with your story, I can't stop you,” she said, revealing nothing of the agony she felt, not so much for Jubal as for Cain. She had lied to her own husband, deceived him. He would leave her.

      
“Very well,” Isobel said. “Distasteful as such tawdry matters are for a lady, I must confess that my finances are exhausted. In uncovering your rather circuitous travel west I spent the last of Nathaniel's inheritance.”

      
“You mean the money he stole from his beloved Confederacy,” Roxanna corrected, quickly intuiting where this confrontation was headed.

      
Isobel reacted as if Roxanna had emptied a chamber pot in her face. Crimson rage flushed her cheeks and her eyes turned from light brown to soulless inky pools glittering venomously. “Nathaniel was not a thief! He was a Southern gentleman. Your lies about him caused his death.”

      
“I told the truth. He was a war profiteer, selling army supplies to the highest bidder, supplies desperately needed by the Confederates. I only sent a letter to General Johnston informing him where to look in the colonel's own records. He killed himself rather than face the disgrace of a court-martial.”

      
Isobel flinched with each word Roxanna spoke, yet eerily held her peace. Only the chalky pallor leaching away the red flush of fury indicated how bitterly she fought to deny the truth. “You murdered him,” she insisted stubbornly. “It was your fault he died.”

      
“You've made me pay for it over and over.”

      
“And bringing you to justice has exhausted my resources,” she replied, her composure once more in place as she tugged on one snowy lace glove. “Fortunately, at the same time I was running out of money, you—scheming little fraud that you are—succeeded in posing as Jubal MacKenzie's only heir. One day you'll have all his wealth—if he doesn't learn that his real granddaughter died back in St. Louis.”

      
“Do you really believe I'll pay you blackmail?”

      
“Of course you will if you want to continue your little charade as Alexa Hunt...and be that Indian's wife.” The last words dropped like stones.

      
Under Isobel's piercing stare, Roxanna tried not to betray her fear—but knew she was failing as miserably as an understudy for Polonius suddenly being thrust into the spotlight to play Hamlet... “You'll only go to Jubal anyway. Why should I pay you to destroy me?”

      
A cold cruel smile touched Isobel's thin mouth, then crumbled into a grimace as if her muscles were unaccustomed to the activity. “Oh, in time no doubt I shall, but for now I need money. You can pay me in installments and hope for sufficient time to work your wiles on that old man and the half-breed. Who knows, you might just be able to win them over so the truth won't matter. Then you'd have the sweetest revenge of all.”

      
Alexa had always been given a more-than-generous allowance by Jubal. When Roxanna closed down the house in St. Louis, several thousand remained unused in her account. Rather than leave it there and risk having the bank contact him, she had closed out the account and transferred all Alexa's funds to a bank in Denver. “It will take me a few days to wire for the money. Will two thousand do for now?” There was a good deal more, but Roxanna was not about to volunteer that. She needed time to think, to plan.

      
Isobel nodded brusquely, wanting to get past the vulgar discussion of dollars and cents. “I shall expect the deposit in my account at Blankenship's Bank on Seventeenth Street in Denver.” She walked swiftly to the door. With her hand on the knob, she turned to say, “I trust you'll be resourceful in finding ways to extract more cash from MacKenzie, since I'm certain your Indian hasn't a sou.”

      
With that she was gone, leaving Roxanna shivering in the warm room. She turned and walked to the window, looking out on the midday street, which teamed with life. A pair of bawdyhouse women resplendent in garish satins strolled past a grubby prospector down on his luck while a cursing driver lashed his mules. Roxanna saw and heard nothing, only stood rubbing her temples. Her mind churned frantically, but she could not come up with a way out. Isobel would win again unless...

      
Dare she tell Cain the truth? It would mean far more than confessing that she was not Jubal's granddaughter. She would have to tell him the whole ugly story of that night in Vicksburg. Would he still want her after that? She rang the bellpull, frantic to have a steamy hot bath as quickly as possible even though she had bathed only an hour earlier.

* * * *

      
Cain squatted on the muddy ground examining the tracks of what he estimated to be a dozen or so horses. He looked around the wreckage of the camp. Only yesterday it had held a crew of fifteen graders and enough supplies to complete another twenty miles of track. Now all that remained were ashes and corpses. “This smells wrong for Indians, Finny.”

      
The rawboned Irish surveyor riding with him leaned over his saddle and spat a wad of tobacco before replying, “And who might ye be thinkin' this is—old Queen Victoria's Royal Lancers?”

      
“About as likely as Cheyenne raiders. Some of the horses were shod,” Cain replied, standing up and dusting the muck off his trousers.

      
Finny snorted. “Them heathens are divlish clever. Prob'ly stole the horses from the army. Sure and it wouldn't be the first time.”

      
Cain shook his head. “A handful, maybe, but not this many. A lot of warriors refuse to ride ponies broken to saddle. Indians steal white men's horses to count coup and to trade, not to ride. Besides, the way that fire was set was too calculated for a hit-and-run raid. Every tie was burned to cinders. Looks as if they dug a trench around the dump and poured something flammable on it. Deliberate sabotage.”

      
Finny tugged at one greasy lock of long hair, then shoved it back under the battered felt hat covering his head. “They got plenty reasons 'n more for wantin' the Iron Horse stopped. Look what old Turkey Leg did over on Plum Creek.”

      
“He derailed a train, but then his warriors ransacked the cars and took off with all the supplies and gewgaws that took their fancy.”

      
“Sure and they can't be carryin' off thousands of oak rail ties,” Finny scoffed.

      
“But they could have taken food. Hunting is poor—their people hungry. Yet these raiders burned up the mess tent with every sack of flour and can of beans in it. Near as I can tell, they took nothing—and they veered off to the south. The hostiles are mostly north and east of here.”

      
Finny shrugged. “Who would you be figgerin' it is, then?”

      
“At forty-eight thousand dollars' federal subsidy for each mile of track laid, this race to link up the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific could turn pretty ugly. MacKenzie's already found out Powell was sniffing around Salt Lake a few weeks ago, trying to interest Brigham Young in a grading contract with the Central Pacific.”

      
“But Young's already signed a contract with the Union Pacific,” Finny said in righteous anger. Then comprehension dawned. “And yer thinkin' himself it was sendin' men to raid our camps and kill our crews?”

      
“That or your queen's lancers.”

      
“That dumpy little Sassenach is not my queen!” Patrick Aloysius Finny drew himself up indignantly and emptied the contents of his mouth. It landed with a loud splat between the horses' hooves, creating a small brown crater in the dirt.

      
Chuckling, Cain remounted. “You'd better catch up with the rest of the crew headed back to the construction camp. Wire the bad news to Jubal for me. He'll have to send woodcutters into the Medicine Bows for more timber. You get a burying party up here. I'm going to follow these tracks and see what I can figure out before the trail goes cold.”

      
“Have a care, boyo. This is divlish mean country out here—one hundred miles to water, twenty miles to wood, six inches to hell,” Finny cautioned as the Scot's Injun rode away.

      
Cain followed the trail along the Little Laramie River, then traveled south to the North Platte. This rocky ground had received no rain for weeks and yielded scant indication of where the raiders had gone. Probably down the North Platte to the trading posts and settlements farther south. He was certain they had not split up the way raiding parties from a warrior society would as a precaution against leading their enemy back to their villages. This group of killers had stuck together...the way white men would.

      
He puzzled over who they were as he rode deeper into Colorado Territory. Renegades for hire to the highest bidder, maybe half-breed gunmen like himself, pushed outside the law—just the sort Andrew Powell liked to hire.
You son of a bitch, I won’t let you beat us,
he thought grimly. Now he had a stake in the Union Pacific along with Jubal.

      
Thoughts of Jubal brought thoughts of his wife. “My wife.” It still sounded strange to say it aloud. He had married Alexa Hunt to become MacKenzie's chief of operations. He had not planned to have her intrude in his thoughts and disrupt his sleep the way she had since they had consummated their vows.

      
Just thinking about that consummation made his body respond, hardening uncomfortably against the unyielding leather saddle. He could abandon this chase and push for Cheyenne tonight. It would strain his mount, but the big chestnut was used to such demands.

      
“Damned if I will,” he muttered to the stallion. He would play out his hand here and see if any of the garrulous traders along the way could give him bits of information linking the renegades to Powell.

* * * *

      
“He said he'd be back in three or four days. It's been over a week, Grandfather.” Roxanna sat in Jubal's opulent railcar sipping a cup of rich black coffee, the remains of his private cook's fluffy omelet mostly untouched on her plate.

      
Jubal studied the dark circles beneath her eyes. “Do na' worry, lass. You know he wired me two days ago. This is part of his job and he's damn good at it.”

      
“But he's only one man, alone in that wilderness chasing after a whole party of renegades who murdered over a dozen men already.” Roxanna bit her lip and stared down at the linen napkin clenched in her hands.

      
“You love him, do you not, Alexa?” the old man asked gently.

      
Her head jerked up. “He's my husband. Of course I do,” she answered a bit too quickly.

      
Jubal studied her with shrewd gray eyes. “Then why are you so defensive about it?” He shushed her protest with a wave of one big freckled paw. “When I arranged yer betrothal with that spineless Powell whelp I had misgivings about giving you to a stranger...but he was from impeccable bloodlines, seemed decent enough at the time. Besides, you were twenty-one and still unwed, a wealthy woman all alone. I convinced myself I was doing it for yer own good.”

      
Roxanna flushed. If he thought twenty-one was an old maid, what would Jubal say if he knew she was really twenty-three? And a fraud to boot? She shivered and pushed thoughts about Isobel Darby to the back of her mind. Her husband's absence was more worrisome even than that hateful woman.

      
“When Powell broke the engagement,” Jubal continued awkwardly, “I...I was worried about you with Cain.”

      
“You mean because of his mixed blood?”

      
He could see the anger sparkling in her eyes. Damned if she wasn't well and truly smitten with Cain. The idea disturbed him, for he was not sure if her husband returned her regard in equal measure. “No,” he began carefully, choosing his words slowly. “But you saw firsthand how most people out West feel about Indians—and half-breeds.”

      
“And women who've consorted with them. Damn their eyes—hypocrites all of them,” she said indignantly, then added with scorn, “Those Cheyenne who captured me had a lot more honor—and honesty.

      
“Not exactly popular sentiments, lass,” he said gently. Never known for being a diplomat, MacKenzie was usually blunt-spoken. In business it served him well, but not with females, especially this one, whose spunk and loyalty he was coming to admire. “I do na' hold his Indian blood against him half so much as he holds it against himself.”