The Cactus Creek Challenge (36 page)

“Sure she’s all right, especially with your dad coming to help her. I’d put my money on Cassie and Obadiah together to be able to turn back a stampede of rattlesnakes if they put their mind to it.”

Ben took comfort from the notion of his experienced, steady, and fearless father backing Cassie’s play. He owed him a lot, from the lessons he’d taught to the example he’d been all Ben’s life. Fathers didn’t come any better than Obadiah Wilder, and it chagrinned Ben that he’d never told him that. Something else to rectify when he got back to Cactus Creek.

Glancing behind him at the angle of the sun, Ben tugged his hat down and shook up the reins. “Daylight’s burning.” They moved out at a steady lope once more following the trail.

After another hour or so, Ben scowled and pulled back on the reins. A couple hundred yards away, near where the ground started breaking up and sloping toward the Palo Duro Canyon rim, something dark moved. He unstrapped his field glasses and put them to his eyes.

“What is it?” Carl’s horse sidled into Ben’s.

Readjusting his grip on the glasses, he drew focus in the waning afternoon light. “It’s a horse.” He swept the area to either side but saw no one. “No saddle, but he was ridden recently. He looks stove in.”

Slipping the glasses back into their pouch lashed to his saddle horn, he lifted the reins. “Let’s go careful. I don’t see any cover for an ambush, but we’ll be on the lookout anyway.”

The only sound was the creak of leather, the clop of hooves, and the sighing of the wind in the grasses. The horse, when they drew near, stood, head down, sides crusted with sweat, and nostrils wide as he blew like a bellows. Ben slid from the saddle and studied the ground while Carl dismounted and coaxed the spent animal to let him lay a hand on him.

“Looks like he had a fresh horse picketed here.” Ben pointed to the hole in the ground where the peg had been driven and the area of close-cropped grass. Judging from a couple of piles of horse dung that weren’t exactly fresh, the horse had been here for some time, at least half a day. Disgust laced his voice. “No sign of a bucket. Shoop left him here with no water.”

“This one, too.” Carl dug in his pack and produced a collapsible canvas bucket and dumped the contents of his canteen into it. The exhausted horse sucked in the water, slobbering and shoving his nose into Carl’s shirt before lowering his head once more. “Sorry, fella, that’s all you can have right now. Any more and you’ll get sick.”

“We’ll have to leave him here. Maybe we can pick him up on the way back to town.” Ben glanced toward the west where the sun was falling ever closer to the horizon. “It’s going to be dark pretty soon. You can see where he took Amanda out of the saddle.” He squatted in a sandy patch of dirt. “See her little shoe prints?”

“Think he turned her loose somewhere around here?”

The hope in Carl’s voice pinched Ben’s chest. “No. He swapped his saddle and hauled her up with him. There are no other tracks that belong to Amanda. He’s still got her, and he’s headed down into the canyon.”

“Then we’d better go.” Carl stuck his boot in the stirrup and swung aboard, his face set like flint and aimed east.

Ben took the lead once more, and in less than half an hour, as the sun slipped below the edge of the world, they reached the rim of the Palo Duro.

A tiny tap on one of the windows stopped Cassie from pacing the small area between the desk and the cells. Jigger’s head came up and the front legs of his chair came down, and Jenny sat up from the cot in the back cell where she’d been attempting to rest—though Cassie knew she wasn’t really sleeping, not with Amanda in the hands of a kidnapper. Cassie put her eye to the gun loop in the shutter and peered out into the dusk.

“Miss Bucknell, it’s me, Mary Alice. I got something to tell you.”

She hurried to the door to let her student in. The girl’s eyes were round, and her breath came in gasps. “I came as quick as I could. Those boys, they took a terrible risk.”

A cold finger of fear slid down Cassie’s spine. Without asking, she knew Mary Alice was talking about the twins. “What did they do?”

“Ulysses went into the saloon and asked the bartender if he could carry out the empty bottles and sweep the floor. Said he wanted some pocket money. And Quincy found the Shoops’ wagon and climbed right into it and under a dirty canvas.” She gripped Cassie’s forearm. “Pierce came and told me about both of them, but there wasn’t anything I could do without causing a scene.”

“Is Ulysses still in the saloon?”
His mother is going to kill me
,
then kill Ulysses, then me again
.

“He came to find me a few minutes ago with the word that the Shoop brothers were in there, but they weren’t drinking much, just a couple of beers, and they were nursing those pretty careful. And they weren’t gambling either. The taller one kept checking his watch, like they were waiting for something.”

Cassie glanced at Jigger, who nodded, his face a sober mask. Just as Ben had thought. The snatching of Amanda must’ve been a diversion to get Ben out of town.

“There’s more.” Mary Alice twisted her apron in her fists. “Quincy finally came out of the wagon and reported in. He says there’s a box under that canvas, and it’s full of these.” She slipped something from her pocket and laid it on the desk.

The pair of small, paper-wrapped tubes made Cassie’s blood flow in frozen chunks. Jigger let out a low whistle, and Jenny braced her palms on the desktop.

“Is that what I think it is?” Cassie pressed her fingers to her lips. The notion of Quincy and Mary Alice toting it around like it was a beeswax candle made her stomach lurch.

“That’s the real thing.” Jigger picked one up and flipped it in the air, making Cassie and Jenny draw in twin gasps.

“Be careful!” Cassie stepped back, barking her hip on the edge of the desk.

He chuckled. “Don’t worry. I could throw this thing against the wall or step on it or bang it on the desk and it wouldn’t blow up. You need a blasting cap or a fuse. TNT is very stable. Almost a shame. If those idiot Shoop brothers were using liquid nitro, they’d blow themselves up long before they got near this jail and save us a lot of trouble.” He tucked the explosives into his shirt pocket like they were cigars. “We’ll have to assume that they do have blasting caps or a fuse and that their plan is to blow a hole through the wall to get to the gold.

Jenny sank into the desk chair and put her head in her hands. Cassie went to her and put her hand on Jenny’s shoulder, squeezing.

Jigger hitched up his pants at his hip. “I don’t fancy sitting in here waiting to get blown sky-high.”

Cassie agreed. “All right, how do we stop them?” She left Jenny and went to the door. “Mary Alice, you’ve done well. Thank you. I want you to gather up every child, those terrible twins included, and send them home. Tell them no arguing and no excuses or I’ll be very angry with them. Get home and don’t alarm your parents. Tell the children to start studying up for this program we have to put on for Mr. Stoltzfus next week.”

Not that the school program was high on her priority list at the moment. Time enough to cross that bridge … if it didn’t get blown up first.

She let Mary Alice out the door, her mind whirling. “Here’s what I think. Jigger is right. If we stay in here, we’re like sheep in a pen. This place won’t withstand a dynamite explosion, even a small one. And we can’t just march into the saloon and arrest the Shoops. They haven’t done anything we can prove yet.”

Jigger scratched his jaw, his fingernails on his stubbly beard sounding like sandpaper. “I agree. The thing is, we have to catch them with their hands in the cookie jar, so to speak.”

“To do that, we have to be outside.” Her mind spun. “But we have to make them think we’re still inside.”

“How do we do that?” Jigger asked.

“Go get the straw ticks off the bunks, and bring the blankets, too.” She retrieved Jigger’s ladder-back chair and set it in front of the window to the right of the door. “What we need are some decoys.”

In short order, using straw stuffing, the despised curtain material, her sunbonnet, and her apron, she’d created a scarecrow-like apparition. It had no legs, which didn’t matter since legs wouldn’t be visible from outside anyway.

Jigger, with Jenny’s help, had another decoy, wearing Jigger’s hat seated behind the desk. “I reckon if we leave one lamp burning but turned down low and the shutter just cracked a bit, it might work. Anybody with a lick of sense would see through it in a hurry, but nobody ever accused the Shoops of having any sense.”

“The trick is going to be slipping outside when they aren’t looking.”

“That’s where I can help.” Jenny adjusted Jigger’s hat on the straw-filled bag that made up the decoy’s head. “I can find out if they’re still in the saloon, then come back and give you a signal.”

“If they’re not in the saloon,” Jigger added dryly, “you’d better give us a signal, too.”

Jenny nodded before easing through the doorway.

The wait was interminable. Cassie bit her thumbnail while Jigger rubbed his broken wrist over and over.

Ben, where are you right now? Have you found Amanda? Are you on your way home yet? I don’t want to let you down. I’m scared
.

Two soft taps on the door alerted her. The Shoops were still in the saloon. They could slip out without notice.

Jigger gathered up his scattergun while Cassie turned down the lamp until the small flame illuminated only a small area on the corner of the desk. Leaving the window shutter open a couple of inches, she followed Jigger through the door.

“We’ll go around the back.” His whisper barely reached her. Jigger amazed her with the light-footed way he moved in spite of his bulk and the heavy gun. His bald spot reflected the moonlight. She kept on his heels as they entered the alley between the jail and the harness shop.

Jenny was waiting for them. “They’re still in the saloon, but they were paying the bartender when I peeked in. I think they might be getting ready to go.”

Cassie surveyed the area. “I want to be able to see the jail from all sides, so Jigger, you find a place to hide back here where you can see down the alley and along the back. Jenny, how about you and I set up over at the bakery. If we keep the place dark, we can watch out the windows and see the front and the other side of the jail. That way they can’t sneak up on the place.”

“If you see them, don’t move too soon. We want to catch them in the act of setting up the explosives.” Jigger broke open the shotgun, checked his loads, and snapped the gun shut. “And don’t forget, it’s more than just Melvin and Alvin. Ivan might be out there somewhere, too. There’s always a chance he left the little girl somewhere out on the prairie and doubled back.”

Jenny bit back a sob, pressing the back of her hand to her lips.

“Sorry, ma’am, but it might be the way the wind is blowing, and we have to be prepared.” Jigger faded into the shadows.

Cassie peeked out onto the main street, holding Jenny’s hand as they ran across the open space and into the bakery. Once inside, she studied the front of the jail. Faint light shone around the shutter edges, and she could see the brim of Jigger’s hat.

A rider went by, his horse’s hooves clopping on the hard-packed dirt. Cassie observed him, trying to see if she recognized either the man or the mount. Jenny touched her arm. “That’s Hawk, a foreman at one of the local ranches. He and his men helped me move some feed my first day down at the stable.”

“The Shoops might not come until very late. If it was me, I would want to wait until most everybody was asleep.”

“Do you think Amanda is out there on the prairie all alone?”

Cassie chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “I don’t know. He couldn’t have known the twins were in that tree or that they would recognize him. If he’d taken her to that hovel the Shoops call a ranch, Ben and Carl would’ve found her and been back by now.”

Please, God, let them find her safe and sound. And help us to stop all the Shoops before anyone gets hurt
.

Jenny squeezed her hand, her eyes closed and her lips moving. Cassie squeezed back, knowing their prayers were intertwined.

The already-quiet town settled even further into nighttime somnolence. Lamps went out, window shades were pulled, music from the saloon quit at midnight as per the town ordinance. Cassie stretched and paced every so often to stay alert.

Just past one in the morning, she peered over the café rod and frilly lace curtain, blinking to focus her tired eyes. Something moved in the shadows in front of the harness shop.

“Jenny, look.”

Her friend shot out of her chair and came to the window. “Is it Carl with Amanda?”

Her plea sent a shaft of pain slicing through Cassie. “No, I think there’s someone hiding in the doorway of the harness shop.”

Jenny peered hard but shook her head. “I can’t see anyone. It’s too dark.”

Cassie grasped her elbow. “Look, coming from the other direction.” This time the shifting shadow was easier to see, man-shaped and sinister as it slunk along the shop fronts on the east end of town. She made out the squarish shape of a box in his arms. Her breath stopped up in her throat, and she found herself gripping the butt of the gun Ben had given her. “That has to be them.”