Trail of Golden Dreams (4 page)

Josie’s eyes widened, and her fingers clamped tightly around the trigger
of the derringer hidden behind her back.  She didn’t want to shoot the
preacher, but she would, if he came at her.  When he took another step,
she said, “Don’t come any closer.  I’m warning you.  I’ll kill you if
you try to lay a hand on me.” 

The preacher laughed, a hearty laugh that filled the barn and might have
caused her to smile in another situation. “You will kill me?” he chided. 
“Why, you’re just a wisp of a little girl. You could barely fill a
thimble.  How are
you
gonna kill
me
?”

She brought her arm out from behind her back.  With the derringer
exposed, she replied, “With this.  I don’t want to, but I will.  I
know how to shoot.  I’m my father’s daughter, in case you’ve forgotten.”

For a fleeting moment, the expression on the preacher’s face
changed.  His eyelids drooped and his lips curved down, like he’d been
defeated.  Then he lunged.  With the swiftness and strength of a
lion, he batted the gun out of her hand.  Dropping to her knees, she
scrambled after it.  The preacher kicked the derringer away with the toe
of his boot.  Then his hand flew to her cheek, and the smack rang through
the barn rafters.  She fell into a mound of hay and moaned.

He stumbled toward the mule and wrestled to remove her leather bags from
the saddle horn, but had difficulty accomplishing the task in his inebriated
state. 

The gun had slid somewhere out of Josie’s sight.  She ignored the
pain from the slap and glanced around the barn searching for any kind of
weapon.  Keeping an eye poised on the preacher, who cussed in a
non-preacher-like fashion, she stumbled to her feet and made a dash to the wall
where a shovel hung on a peg. He turned the moment she brought it down on his
head. A mangled cry exited his throat before he sunk into a heap on the
ground. 

Traveler brayed. 

“It’s alright, boy,” Josie told the mule, rubbing his neck.  “It’s
all over now.” She dropped to the hay-strewn floor again and madly searched for
the derringer.  Finding it deep in the hay, she stuck it in the waistband
of her skirt and stood over the preacher’s body.  He bled from the head,
but his chest rose and fell in an erratic rhythm, so she knew she hadn’t killed
him. 

“Now, what am I suppose to do?” she asked Traveler.  “Ride all the
way back to town to get the marshal?  Will he believe me when I tell him
what happened?  What if the preacher wakes up and isn’t here when I
return?  I don’t think Marshal Kendall is the kind of man who wants his
time wasted.  I don’t want to deal with him anyway.”

How she wished
Traveler could talk so he could help her out of this fix by giving her some
sound advice.  His big liquid brown eyes empathized with her—the next best
thing.  Placing her hand on the saddlebags, she asked the obvious question
out loud. “Was this what he was after?  There aren’t but a few coins in
there.  Is the preacher so desperate for money that he’s taken to
robbing?”  She wondered what the world was coming to when a minister would
steal from a young woman after he had just presided over her dead pa’s
funeral.  She stared down at his unconscious body with a frown on her
lips.

With her ire up and boiling, she took hold of the man’s boots and
attempted to drag him to the corner of the barn, but he was dead weight. 
She dropped his legs and sighed.  Traveler’s ears flopped back. 

“What is it, boy?”  Listening closely, she could hear the stampeding
of horse hooves in the distance. 

Now what?
 

She hurriedly untied the mule and led him to the barn door. The animal
carefully stepped over the preacher’s body with nary a glance down. 
“Shhh,” she warned.  Her body trembled as she watched a posse ride up to the
cabin.  She counted four figures, but couldn’t make out their faces, which
were shrouded by the cover of darkness.

Two men jumped off their horses, kicked open the door, and entered the
cabin while the other two waited on their mounts.  The men who were in her
home carried gas lanterns.  Through the glass window, eerie light bounced
around as they strode between the three rooms.  One of them filled the
front doorframe with his bulk and hollered, “She’s not in here!”

“Search for the saddlebags.”  A man on one of the horses gave the
order.  His voice was deep and sounded vaguely familiar.  A moment
later, the two men exited the cabin.  There was not a hint of a breeze in
the air. From across the yard, Josie could hear their words as clearly as if
they were standing right next to her talking in her ear. 

“They’re not in there.  She must not be back from town yet.”

“She left hours ago,” a third voice said.  “Where else would she
be?”

“Maybe she stayed at the hotel for the night.”

“She didn’t stay in Dry Gulch.  We saw her leave town.”

“Then, where is she?”

Josie detected three different voices, but the only one she recognized
for sure was Del Emmerson’s drawl.  She could only assume the marshal was
also among them. 

Why are they looking for my saddlebags?

Her eyes flew to the pouches that still hung over the saddle horn. 
The preacher had also gone after them. What was in them that had brought her
two sets of intruders tonight? In her mind, she swiftly inventoried the items
she had thrown in before leaving for town: a pair of pants, an extra shirt, her
canteen, and a few personal necessities in case she decided to stay at the
hotel after the hanging.  There wasn’t enough money in there to shake a
stick at, so what was it the preacher and a posse were looking for? 

It struck her like a bolt of lightning.  The only other thing in the
bags was the envelope Ben had given her.  She hadn’t bothered to open it,
figuring she would read the letter from her pa later, once she’d gotten back home
and had time to give it proper attention. In the jail, he’d told her it wasn’t
a letter.  If it wasn’t a letter in the envelope, then what was it?

Whatever it was, the preacher and these men wanted it.

The preacher began to moan softly.  Josie glanced down and wondered
if she was going to have to bash him again.  His eyes fluttered open
briefly, and then closed again. 

“Stay asleep, you drunken fool,” she whispered
. 
She gazed
back across the barnyard to her cabin. 

One of the men had gone inside again.  When he came out he repeated,
“Nothing, boss.  Now what?”

“Light it up!” the stocky man on the horse yelled.

Josie’s fist flew to her mouth
. 
She bit her lips together
hard to keep from screaming
. 
A man on the ground mounted his
horse, and he and the other two riders backed away from the cabin as the man on
the ground prepared to torch the house.

“Go ahead, Garrett.  Do it!”

On that command, the one called Garrett heaved one of the gas lanterns
through the cabin window.  Josie covered her ears as the glass shattered.
Garrett ran like the wind and jumped on his horse as her home-sewn calico
curtains caught fire.  The little place was engulfed in hot, orange flames
within a matter of minutes.  She watched with a sick stomach as black
smoke curled into the sky and licked at the sultry spring air. 
Mama’s
bowl…
Her eyes began to well.

Traveler started to
fidget and dance in place.  Fire was his only fear.  When he called
out in his loud hee-haw, four heads pivoted.  “She’s in the barn!” someone
yelled.

“Get her!” another
man barked.

Josie planted her
foot in the stirrup and hauled herself into the saddle.  “Yaw!” she
hollered.  The mule rocketed out of the barn.  She reined him tight
around the corner, and he sprang over the downed limbs of the pinon tree. Kicking
him hard, she made the split-second decision to head north into the
wilderness. 

As her faithful
companion high-tailed it down the trail, she didn’t dare look back, even with
the thunderous sound of pounding hooves booming in her ears.

Chapter Four

Josie hoped to
lose the posse in the forest, which she knew like the back of her hand, even in
the dark.  With four riders to one, the odds were stacked against her for
escape, but she depended on her secret weapon—Traveler.  Mules needed less
water than horses, had stronger, tougher feet, and became less winded. A mule’s
tough physical and mental qualities inherited from his donkey father accounted
for more durability overall than his horse counterpart.  Traveler would not
let her down.

The mule’s
pancake-sized hooves pounded the ground as he raced for the trees.  “Good
boy!” she yelled.  “Keep running!”  She glanced behind, and was
disappointed, but not surprised to see the horsemen remained in hot pursuit.

Glimpsing the
shadowy opening into the forest ahead, she yanked on Traveler’s bit, and he
turned on a dime. Trees thick with leaves formed a canopy over the pair as she
loped the animal down a wide path littered with pine needles. Pine trees and
firs stood like tall, proud soldiers on each side of the path.

Traveler snorted,
but was barely breathing hard. Josie lifted her gaze and saw rays of moonlight
streaming through the slim cracks between the dense fence-line of trees.
 After firing up a prayer for the angels to get her out of this jam, she
lowered her weary gaze back to the trail just in time to grab the saddle horn
and hang on for dear life. Traveler jumped several feet up and glided through
the air like an eagle. After his hooves hit the ground again with a thud, he continued
trotting down the path without a misstep.

Josie looked over her
shoulder. Squinting, she tried to figure out what was stretched across the
trail that Traveler had just leaped over.  With his excellent eyesight and
inclination not to panic, he had cleared the rope, or crawling vine, or
whatever it was, with ease and prevented them from a serious mishap.  She
enthusiastically patted the side of his head.  “Good boy!”

She wondered if
the posse would be as lucky.  They were hot on her heels, but horses were
not as cautious as mules. This was exactly the chance she needed.  Just
ahead was a break in the forest.  It was a spot she knew well. 
Deviating from the corridor she was on, she veered the mule into a dense
thicket where they could not be seen. 

“Whoa, boy.” 
She reined him in, and he stopped. Quietly catching her breath, she waited and
watched. Her chest burned, and adrenaline surged through her body.  Just
as she hoped, the four horsemen were unable to change course quickly enough.
The terrified whinnies of their mounts pierced the night as the horses ran full
force into the line and collided with one another.  Three of the four men
were bucked off their horses and tossed to the ground. One was trampled as the
frightened animals stomped and panicked amidst the chaos.  Peering out
from her hiding place, Josie watched as one horse ran off, dragging what looked
like a long rope behind him.  His rider limped after him on an injured
foot.  She assumed the rope was what had been stretched across the
path.  If it was, she was pretty sure someone had intentionally set a
trap.  But who had set it? And why?  And for whom was the trap
intended?

Her gaze rotated
from side to side, and she froze.  Wild imaginings of who or what might be
lurking in the forest suddenly filled her head.  If a renegade Indian was
nearby, she had far more problems on her hands than the posse wanting her
saddlebags.

Josie’s gaze
jerked back to the men when she heard Del say, “Harp’s hurt bad, Wade.  He’s
bleeding and I think he’s got broken bones.  I need help getting him onto
his horse.” 

The man who had
been chasing his runaway animal limped over.  “I’ll help ya, Del.” 

“Are you sure you
can put weight on that foot to lift him?”

“I think
so.” 

Del jumped off his
paint, and the two of them maneuvered the injured fellow over his own saddle,
with his nose pointing to the ground.  Josie heard no moaning or groaning
coming from that man, so she didn’t know if he was dead or alive. She watched
as Del tied his horse to the man’s appaloosa before he hauled his weight back
onto his steed.

The lame man on
the ground stumbled and cursed a blue streak. “Dammit.  I think my foot’s
busted!  That saddle cost me a month’s wages, and I paid thirty dollars
for that daggone mare. What the hell am I supposed to ride now?”

“Shut up, Garrett,
and get on the back with Emmerson, unless you want to camp in the woods
tonight.” 

Josie recognized
that deep voice.  The man barking the orders definitely was Marshal
Kendall. He’d been the only one to stay in his saddle and was apparently in no
mood to listen to whiners.  He reined his horse next to Del’s paint. 
Garrett shut his mouth and hobbled over to Del, who offered him a hand up onto
the back of his horse.

Garrett was the one
who’d burned her house down.   Josie ground her teeth together as she
recalled a boy she went to school with by the name of Jimmy Garrett. He’d been
a shy kid, and everyone had called him Slim Jim because he’d been so tall and
spindly.  She hadn’t seen Jimmy in years, but now she was sure it was the
same person.  He had destroyed her home and now he suffered from a busted
foot.  “What goes around comes around, Slim Jim,” she mumbled under her
breath.  “That’s what you get for turning to a life of crime.”

Traveler twitched
beneath her.  She patted his neck and prayed for him to stay silent. When
she looked up, she saw Kendall staring into the thicket.  Even in the
dark, she could feel his cold eyes searching her out. She didn’t dare move a
muscle.

Del broke the
silence.  “We lost her, Wade.  She’s long gone.  What are we
gonna do now?”

The marshal’s
voice sounded as hard as gravel. “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. 
We’re gonna go back to Dry Gulch and get some fresh horses.”