Wildfire in His Arms (15 page)

“W
E
'
RE GOING TO BUTTE
,” Degan said by her ear.

We?
They were a block away from the brothel. Max stopped struggling instantly, but she sure as hell didn't understand what he was up to. And
why
couldn't he have told her that sooner? Like two days ago when they'd left his hotel room? His lack of communication was going to be
his
downfall one of these days.

And he wasn't just feeding her hope to get her to stop struggling. He took her straight to the stable to get her horse. But she only got a moment to hug Noble and to be happy to have him back before Degan grabbed her hands and wrapped a rope around them again. She was surprised he'd waited so long to tie her up. Having eluded him, she knew he wasn't going to trust her out of his reach now. She was still able to mount by herself, and with him holding her reins again, he led her out of town along the southern trail, the one that extended all the way to Utah and was used to freight supplies to Montana Territory from the far west.

She waited until Helena was far behind them before she let her curiosity loose on him. “You and the sheriff back there don't get along? So you're taking me to another one?”

“We'll be in Butte by tonight.”

“That's more'n a hundred miles from here!”

“Maybe half that, give or take a few. If you had read the marshal's notes, you would know that Kid Cade was last seen around Butte.”

“So you
are
going to collect all three of us before turning any of us in?”

He didn't answer that one, but she realized, he wasn't answering her other two questions, either. If she had her own reins, she'd stop right there. But she didn't have that luxury. And she was beginning to figure out that talking to him was not only more aggravation but more trouble than it was worth. So she stopped and just enjoyed that, for whatever reason, she wasn't in a jail cell yet.

He had been pacing the horses between some brisk cantering, some annoying trotting, and a little walking, so they were making good time without tiring the animals and didn't turn off the road to rest until midafternoon. Her stomach had been rumbling for the last hour, but she'd continued to hold her tongue and was going to keep that up until
he
got around to asking her something, so
she
could have the pleasure of not replying. Best-laid plans . . .

Degan took them to a small knoll with quite a few shade trees and smaller flowering trees and bushes scattered around it. It wasn't so far off the road that they couldn't still see it below them. They had only passed a few other riders so far, mostly to and from the gold camps that were south of Helena, a few wagons, an oxen-driven cart, and beyond the camps a couple cowboys who looked more like drifters and left the road to go around Degan. Max snickered as she watched them. Degan didn't seem to notice.

After Degan untied her hands, she dismounted and stretched her legs by walking in circles around the knoll so Degan wouldn't think she was about to run off. In the sunny parts, the ground was covered with purple lupines and yellow black-eyed Susans. Max saw a stagecoach racing down the road below them. Luckily, she and Degan had just missed getting doused in its dust. She wondered about the passengers inside the coach. This was a major route for settlers entering the territory. The stage ran between Virginia City to the south and Fort Benton on the Missouri River up north. They'd already passed the little town of Boulder less than an hour ago, which had grown up around one of the stage stops. Boulder had marked the halfway point to Butte, so they just might reach it by nightfall after all, since the sun didn't set until around nine o'clock at this time of year.

Degan was untying a sack from his saddle. She might have offered to hunt up some food if she wasn't still determined not to talk to him anymore. She smelled the fresh bread before he pulled the loaf out of the sack. He broke it in two and tossed her half. He brought out a round of cheese next and broke that in half, too.

“
Don't
toss that!” She moved forward to take it from him.

She waited there to see if anything else was coming out of the sack, but he started eating, so she went over to a big oak tree and sat down there, resting her back against the trunk, and did the same. Plain fare and yet it tasted so good. She rarely got to eat bread and cheese, and she savored every bite.

Degan finished eating first and opened his friend's leather satchel and took out all the posters. He came over to the tree she was leaning against and sat beside her. Their shoulders were nearly touching, but she didn't move.

Sated and lulled by the sounds of the singing birds and buzzing bees, she momentarily forgot her vow of silence. Glancing at the papers in his hands, she asked, “What are you trying to figure out?”

“I told you that I need three of you before I can call John's favor paid and move on.”

Max decided it might be to her benefit if he had other outlaws to pick from in case she could still figure out how to talk her way out of being one of the three, so she reversed her earlier decision not to help him and grabbed the papers out of his hands.

Thumbing through them, she pulled out a poster. “This fellow holes up in Colorado. I was in that state long enough to see him more'n once over the course of eight months. He had a young girl with him both times. Seemed like a family man to me, not a bank robber.”

“Appearances can be deceiving.”

She gave him a nasty look, knowing full well that remark was directed at her, but he was looking at the poster she'd indicated, not at her, so she pointed to another poster. “This Bixford fellow they call Red Charley, I've heard folks talking about him a few times—in fear. The way he kills, by blowing up buildings and everything in them, you don't see him coming, which is why people hope he gets caught before he wanders up this way.”

“An unusual method of killing.”

With that being Degan's only comment about the vicious outlaw, she pulled out another poster to show him. “Now
this
one actually shared a camp with me early this spring when I was making my way slowly through Wyoming. I stopped before dark to hunt up my dinner, had a rabbit and two trout roasting, which is what drew him my way.”

“You fish?”

“Not in the usual way, no, least, not since I left home. I used to carry a little net with me until I had to break camp fast one night and left it behind. But I still had the net that day when I was following a stream teeming with fish. Anyways, this man looked hungry, probably was, since we were so far from any towns, and I had more'n enough to share. Didn't know he was wanted by the law. Didn't recognize his name when he gave it. He seemed harmless enough and was traveling alone.”

“So you're in the habit of taking in any stray that comes along?”

She detected a note of disapproval in his voice. He obviously didn't know what it was like to have to avoid civilization, to not see or talk to another person for months.

“Hell no. But as you might have guessed, I like to talk, and I hadn't spoken to anyone but myself or Noble in ages, and Noble doesn't exactly talk back, so I made an exception. I didn't sleep that night. I'm not
that
trusting. But he took off in the morning and I stayed another day in that camp to catch up on my sleep.”

“I assume you learned something about him to have mentioned him?”

“These notes say he was last seen in Arizona, but he said he spent the winter in Montana getting a spell of gold fever out of his system. He did approach from the north and headed south when he left. But he said he was heading home to Kansas, that his brother had a farm there. You might want to add that to your friend's notes—unless you think I'm lying about that, too.”

He didn't confirm or deny it, just asked her, “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Willie Nolan and his gang aren't hitting the railroads in Kansas anymore. These days, he and his boys prefer the Northern Pacific line over in the Dakota Territory just east of here.”

He took the poster from her. “Really?”

“You find that interesting?”

“A friend of mine was robbed on that train on her way to Nashart this year.”

Her? So he did have women friends in each town just as she'd guessed? That annoyed her and she wasn't sure why. Of course she didn't need to have a reason to be annoyed with Degan Grant. She'd have more trouble finding a reason
not
to be annoyed with him.

But his mentioning women friends reminded her of the one who had inadvertently helped her to escape. “Who is the fancy lady who was so happy to see you in Helena?”

He finally glanced at Max, but she wished he hadn't. She could almost feel the sudden coldness coming off him. “No one important.”

“Really?”

He wasn't going to explain. Instead he asked, “How do you know the Nolan gang is in Dakota?”

“Don't you dare try to pin train robbery on me,” she growled.

“It was a simple question, Max.”

Now she was touchy? She huffed before saying, “I heard a couple miners talking 'bout it when I went to one of the Helena camps to trade for some lantern fuel. One of them came to Montana on the Northern Pacific and had to sit through one of those robberies. He used to live in Kansas and recognized two of the robbers as members of the Nolan gang.”

“It's Will Nolan who's wanted by the law. Did the miner see him during the robbery?”

“No idea. I only heard him telling his friend who was leaving the territory not to take anything on that train ride that he wouldn't mind losing, or to use a different route instead. And that's why he went into that long story about getting robbed on that train and who did it.”

They both heard the posse riding down the road from the north at about the same instant. So much for her stay of execution. One of the deputies must have recognized her as they rode out of Helena.

“Don't look so glum,” Degan said as he stood up. “They aren't coming for you.”

“How do you know?”

“I recognize that white stallion. Jacob Reed rides one just like it.”

“Never heard of him. Who is he?”

“I shot his brother a few years back. It was a fair fight. Jacob was even there to see it was, but he's still got a powerful urge to kill me for it. He tried that day, rode after me on that stallion.”

“And yet he still lives?”

Degan shrugged. “He was in a rage from his grief. I wasn't going to kill him for that. I hoped a couple wounds would make him see reason, but all it did was send him back to town for a doctor. I found out last year that he's been looking for me ever since.”

“And getting mighty close by the looks of it. Or maybe he ain't following you today.”

“I wouldn't count on it. I've been in Montana too long and a lot of people know it. And someone shot at me in Helena. I had a feeling it might be Reed. Get behind the tree.” He moved the horses a little farther down the other side of the knoll. “I'd rather not deal with Jacob and his friends while I have you in tow.”

“ 'Fraid I'll catch a stray bullet?”

“No, afraid I'll have to shoot you when you take advantage of my distraction and run.”

She chuckled. “Course I would run. But I could've taken care of your Reed problem if you didn't empty my bags of all my rifle bullets. I could have picked off all five of them as they rode by.”

“So you are a killer?”

Did he sound disappointed?
Him?
She snorted. “I hit exactly what I aim at, and a wound to each of them would have sent them back to Boulder for the nearest doctor.”

“Or started a shoot-out that could have lasted until dark.”

That could have been a possibility if she didn't shoot to really hurt them, so she conceded his point and mentioned instead, “There's a trail near here that will take us through the hills directly south. There's a couple decent-sized lakes down that way.”

“How do you know so much about the western part of the territory? I thought you came up here through Wyoming.”

“I did, but we're only a few hours' ride from the shack I was using. I couldn't risk going into Helena more than once a week so I kept busy by exploring. It's useful to know where gulches and big rivers and lakes are located. Might take us an extra hour or so before we can wind back toward Butte, but the trail through the hills will keep us from catching up to that bunch on this main route.”

“Or we could just wait here a little longer.”

“Or you could just go kill Jacob Reed and be done with it. 'Sides, you won't actually find Kid Cade
in
Butte. He knows he's wanted by the law, so he'll be avoiding towns like I do. But if he's around these parts, he'll need to be near water, and there's plenty tween here and Butte, just east of the road your friends are traveling on. Chances are, you're going to end up searching this area anyway. Who knows, you might get lucky and be able to turn both of us over to the Butte sheriff tonight.”

“Come mount up.”

She glanced around the tree to make sure Reed and his friends were gone before she started toward her horse. But he grabbed her arm and pulled her over to his palomino.

“What—?”

“You can't lead the way if I'm pulling you along behind me.”

Ride
with
him? She started to back away, but didn't look behind her first. She tripped on a large rock, fell, and actually rolled a few feet, crushing flowers and getting poked by acorns that had fallen from the oak tree. But that's not all she'd disturbed. She heard the bees before she felt them and panicked at the first sting on her upper arm. She leapt to her feet, slapped at her arms, her head, her legs. She thought she might have gotten them all off her until she felt another sting on the back of her neck and yanked her vest off to use it to swat behind her.