“Didn’t mean any offense,” he went on. “I’ve heard about you folks. The way those damned Britishers treated you never seemed right to me.”
He might as well make them think he was on their side, he told himself. That was the quickest, easiest way to worm himself into their confidence and find out what was going on.
Charlotte got a tin cup out of their gear and lifted a coffeepot from the edge of the fire. She poured the last of the coffee in the pot into the cup and handed it to Palmer.
“Thank you,” he said with a smile. He knew he wasn’t a particularly handsome man, but he was big and rugged-looking and women seemed to respond to him when he smiled.
Charlotte Marat was no different. She lowered her eyes and blushed.
“What are you doing out here?” Joseph Marat demanded, still scowling suspiciously at Palmer.
“I could ask the same thing of you, you know,” Palmer responded. He sipped the coffee, which was bitter and had grounds in it. He didn’t let his face show how bad it tasted.
“Our business is our own,” Marat said.
“Likewise.” Palmer shrugged. “I don’t mind telling you that I’m on my way to Calgary, though. I’ve heard that some friends of mine have gone into business around there. I thought maybe I’d join up with them.”
That was actually true. The criminal grapevine that stretched across even vast areas of frontier wilderness had carried the rumors that Owen Lundy and Jericho Blake were operating in Calgary now. Palmer had worked with Lundy and Blake in Chicago, before they had all moved farther west and north, and he figured they could probably use another good man.
But they would be even more likely to let him throw in with them if he already had a lucrative scheme lined up.
These two innocents might be the key to that.
“If you’re headed to Calgary,” Palmer went on, “maybe we could travel together. On the frontier, it’s always safer for a group.”
With a stubborn look on his face, Marat began, “Our destination is—”
“Your own business, I know,” Palmer cut in. “Look, if you want, I’ll go back to my horses and won’t bother you folks anymore. I don’t like sticking my nose in where it’s not wanted.”
“It’s not that, M’sieu Palmer,” Charlotte said. “It’s just that we are engaged on a matter of great importance. We must be careful about everything we do.”
Her brother glared at her, as if she had already said more than he wanted her to.
Palmer took another sip of the bad coffee and nodded. “Hey, at least I got to see some more humans. This is lonely country, and a man gets tired of looking at nothing but elk and moose.” He drank the last of the coffee and managed not to grimace. “I’ll be pushing on, I guess.”
“Good luck to you in Calgary,” Marat said, but his surly tone made it clear that he didn’t mean it.
“And good luck to you in whatever you’re doing.” Palmer handed the empty cup to Charlotte and smiled again. He nodded, adding, “So long.”
He left the camp, making quite a bit of racket as he tramped through the woods. That was just for show, because he stopped when he was a couple of hundred yards away and listened intently. He heard them moving around and talking to each other, and a few moments later, the sound of horses’ hooves drifted through the night air. The orange glow of the fire was gone now.
They were moving their camp. Palmer wasn’t the least bit surprised. He had expected Marat to insist on it.
It didn’t matter. They might be native to this land, but he had cunning to spare and never lost a trail when there was the promise of a payoff at the end of it. He would find them again and track them until he discovered what was going on here. The delay would give any pursuers coming after him more of a chance to catch up, but it couldn’t be helped.
Whatever Marat and his sister were up to, Palmer intended to cut himself in on it.
And when he had done that … well, maybe he would just take himself a share of pretty little Charlotte as well.
Chapter 9
Frank, Salty, and Meg took up the trail again the next morning, riding east through the mountains. The terrain was rough enough to make their progress frustratingly slow.
That frustration increased when Salty’s horse pulled up lame in the middle of the day. When the horse began to limp, Salty let loose with a flood of angry exclamations that sounded like curses even though they actually weren’t.
“Take it easy,” Frank told him.
“Take it easy?” the old-timer repeated incredulously after he had dismounted and checked his horse’s bad leg. “We’re gonna have to let this jughead rest a day or two. Wouldn’t do no good to switch out the packs on one o’ the mules and slap a saddle on it. Those supplies weigh just about as much as I do, so it wouldn’t help the hoss to have to carry ‘em.” He jerked his battered old hat off and slammed it down on the ground in exasperation. “That varmint Palmer’s gonna get that much farther ahead of us!”
“We’ll make up the time,” Frank said, “and even if we don’t, we know where he’s headed. We’ll just have to catch up to him in Calgary, that’s all.”
“It’s gonna be that much harder to find him once he gets to a settlement,” Salty pointed out. “Calgary’s big enough he’ll be able to find a place to hide.”
Frank couldn’t argue with that. He just said, “We’ll find him, Salty. You’ve got my word on that.”
They dismounted, unsaddled the horses, and took the packs off the mules.
“If we had to make camp sooner than we expected, this isn’t a bad place to do it,” Meg said as she looked around.
She was right about that. The ground was fairly level and there was an open stretch along the bank of the creek, with evergreens towering above it. The valley was narrow here, running between rocky, steep-sided slopes.
Frank took a can of liniment from one of their packs and massaged the thick, foul-smelling stuff into the tight muscle on the bad leg of Salty’s horse.
“That’ll help,” he said. “In the meantime, we might as well take it easy.”
Salty looked as if that was going to be a difficult task for him. He was still muttering to himself as he sat down, leaned against a large rock, and pulled his hat down over his eyes.
Frank grinned and shook his head at the old-timer’s chagrin. He understood why Salty felt the way he did, but there was nothing that could be done about it.
“I think I’ll take a walk up the creek,” he said as he pulled his Winchester from its sheath. “Might find some game. We could have elk steaks tonight.”
Meg said, “We won’t need a fire tonight, but I suppose I’ll go ahead and start gathering some wood.”
“Keep your eyes open,” Frank advised. “You wouldn’t want to run into a bear.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said with a smile.
With the repeater tucked under his arm, Frank walked along the stream. Between the twists and turns it took and the way the trees closed in, he was soon out of sight of the camp.
In fact, as far as he could tell by looking, he might as well have been the only human being in five hundred miles.
Frank didn’t mind the solitude. In fact, he liked it.
He’d had no choice but to get used to being alone, since so many of his long years had been spent that way. Too many days and nights had been spent far from anywhere and anyone, trying to avoid trouble.
Many times he had been on the run from a posse led by some overzealous lawman who blamed him for crimes he hadn’t committed, simply because he had a reputation as a fast gun. When that happened, he sometimes asked himself … if he was going to be damned anyway, why not go ahead and become the sort of man they thought he was?
But he couldn’t, of course. It wasn’t in him to be an owlhoot. He hadn’t been raised that way.