He moved through the house quietly, each step taken like he was inches away from the enemy, fearful that he would wake Lyle.
Safe, he continued outside to the privy. Before stepping inside, he reached down and slid his Bowie out of his belt, then threw open the door, expecting Big Shirt or Liam O’Reilly to be staring back at him, his own Winchester in one of their hands.
It would only take one shot at close range to end everything. Josiah wasn’t taking any undue chances. Those voices on the wind might just be real.
There was nothing inside the privy except the normal stink after a warm day.
At any other time, Josiah would have laughed out loud at himself. But he didn’t. He took Juan Carlos’s warning seriously, knew firsthand what O’Reilly and the Comanche were capable of.
The city would not fend them off. Probably the opposite. Most likely, they had rat holes that they shared with other outlaws, escape routes throughout all of Austin, where they could flee, unseen. Josiah was sure of it.
His business complete, Josiah stepped back outside and stopped to make sure everything in the surrounding area remained as it should. His fingers tingled.
The sky was clear, the stars staring innocently down at him. The bored dog continued to bark at its regular interval. Way off in the distance, piano music tinkled upward into the air out of a saloon. The world continued on while Josiah was fighting with shadows and threats that were not real—at the moment.
From where he was standing, all Josiah could see was one roof after another, a line of houses in all four directions; no mountains in the distance, no piney forests, no broad vistas, just human life up close.
He felt like a bull locked in a stall so tight that he couldn’t move or breathe. He had to wonder again if making the move from Seerville to Austin had been worth it. If the risk and the sacrifice would give Lyle a better life after all or if he was just fooling himself.
Neither of them was any safer in the city than they had been in the country. Maybe less so.
Right now, he felt like a fool, defeated. And he knew he couldn’t let that feeling last . . . or he would drop his guard, overreact, and end up a dead man. Defeat—giving up—was just as much a poison as fear was, and Josiah knew it.
Shaking off the negative blanket of thought, Josiah eased back into the house.
He checked on Lyle, who had not moved, then set about bringing darkness to the small house. Once the last hurricane lamp was extinguished, he stood in the center of the house and let his eyes adjust to the fullness of night.
He did not know the shadows very well in the little house, had spent little time there—and when he had been there, Ofelia was in charge.
Scrap was right, she was more like his wife than a wet nurse. Josiah wondered if Ofelia felt that way. She had never implied that she minded the way things were—they both had agreed that they would know when the day came to change things.
Maybe it was time, Josiah thought.
He headed into the room where Lyle was sleeping and checked on the boy one last time. He was lost in dreamland, eyes pinched shut, the thin blanket gripped in his tiny hand.
Josiah’s bed was on the other side of the room—in actuality only a few feet away from Lyle’s bed. He pulled off his clothes, not thinking a thing about it, letting them fall to the floor.
It wasn’t until he was completely out of the clothes that he realized—remembered—that the clothes didn’t belong to him. They were Charlie Webb’s clothes.
He bundled up the shirt and pants and set them next to the bed gently, thinking that he had to save them from harm, they did not belong to him, they were on loan. Someday he would take the opportunity to return them to Charlie’s widow.
Billie Webb had been kind and generous to him, and as he settled into bed, he stared up through the window at the moon and wondered if she was all right, safe from harm. He wondered what would become of her and her newborn baby. She was not that much different than he was now. Alone in the world with more responsibility than she should have had to handle. But something told Josiah that Billie could handle whatever came her way. Like him, she had no choice.
With images of Billie weighing heavily in his mind, Josiah quickly drifted off to sleep.
He sat straight up at the first sound.
The moon had fallen from the sky, and the room was totally black now. It was the middle of the night, silent beyond the sound that had woken him up. Any dream that may have pulled at Josiah slipped away, out of his grasp and memory, just like the images of Lily. He hadn’t been dreaming of her, he was sure of it—knew how that felt when he woke; like there was a hole in his chest and fire in his loins.
Out of instinct, his hand went to the empty side of the bed, always—still—checking for Lily to be there. The waste of time and motion could have proven costly since the thump that had woken him up in the first place happened again, only this time it was louder.
Josiah reached to the floor for the Colt Frontier, eased the hammer back, and aimed the barrel toward the door, all the while listening carefully for the next sound.
It only took a couple of heartbeats before the next thud came. Somebody was on the front porch.
As he eased out of bed, Lyle stirred. Josiah stopped, caught his breath, then slid past the boy’s bed and out into the front room. He hugged the wall and saw a shadow move across the window.
Two heavy footsteps stopped just outside the door.
The heavy knock on the door surprised Josiah. He wasn’t expecting it. He was expecting somebody to kick in the door and rush in, guns blazing.
“You in there, Wolfe!”
Josiah recognized the voice just as Lyle started to scream, startled out of his sleep in the middle of the night by the loud knock on the door. In a flash, Josiah went from protector, ready to kill, to angry as a bull—ready to kill.
“Come on, Wolfe. Wake up!” It was Scrap Elliot. And he was obviously as drunk as a cowboy fresh off the trail.
CHAPTER 24
Josiah lit a lamp, washing the house in a quick, bright light, then swung open the front door. He did not hesitate like he had with Juan Carlos, unsure and fearful that the Mexican was not alone. He didn’t care if Scrap wasn’t alone—didn’t care if the late night rousing was a trick and Scrap was O’Reilly’s ploy. The Colt was still in his hand, any fear lost, replaced with anger, close enough to erupt into an urge to kill. He couldn’t remember being so mad.
Scrap was leaning on the jamb, trying to hold himself up, smiling crookedly at Josiah. He smelled like he’d washed every part of his body in whiskey for the last week. He was pickled.
Lyle screamed at the top of his lungs from his bed.
“Get in here.” Josiah grabbed Scrap’s shirt collar and pulled him inside.
Scrap stumbled inside the door, crashing to the floor with a whoop, holler, and cackle. Lyle screamed even louder. Josiah looked out the door, up and down the street, and didn’t see hide nor hair of any living creature except Scrap’s blue roan mare, Missy, who was standing nervously in front of the house.
The damned horse wasn’t even tied to the post. A clue to how drunk Scrap really was. He never mistreated his horse, or any horse for that matter. Leaving an animal to fend for itself was a greater sin than killing a man in Scrap Elliot’s book.
Josiah rushed out of the house and quickly tied Missy to the hitching post.
He was aware of everything around him, still not certain that Scrap hadn’t been tricked into leading someone to the house. He had never seen Scrap so drunk, but mostly he was aware that his son was inside the house, screaming at the top of his lungs, afraid and unsure of what was happening. Ofelia was not there to calm the boy down. She would have had Lyle in her arms at the first whimper—now he was alone.