He smiled. “Darn good argument, Willa. You’ll know where to find me if things get out of hand.”
She smiled back. “I’ll know where to find you. And you’ll know where to find me.”
The stage would be rolling in soon. He asked her to walk him out and she did, slipping her arm in his. He grabbed his hat off the hook and put it on. Just outside the hotel, on the boardwalk, with no one around, she took his hands in hers and looked up at him with a heartbreaking smile. There, in the middle of town, they were all alone.
“You do know, Caleb, that you could have... been with me, if you wanted. You know I feel that deeply about you. About this. About us.”
He gave her a gentle smile. “Well, we did get a little frisky at times.”
She blushed. But she said, “You could have had me, Caleb. You still could. You still can.”
He touched her smooth cheek. “That can wait for our wedding night.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“It does. And, anyway—”
The sharp report of a handgun, only slightly muffled, stopped him, from across the street.
First Bank of Trinidad.
He took her in his arms, but not to kiss her, rather to spirit her inside where he said, “Get down. On the floor, now!”
She did. She’d been around gunfire before.
Another muffled gunshot. Yelling.
He flew to the check-in desk and the clerk was gone. Getting back around behind it, he found the little chinless buzzard cowering. But the carpetbag was right there, and York got into it, and yanked the Colt from its holster and ran out.
He hurtled the boardwalk railing and landed solid on the sand, 44 in hand, angled slightly up. Directly across the way, the three-story brick bank building sat imposingly on the corner. Out front at the hitching rail waited three black mustangs, looking calm as a millpond, unruffled by the sound of gunfire.
Not a good sign.
He’d barely landed when the first man blew out of the bank, running for his tethered horse; he wore jeans, a work shirt, the V of a red-and-black bandana kerchief covering his face from mid-nose down. On his heels came a second man, similarly garbed with a dark blue mask covering his lower face, dashing for his horse as well. The third man, also in work shirt, jeans, bandana kerchief mask (blue and white), came charging out, a six-gun in one hand and saddlebags stuffed with bank bags slung over his other arm.
The first one out never made it to his horse. York’s .44 took the top of his head off, which flew away with the dead man’s hat still on it. The robber fell near his horse, the animal so well-trained, so used to guns blazing, that a yawnlike whinny was its only reaction.
The second man got to his horse and on it and the animal was just about to gallop when its burden lessened, as two blasts from York’s .44 caught him in the back, and he let go of the reins and fell off the saddle on the bank side of the street, but got dragged a ways before the horse, getting up a good head of steam now, broke free.
The last man, the saddlebags-turned-moneybags slung in front of his saddle’s duck horn, was mounted already, York too busy killing his confederates to stop him from taking off. And while that shooting was going on, York was blocked from the third man by the two he was busy sending to hell.
Now the surviving robber was heading toward the livery, the horse already working some speed up.
That was when Sheriff Ben Wade barreled out of his office and down the steps to plant himself in the street in front of the oncoming man on horseback, the lawman taking aim with his Peacemaker. The rider swung around him but, as he did, fired once at the sheriff, with the ease of a marksman knocking a tin can off a fence post.
Then the rider was gone, cutting to the left, past the livery, where Tulley had come out with a shotgun in his hands but too late to do anything, hoofbeats receding.
The sheriff was just standing there, like he was thinking about what just happened, trying to make sense of it, weaving just a little. Then he went down all at once, like a house of twigs a child was building.
York went to the first one he’d shot, glanced down at the dead man, who was on his back with a soup of brains and blood emptied out of his ragged skull top, and kicked the weapon from limp fingers. He jogged to the other rider, the one the horse had dragged some, on his back with arms and legs going strange directions, and found the man at least as dead as his compadre, his six-gun lost in the shuffle.
Then York sprinted to Ben Wade, though he knew there was no hurry. The heavyset older man had wound up on his side, like a man sleeping who finally found a comfortable position, hat under him like an insufficient pillow. Some red had leaked from the hole in his chest across his vest and shirt and was soaking the sand, but no blood was flowing now. Dead men don’t bleed.
Caleb York, the black he wore making him an instant mourner, knelt over the man he’d brought to town, to take his place, and he said a prayer for him. But at the end of it he didn’t say, “Amen.”
He said, “Goddamn.”
God damn those who did this.
Townspeople were moving gingerly into the street, but Willa was moving quickly past the dead thieves, the bank president, and a clerk emerging with guns in hand — too little, too late — and over to York, who still knelt at his dead friend’s side. She crouched near the man she loved, put a hand on his shoulder.
“Caleb, are you all right?”
“No.”
“Lord! Were you hit?”
“No. But I’m not all right. I won’t be till I bring in Ben Wade’s killer.”
York unpinned the badge from Wade’s chest. Ben had said York would have to tear it off, if he wanted to take it back. But that wasn’t necessary.
He stood, and Willa rose with him.
She asked, “Does that mean... you’re staying?”
“For as long as it takes, I am.”
She pinned the badge on him.
Chapter Two
Ladies in gingham were letting their husbands make the journey into the sandy street, to get a closer look at the aftermath of the shooting, staying behind on the plank boardwalk soothed in awning shade.
But Willa Cullen was not some timid female. She stayed right with Caleb York as he returned to the first of the men he’d shot.
Not that she didn’t find the sight grotesque — splayed out like a squashed spider, empty eyes staring up into the heaven that no doubt would be denied him, the insides of his skull emptied out like pie filling that hadn’t set yet.
But a woman raised on a ranch — even a woman of a mere twenty-two years — had viewed many a gory sight before, had witnessed butchery of beef and seen men horribly injured, and by age seven had overcome any girlish queasiness of stomach. Last year, when both Trinidad and the surrounding countryside seemed littered with carnage as a result of Harry Gauge’s misdeeds, she’d had her lack of squeamishness challenged, and rose to the occasion.
Still, when Caleb knelt over the corpse, Willa chose not to kneel with him. But she did not avert her gaze when he pulled down the man’s red-and-black bandana kerchief to reveal a scruffy, bearded face.
“Recognize him?” Caleb asked her, without looking her way.
“One of Harry Gauge’s deputies, isn’t he?”
Caleb rose and his eyes met hers. “Clay Peterson. He didn’t wear a star. He worked at the Circle G.”
The Circle G had been the biggest ranch controlled by Gauge, out of the seven or eight the schemer had bought up in that landgrab. The G became the corrupt sheriff’s home, when he wasn’t staying in town.