Читать книгу The Gunman's Bride - Catherine Palmer, Catherine Palmer - Страница 8

April 1883

Raton, New Mexico Territory

Keeping his six-shooter aimed at the sheriff, Bart Kingsley crouched at the corner of a white picket fence. He was bleeding bad. The bullet that caught him in the side hurt something awful. But Bart knew he couldn’t let pain overcome him. He was on a mission to find the woman he loved.

Laura Rose Vermillion’s window stood out as a black patch on the dull gray wall of the dormitory just over the fence. Bart knew it was Rosie’s window because he had caught sight of her shaking out a pink rug that morning. His Rosie…his beautiful Rosie.

“Kingsley!” a voice echoed through the darkness. “Kingsley, I know I winged you, boy. Come on out like a man and maybe the doc can save your sorry hide.”

Bart gritted his teeth. He was too close. Too near Rosie now to let a bullet stop him. Hiding in some shrubs near the depot, he had waited all day until the sun went down and the last train left town. But when he made his move, Sheriff Mason T. Bowman had appeared out of nowhere.

“I’ve got help, Kingsley,” the lawman called out now. “The Pinkerton National Detective Agency out of New York City sent their best man after you. You ain’t never going to get away. Not with a Pinkerton detective on your trail. You know that, boy. So, put your hands up nice and slow, and we’ll hold our fire.”

Bart grimaced. A Pinkerton man? Now that was serious business. Those fellows could track outlaws better than a pack of hound dogs. The damp blood on his buckskin jacket told Bart he was leaving a trail nobody could miss.

But he couldn’t be captured now. Not this close to his Rosie. Bart tugged the kerchief loose from his neck and pressed it against the bullet wound. He set his gun on the ground and worked his jacket’s buttons into place to hold the kerchief tight.

Taking up his pistol, he began to creep along the boards of the fence. The dormitory housed young women who worked as waitresses for Fred Harvey’s famous railway restaurant. Bart surmised that a fence built to keep eager young bucks away from the pretty females inside it would have a gap or two.

“Kingsley, we’ve got every street blocked!” Bowman barked. “You’ll never leave Raton alive unless you surrender now. Come on out, boy!”

Bart pushed against the pickets as he inched toward Rosie’s window. Aha. A loose board swung outward, leaving just enough room for a man to slip through the fence. Bart edged himself between the securely nailed pickets, then reached back and eased the loose board back into place.

“Look at this!” a deep voice called out. “You plugged him all right, sheriff. There’s blood right here by this fence. Good shot. He won’t get far.”

The Pinkerton detective, Bart guessed. He touched his jacket and prayed the kerchief would hold. Slinking across the grass, Bart tried to think about Rosie. Beautiful Rosie with long brown hair and pretty little ankles. Six years had passed since he’d seen her, but Bart knew he would always love her.

“The blood trail stops at the corner,” the Pinkerton man announced. “He’s close.”

Bowman shouted into the night. “Men, search under every woodpile and behind every fence. Shoot him if he runs.”

Bart pushed himself up against the rough stone wall of the dormitory until he was standing. Dark mists swirled before his eyes. Don’t faint. Not now.

He reached up and caught the edge of a protruding stone. Then he lifted one leg and found a foothold. Rosie, he reminded himself. Overhead was Rosie’s window.

“’Spose he could have gotten over the Harvey girls’ fence?” someone asked.

Bart pulled himself upward until he found another stone ledge to grab.

“Nah, the sheriff pegged him good,” came the response. “If he ain’t dead already, it won’t be long.”

Now Bart ran his fingertips along Rosie’s wood windowsill. He set his foot on a protruding metal pipe. As he placed his weight on it, the pipe cracked.

“You hear that?”

“Sounded like it came from the dormitory!”

“Who’s got a light? Sheriff, over here! Bring a lantern!”

Bart had slipped down a good two feet, scraping the skin on his palms. Now he found another foothold, this one of stone, and he heaved himself up again.

Coming up in line with the sill, he lifted a prayer. God, let this window open.

He gripped the lower edge of the casement and pushed. The window slid up. The scent of lavender and roses drifted out into the night. With a grunt, Bart dragged his body over the sill and tumbled to the floor of Rosie’s room. A wave of dizziness came over him as he fought to stay conscious.

“Hey, here’s a place where a picket is loose on the fence! Bring that lantern over here!”

“You see any blood?”

Without waiting to hear the response, Bart reached up and pulled the window shut. For a moment, he sat on the floor, head bent as he sucked in air. At the sound of girlish voices outside the room, he stretched out flat. Then, with the last of his strength, he scooted his big body under the bed.

Lying in the darkness, Bart anticipated the moment Rosie would enter the room. Or would it be the Pinkerton man who had finally cornered him? Or the sheriff, gun drawn, ready to blast the fugitive?

Bart closed his eyes. He was close now. So close. He had spent the past two months tracking a runaway woman who didn’t want to be found. Trailing her halfway across the frontier. Spotting her at last in this two-bit mountain town.

“Oh, my,” a light voice sang out as the door opened and a shaft of light sliced the darkness. “I don’t know about you, Etta, but I am just whipped. Good night.”

Rosie!

Another girl spoke. “I’m so tired I could fall asleep right where I’m standing. Morning’s going to come early. Sleep well.”

Rosie shut the door to her dormitory room and sat down on the bed. Beneath the hem of her black skirt, Bart caught sight of those pretty little ankles he remembered so well—worth every drop of blood he had shed.

Until Sheriff Bowman shot him, no one had ever spilled a drop of Bart’s mixed Apache and White Eye blood. Not his stepfather, who’d sure tried enough times. Not Laura Rose’s pappy, who would have liked to, whether he had the guts to pull the trigger. Not any of the string of lawmen and bounty hunters who had tried to gun down Bart and had found themselves eating cold lead for supper.

But here he lay, his blood soaking into the edge of Rosie’s pink hooked rug. All this because of a woman he’d tried to forget for six long years.

Laura Rose. From underneath the bed, Bart studied those ankles as she unlaced her leather shoes and worked her stocking feet around in tiny circles. God didn’t make many ankles that slim, that fragile, that downright luscious. Rosie had ankles worth fighting for.

Not that Bart had ever fought for them.

No, sir, there was no way he could deny that when push had come to shove, he had skedaddled out of Kansas City as if a scorpion was crawling down his neck. He’d been only seventeen at the time, but strong as an ox and twice as stubborn.

He could have stayed in Missouri and challenged Rosie’s pappy for her. He could have pulled out the marriage license he still carried with him everywhere. He could have argued his case in court as her pappy had threatened to make him do. But Rosie’s father wasn’t a highfalutin doctor for nothing. After the shouting, warnings and threats had failed to make Bart give in, Dr. Vermillion had resorted to the only weapon left in his arsenal—the truth.

Under the bed, Bart grimaced as he probed the seeping wound in his side. The physical pain seemed almost easier to bear than the memory of Dr. Vermillion’s accusations. He shut his eyes for a moment, fighting the self-contempt that had made him silent and withdrawn as a boy, the shame that inflamed his angry loneliness as a man.

Breathing steadily, he willed a wall of iron around the hurt inside and watched Rosie’s feet moving around the room—small feet for a woman so tall. A ragged hole in the heel of one dark cotton stocking revealed tender pink skin.

“Etta, come in here, would you?” She had opened the door to her room and was calling down the hallway. Bart wished he could shrink farther into the space beneath her bed, but it was mighty hard to fit a six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-pound man under a brass bedstead.

“Do you smell anything odd in here?” Rosie was asking her slipper-footed neighbor. “The minute I came in from the restaurant, I noticed the scent of leather and dust—as if the outside air had gotten into my room.”

Beneath the bed, Bart bent his head and took a whiff of his buckskin jacket. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a good wash. Come to think of it, his hair probably needed combing in the worst way—maybe a cut, too—and his boots hadn’t been polished since he took them off that horse thief in Little Rock.

“Phew!” Etta exclaimed. “I hate to say it, but the smell’s probably coming from your own shoes, Laurie. These laced boots Mr. Harvey makes us wear cause all kinds of problems for a girl in a busy restaurant. I’ve gone through two pairs of stockings a month since I started here.”

Bart saw Rosie lift one foot and heard her little gasp. “Would you just look at this, Etta? An awful blister right on my heel!”

“What did I tell you? You’ll have calluses in a month and corns before you know it. Someone should write a letter to Mr. Harvey and tell him how we suffer. You soak your foot in a basin of water, and I’ll fetch some vanilla from my room.”

“Vanilla?”

“Put a drop in each shoe and set them in the hall all night. By morning that scent will be gone, you’ll see.” Etta paused a moment. “Although I must admit your shoes really do have the oddest odor I’ve ever smelled.”

As her friend shut the door, Rosie hurried to the window. Bart heard the sash drawn up and felt a blast of chilly air. The sound of male voices drifted into the room from the street below, and Bart stiffened.

Etta breezed back into the room. “What on earth are you doing, Laura Kingsley? You’ll catch your death!”

Turning his head with some difficulty in the tight space, Bart watched as Rosie stood on tiptoe to lean out the open window of the second-floor room. Laura Kingsley, Etta had called her. The name Rosie had chosen for herself sent a warm thrill down Bart’s spine.

“What’s going on outside, Etta?” she asked. “Look at all those men and horses right under my window.”

“Ma’am?” someone shouted from below. “Excuse me, ma’am, but have you seen a wounded man about these parts?”

“Shut the window!” Etta hissed. “Quick! Shut the—”

“I’ll have you know men aren’t allowed near our dormitory,” Rosie called out. “It’s against Mr. Harvey’s regulations. You’d better take your horses out of this yard before the sheriff arrests you.”

“I’m the sheriff of Colfax County, miss. Sheriff Mason T. Bowman. This fellow with me is a detective from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency out of New York City.”

“Oh, my!”

“I told you to shut the window,” Etta whispered.

“Don’t mean to frighten you ladies, but we’re in search of a desperate outlaw. He was wounded about an hour ago in a gun battle just outside of town—shot two or three times. He’s lost a lot of blood, and we’ve tracked him as far as this backyard.” Shot once, Bart corrected silently under the bed. He might have needed an excuse to get close to Rosie, but he wasn’t fool enough to let two bullets plug him.

“This man is armed and dangerous. He’s a hardened criminal with a price on his head in Missouri. You ladies had better keep your windows shut tight and your doors locked.”

“Yes, Sheriff Bowman.” Rosie’s voice quavered. “I’ll tell the other women.”

“What has this man done?” Etta called down.

“You name it. Robbed banks, trains, stagecoaches. He’s a horse thief and a cattle rustler. And he’s wanted for murder.”

Under the bed, Bart frowned. He was not a horse thief and cattle rustler.

“What’s his name?” Etta asked.

“Goes by two or three aliases—Injun Jack, Savage Jack, Jack King. His legal name is Bart Kingsley. He ran with Frank and Jesse James before Jesse got killed last year. The detective is after him for three train robberies in Missouri. Been trailing Kingsley all the way from Kansas City.”

Kansas City? Bart frowned. The Pinkerton detective had been tracing him since Kansas City? Rosie had left a trail a mile wide, but Bart didn’t think he had given any clues to his own whereabouts. Maybe he was a chuckleheaded fool after all. No wonder the sheriff had plugged him.

“If we see anything suspicious, we’ll send for you right away,” Etta assured the sheriff as she shut the window. “A murderer! Can you imagine, Laurie? Right outside the dormitory, too. The other girls will be scared out of their wits at the thought. I’m going to tell Annie and Mae right away. Won’t they just swoon? Laurie? Are you all right? You’re trembling!”

“Oh, Etta.”

“Don’t be scared of that outlaw. The sheriff will have him rounded up by morning.”

“Etta, I want you to open my wardrobe door right this minute and look inside. Wait—take this!”

Rosie knelt by the bed, and Bart prayed she wouldn’t see him in the shadow as she fished a pistol out from under the mattress. He let out a stifled sigh when she stood and gave the weapon to her friend.

“Laurie! You’re not supposed to have a gun,” Etta squealed. “It’s against regulations!”

“If he’s in there, shoot him! Just shoot him right through the heart.”

Bart scowled. Well, that was a fine attitude.

“Take your gun, Laurie. The wardrobe’s empty.”

“Don’t leave me here alone. Please, I beg you!”

“That man’s not going to get in here. I locked your window, and you can bolt the door after I’m gone. I never expected you to be so—”

“Etta…” Her breath was shallow. “Etta…I know that man. The outlaw. The killer. I know him. Or I used to know someone by that name.”

“Injun Jack?”

For a moment the room was silent. Then Rosie let out a ragged breath. “Bart Kingsley,” she whispered. “I was married to him.”

A knock on the door by one of the girls who had come to investigate the shouting had taken Etta out of the room for a moment. As soon as she informed everyone about the sheriff’s warnings, she hurried back into Rosie’s room and sat down on the bed beside her friend.

“I swear my heart is about to pound right out of my chest! I could barely hold my tongue after what you told me, Laurie. You think you were married to the outlaw?”

“Etta, please,” Rosie pleaded, trying to still her own heartbeat. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s all in the past.”

“Oh, Laurie, how can you just up and say you were married to a murderous outlaw and then not tell the story to me—your very best friend in all the world?”

“I wasn’t married to an outlaw, Etta. The Bart Kingsley I knew in Kansas City was no killer. He was a boy. Seventeen. And I was only fifteen. It happened a long time ago.”

“You got married when you were fifteen years old?” Etta’s blue eyes sparkled as bright pink spots lit up her cheeks. Her hair had escaped its roll to form a wildly frizzy blond spray across her forehead.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rosie repeated. She felt hot, miserable and suddenly close to tears as a flood of memories washed through her. All she had ever wanted was to teach children. How she loved little ones with their wide eyes and fertile minds! She longed to open those minds and pour in knowledge that would create successful, happy adults who could change the world into a better place.

But schoolteachers were working women, Pappy always said, and far beneath her social rank. She would never be allowed to stand in a classroom, he informed her, with chalky fingers and eyes tired from reading late by candlelight. No, she was to marry—marry someone well situated—and forget her schoolmarm notions.

Then Bart Kingsley came along.

“Laurie, please tell me,” Etta begged.

“It’s not romantic like you think. It was all a mistake.”

“Was he cruel? Did you know he was going to become a killer?”

“Of course not. In fact…I couldn’t have known the Bart Kingsley they’re hunting. At least…I don’t think it could be the same man.”

“But it might be,” Etta stressed. “Remember how scared you were when you first heard his name—same as yours.”

With a sigh Rosie smoothed down her black cotton skirt. Right now she wanted nothing more than to untie her soiled white apron, slip off her stockings and soak her sore feet in a basin of water. She didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t want to remember Bart Kingsley.

“He was handsome,” she murmured, unable to look at Etta. “My Bart Kingsley had green eyes…strange green eyes with threads of gold. And straight hair, black as midnight. He was skinny—rail thin—but strong. Oh, my Bart was so strong. He was kind, too. Always soft-spoken and polite to everyone. He loved animals. Stray dogs and cats followed him around the farm. When he sat down to rest, there’d be one cat on his shoulder and another on his lap.”

“He worked on your father’s farm?”

“In the stables. He was wonderful with horses. He broke and trained them with such gentleness. It was like magic the way they obeyed him. And you should have seen my Bart ride.”

“What do you suppose turned him into a cattle rustler and a murderer?”

“It couldn’t be the same man,” Laura Rose retorted. “The Bart Kingsley I married never hurt anybody. He wouldn’t even say a harsh word if someone was cruel to him.”

“If he was so kind, why would anyone be cruel to him?”

“The other farmhands taunted him because…well, because he was part Indian. His father was an Apache.”

“Apache!” Etta cried. “The sheriff just told us that outlaw they’re hunting for goes by the name of Injun Jack. I’ll bet it’s him, Laurie. How many men could fit that description?”

“A lot,” she shot back with more defiance than she felt.

“So you married him when you were fifteen. Did you actually keep house together?”

“No, of course not. We weren’t even…we didn’t sleep together like married people. We were just children really—children with such beautiful hopes and dreams.”

“I don’t see how you could bring yourself to marry a savage even if he was nice to you,” Etta rattled on.

“Did you get a…a divorce? Harvey Girls aren’t supposed to be married—it’s against regulations. You could be fired.”

“We were married two weeks before my father found out,” Rosie explained. “He was furious. The two of them had a long talk, and Bart left the farm that afternoon.”

“He left you? Just like that?”

“There was a note.” Her voice grew thin and wistful as she thought of the special place in the woods where they had first kissed each other. The place where she had found the note. “Bart wrote that he realized the marriage had been a mistake. He said we were too young to know what we were doing, and he’d begun to realize it right away after we got married. He said…he said he didn’t really love me after all, and I should forget about him. I was to consider that nothing had ever happened between us.”

“Nothing?”

Rosie focused on her friend. “Nothing. So there…I wasn’t really married to him at all. Not in the Bible way. Our marriage didn’t count. And that’s the end of the story, so if you’d please just leave me alone now, Etta, I want to go to bed. I have the early shift tomorrow.”

“You’ve got that blister, too,” Etta added, her voice sympathetic as she gave her friend a quick hug.

Pulling out of the embrace, Rosie stood and smoothed the rumples in the pink quilt on her bed. There were probably lots of Bart Kingsleys in the world. Besides, she was about as far as she could be from Kansas City and the life she had shared with him. No one was going to find her in Raton, New Mexico. Not her pappy. Not the man who had been her fiancé for the past two years. And certainly not Bart Kingsley.

“Lock up now, Laurie,” Etta said from the doorway.

“I’ve put your shoes out in the hall. You’ll see how much better everything will be in the morning.”

Under the bed, Bart watched as Rosie bolted her door and set a chair under the knob. He knew she was afraid. But afraid of Bart, the murdering outlaw? Or afraid of him, the Bart who had married her and then had run off and left her high and dry?

It wasn’t going to matter much either way if he up and died right under her bed. He needed to slide out from under this bed, wash his wound with some clean water and try to take a look at the damage. He needed ointment and bandages. He needed water. His mouth felt like the inside of an old shoe.

But he couldn’t risk scaring Rosie by edging out into the open. She’d holler, her friends would come running and that would be that. The sheriff would cart him off to jail, the Pinkerton agent would haul him back to Missouri and the law would hang him high. A half-breed Indian who had robbed trains and banks with Jesse James wouldn’t stand a chance in court.

Bart swallowed against the bitter gall of memory as he recalled the years he’d squandered. And now, after all this time, he’d found his Rosie again. She had been the one bright spot in his life, and once again she was his only hope.

He studied her feet as she peeled away her stockings. There had been a time when she would let him hold those feet, rub away their tiredness, kiss each tender pink toe. Her black dress puddled to the floor and a soft white ruffle-hemmed gown took its place, skimming over her pretty ankles.

She began to hum, and Bart worked his shoulders across the hard floor in hope of a better look. The thought of dying this close to his Rosie without ever really seeing her face again sent an ache through him. He tilted his head so the pink quilt covered just one eye and left the other exposed.

Her back turned to him, she sat on a chair, let down her hair and began to pull a brush from the dark chocolate roots to the sun-lightened cascade that fell past her waist and over her hips. “Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,” she counted in a soft voice.

She swung the mass of hair across her shoulders and began to brush the other side. “Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three…”

She had put her feet into a basin of water while she worked on her hair, and Bart could see those bare ankles again. He shut his eyes, swallowing the lump that rose in his throat at the memory of the first time he’d caught a glimpse of Rosie’s feet.

They had been down at the swimming hole where he and his stepbrothers liked to fool around. But this was a chilly autumn afternoon, and Bart’s stepbrothers were nowhere in sight. Rosie had agreed to meet him at the swimming hole, and he’d been waiting for her like a horse champing at the bit.

When she finally came, she was full of silliness and laughter, her head tilted back and her brown eyes shining at him with all the love in the world. She had dropped down onto the grassy bank, unlaced her boots and taken off her stockings. Then, while he held his breath, she had lifted the hem of her skirt and waded right into the icy pool.

Hoo-ee, how he had stared at those pale curvy legs and those thin little ankles. She hadn’t known, of course, what havoc her childlike impulse wreaked in his heart. His prim, sweet Rosie was the essence of innocence.

Under the bed, Bart suppressed the urge to chuckle at the memory of her sauntering back onto the bank, pulling up her stockings and lacing her boots—annoyed that he had not joined her in the water, and unaware of the reasons why he couldn’t trust himself.

They had sat together in silence for such a long time that Bart had begun to fear she really was mad at him. So he did the only thing he could think of—he grabbed her, kissed her right on the mouth, and then ran off lickety-split like the devil was after him.

“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred,” Rosie said now from the chair. She lifted her feet out of the water and dried them with a cotton towel. She checked the bolt on her door and tested the window latch before crossing to the wardrobe. Breathing heavily, she jerked open the door. After a moment she shut it again and let out yet another sigh.

“Dear God,” she said, dropping to her knees beside the bed, “please watch over me tonight. I’m so scared. Don’t let Bart be out there, dear Lord. Please don’t let that horrible killer be my Bart.”

She was silent for a long time, and under the bed Bart held his breath. Eyes squeezed shut, he found himself praying along with her, as if he could will away the truth: Don’t let me be that Bart, dear Lord. Please don’t let me be that killer they’re after.

“Dear God, please help me to like Etta as much as she likes me,” Rosie prayed on. “Give me patience, and please don’t let her blabber the things I told her tonight. Bless Pappy, but don’t let him find me—not until I’ve started teaching school and gotten myself established here in town with a house and enough money so I can keep him from hauling me back to Kansas City. Bless…bless Dr. Lowell and help him to understand why I never could be a good wife to him.”

Bart’s eyes flew open. Dr. Lowell’s wife? But she was married to Bart Kingsley! Could she have married another man, too? Or been engaged to him? She was Rosie—his Rosie!

“Forgive me, Father, for my sins. My many sins,” she murmured in a voice so low that Bart could hardly hear it. She sniffled as she spoke, her voice tight with suppressed tears. “And please take care of Bart. Amen.”

The bed creaked as she climbed into it. Lying underneath, Bart heard her sniffling. She hadn’t yet blown out the lamp on her dressing table, and Bart studied her shadow on the opposite wall as she twisted the coverlet in her hands.

He felt sick. Dizzy with loss of blood. And knotted up inside like a tangled vine. Had Rosie promised to marry someone else? Had she actually gone through with it? How long had it been? Why hadn’t his half brother told him?

Some other man had touched his Rosie! How could she have gone and gotten engaged or married to another man when she knew good and well she was already married to him? He had the license to prove it! He wanted to shake it in front of her face and shout, Why? Why, Rosie?

But she could simply throw his question back. Why, Bart? Why did you run off and leave me? Why is the sheriff hunting for you? Why did you kill and rob and throw in with a gang of outlaws? Why, Bart?

He heard her breathing grow steady, her tossing ease and the bed cease to groan. He touched his side and found that blood had finally begun to clot over the ragged, burned hole in his skin. He had to get out from under the bed, and soon. He couldn’t go much longer without water.

Should he slip out the window and hope the posse had given up hunting for the night? Should he leave Rosie sleeping, never to know the cause of the bloodstain on her pink hooked rug?

He ran a dry tongue over his lower lip. Quietly, he began to shrug his shoulders across the wood floor and out from under the bed. The pain in his side flared, movement relighting a fire inside his gut. Clenching his teeth, he scooted his hips clear of the iron bed, then dragged his legs out into the open.

The world swung like a bucking bronco as he rose onto his elbows. Dizzy, he shook his head, but the fog refused to roll back. Fighting to keep silent, he rolled up onto his knees. His breath came in hoarse gasps.

There she was! His beautiful Rosie, sleeping like an innocent babe in her bed of pink. She was prettier than ever. Rounded cheekbones, delicate nose, full lips barely parted.

Grabbing his side, he tried to haul himself to his feet. The floor swayed out from under him, the lamplight tilting crazily. He groaned, caught the bed rail, felt the iron frame jolt at his weight. Rosie’s eyes drifted open, focused and jerked wide. She sucked in a breath just as he clamped his hand over her mouth.

“Don’t scream, Rosie,” he croaked as the bed seemed to turn on its side and his feet began to drift on cotton clouds. “Don’t scream, Rosie, Please. It’s me. Bart.”

Her skin and lips melted under his palm as black curtains fell across his vision.

“Bart!” he heard her gasp. Then the curtains wrapped over his head, and his feet floated out from under him. He tumbled like a falling oak tree across his Rosie’s soft body.