Читать книгу The Ranger's Bride - Laurie Grant - Страница 9

A rifle cracked suddenly from somewhere behind the stoop, followed closely by a sharp cry from the stagecoach driver. Addy heard a thud, then suddenly the team of horses was plunging off the road at a full gallop.

The thin woman with the migraine screamed.

“Bandits! The driver’s shot!” cried the shotgun guard. Addy could hear him scrambling around on top. No doubt he was struggling to grab the dropped reins while still holding the shotgun. Had the thud she’d heard been the sound of the driver’s body hitting the road?

The drummer yanked up the leather flap. “We’re ’bout to be held up!” he shouted.

Many things happened at once. The stranger grabbed for his saddlebags, thrusting a hand into one and coming out with the Colt revolver Addy had suspected was there. The older woman on Addy’s left began to whimper in chorus with the other woman across from her.

Addy was sick with fear. She felt a scream bubbling up inside herself, but the knot of terror in her throat wouldn’t let it out. She wanted to look out the window, but bullets whizzed past and she knew it wouldn’t be wise.

“Get down on the floor!” the stranger ordered Addy and the old women. Then, when the old woman seemed frozen to her seat, he yelled, “Do it! Right now!”

Addy heard him cock his gun, and for a single panicked second, she thought he was in league with the outlaws. Then she decided it was more likely he was trying to get a clear shot at the robbers and didn’t want the two women in the line of fire.

“Get down with me, ma’am!” she cried, pulling at the resisting old woman’s hands. “He’s just trying to help us!” But the woman yanked her hands out of Addy’s, clenched them into a fist at each ear and screamed.

“Whip up those horses there!” she heard the big man yell to the man on top. “We can outrun—”

He never finished his sentence. There was another loud crack, and suddenly he slumped over across Addy. She couldn’t tell where he was hit, but a warm crimson fountain instantly bathed Addy, running down her cheek in a warm, sickening flow.

It was too much. She felt a black mist descend over her, and suddenly there was nothing.

The buzzing of flies at her ear woke her, how much later Addy had no idea. She only knew there was an enormous weight lying against her back, hampering her breathing so that she couldn’t take a full breath. Her nostrils were full of the horrible coppery stench of blood.

She could feel no rise and fall of breathing from the body lying against her, but just to be sure, she took hold of the wrist dangling over her back and felt for a heartbeat. None. The big man who had leered down at her so recently was dead.

Struggling against the horror that was welling up into a scream—which might put her in danger if the outlaws were still around—Addy forced herself to listen, to concentrate on something else besides the corpse partially pinning her down on the stagecoach floor. None of the other passengers remained inside. Where were they? Were the outlaws still outside?

She could hear no voices, neither outlaws calling out orders nor those of the passengers. Nothing but the humming of the flies and the endless soughing of the hot summer wind as it echoed around the limestone hills. Holding her breath so she could hear better, though, she could hear the soft tearing sound horses made as they cropped grass.

Where was everyone else? Were they all dead, too? Would someone shoot her the moment she showed her face outside the coach?

Determinedly, she pushed and wiggled until she had worked herself out from under the dead man and stealthily lifted the flap, pushing herself up just enough to see over the edge.

The hem of a fluttering skirt on the grass was all she could see.

Pushing open the door, she stood at the door for a minute, peering out at the scene before her.

The outlaws were gone. Five bodies lay in the dusty road—the shotgun guard, flat on his back, the old woman, lying on her side as if napping, the drummer, sprawled in an ungainly heap as if he had been kneeling, the thin middle-aged woman who’d had the migraine, looking like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and finally and most horribly, the man who had been sitting opposite her in the stagecoach. He lay prone, his arms outflung in the dirt.

Stifling a moan of anguish, she ran to each of them in turn, finding in each a fatal bullet wound either in the chest or the head.

Addy left the stranger’s body until last, knowing that when she proved to herself he was as lifeless as the others, she would very likely succumb to hysterics. For then she would be truly alone.

She was so shaky she couldn’t be sure if his chest was rising or not. The back of his shirt was streaked with blood. What would she see when she turned him over?

When she took hold of his shoulder and pulled him gently back toward her though, she lost all hope. Blood spread over his shirtfront like a horrible scarlet blossom. No one lived after being shot through the heart.

And then he groaned.

Addy, who had been crouched over him, fell back on her extended elbows.

He groaned again. He was alive! But for how long?

“Mister! Can you talk to me? Wake up! Where are you hit?” Addy cried. His eyes flew open even as he tried to wrench away from her, then settled back with a grunt.

“Easy, now, easy!” she soothed him. “I’m not one of the outlaws! Seems like they’re gone now. I need to know where you’re hit,” she said as she pushed back his rawhide vest and began to unfasten his shirt.

She saw him relax fractionally at her words.

“F-Fogartys,” he muttered.

“You mean you think it was the Fogarty Gang that did this?” she questioned him, as she reached the last button. “Weren’t you the one who said they hadn’t been operating around here since their leader was hanged, years ago?”

He opened his eyes again and looked at her, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She just knew that the eyes she’d thought might be black were brown, but the deepest shade of it she’d ever seen.

Wrenching her gaze away from those fathomless pools, she pushed aside his shirt.

The bullet hole was higher than she’d expected, just over his collarbone. It must have gone in higher than the lung. That’s why he still lived, then. But if the bullet was still in him, he could die of blood poisoning. Reaching down his back, though, she felt a larger, bloodier wound in the back of his shoulder, and breathed a sigh of relief. The bullet had apparently exited there.

He’d shuddered even at her gentle touch, but now the stranger’s eyes drifted shut.

“We’ve got to get you some help,” she said urgently. Then, when he seemed reluctant to reawaken, Addy shook him by his left upper arm.

That brought instant results.

“Judas priest, woman, let go! That hurts like fire!”

Looking down, she saw a bullet hole she’d missed before in the cloth of his sleeve. Easing the shirt down from his shoulder, she saw another wound in the fleshy part of his upper arm. Probing the muscle with careful fingers, she could not find a second hole. That bullet must still be in there.

A horse whinnied behind her, and Addy darted a look over her shoulder, half expecting to see the outlaws had returned to finish them off. But it was only one of the team, still hitched to the stagecoach.

“Fogartys…they’ll come back….” he muttered.

They had to get out of here, and get him to a doctor, but how? It wasn’t as if she could carry him, and from the pallor beneath his sun-bronzed face, he sure couldn’t walk the two miles to her place.

There was only the stagecoach—and of course she’d never driven one. The body of the dead man was still inside it. But what other choice did they have?

Addy touched the man’s other shoulder to rouse him. “Mister, we’ve got to get you out of here, get you to some help,” she said, nervously eyeing the horizon lest the outlaws come galloping over it.

He didn’t open his eyes. “Everyone’s dead….”

She nodded, though she knew he couldn’t see her. “Yes, everyone’s dead, except you and me.”

“Just…witnesses. ’Sposed to be me….”

She didn’t know what he meant by that, and at the moment, she didn’t care. “Look, we’re going to have to get you into the stage. That big man who was sitting next to me is lying dead in there, but I can’t move him, and neither can you.”

He shrugged, a movement that instantly made him groan in pain. “I’ve been around dead bodies before.” He opened his eyes, and pierced her with his dark gaze. “You ever driven a stage team?”

She fought the urge to laugh hysterically. “No, of course not. But looks like I’ll have to try, doesn’t it?”

His mouth twisted wryly. “Don’t think I could climb up on top if I had to….”

“No, of course not.” She squared her shoulders. “Well, you’re going to have to help me get you to your feet.”

He’d closed his eyes again. For a moment he was so still, she thought he’d passed out; and then he reached inside his vest and fumbled at something for the longest time.

“Whatever you’re trying to find can wait,” she said. “We need to hurry and get you to a doctor.”

Opening his eyes again, the man shook his head. “No doctor…” He held out his hand, the one that had reached inside his vest. His fingers were folded around something. “Here—put this…on one of the men. The shotgun guard.”

Her eyes locked with his, Addy allowed him to drop the object into her hand. Its hard coolness told her it was metal before she looked down.

When she did, Addy was startled to see it was a lawman’s badge. She squinted in the strong afternoon sunlight. It was the badge of a Texas Ranger.

Her eyes flew to his face. “You’re a Ranger? I thought…” She shut her mouth before she could say, “I thought you were an outlaw or a gunslinger,” but his raised brow and the wry twist of his mouth told her he’d guessed exactly what she’d been thinking.

He was too pale, and the sun above, too fierce. She had to get him to shelter. “Well, never mind. I’ll do as you said.” Later, she would find out why he wanted her to make it look as though the dead shotgun guard had been him.

Addy avoided the sight of the dead guard’s staring eyes, but couldn’t help flinching as she pierced the blood-caked cloth with the pin of the badge.

She came back to find the Ranger struggling to his feet, his left arm dragging. He swayed, and she was just in time to put her shoulder underneath his arm to brace him.

His face had gone gray with the effort, but his gaze was direct as he spoke. “From what you said earlier, sounds to me as if you live a ways outside town?”

Puzzled, she nodded. “About a half mile this side of Connor’s Crossing. We’re just a couple of miles away.”

“That’ll do. You can take the bullet out there.”

“I can’t remove a bullet—I’m no doctor!”

“Lady, there’s men lookin’ t’ kill me, and they will if it gets ’round that the doctor’s been called to tend some fellow wounded in a stage robbery. I reckon if you don’t care about that, you can take me on into town.”

“Well, of course I don’t want you killed,” she protested. “But don’t you see, I can’t…”

“Look, lady, whatever you decide is fine by me,” he snapped. “I don’t have the strength to stand here and argue with you. Let’s just get out of here, all right?”

Startled at his tone—and embarrassed that she’d forgotten how much blood he’d lost and how much pain he must be feeling—she nodded.

He gave her a wan smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. If you can hold the horses steady, I think I can climb in.”

The leaders shied and sidestepped nervously, obviously smelling blood as he drew near, but Addy went to the head of the nearest one and held its chinstrap, murmuring soothing nonsense to it.

Addy watched the Ranger take hold of the side of the coach with one hand and grab the window frame with the other, uttering a barely muffled groan as he did so. She wished she could be in two places at once so she could hold the horses and help him somehow. He more or less fell inside, landing on the seat with a thud and a smothered curse.

“Okay, lady, I’m set,” he announced from within. “You ready to drive?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she called back, then said, “Addy. My name is Addy—Adelaide Kelly.”

He made no answer.

She stared over the empty road again, but saw nothing but a jackrabbit pausing to nibble some gramma grass.