Читать книгу The Lawman - Patricia Potter - Страница 9

Colorado Territory

January, 1866

GUILT WEIGHED like an anvil on his heart.

He should have insisted that Emma wait until he could accompany her from Kansas to Denver. He should have been with her.

Now she was dead, and he was responsible.

Just like before.

“You know her, Marshal?”

Jared Evans heard the question but didn’t answer. Instead he picked up the body of the young woman from the inside of the coach and carried her into the office he sometimes shared with Denver’s sheriff. He wanted her away from the prying eyes of curious onlookers.

He gently laid her down on the bench and knelt beside her, choking off the growl that started deep in his chest.

Emma. Pretty, smart Emma lay still, her dress stained with blood from a gunshot to the heart. She’d been all he had left of his wife, Sarah, who’d also died from an outlaw’s bullet three years earlier. Sisters.

She looked so much like Sarah. The same soft, pretty features and golden hair and blue eyes.

Jared hadn’t seen her since he’d returned after the war, only to find his wife, young daughter and brother dead, killed months earlier by Quantrill’s bloody murderers. Emma had taken him to the graves. Watched as he’d knelt down and howled in grief.

Emma was engaged then, and he’d left to track down the men who’d killed his family….

He closed his eyes. Sarah’s face replaced Emma’s in his mind’s eye.

“Marshal?”

He turned around.

“You know her, Marshal?” The driver, who’d followed them inside, asked again.

He nodded.

“Wasn’t no need to kill her,” the driver said. “Wasn’t no need for anyone to git killed. I stopped. But one of them bushwhackers tried to kiss her after he took her purse, and she bit him. He just plain shot her, then turned the gun on me. I dropped when it hit my shoulder. Heard someone use the name Thornton.”

Thornton. He knew the name. Knew it too damned well. He’d been chasing the Thornton gang for more than eight months. Confederates who didn’t know the damn war was over. Been robbing mostly military payrolls all over the territory. The jobs had been meticulously planned.

No one had been killed until now.

He touched Emma’s hair and closed her eyes. Rage and a terrible grief warred in his heart. For the second time in his life, he was too late to save someone close to his heart. “I’ll get them for you,” he said to her. “If it’s the last thing I ever do, every one of them will hang.”