Lynna Banning Page 25

  The trail narrowed to a faint path snaking through anklehigh goosebush and quack grass, the delicate stalks doubled over by the recent rainstorm. Behind him, Ben heard Jeremiah’s mare break into a canter, closing the distance between them.

  “This place gives me the spooks, Ben. Always has.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. Another mile and we can see the roof. Check for smoke.”

  Jeremiah was silent.

  “I saw only one rider,” Ben continued. “Plus a packhorse and a mule. Might have been more behind him, but I didn’t wait to find out.”

  “Did he see you?”

  Ben thought for a moment, nosing the gelding along with knee pressure as he twisted toward Jeremiah. “Don’t know. Maybe. We were quiet enough, but he could have seen one of the horses. No woodsmoke, though. We didn’t keep up the fire much past nightfall.”

  Jeremiah chuckled. “Didn’t need it, most likely,” he said dryly.

  Ben let the remark pass. Some things were best kept private, even from his lifelong friend.

  “Ben.” Jeremiah brought his mount to a halt and pointed beyond Ben’s shoulder.

  A hundred yards below them, a lazy curl of blue smoke wound into the sky. In the next moment the blackened metal chimney came into view, just visible through the screen of cedars and sugar pines.

  “How many, do you think?”

  “Can’t tell yet,” Ben replied. “Just beyond that tree stump, you can see the back side of the cabin. The horses will be tied there. The window’s around to the front.”

  Jeremiah grunted and stepped his mare forward.

  “Cover me,” Ben directed.

  The deputy slid his shotgun out of the rifle scabbard and laid it across the saddle in front of him. Ben did the same. Then he nudged the gelding into motion.

  Despite the evidence of smoke from the cabin chimney, Ben saw no sign of life, heard nothing but the raucous call of an emboldened blue jay and the nattering of a woodpecker in a sugar pine high above his head. He walked the gelding ahead a few yards, then dismounted. Jeremiah followed suit. With slow, deliberate footsteps, the two men crept noiselessly forward until the cabin came into full view.

  Three animals—two horses and the pack mule—were tethered to a log hitching post. Ben breathed out in relief. Only one rider. They could take the man easily. He shoved a cartridge into the chamber of his rifle.

  Motioning to Jeremiah, he crept around the side of the structure to the front wall and stationed himself beside the plank door. It was not bolted. The door hung slightly off center unless pinned from the inside by the thick iron rod.

  Jeremiah moved into position, pulled back both hammers on his shotgun. Ben sucked in a lungful of air and held it. In the next instant he smashed one booted foot against the metal hasp and sprang into the entrance as the heavy plank door swung inward.

  A dark, wiry man looked up from the weathered kitchen table as Ben strode into the room.

  “Kinda early for a visit, aren’t ya, Sheriff?” Jack Larsen’s thin lips curled into a smile. “Sit down, why don’tcha, Ben? Coffee’s still hot.”

  “I’ll stand.” Ben noted the three-day growth of dark stubble on the railroad man’s narrow jaw. “Been here long?”

  “Yeah. Came in after that storm. How’d you know that?”

  Ben didn’t answer. Instead, he gestured with his gun barrel at the four boxes of Spencer rifles stacked up in the corner.

  “Where did those rifles come from?”

  Larsen shrugged. “Beats me.”

  Ben nudged his rifle against the top button of the man’s patterned silk vest. “Come on now, Jack. Give me some straight talk.”

  Larsen’s dark eyes flicked to Jeremiah, then back to Ben. “I packed them in, goddammit.”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  Nervous, Larsen eyed the steel barrel poking his chest.

  “Where?” Ben repeated, his tone hardening.

  “They’re bought and paid for, Ben. What the hell does it matter where they came from?”

  “It matters. Who bought them—you?”

  Larsen shook his head.

  “Who, then? Someone’s in this with you. I want to know who it is.”

  “Can’t say,” the sharp-faced railroad man barked back. Again his gaze drifted from Ben to Jeremiah and back. Uneasy, he shifted position on the hard chair.

  “Talk to me, Jack. Where were those rifles bought and who bought them? I think I know where the money came from—you rustled cattle from ranches all over the valley, didn’t you? You, or somebody working with you, drove them to Idaho to sell, then used the money to buy guns.”

  He shoved the gun hard into Larsen’s sternum. “Give me some answers, Jack.”

  Larsen squirmed. “Honest, Ben, I only took a few beeves at a time. I figured they wouldn’t hardly be missed. Anyway, it wasn’t my idea to buy guns. Hell, I needed the money for my railroad!” He sent a desperate look at Ben and then at Jeremiah, behind him.

  “For your railroad,” Ben echoed. “You damn fool. You turned cattle thief to finance a railroad?”

  The thin face whitened. “I had to, Ben. I ran out of money, and… Well, there’s twenty years of my life gone. I had to do something!”

  “I’d say you made a very bad choice. You ended up with rifles, not railroad shares. I figure somebody pressured you to change your plans. Come on now, Jack—you know in the end I’m going to find out who it was.”

  “I—I got a partner, it’s true. But that doesn’t mean I got to go down on his ship, does it? If I tell you who it is, will you go easy on me? Maybe let me ride out of here?”

  Jeremiah’s gravelly voice rose at Ben’s back. “Why, you lousy son of a—You oughtta be shot!”

  Larsen flinched. “No! Don’t shoot me! I—I…uh…won’t say any more. But look at it this way, Sheriff.” A crafty glint surfaced in the black eyes. “The dumber people think you are,” he said, pronouncing each syllable with care, “the more surprised they are when you kill them.” His gaze flicked to Jeremiah. “Isn’t that right, Jeremiah?”

  Jeremiah said nothing.

  Ben swore under his breath. “You killed Thad Whittaker, didn’t you, Jack?”

  For a long minute, no one in the room moved. Then Larsen slumped forward, his face in his hands. “God help me, Ben, I didn’t mean to. The old man just never stopped writin’ those things in his newspaper. He was gettin’ closer and closer to the truth—I had to shut him up. I was only gonna threaten him, but Thad went yellin’ across the street to the sheriffs office, and—”

  “You shot him in the back,” Ben finished for him. “I’ve got to take you in, Jack. You’ll hang for killing Thad.”

  Larsen’s narrow shoulders sagged. “I’m not goin’ alone, you hear?” he muttered. He looked up, staring at something over Ben’s right shoulder. “There’s two of us, only one of you.”

  Ben glared at the small man cowering at the table. It made sense now. The pieces were falling into place. Larsen had a partner, someone who had blackmailed him into buying rifles instead of railroad stock. Someone who knew it was Jack who had murdered Thad Whittaker.

  Something clicked into place. There’s two of us. The other person, Jack’s unnamed partner, was the one supplying rifles to Black Eagle. In exchange for what? The only thing the Indian chief had left of any value was…

  He closed his eyes in anguish as the realization hit him. In that instant Larsen came to life, knocking Ben’s rifle aside. He grasped the gun barrel and yanked it out of Ben’s momentarily loosened grip.

  Jeremiah. It was Jeremiah who was supplying guns to Black Eagle. Ben suddenly felt sick.

  A shotgun pressed against his backbone. “I had to have her, Ben,” his deputy rasped in his ear. “This was the only way.”

  Ben jerked. “God in heaven, man, it couldn’t have been the only way. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  “Maybe,” Jeremiah breathed. “Yeah, just maybe.”

  Larsen edged toward the open
door, keeping the rifle pointed at Ben’s heart. “I don’t want to hang for Thad Whittaker’s killing. Your deputy was there—he could’a stopped it, but he didn’t. He let me walk away afterward, so the way I figure it, he’s in it as deep as me.”

  He gestured with the rifle barrel. “So you just move on over to the stove, real easy-like.”

  Ben took a single step forward. A sickening sense of futility washed over him. Of what value was law, or truth, or even love if it could so easily be swept away by greed? Simply disregarded by someone willing to betray a friend for gain? What value then lay in the bonds of human friendship, the kind he had known with Jeremiah all the years of his life, if in the end one man turned against another?

  Ben loved Jeremiah like a brother, had thought of him as family ever since they’d fished and gone swimming and learned how to read together back as boys in Carolina. His throat thickened. It was harder to swallow in some ways than Lorena had been.

  He reached the stove and turned to face his deputy.

  Jeremiah’s soft, chocolate brown eyes shone with tears. “I’d give anything if I hadn’ta done it, Ben. God knows I never wanted you to hurt over it.”

  Ben studied the familiar square visage of his old friend. “It was because of Lorena, wasn’t it? Because you loved her, too, and I—When she wouldn’t have me, after the war, I left Carolina for good.”

  Jeremiah nodded, his face stricken. “I loved her all my life, Ben. I never once woke up in the mornin’ without seein’ her face, rememberin’ how good she smelled.”

  He shook his head as if to clear away a memory. “I couldn’t never have had her—I knowed that all along. I wasn’t the man you was, Ben. My daddy was poor. Miss Lorena, she never looked twice at me, even when we was growin’ up. You could’a convinced her to marry you, though. Stayed in Carolina after the war. And then I could’a just been near her sometimes, like when we was young.”

  Ben shut his eyes for a brief moment. “Lorena didn’t want me after the war. She wanted land. Money. My God, how you must have hated me, Jeremiah. I never knew.”

  The stocky man drew in an unsteady breath. “I didn’t hate you, Ben. God knows I wanted to—for years I wanted to. But I just couldn’t. I guess I loved both you and Miss Lorena ‘bout equal.”

  He lowered the shotgun. “Then we found Walks Dancing by the river that day, and Black Eagle said he needed rifles. I figured another woman’d help me get over Lorena.”

  Ben’s chest tightened.

  By the doorway, Larsen made an abrupt motion. “What the. hell does all this talk matter, Jeremiah? Shoot him and get it over with!”

  Jeremiah stiffened. “Shut up, Jack.”

  “One of us has to do it!” the wiry man snarled. “If you’re not up to it, I’ll—” he raised the rifle, pointed it at Ben’s chest “—do it myself.”

  “Jack, no!”

  Larsen’s forefinger squeezed the trigger, and a blaze of orange fire erupted from the barrel. Frozen, Ben waited for his body to feel the bullet. At that range, he was a dead man.

  A hot, white pain blasted into his chest. For a fleeting moment he felt relief. It was over now. He thought of Jessamyn, hoped desperately she had conceived his child. He sank to his knees and braced himself for death.

  Instead, Jack Larsen crumpled to the floor, a bloody hole gaping in his throat. Smoke curled out of Jeremiah’s shotgun.

  The deputy hurled the weapon away from him and knelt over Ben. With his big, gentle hands, he stripped off Ben’s shirt, ripped away the blood-soaked underwear and pressed his fist hard against the gushing wound.

  Ben groaned. “Damn, that hurts!”

  “Won’t be the first time I tended a bullet wound in yer hide,” Jeremiah muttered. Hurriedly he tore Ben’s undershirt into strips and packed them against the flesh. Suddenly his large hand stilled. “But prob’ly be the last, won’t it?”

  For a moment Ben could not speak. His gaze locked with his deputy’s. At last he nodded. “Jack?” he managed.

  “Dead.”

  “Thanks for that,” Ben murmured.

  Jeremiah made no response. He bound Ben’s shoulder and immobilized his useless arm using his own belt as a sling. “Can you ride?”

  “Not sure,” Ben replied through gritted teeth. “Maybe.”

  Jeremiah caught him under the armpits. “Try,” he ordered.

  Ben struggled to stand. A wave of dizziness drove him down to his knees.

  “Again,” Jeremiah demanded.

  “Can’t Ben gasped. “Leave me here. Go for help.”

  The deputy snorted. “What makes you think I’d come back instead of skedaddlin’ to Colorado?”

  In spite of his pain, Ben gave a tight laugh. “You wouldn’t dare. I know Colorado as well as you.”

  “You make it mighty hard on a man, Ben.” Jeremiah’s voice shook, and he hardened it before he spoke again. “Somebody hits me, I’m gonna hit him back, even if he is a friend. You know that, Ben.”

  “Shut up, man. You shot Jack to save my life—you’re not going to let me die now. Help me stand up.”

  With a supreme effort, Ben pulled himself to an upright position. Leaning his weight on Jeremiah’s solid shoulder, he struggled step by step out the doorway and along the west wall of the cabin. In a haze of pain he mounted his horse with a hefty boost from behind.

  “Get me up out of this hellhole and make camp somewhere. I can last till then.” He made a feeble attempt to kick his horse.

  Jeremiah swung up onto the mare, laid the shotgun across his saddle and leaned down to grab the gelding’s bridle. He tied the reins to his wrist. “We’ll go out together,” he rasped. “Maybe do some talkin’.”

  Ben tried to grin. “Maybe. Not much breath left.”

  Jeremiah shot a quick look at him. Ben knew he was sweating. His chest felt wet and sticky. It couldn’t be all blood, he reasoned. He looked down and groaned. His underwear dripped crimson.

  I’m not going to die, dammit. That bullet hurts less than finding out Jeremiah watched Thad die and turned a blind eye. That’s what’s tearing up my gut. But it’s not going to take me. Oh, God, if I die, I’ll never see Jessamyn again.

  Ben stepped his gelding after Jeremiah’s mare.

  Hours passed. The deputy moved steadily up the steep, narrow trail. Ben could hear the raspy voice ahead of him, sometimes talking, sometimes singing in a croaky tenor, the way he’d done when they’d been at Rock Island prison together. Gradually, the trail leveled out. When Ben opened his eyes, he recognized the campsite he’d used two nights ago.

  His shoulder throbbed as if it had been skewered with a red-hot poker. His head pounded. At each jolting step the gelding took, bile rose in the back of his throat.

  Jeremiah stopped his rough rendition of “Shenandoah” and began to talk again. Ben could barely distinguish the words.

  “I never been like you, Ben,” his deputy said in his low, rough voice. “You wanted Lorena, but when she wouldn’t have you, seems you could set her aside and get on with yer life. You believe in things. Me, I mostly done without much philos’phy. ‘Bout the most precious things to me all my life were my momma and Miss Lorena. And you,” he added in a softer tone. “I always been proud to ride beside you, Ben,”

  Ben released a careful breath. “You saved my life twice now,” he said. “Once in prison in Illinois. Seems like a long time ago.”

  Jeremiah dismounted, a worried expression on his face. He led Ben’s horse close to the rock fire pit, still intact after Ben’s last use. “You rest easy. I’m gonna boil up some water and poultice that hole in yer chest with wet moss, like my momma taught me.”

  Ben let himself slip sideways onto Jeremiah’s solid, muscular body, felt his deputy cushion his descent to the ground. Grateful for the presence of another human being— even the friend who had betrayed him—Ben whispered his thanks and let his eyelids drift shut.

  Jeremiah was just a man, like himself, driven by his longing for a woman, by his own private de
mons. Just the same, he’d gamble that his deputy wouldn’t turn on him now. He’d have to stake his life on it. Poor love-smitten bastard that he was, all Jeremiah had wanted was his own woman. Ben had just been in the way.

  He must have dozed off. When he woke, Jeremiah had a fire going and a pan of water bubbling between two flat rocks. The deputy cut away the sweaty, blood-soaked pieces of undershirt, dropped a relatively clean strip of fabric into the boiling water and stirred it with a short, straight pine branch. When steam rose, he lifted the material out with the stick and slapped it onto the ragged wound in Ben’s chest.

  Ben sucked air between his teeth. “Goddammit, Jeremiah!” He tried to twist away, but his deputy pinned his arms.

  “Easy, Ben. Only hurts for a minute.”

  “A minute!” Ben’s senses swam. “You got any idea how long a minute can feel when you’re being boiled alive?”

  “Must feel a little bit like goin’ to hell, I guess,” Jeremiah growled low in his throat. “Yessirree, I surely do know what that feels like.”

  He hesitated, then began to swish another square of Ben’s underwear back and forth in the boiling water. “I thought for a long time about doin’ what I did—buyin’ those guns off the army post. Felt torn in two about it, like a man bein’ ripped apart tied to a couple of Sioux ponies.”

  He lifted the cool cloth from Ben’s chest, dropped a steaming one in its place. “Sorry, Colonel. If it don’t sting, it ain’t hot enough.”

  “Sting!” Ben repeated through clenched teeth. “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you.”

  Jeremiah fell silent. After a long minute, he exhaled an uneven breath. “In a way, Ben, I wish you would.”

  Ben shook his head. “You know I can’t do that.”

  Jeremiah’s jaw worked. He refused to meet Ben’s eyes. “You gotta do something, Ben. I know it, and you know it. You can’t let me go scot-free after what I done, and live with yourself. I know you too well.”

  Ben groaned. At this moment his deputy didn’t know him at all. All day long in his lucid moments he’d chewed over what to do about Jeremiah. He doubted Jeremiah could guess how tempting it had been to overlook his perfidy. But his deputy was right—as the sheriff, he had to exact some recompense. Otherwise, the entire concept of a society based on law and order was undermined. But, God almighty, the idea ripped his insides open.