Deborah Camp (36 page)

Shorty must have got suspicious, Cassie thought, remembering the will he’d drawn up. He must have sensed that Boone was after more than friendship.

Another thought pierced her like an arrow and made Cassie suck in her breath.

Had Boone shot Shorty?

The tightness in her chest and throat was consuming her, until she felt as if she might explode. Had Boone Rutledge—Boone, who had kissed her and caressed her and called her such pretty things—had he shot her pa in the back and left him to die?

Cassie stared straight ahead, all expression leaving her face except for a dull flicker of hatred in her blue eyes.

“Don’t you worry, Pa,” she whispered. “Justice will be done, even if I have to mete it out myself.”

Blackie Colton lounged back in the marble tub and closed his eyes as the thin young woman poured warm mineral water over him.

“That feels good, buttercup.” He opened his eyes a fraction, in time to see her coy smile. “I bet you’d feel good too, buttercup.”

The woman giggled and set the bucket down to one side. “I know who you are.” Her dark eyes grew enormous as she ran them over Blackie’s scarred body. “You’re Blackie Colton, ain’tcha?”

“What if I am, buttercup?” He grinned and placed the soggy end of his cigar in his mouth.

“They say you’re a killer and a robber.” She ran her hands down her threadbare dress, drawing it closer against her lissome body. Her nipples stood out against the fabric, stiff and erect.

“That get you hot?” Blackie asked between puffs on the cigar.

She smiled and fanned her skirt. “What you doing in Eureka Springs? Gonna rob the bank?”

“No, I’m getting all gussied up before I go over to Jewel Townsend’s.”

The dark-eyed woman began unbuttoning the front of her dress. She slipped it off her shoulders. Her nipples were dark brown, almost black, like wild berries.

“No need in you paying for pleasure,” she said, stepping into the tub and straddling him. “Not while I’s here.”

* * *

An hour later Blackie pushed open the bathhouse door and stepped out into the cold, misty rain. He hadn’t taken more than three steps when he heard the report of a rifle. He ducked.

The first bullet missed him, but the next twenty-five didn’t.

A skinny woman ran out of the bathhouse, waving her arms and jumping up and down.

“I’s the one that knowed who he was! I’s the one to collect the reward money!” She stopped jumping and looked down at Blackie’s lifeless body. “And I’s the last woman to be with him.” She looked up at the ten men who had volunteered to murder Blackie Colton. Pride radiated from her smile and glistened in her ebony eyes. “I’s famous,” she said and then cackled like a witch.

Lucy Lee flung open the front door and raced toward the staircase, but Jewel’s voice waylaid her.

“Hey, there! Where you off to in such a hurry?” Jewel called from the sitting room. “That you, Lucy? Did you bring me the candies I sent you after?”

“No, I forgot.” Lucy stepped into the sitting room and placed one hand over her pounding heart.

“You forgot! Well, go back and get them! Mr. Haversham put them aside for me, but he won’t hold them for long. Those imported candies go like wildfire around here.”

“Okay, but I want to tell the girls about the shooting first.”

“What shooting?” Jewel was sitting at the rolltop desk that was against the wall, her ledgers spread before her, pen in hand. She gave Lucy a look that was partly irritated and partly questioning. She dropped the pen and rested her hands flat on the desk top. “Well? Are you just going to stand there with your bare face hanging out?”

“Some town men killed an outlaw!” Lucy said, breathlessly.

Jewel pushed herself up from the chair and the color drained from her face. She tried to steel herself to hear the news that she knew would be almost impossible to bear.

“Which one of them is dead?” Jewel asked in a toneless voice.

“His name is Blackie.” Lucy’s eyes were large with happy excitement. “They gunned him down outside the bathhouse. You know that colored girl that works there? She was telling everybody that she was the one who turned him in. Can you imagine?” Lucy laughed gaily. “That skinny ninny’s going to collect all that reward money!”

Jewel turned her back on Lucy and put a hand up to cover her face. “Send Delphia to me, Lucy, and go get my chocolates.”

In less than a minute Delphia was beside Jewel.

“Yes, ma’am?” Delphia asked, peering curiously up into Jewel’s pale face.

“Delphie, I want you to go see the owner of the Palace Bathhouse. He’s got a Negro girl working for him.” Jewel turned to face Delphia, placing her hands firmly on the woman’s bony shoulders.

“Miss Jewel, you be awful pale. You okay?”

“I will be, but I need your help with something.”

“Anything, Miss Jewel. What you want?”

“That Negro girl who works in the bathhouse—”

“Yes’m. The skinny one. Her be called Calico.”

“That’s the one.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t ever want to see her face again. You understand me, Delphie? I want you to tell the owner of the bathhouse how I feel. You tell him that he won’t be allowed inside my place as long as that girl works for him.”

Delphia’s smile was slow and cunning. “Don’t you fret none, Miss Jewel. It’s as good as done.”

“Then I want you to go to the sheriff and tell him that he can’t come around here, nor any of his deputies, until that girl is out of Eureka Springs. I don’t want to ever see her again. Make them all understand that.”

“Yes’m.” Delphia nodded, her cherub face drawn and serious. “She’s as good as gone.”

Judge Isaac Charles Parker examined the sheet of parchment and chuckled. He laid it flat on his desk and stared with interest at the young man seated across from him.

“I’ll be damned if he don’t look just like you,” the
judge allowed. “Of course, there’s that scar, but a bounty hunter wouldn’t look close enough to notice until it was too late.”

“I know, Judge. That’s why I came to Fort Smith. I needed your help, but all I’ve received so far is questioning. I feel as if I’m under house arrest.” Rook shifted in the chair in response to the irritation he felt. He wanted to get back to Eureka Springs and Cassie, but Judge Parker had been dragging his feet for days and keeping Rook on a short lead rope. Rook continued: “This part of the country is crawling with your appointed officers and bounty hunters—all looking for a man who looks an awful lot like me.”

The judge stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “I told you I’d help you if you’d help me.” A sinister gleam appeared in his eyes. “Where’s that brother of yours, Colton? You wouldn’t want to go to jail for aiding a known criminal, would you?”

Rook crossed one leg over the other, affecting an attitude of casual self-assurance in the face, of the notorious judge’s threat. “I’d be glad to tell you what I know of my brother’s whereabouts. I’ve cooperated since I’ve been here, haven’t I? I know you were playing a hunch that my brother might come looking for me and you’d trap him, but that won’t happen. Blackie doesn’t give a damn where I am or if I’m in trouble. There’s certainly no need to threaten me, since you and I are on the same side of the law.”

“I wasn’t threatening you.”

“Please, Judge Parker,” Rook said, smiling coldly, “let’s not insult each other’s intelligence.” Rook acknowledged the flicker of grudging admiration in the judge’s eyes with a lift of his brows and a slight bow of his head. “I usually stay as far away from Blackie as I can, but I was asked recently by a relative to convince Blackie to turn himself in before he was shot in cold blood like our father.”

“It was one of my men that shot Dubbin Colton. Got him in Tulsey Town, didn’t he?”

“No, it was in Guthrie. Dubbin was gunned down outside the livery stable.”

“That’s right.” Judge Parker smiled and fingered his white mustache. “I take it that Blackie didn’t want to listen to reason.”

“No, he didn’t.” Rook shook his head when the judge offered him a chew of tobacco. “In fact, I got a bullet in my back for my trouble.”

“He shot you?”

“Yes, while I was trying to leave Blackie’s camp without him knowing it.”

“I assume you were going to tell the authorities of his whereabouts.”

Rook continued to smile, although he resented the judge’s attempt to trap him. “You may assume what you wish, Judge Parker.”

The judge chuckled and spit into a brass spittoon.

“Anyway, after I recuperated Blackie paid me a visit at the home of Cassandra Potter. She lives outside Eureka Springs and was kind enough to take me in and nurse me back to health.” He smiled to himself, seeing Cassie’s face in his mind and feeling the warmth of love for her.

“Was his gang with him, or was he riding alone?”

Rook blinked away his bittersweet memories. “The whole bunch was with him, including his woman.”

“Annabelle Dishong,” the judge said.

“Dishong.” Rook smiled. “I never knew her last name.”

“That’s what’s on her warrant.”

“She’s wanted too?”

“Of course!” Judge Parker pounded the desk with one fist. “She’s aiding a criminal! I don’t cotton to anyone who stands in the way of justice.” He delivered a fiery-eyed glare at Rook, but Rook did not lose his pleasant smile.

“I was concerned for Miss Potter’s welfare, so I managed to get her away from the house. This angered Blackie—he was roaring drunk to boot—and he took a swing at me. We tussled, but his boys pulled me off him. Blackie got in a couple of punches while his boys held onto me. I was soon unconscious.”

The judge surveyed the man’s battered face—blackened
eyes, a bruised cheekbone, and a nasty cut on his lower lip. The bruises were fading and the cuts were healing, but the judge remembered that the man had been in bad shape when he’d ridden into town almost week before.

“Yep, your brother got in a few good licks.”

Rook shrugged, preferring to ignore his aches and pains, and picked up the thread of his story. “When I woke up it was dawn and Blackie and his bunch were saddled up and ready to go. They pulled their guns on me and made me go with them. We went up into the hills outside Eureka. I told Blackie he’d be a fool to go into town and I asked him again to give himself up to the authorities.”

“You think there’s any chance of that, Colton?”

“No, sir.” Rook sighed heavily and turned his head to look at the patch of sky he could see through the dusty window. “Blackie and I had a long talk. I explained to him the fix I was in—my resembling him so closely and all. I told him that I couldn’t keep walking this fine line between lawfulness and unlawfulness. I made it clear that I was going to report his whereabouts to the authorities at my next opportunity.”

“And?” the judge asked, leaning forward with interest.

“And he let me go,” Rook said, lifting a brow as he again experienced the surprise he’d felt at the time. “He laughed in my face and told me to get going. I thought he was going to shoot me before I got very far, but—” He held out his hands and lifted his shoulders. “Well, I’m here all in one piece.”

“Don’t that beat all?” Judge Parker said softly.

“Blackie doesn’t think anything or anyone can hurt him.” A sense of doom came over him, and his heart felt encased in an icy shell. “Blackie’s crazy, sir. I hate to say that about my own brother, but it’s true. His mind is rotting away.”

Judge Parker was silent for a full minute as he sized up the other man; then he placed his hands on the desk and pushed himself up.

“Okay, son, I believe you. I think we should put your picture in the newspapers in these parts and alert everyone
that Blackie’s got a look-alike brother. That’s about all we can—” He cut off the rest of his sentence and looked past Rook to the clerk standing in the doorway. “Yes, Bryant?”

“Judge, we just got some news over the telegraph,” the bespeckled clerk said, his voice quivering with excitement.

“What news?” the judge asked, while Rook turned around in his chair to look at the slightly built man.

“Blackie Colton’s dead,” Bryant announced, his voice squeaking like a badly played clarinet. “He was shot outside a bathhouse in Eureka Springs!”

Rook flinched, and tears filled his eyes as he turned back to face the judge. The ice around his heart seemed to melt, leaving him vulnerable to an unexpected push of pain at the sudden loss of his brother.

The judge scowled and motioned Bryant out of the room.

“I’m sorry, son,” Judge Parker said, coming around the desk and placing a hand on Rook’s shoulder. “A life of crime usually ends with a bullet in the heart or a rope around the neck.”

Rook closed his eyes and felt his mother’s grief reaching out to him across the miles between Eureka Springs and Fort Smith.

“May I use your telegraph? I must send word to my sister in Chicago. Then I’ve got to get back to Eureka Springs. It seems I have some sad business to attend to there.”

Shorty Potter was probably laughing his butt off up in heaven, Cassie thought with a smile as she trudged along, pushing another wheelbarrow full of dirt and rock ahead of her. She could visualize her whiskered pa gazing down at his daughter and the banker’s son, both breaking their backs in a mine that Shorty knew held nothing but bitter memories and broken dreams.

Cassie dumped the dirt and rock, then raised a playful fist at the heavens.

“Think this is funny, don’t you?” she asked, her voice rousing Slim, who’d been dozing in the sun. “It’s your last laugh, right? You plant a seed in my mind and in Boone’s,
then leave this earth and watch us each try to beat the other to the riches. Only thing is, there ain’t any riches.”

Then she recalled the nature of her pa’s demise, and she wondered if Shorty had put the thought there to remind her that he’d been killed over the mine. If so, he’d succeeded in raising her doubts again about what the mine might hold—that maybe it wasn’t worthless after all.

“But I’ve mined almost all of it,” she groaned, “and I haven’t found a doggone thing!” She sat on the edge of the wheelbarrow with her shoulders hunched and her head hanging down. “Lord, I miss Rook.”