Foxfire Bride (41 page)

That night they sat around the fire, faces pink with cold and shoulders slumped with weariness.

"The old man couldn't have managed this," Jubal commented scanning the patches of snow surrounding their campsite.

"No," Fox said, rubbing some heat into her cheeks. "Are you still planning to go join up with the war?" She hadn't thought about the war in weeks. Didn't much care about it.

"I haven't ruled it out exactly. But a few other possibilities have turned up. Maybe I'll head to Mexico. Find me a hot tamale and settle down." He let the steam from his coffee bathe his face. "How about you?"

"I've got some things to do in Denver," Fox answered vaguely.

"Are you going back to the mines outside Carson City?" Jubal asked Tanner. "Or going off to look for fossils? What are your plans?"

Surprisingly, Tanner opened up and talked about the valley off the Grand mesa. Quickly Fox realized he was actually speaking to her. Looking into the flames, she listened as he spoke about the life a man could build in the valley. The house he would design and the apple trees he wanted to grow. In her mind she recalled sunlight sparkling off the river and the tall cottonwoods winding down the length of valley. Remembered the smell of early spring and fertile earth. Radishes that could spring out of the ground before a man came home from fossil hunting.

Putting down her coffee, she walked away from the fire and crawled inside her tent.

Like the men, Fox rode with her rifle across her lap and continually scanned the trees on either side of the trail. The expectation that today they would encounter the kidnappers made her jumpy. The old familiar anger raged in her chest, worsened by the knowledge that she would help rescue Hobbs Jennings from his ordeal, if the bastard was still alive.

She wanted him to be alive. She wanted to be the one who killed Jennings and she wanted him to know why. On the other hand, part of her hoped he was already dead and she would not play a role in saving him. Part of her wanted the kidnappers to have killed Jennings and thereby solved the problem between her and Tanner.

The hair stood up on the back of her arms and she frowned, sensing the moment draw near. Tanner and Jubal felt it, too. Both rode up beside her, faces hard and alert.

Fox spotted a red bandanna tied to a tree limb at the same moment Tanner said, "Up ahead."

They were ready. Tanner led the money mule. The other mules followed the horses, not realizing no one led them. Fox touched the Colt at her side, removed her gloves and slid her fingers down the stock of her rifle. The weapons were right; her mood was right.

"I'm thinking they're just beyond the rise," Tanner said tersely. His eyes glittered like dark stones above a tight jaw.

Fox glanced at him, knowing his thoughts had jumped ahead. In minutes he would discover if his father was alive or dead. Everything they had gone through to get here came down to the next few minutes. She tilted her head and listened hard, but she heard nothing except the sound of their animals and her own steady breathing.

They topped the rise and Fox spotted Jennings at once, sitting on the ground with his arms bound behind him, his ankles tied in front. His head had dropped, chin on chest, and he appeared to have difficulty breathing the thin mountain air. She had a quick impression that he was bruised and filthy before she pulled up on her reins and examined the trees behind Jennings.

There were three of them, mounted on Indian ponies poorly positioned behind the stunted trees that grew at this altitude.

"We can take them," Jubal said quietly. "Your call."

"No." Tanner stared at his father, watching his chest rise and fall in shallow breaths.

Fox couldn't read Tanner's expression or the emotions that flashed in his gaze. Anger, contempt, relief followed by a stare that said he was looking at a stranger.

"Once this is over and they've moved out," he said to Jubal, "they're yours if you want them. Not now."

A voice shouted from the trees. "Throw down your guns and bring the mule to the edge of the trees."

Tanner rode forward. "I'm bringing the mule. All the money is in the bags. But we're not throwing down our guns."

Fox overheard low voices arguing. "They're about as Indian as I am," she muttered to Jubal.

"We're not looking for trouble," Tanner shouted. "Take the money and go." He led the mule to the spot they had indicated.

Nothing happened. From the corner of her eye, Fox watched Tanner move the bay away from the mule and head toward his father, his expression hard and tight.

Then a man rode out of the trees dressed in a Ute war shirt, a feather knotted in his hair. He wore a Union soldier's trousers and his face was painted blue and yellow. If the moment hadn't been so tense, Fox would have laughed at his ridiculous attempt to impersonate an Indian. Instead she focused on the rifle pointing at her and Jubal and her fingers tightened on her own weapon.

"Don't nobody move," he shouted. While Fox and Jubal stared back at him, he dipped, caught the mule's lead and returned to the trees. Within minutes the kidnappers had moved away from the clearing and dropped below the rise.

Jubal spit in disgust. "If that ain't a let down! We come all this distance for what? Five minutes during which nothing happens." A string of cuss words poured out of his mouth.

"They didn't insist on counting the coins," Fox said, as disgusted as Jubal. "There could be rocks in those bags for all they know right now."

"I've had more excitement visiting my grandma."

"Maybe you'll find some excitement hunting them down," Fox said, her eyes fixed on Tanner cutting the ropes that bound his father's arms. She couldn't look at Jennings. Her hatred was so intense that she itched to shoot him here and now.

"Probably not much. Did you see them? Amateurs. Getting that gold is going to be like stealing from a blind man. Hell, they're going to leave a trail a mile wide, plus the mule will slow them down. Stealing the gold is going to be so easy, it's insulting."

Grinning, Fox turned to him and thrust out her hand. "You're one of a kind, Brown. Good luck to you."

He gripped her palm and returned the grin. "Luck to you, too, ma'am. Aside from the time you beat me up, it's been a pleasure riding with you."

"Wish I could say the same," Fox replied, and they both laughed.

Tanner helped his father to his feet and wrapped him in an embrace, feeling the tremble that rippled through his father's body. For the first time he thought of his father as frail, the image disturbing and sad and utterly different from the brutish figure he'd been imagining since he'd learned the truth.

"I knew you'd come. I told them."

"Is anything broken? Are you ill?"

"By and large, they treated me squarely." He supported himself by holding on to Tanner's arms while the circulation returned to his legs and arms. "I want a bath, a shave, clean clothing, and a real bed." He stared. "I've never been so happy to see anyone in my life."

Almost a year had elapsed since Tanner had last seen his father. He'd forgotten the sadness in those expressive eyes, so like his own. Now he suspected the source of that sadness. "I'll get you to the closest mining camp with a real hotel," he promised.

Despite his anger and sense of urgency, he would wait until his father had rested and begun to recover from his ordeal before confronting him. Then, Tanner and Fox would he looked over his shoulder and spotted Jubal tying the loose mules back on the tether line, wearing the look of a man eager to be on his way.

Fox was gone.

As there was no longer any time pressure Fox didn't rush the final leg of the journey into Denver. Undoubtedly Tanner would take his father to the nearest mining camp to rest from his ordeal, so she bypassed the camps and pushed on to Idaho Springs.

What had begun as a rough collection of tents and dugouts had boomed into a gold and silver bonanza town since her last trip east. Tents, wooden shacks, and a growing number of substantial buildings lay strung out along a narrow canyon bottom. Wagons, carts, stages, and horses congested the road through town and the excitement of hope and actual strikes sparkled beneath the dust spun up by wheels and hooves.

Fox chose a two-story hotel with a weathered front that looked cheaper than the brick palace on the corner. The room she rented was small but the bed felt like a piece of heaven after sleeping on the ground for nearly three months.

She tossed her hat toward a row of hooks and stowed her saddlebags beneath the bed, then she tugged off her boots and fell fully clothed on the quilt, sighing deeply when her head sank into a feather pillow. In minutes she slept soundly enough that she didn't open her eyes until noon of the next day.

First thing after pulling on her boots, she ate a big breakfast of ham, eggs, potatoes, and biscuits smothered in cream gravy, washed down with a pot of sugared coffee. Next she went to the bathhouse and ordered the works, a private cubicle, fluffy clean towels, scented soap and shampoo. It seemed a shame to dress her freshly scrubbed pink self in the same travel-stained clothing she'd worn so long, but it would only be for a brief while.

Throughout the remainder of the afternoon she explored what stores were available in Idaho Springs, pleased to discover she could buy the items she needed.

Her first acquisition was a tapestry bag in which to place the other items she intended to purchase. Starting from the ground up, she bought lady boots and a hook to button them. Next she collected stockings and garters, a cotton shift and drawers, and, after much indecision, an embroidered corset with wooden stays. A saleslady labored long to sell her a crinoline, but Fox wasn't yet ready for that contraption. She settled for several stiffened petticoats to plump out the wide percale skirts that came next. Then two shirtwaists followed by a summer mantle.

And of course she had to have little lace hankies and gloves and a wrist bag and hairpins plus a decent comb with all the teeth present. She curled her lip and passed on smelling salts but allowed the saleslady to exploit a secret weakness and sell her a small bottle of rosewater that she had absolutely no use for.

"You'll need earbobs," the saleslady suggested.

"No, I don't."

The saleslady peered at her missing earlobe then promptly moved her to a display of bonnets. "You must have a good bonnet," she insisted. "If your house is on fire and you can choose only one item of clothing to save, choose your best bonnet. A good bonnet can make or ruin your ensemble."

Fox shrugged, tired of shopping for items that impressed her as necessary to her plan but were grossly uncomfortable. "You pick one out."

The saleslady selected a summer-weight bonnet trimmed with tiny ruffles and a spray of violets that matched her new mantle and the ribbon trim on her skirt. Fox didn't suppose that she herself would have thought to match the colors.

As she paid for her purchases, shocked by the prices of lady items, the saleswoman studied her. "Part your hair in the center and wrap it into a clever bun on your neck." She sighed and shook her head. "Well, at least into a bun."

After dropping her packages at the hotel, Fox walked down to the trade lot and sold her rifle and the mustang for a good price. Before she left, she wrapped her arm around the mustang's neck and stood with him a while thinking how far they had come together. She was happy about the price he'd fetched, but it was never easy to sell a good horse, or a good rifle. Unfortunately, she couldn't ride a horse in her lady getup, and the rifle wouldn't fit into her tapestry bag.