Merline Lovelace (24 page)

“Ying Li?”

His face grim, Dawes held the fuse of the firecrackers an inch from the open flame. Sulfur sizzled and spit.

“Reckon it’s all right for us to go in?” the women heard Matt mutter.

Jack’s answer came more slowly. “They knew we were coming.”

“Yeah, they did.”

Tiny sparks leaped along the fuse. One-handed, Dawes tossed the string of firecrackers through the tent flap.

“Well, look at that!” the new groom exclaimed. “Must be another of Ying Li’s rituals. Scarin’ off more bad spirits, I guess. Let’s go in before—”

The rest of his words were lost in the ensuing din. A cacophony erupted, shattering the night. The exploding fireworks raised an instant, answering chorus of barks and yelps. Knowing time had just run out, Suzanne tugged at her bonds in a frenzy.

“Ungh!”

With an incoherent grunt, she slipped free. Clawing at her gag with one hand, she pushed off the bed with the other while the still-bound Ying Li struggled to her knees.

“Jack!” Suzanne screamed over the clamor. “It’s Dawes! He’s got a gun!”

Cursing, Dawes spun around and fired. Suzanne flung herself to the ground beside the bed, heard a muffled, agonized cry behind her. Ying Li! Dear God, Ying Li!

She was scrabbling on all fours when the tent flap flew open. Jerking back around, Dawes fired
off three quick shots at the men who charged into the tent.

Matt crumpled. Leaping over his body, Jack swung his walking stick with bone-cracking fury. The gun flew out of Dawes’s hand and the two men went down. They thrashed around in the confined space, snarling, grappling for a hold. The din outside drowned their grunts and Suzanne’s panting gasps as she dived for Dawes’s pistol.

Rage drove Jack, hot and murderous. He’d waited for this for so many years, envisioned Dawes pale and sweating as he faced his executioner. Yet at this moment, all Jack’s fury, all his fear, was for Suzanne. If Dawes had touched her, if he’d hurt her or Ying Li…

Hooking a leg behind Dawes’s knee, Jack used the leverage to roll upright. His fist slammed into the face he’d carried in his head all these years. Once, twice, again. Bone crunched. Blood spurted.

“Ungh!”

Dawes’s elbow dug into Jack’s ribs, hard, right where the bullet had gone into his lung. Everything went black. For a moment, the tent spun around him.

That moment was all Dawes needed. Bucking like a crazed wild horse, he dislodged his attacker, scrabbled for the gnarled oak walking stick and smashed the knob into Jack’s skull.

Struggling to his feet, Dawes swung the stick
again. He was bringing it down with all the force in him when Suzanne fired at point-blank range.

The last firecracker popped.

The chorus of barks and yelps continued, until finally that, too, died away.

Suzanne didn’t hear the silence,
couldn’t
hear it over the roaring in her ears. The stink of gunpowder seared her nostrils, blurred her vision. Blinking to clear her burning eyes, she spun toward the bed.

“Oh, no! Dear Lord, no!”

One glance, one touch confirmed the small, still figure lying in a pool of blood on her wedding bed was dead.

With Dawes’s six-shooter still clutched tight in her fist, Suzanne edged around his body and dropped to her knees. Jack’s groan told her he was recovering from the savage blow to his head. Matt…

Matt died in her arms.

Shaking from head to toe, Suzanne rolled him over to check his wounds. He’d taken a bullet through the throat, another through the heart. Convulsions racked him even as Suzanne grabbed a fistful of skirt and petticoat in a futile attempt to staunch the blood. All she could do then was hold him.

The awful shudders ceased. His eyelids fluttered,
came up. Confusion blanked his blue eyes. In a torturous effort, he gurgled out a single word.

“Becky?”

Her heart breaking, Suzanne rocked him in her arms. “I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m here.”

His eyes closed. With a long, rattling sigh, he was still.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Suzanne held him tight against her breast, rocking back and forth, until Jack reached down, eased the boy from her arms and took her into his.

T
hey buried Matt and Ying Li in the Fort Meade cemetery. The post carpenter nailed together raw pine boards for the coffins. Prisoners from the guardhouse were detailed to dig the graves. Huddled together for protection against the biting wind that carried light swirls of snow, they leaned elbows on their shovels and waited impatiently for the services to conclude.

The few mourners who gathered at the graveside had tied white handkerchiefs around their arms, since Chinese custom dictated that as the color of sorrow. Chaplain Sergeant Renquist said the words over them in a bitter mockery of the ceremony he’d performed only the day before.

His nine-year-old face solemn, Sam set off another string of firecrackers.

“To frighten away the evil spirits,” Suzanne murmured, grieving for the generous-hearted Ro
meo and his unlikely Juliet. “So they might make the journey to the next world safely.”

Chinese burial customs, she’d learned in the brief hours since she’d participated in Ying Li’s wedding rituals, weren’t all that different from those of the Plains Indians. Both peoples believed in the long journey to the afterlife and offered symbolic gifts of food and precious objects to the departed to ease their way.

Julia Bonneaux Garrett stepped to the graveside. Slender and elegant in her lavender wool gown and fur-trimmed coat, she opened her fist. Bits of crumbled rice cakes drifted down onto the raw pine boards.

“To sustain you on your journey,” she murmured.

Her husband joined her. Rigged out in his dress uniform once again, the colonel rested a hand on his sword and dropped a wad of greenbacks onto the coffins. They’d no doubt disappear into the pockets of the grave-diggers, but at least Ying Li’s gods would be appeased.

With a wrenching ache, Suzanne added her contribution. She’d searched the post library for a dimly remembered verse until she found the bard’s declaration to an unknown love and copied it in flowing, embellished script. The poem fluttered down as she recited the lines.

“So long as men can breathe,

Or eyes can see,

So long lives this,

And this gives life to thee.”

She’d included the same lines in the letter she’d written to Matt’s parents back in Ohio. In that letter, she’d enclosed a brief note for Becky. It was, she thought, the most difficult missive she’d ever had to compose.

Swallowing to ease the ache in her throat, Suzanne stepped back and hooked her arm in Jack’s. He’d said little after the shootings last night, even less this morning. Worrying that he’d injured himself more than he’d admit, she studied his stony profile.

Bruises purpled the side of his face. His knuckles were raw, his eyes as gray and cold as the snow-laded sky. He stared down at the pine coffins for a long moment before lifting his gaze to stare at the distant mountains.

A fresh, piercing grief lanced into Suzanne’s heart. Jack blamed himself, she knew. He’d warned her repeatedly that anyone who walked or rode in his shadow faced as much danger as he did. The badge he wore wouldn’t protect him or anyone with him.

He was going to ride out. Alone. She sensed it with everything in her. And this time she couldn’t,
wouldn’t
even try to stop him. She’d curl up with her misery and die before she let another creature like Dawes use her as bait to lure Jack into a trap.

Finally, Suzanne had come to accept the truth of Bright Water’s gentle observation. She loved too much. Too hard. She had to let go.

“Jack…”

“Hold on a minute.”

Shaking free of her hold, he limped to the grave. His jaw tight, he tugged at the leather ties anchoring the Colt’s holster to his thigh.

Suzanne’s heart jumped into her throat. Stunned, she watched him fumble under his gray wool jacket and unbuckle his gun belt. Slowly, deliberately, he wrapped the cartridge belt around the worn leather holster. It landed atop the coffins with a thud that sounded as final as death.

Turning his back on the past that had haunted him for so many years, Jack reached for the future he’d never imagined he’d have.

“I’m thinking it’s time to start looking for that piece of land we talked about,” he said quietly. “Maybe buy a few head of cattle, build that cabin…”

“I…I think so, too.”

“Marry me, Suzanne.” He lifted his hand, brushed his knuckles down the curve of her cheek. “Tomorrow, if you can see past the sorrow of today.”

“Oh, Jack!”

The tears fell freely now. Joy overlaid the hurt in her heart.

“I don’t think Matt and Ying Li would want us to wait until tomorrow. As she’d point out, it’s…it’s all same, no matter.”

Extracting a promise from the astonished Chaplain Sergeant Renquist to meet them in the chapel come sundown, Suzanne tucked her arm in his.

A
fresh dusting of snow glistened over the parade ground when Colonel and Mrs. Garrett bid farewell to the McCormacks and came down the front steps of the commanding officer’s quarters. Bundled in a warm beaver coat, Julia insisted on riding the gelding her husband had procured for her instead of traveling via wagon, as did their son. Sam was already in the saddle and ready for the long trip back to Fort Russell.

The colonel’s charger and the gelding waited patiently, their breath steaming on the cold air. They were tied at the mounting block next to a big roan and a chestnut wearing the Black Hills Stage and Express Line brand.

Jack stood beside the roan, with Suzanne at his side. As the colonel approached, Jack held out a gloved hand. In his palm lay the tin star.

“I won’t be needing this.”

Andrew pocketed the badge and met Sloan’s look head-on. He still didn’t like the man, although he supposed that might come with time. Maybe.

“You sure you two don’t want to ride back to Cheyenne with us?” he asked Suzanne.

“No. We’ll take the long way, through Rawhide Buttes. I left a string of debts I’ve yet to make good on, remember?”

Her glance tipped to Sloan. A small, intimate smile curved her lips. “Some of my debts are rather more urgent than others,” she murmured.

Conceding defeat for one of the few times in his life, Andrew consigned the daughter he loved as much as life itself to Sloan’s care.

“We’ll see you in Cheyenne.”

After a fierce hug from her mother, Suzanne watched the small cavalcade wheel and start across the parade ground. A part of her shivered, realizing they took with them the life she’d known up to now. Yet the larger part was filled with a bursting, blooming happiness.

Giving her love free rein, she smiled up at the man watching the riders with a grim expression.

“Don’t worry about the colonel. He’ll come around. My mother and I are both convinced the baby will mend matters between you two.”

“Baby?”

His glance whipped down to her. Disbelief chased across his face, followed in close order by
uncertainty and something perilously close to exasperation.

“Dammit! I knew that business with Bright Water’s herbs was a bluff!”

Mischief dancing in her eyes, she pursed her lips. “Indeed?”

Her laughter vanquished him. Grinning, Jack wrapped his hands around her upper arms and drew her close.

Suzanne wasn’t sure what she expected at that point. A repeat of the vow he’d made last evening to hold and cherish her for the rest of his days, perhaps. Or more of the whispered words of love they’d exchanged in the dark, tangled together in the bedclothes in the McCormacks’ upstairs bedchamber. What she didn’t expect was the sardonic hook to his brow.

“Are you ever going to tell me what the hell was in the hand you folded that night at Mother Featherlegs’s Saloon?”

“A good poker player never reveals her strategy,” she returned primly.

“One of these days,
Miss
Bonn—” he caught himself just in time “—Mrs. Sloan, I’m going to call your bluff.”

Flinging her arms around his neck, she rose up on tiptoe and brushed her lips to his.

“I hope so, Mr. Sloan! I sincerely hope so.”