One Bright Morning (50 page)

She didn’t even try to stop crying, even
though she knew it would upset Annie. She couldn’t help it.

Four Toes Smith was the kindest man she’d
ever known in her entire life, and the best friend her little girl
would ever have. She couldn’t even stand the thought of him lying
there, dead, under the merciless desert sun. And she was here in
this wagon, being driven as a hostage to a crazy man she’d never
even met, and she couldn’t do a thing for Four Toes. She couldn’t
even bury him, for God’s sake.

Not personal. Maggie couldn’t stand it.

# # #

When Jubal and Dan got to El Paso and found
out Mulrooney had left, they knew something had gone incredibly
wrong.

“
There’s no way he would
have left unless he knew we were coming for him,” Jubal told Dan as
they tore away from the town and back toward Green Valley.
“Mulrooney never moves unless he has to. There’s something
wrong.”

“
Jesus, Jubal, do you think
Maggie and Four Toes are in any danger? They were going out to the
desert today.”

“
Sammy sends guards with
them whenever they leave the ranch.”

Dan eyed Jubal through the dust that the
pounding hooves of their horses spewed up. “He’s had to hire new
guards, Jubal, since everybody’s been getting sick. If Mulrooney
knew about our coming to El Paso, that means somebody on your
spread is being paid. That means he might have infiltrated your
forces, no matter how careful Sammy’s been.”

Jubal’s face was pale as death under his hat
in the lovely spring sunshine. His lips were pinched together and
his expression was drawn with worry.

“
I know that, Dan.” His
words were clipped. “I already know that.”

They rode back to Green Valley as fast as
they could without killing their mounts.

# # #

“
So this is Mrs.
Green.”

The black-haired man, whose name, Maggie
learned, was Sloane, had led Maggie by the arm through the five-car
special to the very last carriage and deposited her in front of an
enormously fat man. The light-haired man, Potts, had rejoined them
before the wagon reached the train.

Maggie couldn’t even look at Potts, the
villain who had murdered Four Toes. She held Annie tightly in her
arms.

It made her feel sick to her stomach when a
mousy little man gave Sloane and Potts each a wad of money and the
two thugs left the train and rode away across the desert. She
wondered where they were headed now, and if kidnap and murder were
their usual line of work.

Prometheus Mulrooney stood near the little
open observation deck in his luxurious, private railroad carriage
and beamed at his prisoners. His voice was slick with pleasure. His
turkey wattles quivered with delight, and his big stomach rippled
when he laughed. He was so pleased with himself that his fat face
fairly glowed.

Maggie was petrified, but she swore to
herself that she’d be skewered on a spit and roasted alive before
she’d allow Prometheus Mulrooney to witness her terror. She noticed
that two men, one of them the mousy man who had paid Four Toes’
murderer and her kidnapper, were cowering at Mulrooney’s side. They
kept eyeing Mulrooney as though to assess his mood.

The two were obviously underlings of
Mulrooney’s and they both seemed like truly miserable human beings
to her. Maggie didn’t understand how people could allow themselves
to be so downtrodden as to let their better natures be so
completely subverted. Yet that’s apparently just what these
creatures had done.

She found the two men contemptible, and
their cowardice repelled her. Unwittingly, they gave spur to her
own courage. She sucked in a deep breath.

“
Yes, I’m Mrs. Green.
And
you
must be
Prometheus Mulrooney.”

Maggie spoke to the huge man as though he
were a freak in a circus side show. To the contempt in her tone of
voice, she added a comprehensive glare that took in the fullness of
Mulrooney’s person, from the fat little toes that wiggled inside of
his broad shoes, to his enormous, sparsely covered head. Maggie’s
supercilious stare did not miss his huge belly or his watermelon
thighs. She tried very hard to make her expression as full of
loathing and disgust as she could. It was not a difficult task.

Ferrett and Pelch, the two men whose
defeated demeanor unknowingly fired Maggie’s spirit, looked at each
other with horrified astonishment.

Mulrooney’s smile soured some at Maggie’s
tone of voice and frosty glare of contempt.

“
The same, madam,” he said.
“And I suggest you treat me with the respect I deserve.” He spoke
smugly and rocked back on his feet. His demeanor was that of a man
supremely pleased with himself.

“
Respect
?” The word hurtled out of Maggie’s mouth and slapped
Mulrooney on the cheek as surely as if she’d used her open palm.
“
Respect
? You
don’t know the meaning of the word. You’re a filthy murderer.
You—you—you horrible man. You’re a beast! A criminal! A filthy,
disgusting murderer! Respect? I’d respect a rattlesnake before I’d
respect you.” Maggie’s eyes raked Mulrooney’s blubbery body once
more. “You, Mr. Mulrooney, are a truly contemptible
creature.”

Mulrooney had already turned a deep red.
Nobody had talked to him like this in at least forty years. He had
made it a point to see that no one he dealt with had any spirit.
But this honey-haired woman who was, at most, a quarter his size,
was actually daring to vilify him—and in front of his underlings,
what’s more.

His huge body quaked with outrage.

“
I suggest you shut your
mouth, Mrs. Green. Perhaps you don’t realize just exactly how
tenuous your position is.” His voice was quivering with
wrath.

“
My position?
Tenuous
?” Maggie spat at
him. Her courage had been overtaken by anger and she wasn’t even
thinking any longer. Her one goal at this moment was to let
Prometheus Mulrooney know how much she hated him.

“
Tenuous? I don’t even know
what that word means, mister. If you’re trying to tell me you’re
going to kill me and my baby, why don’t you just say so. That
shouldn’t be too hard for you. God knows, you’ve murdered better
people than me in your disgusting, filthy life.”

Mulrooney’s pig eyes bulged ominously in his
florid face. “Ferrett!” he roared at his secretary, who jumped a
foot.

“
Yessir,” Ferrett
whispered.

“
Take this miserable
creature away from me.”

“
Yessir.”

Maggie whirled on Ferrett now. He still
stood next to Pelch, not quite yet daring to move, and both men
were eyeing Maggie with awe. They had never heard anybody stand up
to Prometheus Mulrooney before.

“
And
you
!” Maggie shrieked at Ferrett.
“What do you do all day long? Just quake in your boots while this
horrid man makes you pay the people who do murder for him? How on
earth can you live with yourself? I’ve never seen anything like
it!”

Ferrett reached a tentative hand out to pat
Maggie’s arm, as though he were trying to get her to calm down. His
own timid nature would never allow him to buck Mulrooney. He was
sure Maggie was destined for a cruel, perhaps immediate fate, if
she didn’t stop yelling soon.

“
Take your cowardly hands
off me, you miserable thing,” Maggie cried at Ferrett, wrenching
her arm away from his touch. Poor Ferrett shrank back against
Pelch, who put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“
Ferrett! Pelch!”
Mulrooney’s face had by now turned a deeper purple than either man
had ever seen it. His putty nose looked like a huge, doughy
dumpling floating in a bowl of beet soup.

Maggie spun to face Mulrooney again.

“
Ferrett! Pelch!” Her voice
was a mockery of Mulrooney’s furious rumble. “You filthy pig! You
murdering devil! You surround yourself with weaklings and toadies
and make them do your horrid butchery. You slime! You burned my
house! You murdered my friend!” Her voice caught at the mention of
Four Toes’ death, but she took a deep breath and went on. “You
tried to murder my husband! You awful, awful, awful, fat,
disgusting—greasy lard pudding!”

Maggie couldn’t think of words terrible
enough to express to Mulrooney exactly what she thought about him,
but she was doing a fair job of getting her point across. The
expressions on the faces of the room’s occupants testified
eloquently to that truth.

At the word “fat,” both Ferrett and Pelch
looked at each other with alarm. When she called him a “greasy lard
pudding,” both men gasped. Nobody ever mentioned Mulrooney’s
obesity in his presence. It was a law in his land.

“
Enough!” Mulrooney
roared.

His piggy eyes were lost in his purple face,
and his hands were balled into enormous lumps of suet at his sides.
He reached one of them out now to push at Maggie, who was leaning
toward him. He’d never had to lay a hand on an enemy before, but
Maggie showed no signs of going away, and neither Ferrett nor Pelch
showed any sign of recovering from their respective stupors of
surprise.

Annie chose that moment to frown, point at
the quivering man, and say, “Mama, dat’s a bad fat man.”

“
He’s a terrible, bad, fat
man, Annie,” Maggie confirmed furiously.

Mulrooney’s roar could have deafened a
person less incensed than Maggie. It only fired her own fury to a
pitch unknown to her before.

When Mulrooney’s hand reached out to her,
Maggie rebalanced Annie on her hip in an instant and slapped the
enormous, porky fist as hard as she could. The fat man drew his
hand back with a gasp of pained surprise. Nobody had ever dared
strike Prometheus Mulrooney. He actually took a step back.

Maggie, who knew nothing of battles or the
element of surprise, instinctively pressed her advantage and
followed him. She stalked Mulrooney like an infuriated cat
attacking its prey.

“
You vicious, foul,
disgusting thing. You don’t even deserve the word ‘human.’ You’re
too foul. How many people have you murdered in your miserable life,
anyway? How much did it cost you to burn my house? It wasn’t worth
it, believe me. That poor place barely kept us alive, yet you must
have spent hundreds of dollars to burn it down. And how much did it
cost you to have Four Toes Smith murdered? As good a man as ever
walked the earth, and you killed him!” Maggie’s voice cracked
again, but she pushed herself on, rage giving her strength. “And
you did it all out of pure meanness. You’re a freak Mr. Mulrooney.
You’re a fat, disgusting freak of nature. Why are you doing this?
Why? Why?
Why
?”

Maggie’s shriek might have shattered glass
if the door to the deck had been shut, but it wasn’t. She had
backed Mulrooney out the open door of his carriage by this
time.

“
Why
?” Mulrooney was roaring in harmony to Maggie’s screaming.
“Because that damned Marianna Potter wouldn’t marry me, that’s why!
I’ll teach her! I’m going to wipe the Green’s off the face of the
earth! The fool married Benjamin Green instead. That’s
why!”

He was trying to sound ferocious, but he
was, in truth, frightened. Nobody had ever yelled at him or come at
him the way Maggie was doing. She’d even slapped him! And nobody
was bounding to his rescue, either.

“
She wouldn’t marry
you
?” Maggie’s voice dripped with sarcasm
that was acid enough to eat through metal.

“
She wouldn’t marry me.”
Mulrooney was whining now.

“
That’s
the reason for all this butchery?” Maggie’s hand swept out in
a gesture that encompassed years and years and lives and
lives.

“
I prefer to call it
justice,” said Mulrooney. He was still whining.

“
Justice? You prefer?
You prefer
? You
disgusting idiot!”

“
Well, she wouldn’t marry
me!”

“
Well, why should she marry
you? You’re a disgusting, filthy, grotesque pile of lard! You’re a
horrible person! Who on earth would want to marry you?”

Mulrooney uttered an incoherent bellow of
outrage.

Maggie had by this time shrieked Mulrooney
across his observation deck to the wrought-iron railing of the
platform. When he leaned his bulk against the rails to get away
from the violent, screaming termagant who wouldn’t stop following
him, Ferrett and Pelch looked at each other with big eyes. They
were probably the only two people on the whole train who heard the
ominous groan of overtaxed metal.

“
Oh, my Lord, Mr. Pelch,”
whispered Ferrett.

He looked out the window of the carriage to
discover that the train was, at this very moment, crossing a bridge
that spanned a deep—a very deep—rocky gorge. Ferrett tapped Pelch
on the shoulder and pointed out the window. Pelch gasped.

“
Good heavens, Mr. Ferrett,”
he breathed.

He crept to the deck and stood in the
doorway. He stared as Maggie pressed closer and closer to Mulrooney
and Mulrooney leaned harder and harder against the delicate
railing. Ferrett joined Pelch, and they watched, wide-eyed, as
Maggie continued to confront her husband’s family’s tormentor.

“
You vicious fiend! You
actually created all this misery just because a woman wouldn’t
marry you? Who’d want to marry you? You’re a stinking, filthy, fat,
disgusting blob! No woman on the earth would want you! I can’t
believe you murdered all those people just because a woman spurned
you. You’re not even a man. A man would have accepted his fate and
gone on with his life. But not you. No. You had to get even. Like a
little baby, you had to get your revenge. You’re crazy! You’re a
maniac! You may kill me and my little girl, you filthy pig, but
I’ll be damned if I’ll let you do it before I tell you what I think
of you.”