When she was sure the note was going to stay on the nail and not slither off to the floor, she stood straight, smoothed her hair back from her cheek, sucked a deep, calming breath, and pushed out through the door.
“There she is!” Miller said, leaning against the wood pile, arms crossed on his chest. He glanced at the tall, gray-haired Ranger standing nearby. “Lookee here, got us an Arizona Ranger. Miss Faith, meet Ranger Jake Winter.”
Faith’s heart fluttered as she cut her eyes between the grinning Miller and the Ranger, whose leathery face flushed slightly as he nodded cordially, then, as an afterthought, reached up to remove his hat. “Ma’am.”
Faith nodded back as she passed between the two men. “How do you do?”
“Well, better now that you finally freed up the outhouse!” Miller chuckled. Then he tipped his hat to the Ranger, who gave an official smile as he set his hat on his head and began tramping toward the outhouse, looking goosey on his long, slightly stiff legs clad in brown-checked wool.
Reaching for the back door handle, Faith glanced quickly over her shoulder, her heart now skipping beats as the Ranger reached for the handle of the outhouse door. Just as the man began drawing the door open, Faith stepped into the roadhouse and strode straight on past a couple of hanging brooms and the counter to the table where the others were hunkered over steaming plates and coffee mugs.
“’Bout time,” Temple said, pulling Faith’s chair out with one hand. “Your food’s gettin’ cold.”
“Can’t turn a deaf ear to nature’s call.”
Faith sat down and, scooting her chair forward, looked down at her plate. The steak was swimming in its own grease, a dollop of butter melting on top. At any other time after a long, hard ride, the succulent beef, cooked the way she liked it—rare— would have made her mouth water and her stomach growl hungrily.
Now, with her stomach in knots, the sight and smell of the food nearly made her wretch.
In spite of herself, she picked up her fork and knife and began cutting into the meat. At the same time, Miller leaned toward Temple, who was hungrily shoving steak and potatoes into his mouth.
“Did you see . . . ?” the blond said so softly that Faith could barely hear. Miller canted his head toward the two Rangers sitting on the other side of the room, fifteen feet away.
“I saw the badge when one got up,” Temple said, keeping his own voice low, below the din of the laughing freighters and the two Rangers themselves, who appeared in serious and somewhat heated discussion, the words “reservation” and “redskin” occasionally rising above their table.
Temple swallowed and turned to Faith, who was forcing a small bite of meat into her mouth. He wore his nerve-cleaving, insinuating smile. “You didn’t know we were sharing the room with law dogs, did you?”
“Not until a minute ago,” Faith said, purposefully chewing the meat and trying to look as though she were enjoying it. “Wish I had. I would have leaped onto the table and begged them to shoot you out of your damn boots.”
She swallowed and dipped her fork into her buttery baked potato. Across from her, Garza was as busy shoveling food as Temple, to whom he growled, “Wouldn’t worry,
jefe
. It’s only three old coyotes. I’ll take them out as soon as I’m done eating, if you wish.”
“No trouble,” Temple said. “We got a job to do, and we ain’t gonna complicate it. Besides, they ain’t done nothin’ to us.”
“Yes, well, they are lawmen just the same.” Chulo grinned, showing the food stuck to his rotten, crooked teeth. “You know how I feel about lawmen, uh?”
Behind Faith, the back door opened with a slight screech. Boots thudded and scuffed, and then the door rasped shut. Though she’d been listening for the lawman’s return, Faith jerked with a start.
She stared hard at her plate, trying to keep her hands moving, as she heard the loudening clomp of boots and
ching
of spurs. When the Ranger appeared to Temple’s left, angling toward the table where the other two lawmen were now drinking coffee and eating cobbler, she cast a quick glance toward that side of the room. The Ranger, Winter, stood across from one of the others, and tapped the crown of the man’s black hat.
“Ain’t polite, you know, Grayson—wearin’ your hat inside.” Winter chuckled and, without so much as a glance in Faith’s direction, dragged out his chair, doffed his own hat, and sat down to the table. “Didn’t your ma teach ya nothin’?”
Good, Faith thought, as the lawmen casually conversed, Winter digging into the pie that had been waiting for him. Play it cool. She’d been worried they might make a play on the cutthroats as soon as they found out her situation, and get themselves killed.
But they were too savvy for that. They were Rangers, after all. Not local tin stars with reputations to build. They’d talk it over, bide their time, and wait for the right moment to make their move.
“Ain’t hungry?” Temple said later, when the young Chinaman had set dessert before each of them and refilled their coffee mugs.
Faith glanced down. She’d eaten only half her steak and potato and only a few bites of her green beans. She’d turned down dessert and was now only sipping her coffee.
“It isn’t like I have a barn to clean today,” she muttered, raising her mug to her lips.
“Got a long pull ahead.” Miller shoved a forkful of cream-drenched pie into his mouth, and chewed with his mouth open. “Best eat up. Build your strength for Thornton.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but stopped when, on the other side of the room, the Rangers all raked their chairs back and, sighing and stifling belches, plunked coins onto the table. They buttoned their coats, donned their hats, hefted their rifles, and started toward the door.
The man called Grayson cast a glance at the back of the room. “Thanks, Edna. Be back through next week, prob’ly.”
“You be good, Dave!” the old woman called without turning from scrubbing the range top.
“He couldn’t be good if there was money in it,” Winter called, laughing and resting his rifle on his shoulder as he opened the door.
The freighters had already left, and when the lawmen had thumped on out of the roadhouse and off the porch, joking and laughing as they tightened their saddle cinches outside, a cavelike silence descended. It was broken only by the ticks of the cutthroats’ forks, their snorts, and the raucous scrape of Garza sliding back his chair and scratching a lucifer to light on his large-roweled Chihuahua spur.
Benny Freeze groaned and stretched. “Jeepers, now I could use a nap!”
Faith stared over her coffee mug, between Miller and Garza, and out the bright window at the far end of the room’s smoky purple shadows. The Rangers, still conversing easily, had mounted their horses. The one named Grayson paused while the others pulled their horses away from the hitch rail to light his cigar. Then he reined his bay around and followed the others out of the yard, heading in the direction from which Faith and the others had come.
Faith stared at the dust wafting in the yard before the window, incredulity mixing with the tension in her gut. She’d thought the men were merely acting casual, so as not to telegraph their intent to the cutthroats. But now she was beginning to doubt that Winter had found her note in the privy.
The Rangers hadn’t seemed to be acting. They hadn’t hesitated once. Not one had glanced suspiciously toward Faith or her kidnappers. And when they’d ridden from the yard, they’d done so with purposeful ease, eyes intent on the trail before them.
Suddenly, she felt Temple’s gray eyes on her, and she glanced at the outlaw leader. “Damn,” he said, lifting his mouth corners shrewdly. “They’re gone. And you’re still here . . . on your way to see an old friend.”
Faith bit the inside of her lip, feeling the burn of frustration and anger down deep in her loins. Then she turned away and, maintaining a casual air, threw back the last of her coffee.
“Time to pull foot, fellas,” Temple said, rising and dropping his spent cheroot in his coffee mug, where it fizzled softly. He and the others dropped coins on the table with a metallic clatter.
Rising from her own chair, Faith glanced once more at the Rangers’ table, which the young Chinaman was busily clearing. Her note must have slipped off the privy door’s locking nail when either she or the Ranger had opened the door, and the breeze had no doubt blown it away. If he’d seen the scrap, he’d probably dismissed it as trash.
Frustration bit her, and she silently cursed herself for a fool. Three lawmen had been no more than fifteen feet away from her, and her own carelessness had foiled her attempt at summoning their help.
“Come on,
dearest
,” Temple ordered, grabbing her arm and shoving her toward the door. “Quit lollygaggin’ and break a leg.”
Chapter 14
Temple tightened Faith’s mare’s saddle cinch, and then he tied Faith’s wrists to her saddle horn. He and the others mounted, and as the sun began angling westward from its zenith and a cool breeze swept dust from the yard, the group headed north from the roadhouse, the faint clatter of pots and pans echoing behind them.
Riding through high mountain country, pines shading their trail as they climbed toward a steep rimrock formation, eagles screeching over a stream winking in the valley they’d just left, Faith found her thoughts returning to Yakima and her brother, Kelly.
Both dead now, she was sure. If Yakima wasn’t dead, he would have tracked her by now. She was sure of it. It was just as well she hadn’t been able to summon the Rangers’ help. Why put others in danger? She no longer cared what happened to her.
Besides her, Kelly had been the last living memberof her immediate family. Her older brother, George, had been killed in a ranching accident somewhere in Wyoming, and her father, who had been living alone in the Chugwater Buttes north of Cheyenne, had drunk himself to death. Her mother had died of a fever a year before Faith had left home at age fifteen—driven out by her father’s bereaved, drunken rage.
Now the only man she’d ever loved had been taken from her, too. Her chest heaved suddenly with a raw wave of sorrow, and, as she’d trained herself over her long run of hard years, she quickly turned it to anger. She set her jaws and imagined the face of the man responsible.
Bill Thornton.
A mild voice interrupted her thoughts—a voice so soft and mild that at first she thought she’d imagined it or that it had been a trick of the wind. Temple must have wondered, too, because, ahead of Faith’s mare, he turned his head slowly from side to side, a curious frown ridging his brow.
“Temple,” Miller said, riding just off Faith’s mare’s right hip.
The outlaw leader pulled back on his steeldust’s reins and started turning toward Miller when something in the rocks right of the trail caught his eye, and his right hand dropped to one of his revolvers.
The voice came again, louder this time. “Uh-uh. Nope. That’s the wrong thing to do, mister.”
Faith whipped her head around quickly, at first thinking they’d been stopped by bandits. But then the sun glinted dully off a badge, and her pulse quickened.
The Ranger she’d met behind the roadhouse, Winter, was aiming a rifle out from behind a scarp amongst the pines behind her and right of the trail, upslope a few yards. Another Ranger—the one called Grayson—stood beside a tree ahead and just to the left of the trail, slightly downslope. He aimed a Winchester straight out from his shoulder, while the third man, who had gray hair like Winter’s and an even more sun-darkened face, aimed his own rifle from the same scarp as did Winter, but ahead and to the right of the trail. A long weed stem protruded from between his teeth.