Authors: P. A. Bechko
Why? Amanda asked herself the same question again and again. Why this when the real bank robbers were getting away with the money? Only one answer came readily to mind and it was a frightening one. John Berglund himself could have been a part of that robbery which had cost Eddie his life at the same time casting a dark shadow on her reputation and that of a total stranger.
Her thoughts scattered like dust before the wind leaving her terrified, sweating and trembling. She reminded herself again the truth would prevail.
The sheriff roughly pulled her across the room. He was muttering under his breath and paused only long enough at the hulking desk to pick up a ring of keys before ushering her to one of the two adjoining cells.
“Why did you have to go and shoot poor Eddie?”
He opened the cell door, pushed her inside and closed it with a decisive clang.
“I didn’t shoot anyone, and neither did that man they’re bringing over here now. There were only three bank robbers and all of them got away. You’re wasting your time with us while they’re escaping!”
The sheriff’s face was closed and cold. “I’ve know John Berglund a while,” he stepped back from the barred door. “Ain’t no reason for him to be lyin’ about something like this. You got yourself into a peck of trouble, Miss.”
“But he
is
lying,” Amanda persisted desperately . “And you should be looking for the reason!”
Carson turned his back on her, cutting off further protests as the men toting Hollander entered, Berglund on their heels. Dutifully, the sheriff opened the door to the second cell and they carried him inside, tossing him, on the narrow cot against the back wall.
Amanda rushed to the side of her cell closest to that of the injured man.
“Aren’t you going to get him a doctor?”
The men left without a word. The sheriff hooked the keys on his belt with a commanding snap and joined Phoenix’s most respected banker at the door.
“It’s not much more than a scratch,” Berglund said from the doorway without concern. “He’ll be all right in time for the trial later.”
“Trial!” Amanda exploded as Carson and Berglund filed out the door. “Wait! You can’t . . .” she objected, but as the heavy wooden door closed with a solid thump, she was filled with a sick certainty that they most certainly could—and would.
What if John Berglund, whatever his reasons, convinced them that she really had murdered Eddie? She shuddered. That was impossible. There couldn’t be a trial. She hadn’t done anything!
Silence settled over the jail with the thickness of sea fog. The only sounds to break it was that of her own breathing, and that of Hollander, his definitely more ragged.
Glancing sideways at him she saw blood seeping from the scalp wound. How much blood could a man lose before he was in danger of slipping away? She worried her lip between her teeth in concern. The bunk he lay on was positioned so he was sprawled parallel with the back wall, head near the bars separating their two cells.
Amanda found a pitcher full of water and a basin. Hastily slopping the tepid water into the bowl, she carried it over to Hollander, and knelt on the floor beside the bars nearest him. She stuck a hand through the bars, tugged his neckerchief from around his neck, and dipped it into the water, and began dabbing gently at the raw, angry looking wound.
“You’re going to have an awful headache,” she murmured to the unconscious man.
Finally the flow of blood slowed. A few moments more and Hollander stirred. He made a sound low in his throat that would have passed completely unnoticed had he been laying even a foot further from her.
Then, suddenly, he bit off a curse and rolled into a sitting position on the cot. He cradled his head in both hands and blinked as if even the dim light the setting sun cast across the jail’s gloom was too bright.
Amanda first stared at the dingy, blood-splattered pillow where his head had lain, then watched as he took in his surroundings in weighted silence. The curse he’d swallowed passed softly from his lips.
“They say I killed Eddie, and you and I were in on the robbery.” Amanda decided he’d better know the facts, and quickly. “The banker, John Berglund, claims he shot you and winged the other man.”
“Great,” Jake grumbled climbing to his feet, swaying a bit. “They get around to talking about a trial yet?”
Amanda blinked in surprise. “Why yes, yes they did. I think they intend to have one tonight. But we didn’t do anything,” she added quickly. “Surely you don’t believe they’ll . . . .”
The trail-rider gave her a twisted grin.
“Lady, how long you been in these parts?”
“Three months,” she answered with injured dignity. “Now sit down and let me finish cleaning that wound. It doesn’t look good.”
Hollander glanced heavenward as if he might expect some help from that quarter, then winced at the pain the sudden movement brought to his throbbing head. He gingerly touched the fresh gouge where the skin was peeled back nearly all the way from bone. He’d seen it coming when he had first seen the banker’s face.
The banker had been a part of it just as sure as the sun would rise in the morning. Hollander had seen it first in his eyes, then in the nod he had given to the leader of the trio to take along the dirty, trail-worn canvas bag containing the twenty thousand dollars. Until then the outlaws had taken no real notice of it. The little lady had almost saved it for him. She had been scared, but she had played it right, neither completely ignoring the sack, nor trying to hide it. But, as he suspected, Lord what a tenderfoot she was. Three months! And, she had learned nothing during those months, spending the entire time working in the sheltered safety of a bank. It was that way with the few women, town women anyway, who did not end up working in saloons or worse, but it left Jake with a hell of a problem.
Christ what a fix. Already the scanty facts, as Jake knew them, were falling into place. Long years of living, filled with bitter experience had exposed him to almost everything, and there was nothing new in a banker having a hand in robbing his own bank. The twist this time though was the position he found himself in because of it, and the woman right along with him.
He looked at her again. She was a beauty. Son-of-a-bitch if she wasn’t. That thick wavy black hair tumbling over her shoulders and those mysterious green eyes. Despite the character he saw in the firm set of her jaw, she was the greenest of greenhorns. And that dazzling beauty of hers would be nothing now but a burden. Worse, he feared it was going to be his to bear.
“Well?” Amanda asked, an impatient note in her voice as a trickle of blood oozed from the wound running slowly over his temple and down his cheek to drip with a barely audible splat just outside the edge of his boot toe.
“You think there’s something wrong, that the trial they’re going to give us won’t be fair, don’t you?”
She was sober and downcast when he settled himself back on the cot near the bars, but that didn’t stop her from reaching through the bars to finish cleaning the bullet graze.
“If that banker has anything to say about it, they’ll probably string us both up,” Jake winced as she continued her further clumsy attempts at nursing.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Amanda said with a sigh, while her hands kept busy tending the raw, ugly rip in his scalp.
“Your good friend, the banker, just robbed his own establishment is what I’m saying. With some help of course. I had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a sack full of money that wasn’t mine.”
“Of course. I think I had that part figured out. What I don’t understand is how he hopes to gain by making it appear we did it.”
“You don’t?”
Amanda shook her head.
“We’re probably the best scapegoats he could have hoped for. If I hadn’t turned up, he would have had to let the sheriff go charging off after the real outlaws and hope the man didn’t catch up with them. Instead, with us in hand, by his account part of the gang, and you being the one who actually killed that boy.” Jake gave a shrug. “Things slow down a bit. Somebody’s dead. They have to take time out for a trial, and probably a hanging before they can get down to the serious tracking of the other three who have no doubt met with the banker, split my twenty thousand dollars as well as the bank money between them and are now riding hell for leather out of the territory.”
He eyed Amanda as she ripped a length of petticoat for a bandage.
“Me I can understand, but the man has to have a grudge against you, honey, and it must be a beaut. What in blazes did you do to get that fella out for your blood?”
Amanda’s hands froze at their task of rolling the bandage, and she stared at Jake in open disbelief.
“Don’t be ridiculous! I didn’t do anything worthy of the kind of anger needed to justify this!”
“But you did do something.”
Amanda reddened. “It was nothing. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time.”
“And that was?”
She didn’t respond, just returned to furiously readying the bandage.
“Come on, lady, we’re hip deep in prairie fuel here. I need to know what we’re talking about.”
“Well, I—it’s just that I didn’t respond to Mr. Berglund’s advances.”
“He wants to spark you and you refused?”
A short nod from Amanda was his answer.
Jake grunted when the door swung open with a bang. Amanda jerked toward the door and the sheriff lit one of the oil lamps hanging overhead as John Berglund followed him inside.
“Told you we’d probably find them like that,” the banker said with a leer, the chill in his deep-set brown eyes enough to chill the dead.
“That pair is thick, Matt. I saw him in the bank a time or two before. Said he was just passing through. Must have been when she told him when there would be the most cash on hand and when it would be easiest to hit my bank. When poor Eddie tried to stop them, she pulled that gun from her drawer and shot him. Who would have figured it?”
“That’s not true!” Amanda jumped to her feet. “Can’t you see he’s lying, sheriff?”
“You said that before,” Carson said calmly, his hazel eyes indifferent. “You can say it again at the trial soon as they have things set up over at the saloon.”
“What?”
“You’re gonna get a fair trial. The both of you.”
“Fair! No trial could be fair. I didn’t
do
anything. Neither did he,” she finished pointing a finger in Hollander’s direction.
The banker strolled closer to the jail cells looking at Hollander sprawled on his cot, one knee up, wrist resting on it with studied indifference. When he spoke it was for Amanda’s ears.
“Never know at a trial. Could be someone might not remember things clearly. Could be I might remember you didn’t have anything to do with it. That it was just the drifter in the next cell.”
“You bastard!” Amanda ground out the oath, amazed at how easily it had come to her lips.
“Whatever you say.” He turned away, rejoining the sheriff at the door.
Stunned, Amanda turned back to Jake, her face hardening, a grimness matching his etching itself deeply into her features.
Chapter 3
Hollander had tried to prepare her for the verdict, down to the fact that it would take the good citizens of the town no time at all to make a decision. Even so, the outcome had shocked Amanda. How could it have been such a pre-determined event as far as her cell-mate had predicted? Abrupt, and unalterable, the sentence was as Jake had foreseen. They were to hang with the sunrise.
When she’d heard the sentence actually droned out loud, Amanda had endured a hard lump in her throat and a tightening in the pit of her stomach. Plainly the audience had expected her to break down and cry, but instead. she got mad. More furious than she’d ever been before in her life or, she reflected then with grim humor, was ever likely to be again in light of her fate. Like a bitter pill the injustice of it stuck in her throat right there alongside that lump, and she had wanted to swear and scream her rage in their pious faces. However, she’d managed to hold herself in check, not willing to give Berglund any more to gloat over than he had just witnessed.
So, her face had stilled into an emotionless mask with the smooth coolness of fine polished marble, and she had chosen to look only to the man who shared her fate—Jake Hollander.
Jake, touching her hand in a gesture of comfort, had stood close beside her, directing his insolent glare at the jury, the judge and John Berglund.
He had seen the instantaneous look of shock on Amanda’s face, and then had come the change. And that expression had been one of cold fury. She proved she wasn’t going to go to pieces on him. A wry twist of his lips had become an encouraging smile when they’d been led from the make-shift courtroom in the closed saloon, past the gallows that were already under construction in front of the livery, and back to their respective jail cells.
Once there the sheriff turned suddenly more human.
“Reckon I ought to ask you if there’s anythin’ special you’d like to eat, seeing as how you two didn’t get any dinner and this would be your last meal.”