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At the sound of the dreaded name, Oat jolted into wakefulness. “Night Bird?” he said, his hand reaching for his gun. His rheumy eyes were wide with fear.
“We were just talking, Oat,” Paulie assured the older man. Lord only knew what he would do if Night Bird ever did come riding over the hill.
Lord only knew what any of them would do!
“Then what’s that I hear comin’?”
It wasn’t until Oat mentioned them that Paulie heard the hoofbeats thundering toward them. She scrambled for her rifle, as did Trip, who stood on wobbly legs, but with a cool head, watching. How could he be so calm? She wasn’t sure what was coming at them, but it didn’t sound good.
Just as she was readying her gun for a battle, the rider crested the gentle hill in front of them. It was Will, riding as if Beelzebub himself were nipping at his heels. Paulie waited, looking to see what was following him, but nothing appeared to explain the crazed way he had galloped into their calm little camp.
He brought his horse to a quick stop just a few feet away from them and quipped, “Thought I might need to wake you all up.”
Paulie put her hands on her hips, half in anger, half to steady herself as she stared into his whiskey-colored eyes. Heavens, Will was a handsome man! Of course she’d known that already, but now she had the additional bonus of knowing how it felt to be in those strong arms of his. And with his dark hair wild from his ride, and his eyes shining as if lit from some internal fire, he was even better-looking than he’d seemed the night before, when he’d kissed her. She felt dizzy from the mere memory of it—light-headed and weightless.
It was hard to keep her thoughts straight, being so close to him. She just couldn’t allow herself to think about that kiss, not right at the moment.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, riding in like that and scaring us half to death!”
Will swung off his horse. “Good morning to you, too, Sprout.” He seemed to look right through her, as though he didn’t want to deal with her at all. Like last night had meant nothing to him!
Well, he would soon find out she wasn’t so easy to ignore. “Do you realize we were poised to shoot whoever was coming? You could have got yourself killed just now!”
He turned on her, eyes flashing. “If you can’t keep a cool head, you shouldn’t be here.”
Her blood shot from hot to the boiling point in nothing flat. “You’re the one who’s been flying off the handle all the time, Mr. Hothead,” she said. She almost added that it was his jumping to fool conclusions about his lady love’s abduction that was leading them off on this crazy mission to begin with, but decided to refrain, for Oat’s sake.
Will turned to her with a retort on his lips, but was cut off by Trip.
“Any sign of Night Bird?”
Will pivoted toward Trip—dismissing Paulie as easily as he would swat a bothersome gnat away. “No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Where are we goin’ today?”
“I thought we could head into Vinegaroon.”
Paulie’s ire evaporated at the mention of that town. “Vinegaroon!” she cried. “There isn’t anything there but a saloon.”
“You’ll be thirsty by the time we get there,” Will told her with a wry smile.
The reply poised on the tip of Paulie’s tongue was interrupted by Oat, who was nodding in agreement with Will. “Roy Bean’ll know if Night Bird is crawling around.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Will said.
“Judge Bean, you mean!” Paulie had heard about Roy Bean, but had never met the man. He had a reputation for running a hell of a saloon, and, since being appointed judge, or appointing himself—no one was ever quite sure which—he’d also become known for doling out swift justice. She wasn’t sure she would like him. “I’ve heard of innocent men wandering into that place in the morning and ending the day swinging by a rope.”
Will looked at her, really looked at her for the first time that morning, and she could have sworn there was laughter in those brown eyes. “Well maybe if you mind your manners and keep your mouth shut, we won’t have to waste time cutting you down at sunset.”
Then he turned, missing by inches the hard biscuit that Paulie sent whizzing past his ear.
If Trip wanted Paulie Johnson, he was welcome to her. And good luck to him!
Will snorted to himself and spurred Ferdinand just a little faster, knowing that the others would keep up, no matter what. Paulie would die before she let out a whimper of complaint about their pace, or her hunger, which she was probably feeling keenly by now. The fool girl should be eating more food and throwing less of it. Trip said she hadn’t eaten a bite at breakfast. Probably just more evidence of her lovesickness, he thought, feeling a now familiar prick of unease at the thought of the pair of them.
The whole affair was none of his business, and he’d already spent far too much time thinking about it. Brooding about it, almost. Bad enough he hadn’t been able to sleep almost all the night, but the minute his bleary eyes had opened this morning, he’d started thinking about that kiss again, and how surprisingly soft and warm Paulie had felt in his arms. And then he’d remembered that Paulie belonged to Trip. He’d ridden out and had been unable to think about anything else. Night Bird could have jumped on the back of the horse with him and he wouldn’t have known it.
He was determined not to give Trip and Paulie—or that kiss—another thought.
He rode on for a few minutes, trying to concentrate on the landscape around him. Scrubby hills surrounded them, providing perfect hiding places for bandits.
Will sighed, unconsciously giving up his internal struggle. He just couldn’t even begin to guess why a sensible man like Trip Peabody would choose an ill-tempered waif like Paulie Johnson to sacrifice his long-held bachelorhood to! It didn’t make sense. Especially when everyone had always thought he would marry Tessie Hale.
Tessie Hale... Now there was a woman! Tessie was tall, pretty and even-tempered. Sure, she was a little long in the tooth—seasoned, you might say—but so was Trip. And she was a widow, which was about the perfect thing for a woman to be, when it came to a man’s choosing a mate. It meant that she’d already had some measure of matrimonial success. Will frowned. Or maybe it just meant that she’d nagged her husband into an early grave.
Paulie’s laughter startled him out of his thoughts. “Trip, you chucklehead!”
Her voice travelled forward, a husky whisper on the light dry breeze. There was something soothing and friendly about the teasing sound. He remembered now that sometimes when he was going up to Kansas, he’d think back on his silly conversations with Paulie. Paulie could chatter on for hours about nothing and still manage to be entertaining. Now that he considered it, he couldn’t remember thinking back on a single conversation he’d had with Mary Ann while he was on his way to Kansas. Maybe that was why he’d written Mary Ann that damn letter—the epistle that had seemed to cause the whole world to turn topsy-turvy.
If so, that was a fool reason. It was ridiculous to compare Paulie and Mary Ann anyway—like comparing a fig to a daisy.
He couldn’t help glancing back at her. At just that moment, she tossed her head back, laughing at something Trip had said. Or maybe she was laughing at one of her own jokes. Even from this distance, he could almost see her eyes sparkling with humor. Her head was tilted as it always did when she found something particularly funny.
He quickly turned back, sighed again, and shook his head, clearing it. Trip Peabody? It just didn’t make sense. But neither sometimes did his wanting to honor the pledge he’d made Mary Ann’s father. Especially now that she was married to Oat. But he felt it just the same, and maybe it was that feeling of being bound to someone against all reason that had brought Paulie and Trip together. If so, be knew he couldn’t talk her out of it.
Not that he wanted to, he assured himself for the millionth time. It was none of his business who Paulie Johnson set her heart on.
Galloping hoofbeats closed in on him, and he didn’t have to turn around to guess whose horse they belonged to.
“Look, Will!” Paulie cried with more enthusiasm than he would have thought any one of them would have the energy to muster. “There’s the saloon!”
“You’d think you’d never seen one before,” he said, making fun of her excitement over a mere wooden building—one he apparently would have missed, his mind was so preoccupied.
Sure enough, there it stood on the horizon, looking sturdy, almost fortresslike on the bare arid land surrounding it. A horse was tethered out front, and a pair of men sat on the porch. They were dwarfed by a brand-new sign running the length of the saloon’s roof that read The Law West of the Pecos.
“Roy Bean sure seems to take his job seriously,” Paulie said.
“His job, his liquor and his woman,” Will agreed.
“Woman?” Paulie looked at him in some confusion. “I didn’t know he was married.”
Will smiled. “Married to an idea, you might say.”
She didn’t look like he had clarified the situation for her any, so he simply rode on, deciding it was best to let her discover for herself Roy Bean’s odd fascination with Lily Langtry, a woman he’d never met—and probably never would, considering that famous English actresses didn’t make it around to South Texas very often. Oat and Trip caught up with Will and Paulie in the final stretch, both men looking very excited to be within spitting distance of the inside of a building again. A building with liquor in it, too.
“Think I might have me a sarsaparilla,” Oat said, looking about as animated as Will had seen him.
“Me, I’m gonna have a whiskey.” Trip almost licked his lips. “Seems like forever since we’ve had that, hey, Paulie?”
The two looked at each other and smiled—an exchange Will tried to glean for any kernel of meaning. But of course the intent, if not the meaning itself, was clear. From this peculiar couple, a shared grin was the equivalent of a lovey-dovey simper from a more traditional pair of lovers.
“It seems forever since I’ve sold any, I know that,” Paulie agreed. “But you never did care about sellin’ so much as drinkin’, Trip.”
Will winced. Hearing them talk about the mundane goings-on at that saloon of theirs, he felt as if he were listening in on the most intimate of conversations. Oat didn’t look the slightest bit uncomfortable...but perhaps he just didn’t know the truth. Yet. The way Paulie and Trip were carrying on, everyone was bound to start suspecting sooner or later.
“What about you, Will?” Paulie asked. She reached over and nudged him in the arm—at her merest touch, he nearly shot right out of his saddle.
“Good grief!” Trip exclaimed. “From the way you reacted, Will, anyone would have thought she’d poked you with a bolt of lightning!”
Will shook his head to clear it. “What were you asking, Paulie?”
“I asked, what’s your poison going to be?”
“I’m not here to socialize,” he said tightly. “I’m here for answers.”
He spurred his horse and rode on, loping into Vinegaroon just ahead of the others. He needed to put some distance between himself and Paulie and Trip. Their relationship was just none of his business. He needed to get a hold of himself.
Roy Bean, a tough wiry old cuss if ever there was one, pushed out of his chair and leaned against the porch railing, looking bemused by the approaching party. “Well, if it ain’t Will Brockett!” he said in his signature terse, wry voice. He tugged at his handlebar mustache. “I heard you’d gotten back from Kansas, Will, but I wasn’t expecting you to come callin’ so soon.”
Will dismounted and tethered Ferdinand at the post in front of saloon. “I just came by to—”
“Well, well!” Roy cried, too focused on the company Will was keeping to care about why he had come around. “This is a ragtag band you got riding drag! Oat, Trip Peabody and some whippersnapper I ain’t never seen before.”
Before Will could make introductions, Paulie was off her horse.
“I’m Paulie Johnson, from Possum Trot,” she said excitedly, pumping Roy’s hand a mile a minute. A while back she had seemed reluctant to meet Roy, but now she was greeting him as though he were her long-lost uncle.
“Johnson?” he asked, his beady eyes sparking with interest. “That girl that runs the Dry Wallow?”
Will folded his arms and felt the corners of his lips tug into a frown. Paulie, apparently, could charm men more ably than he had ever given her credit for. At least rough types who hung around saloons.
“I imagine you folks want to come on in and wet your whistle,” Roy said. “I was just about to set myself down to lunch.”
Paulie practically licked her lips. “Lunch?”
Roy eyed Will. “Man, are you leading these folks on some sort of starvation trail?”
It seemed as good an opening as any for telling Roy why they were really there. “Actually, I’m—”
Roy didn’t wait for his explanation. He was too enraptured by his other newcomers. “Well, come on inside and help yourself,” he told Paulie. “I don’t know if the vittles is what you’re used to, but I’ve got plenty of ’em.”
The judge led Paulie, Oat and Trip into the saloon, leaving his companion on the porch unintroduced. Will turned to the man, a mean-looking character who didn’t even bother to glance up at him. He just kept staring at the dusty planks that made up the saloon’s porch, pivoting once to spit off to the side. Frankly, the stranger gave Will the shivers, but he couldn’t say exactly why that was. He was a regular-looking fellow with sandy blond hair peeking out from under the brim of his hat. Only he had a hardness in his eyes that made Will uneasy.
After a few more moments of the silent treatment, Will followed the talking and laughter into the saloon and found the group of men nursing drinks around Paulie, who was seated at the head of a long table, stuffing herself with a plate of some sort of concoction of rice and beans, with a few hunks of nondescript meat mixed in for good measure.
They all glanced up at him when he took a seat nearby, then looked quickly away again, focusing all their rapt attention on Paulie.
She swallowed down a gulp of food and said, savoring every syllable of what apparently was a punch line, “...And so I told the man, ‘I don’t know about your wife, Mister, but you sure could use a new horse.”’
The men roared with laughter. Even Oat. Roy was all but slapping his knee, and of course Trip was laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes. He had probably heard the silly joke about a thousand times already. People in love certainly did make fools of themselves, Will thought, crossing his arms sourly.
Roy took note of his demeanor and turned to him for a moment. “Well, Will, I keep expecting you to come out and tell me what it is you’re doing here any minute now.”
As if he hadn’t already tried to tell the man twice already!
“Why so closemouthed, Will?” Roy went on.
Glad for the opening to finally get down to business, Will took a breath.
Paulie downed another heaping spoonful of that unappetizing mash of Roy’s and blurted out, “We’re looking for Night Bird. That’s why we’ve come. Everybody thought maybe you’d heard of his whereabouts.”
At this explanation, Roy looked almost startled. His narrow eyes widened and he rubbed his stubbly jaw in wonder. “Night Bird, huh?” he asked, looking at Will as if he’d just gone plumb crazy. “You got a death wish, Brockett?”
Will opened his mouth to defend his mission, but Paulie once again beat him to the punch.
“That’s what I said!” Paulie exclaimed. “But the trouble is, we suspect Night Bird ran off with Oat’s wife.”
They suspected? Will thought. The last time he’d checked, Paulie considered the Night Bird theory to be nothing but pure flapdoodle. Now she was almost making it sound as if chasing the renegade had been her idea!
“That pretty Redfern girl I heard so much about?” Roy asked, uninhibited in his shock. He didn’t have to mention that he’d heard so much about her precisely because she had married Oat, either. Despite her beauty, Mary Ann hadn’t gained any real notoriety until she’d made a surprising choice of husband.
“That’s the one,” Paulie said.
“I lost her,” Oat added, still as puzzled as ever.
“Good Lord!” Roy exclaimed. Then he called out to the porch. “Cal, you hear that?”
When they looked up, the man with the cold gaze had it fixed on Will, as if sizing him up for the task of chasing Night Bird. “I heard,” he said curtly.
“What do you think, Cal?”
The man shrugged.
Roy looked at his assembled guests. “You all have something in common with Cal here. He’s been hired by the family of one of those men Night Bird killed to catch him dead or alive.”
A killer. That would explain his demeanor, Will thought. One glance at the man was enough to know that he didn’t give a fig about whether his quarry was alive or not when he laid him at the feet of the family who hired him.
“Do you know where Night Bird is?” Will asked.
The man spat on Roy’s floor, then shrugged. “Mexico.”
“Are you going after him?”
The bounty hunter shook his head. “Nope.”
“It’s foolhardy to chase a bandit into Mexico, Will,” Roy said. “He’ll get more trigger-happy the closer he is to the border—and the farther away from American law.”
Will shook his head, feeling the weight of his responsibility more sharply the worse the news became. “I can’t just let him go,” he explained. “Not while he’s got Mary—I mean, Mrs. Murphy.”
