The Outlaw And The Runaway
Out in the bright sunshine, Roy felt his head swim and his mouth go dry. He tossed the bags of gold to Keeler. Saldana and Davies were already cantering away. Roy gripped the pommel of the saddle, gathered his strength to climb up on Dagur. Spooked by the smell of blood, the buckskin took a frightened sidestep, causing Roy to stumble. The others got on their horses and thundered out of town, dust billowing in their wake.
From the boardwalk came the rapid clatter of footsteps. Roy turned to look. The girl was heading the formation of people charging toward the bank. The elderly clerk from the mercantile and the barber in a leather apron followed close behind. Still farther back, three men had burst out of the saloon. One had hurried to his mount at the hitching rail and was pulling a rifle out of a saddle scabbard.
Roy vaulted on his horse, pain throbbing in his shoulder. Once more, he glanced back, as much to look at Celia Courtwood as to assess the danger. The girl had jumped down at the end of the boardwalk, only a few paces away from him. Their gazes collided. From the way he saw her against the backdrop of the weather-beaten buildings and the dusty street, with a full depth perception instead of the flat vision of a one-eyed man, Roy knew the protecting tuft of horsehair in his wig had shifted aside. And from the way the girl came to a halt, the shock of recognition stamped on her pretty features, he knew that she had noticed his mismatched eyes—had identified him despite the disguise.
For a moment, time stood still as they stared at each other, the air between them charged with unspoken questions and apologies and explanations. Then Roy turned to face forward, dug his heels into the flanks of the buckskin and shot down the street. Behind him came the girl’s frightened scream. “Papa! Papa!”
Your father is fine, Roy thought with a trace of irony. I took the bullet meant for him.
He couldn’t understand what had happened, why Curtis had fired at the teller, unless it was a random act of violence. Some men went crazy with the outlaw life, got into the habit of using gunplay as a means to demonstrate their power, or simply to alleviate the boredom of being shut away in the hideout for months on end, with little to amuse them apart from gambling and drinking and brawling.
A rifle shot cracked through the air. The rancher who’d burst out of the saloon must have fired, and soon others would fetch their hunting weapons and start shooting. Roy heard the bullet whizz by, chasing him. He squatted low in the saddle and urged Dagur on. One hole in his hide was enough.
As he left the town behind, the sun in the sky seemed to grow hotter and hotter. His vision wavered, making the landscape hazy. Pain rolled over him in waves that appeared to swallow him up. Sweat coated his skin, mixing with the stream of blood from his shoulder.
In the distance, he could see a cloud of dust where his associates were making their escape. He twisted awkwardly in the saddle to survey the trail behind him. A burning pain sliced through his side at the motion, but he saw no sign of anyone chasing him.
He slowed his pace, teetered in the saddle. He was losing too much blood. Unless he attended to his wound and got some rest, he’d never survive the long ride north, to the maze of canyons where the law didn’t reach.
The gang had arranged to regroup at an abandoned mine, to inspect the haul and to retrieve the provisions they had stored there for the return journey to the hideout. However, Lom Curtis might feel that leaving behind an injured man posed too great a risk. He had a cast-iron rule that any man who joined the Red Bluff Gang could never walk away or be left behind, and in his weakened state Roy would be no match for the outlaw boss—not with fists, not with guns, nor in terms of outwitting him.
Taking a sharp turn into an outcrop of boulders, Roy pointed the buckskin toward the west, along a trail overgrown with sagebrush and creosote. Unlike Saldana and Davies, who’d spent their idle hours gambling, Roy had roamed the surrounding hills. He’d come across an abandoned homestead, with a log cabin and a spring.
If he could make it that far, the cabin would offer a place to hide, a refuge from both a posse and the outlaw leader who placed no value on loyalty.
* * *
Celia shook herself free from the trance she’d tumbled into when she’d recognized the man with mismatched eyes in his Indian disguise. She jumped up the front steps of the bank, shoved the door open with both hands and hurtled through.
“Papa! Papa!” She could hear the shrill ring of terror in her voice, could feel her heart hammering in the confines of her chest.
She raked a frantic glance around the room, divided by a polished oak counter and a glass partition above. Her father and the manager, Mr. Northfield, sat sprawled with their backs against the wall on the customer side. Celia rushed up to them, sank to her knees in front of her father.
“Papa! Are you all right? Are you all right?” With searching hands, she patted his freshly laundered shirt and the suit coat that hung on his emaciated frame. No blood. No blood. But a glazed look filled her father’s eyes and beneath her searching palms Celia could feel his frail body trembling with fear.
While she completed her examination, her father sucked in a calming breath and expelled it on a sigh. “I’m fine, Celia girl,” he reassured her. “Just a bit shaken up.”
She turned to the manager. From an affluent Baltimore family, Mr. Northfield had employed her father on a recommendation from shared acquaintances. In his sixties, cool in manner, trim in appearance, with neatly clipped graying hair and a pencil moustache, the manager kept himself aloof from his employees. Celia possessed no fondness for him, but she was grateful for the opportunity he had extended to her father.
“Mr. Northfield, are you all right?”
“I am unharmed, if that is what you mean.” The manager sat upright on the floor and tugged at the lapels of his broadcloth suit. “But I am far from all right. They emptied the vault, all of it. Forty thousand dollars’ worth of gold, the most we have ever held in the bank.”
Her panic receding, Celia twisted on her knees to survey the disarray. A crack ran across the glass partition and ugly scratches marred the front of the oak counter. Behind the partition, the vault stood open, empty coin trays scattered about. Overturned chairs and papers strewn about completed the scene of destruction. In the air, the acrid smell of gunpowder mingled with the familiar scents of beeswax polish and lemon cleaner.
Anger flared in Celia, the edge of it dulled by a sense of guilt and shame. In her bitterness toward the townspeople, she had secretly welcomed the disaster, had gloated over having figured out what no one else seemed to have the brains to suspect.
Now, regret flooded her conscience. Her father loved his job. It gave him dignity, a position in the community. During the robbery, his place of business, the citadel of finance in which he took such pride had been violated, equipment damaged, order and precision replaced with chaos and lawlessness.
She turned back to the men. “I heard a gunshot.”
Her father swallowed, his thin throat rippling. “That’s the damnedest thing, Celia girl. One of the outlaws, the gang leader, pointed his gun at me. I believe he was going to shoot me, but another one of the robbers got in the way. The Indian, with long black hair. I think he got hit.”
Celia’s thoughts reverted to the stranger with mismatched eyes. She’d been waiting for him to return, and for the briefest of instants out there in the midday sun, as she jumped down from the boardwalk and her eyes locked with one brown eye and one blue, the thrill of recognition had made her forget everything else.
Just as she had suspected, the stranger had come back to rob the bank. And he had protected her father. Why had he done it? Was it to rule out the prospect of being hanged for murder if the gang got caught? Or had he known the teller was her father? Had he done it for her, to protect her from the loss of a parent?
“He got hit?” she asked, urgency in her tone as a new worry seized her mind. Such concern for one of the robbers might appear unwarranted, but she had to know. “The man with long black hair who stepped between you and the gunman got hit?”
Her father nodded. “A bullet in the shoulder. He walked out on his own steam, but he was in pain. I could tell.”
As her mental processes sprang back to their normal clarity, Celia recalled hearing rifle shots out in the street while she’d been kneeling to examine her father for injuries. In her mind, she played back the image of the man with different-colored eyes. He had struggled to get on his horse while his companions were already making their escape. The last one to get away, he’d have been the target for those rifle shots.
Fear closed around her, startling in its intensity. She jumped up to her feet and spoke in a breathless rush. “I need air. I have to go outside.”
As she whirled about and darted toward the exit, she noticed Mr. Northfield studying her father with a sharp, assessing look. Perhaps the manager was concerned about her father’s fragile health, the impact the frightening events might have on it.
Out in the street, the bright sunshine made Celia blink. Vaguely, she worried about not wearing a bonnet, an omission that would deepen the tan on her skin and cause her scar to stand out even more vividly.
“Did you shoot him?” she cried out to the cluster of men who stood staring into the distance. There was Mr. Selden, her boss at the store, and Mr. Grosser, who ran the barbershop, and three ranchers, one of them holding a rifle. A crowd was gathering around them, but no one was shooting or going to fetch their horses.
“Sorry, Miss Celia,” Mr. Grosser replied. “He got away.”
He got away.
Her hand went to her chest, where her fingers felt the round shape of the gold coin she’d hung around her neck in a tiny pouch sewn from a scrap of silk. The stranger with mismatched eyes had managed to escape. A sense of destiny, a sense of an inevitable crossing of paths, solidified inside Celia. Every instinct told her that their fates would be intertwined.
Chapter Three
Roy hung grimly in the saddle, pain burning in his shoulder, the blood-soaked shirt sticking to his back, cold shivers racking him. He ought to have packed his wound to stem the bleeding, but he daren’t stop, not even to take off the itchy black wig and put his hat on.
He’d slipped the cotton patch back in its place, to protect his brown eye, unused to daylight, from the glare of the sun. Already, his body was shutting down, making him light-headed and giving him a tunnel vision that closed out everything except the trail ahead that led to a place of safety.
At last, the small log cabin, half dug into the hillside, with an earth roof over it, hovered in his sights. With one final burst of effort, Roy urged Dagur up the path, reined in and slid down from the saddle. He stumbled to the entrance and kicked the door open. Ducking his head, he stepped in through the low frame and pulled the buckskin inside after him, then kicked the door shut again.
Darkness filled the cramped space. The horse gave a frightened whinny. Leaning against the heavy flank of the animal to steady himself, Roy stroked the lathered coat.
“Easy, boy. Easy now, Dagur. We’re safe.”
He tugged aside the patch that covered his brown eye. Protected from light, the eye needed no time to adjust to the darkness, allowing Roy to survey his surroundings.
The place was just as he’d left it two weeks ago. Sturdy log walls, floor of hard-packed earth swept clean, the single window firmly shuttered. Some previous occupant must have burned any remaining furniture for firewood, but they had left the water barrel that stood in the corner next to the primitive stone chimney.
A standard-sized whiskey barrel, it held fifty-three gallons. During his earlier visits Roy had painstakingly cleaned the timber container and filled it from the spring outside, spending hours shuttling to and fro with nothing but a canteen to transport the water.
To complete his preparations, he’d gathered firewood into a tall stack along the rear wall, and with handfuls of desert sand and grit he had scrubbed away the layer of grease from the rusty iron pot that stood on tripod legs inside the stone hearth.
Now he turned to Dagur and pulled his hat from the folds of his bedroll where he had tucked it away, pushed the crown back into shape and sank to his knees beside the water barrel. Using a piece of firewood to knock loose the wooden plug, he lined his hat beneath the hole in the barrel and filled the hollow of the crown to the brim. After replacing the plug on the side of the barrel, Roy held up the hat for the buckskin to drink.
“Good boy,” he murmured. “Rest now. Later, when it gets dark, I’ll let you out to graze. There’s a strip of grama beyond the spring, much better than the desert grass you’ve been eating recently.”
The horse blew and snorted, as if to agree. Twice more, Roy filled his hat and let Dagur drink. Then he took out his canteen and quenched his own thirst. After allowing himself a moment of rest, he poured water into the iron pot in the hearth, arranged firewood beneath the tripod legs and took out his tin of matches to start a fire.
The pain closed around him, burning like a hot poker in his shoulder and streaking down his side with every move he made. He needed to get the wound cleaned and dressed before he passed out. The bullet wouldn’t kill him, but the fever that followed might, if he didn’t manage to stem the bleeding and prevent an infection.
As the flames caught in the hearth, a warm yellow glow danced over the log walls. The reassuring scents of wood smoke and pine resin, familiar from a thousand campfires, filled the cabin. Roy imagined primitive man, living in caves, hunting and gathering. For him, a bonfire must have meant life, just as much as water and food did, and more—a fire must have been the first step toward civilization, mastering the elements of nature.
Sitting cross-legged in front of the stone chimney, Roy pulled a knife from the scabbard in his boot and sliced away his shirt. Easier than trying to lift his arms overhead to undress. The coarse white cotton was matted with blood but the bleeding had slowed to a trickle.
Gently, Roy felt the wound in his shoulder with his fingertips. There was no exit hole, but high up on the front he could feel a small lump beneath the skin. The surge of relief nearly made him faint. From the way he’d been able to move his arm, he’d known the bone remained intact, but had the bullet lodged deeper inside his shoulder, it might have been impossible for him to remove.
Leaning toward the fire, Roy enjoyed the comfort of heat while he held the tip of his knife to the flames to purify it. When he was satisfied the blade was clean, he made a small incision at the front of his shoulder, in the fleshy part where the muscle sloped toward the neck, to create an exit wound. With pressure from his fingertips, the bullet slid out.
It was a .36 caliber homemade lead ball. Despite the small size, had the bullet struck lower, it would have shattered the bone, most likely leaving too many fragments to remove. And even if Roy hadn’t already known, the small lead ball would have revealed the shooter to be Lom Curtis. Short and slight, the leader of the outlaw gang liked his pair of lightweight Navy Colts and had never switched to more powerful weapons or jacketed ammunition.
Roy tossed the bullet into the fire and inspected the remains of his shirt, assembling the back panel like a jigsaw puzzle. A small circular piece was missing. He swore. During his years on the outlaw trail, he’d seen plenty of doctoring for gunshot wounds, both by qualified surgeons and by anyone with a knife and a steady hand, and he understood that a piece of fabric left inside the wound could kill as effectively as a vial of poison.
Behind him, Dagur was snoring, asleep on his feet. Roy twisted around and raised his voice. “Dagur, sit down.”
The horse blinked his eyes open, gave a protesting whinny but folded his legs and sank to the earth floor. Roy reached over and tugged his saddlebags free. Summoning all his strength, he loosened the cinch on the saddle girth and pulled the weight off the horse, letting the saddle tumble to the ground.
“It’s okay, boy,” Roy said. “Go to sleep.” With another whinny, Dagur rolled over to his side and extended his legs, filling half the cabin, and resumed his snoring.
Roy tore a section from the clean part of his shirt and spread the piece of fabric on the earth floor. From his saddlebags, he took out a piece of rawhide string, a flask of whiskey and a bottle of kerosene, and a needle. Moving stiffly, fighting the pain, he arranged the objects on the cloth. Last, he snatched the black wig from his head, used his knife to snap away a couple of the horsehairs and dropped them into the iron cauldron on the fire to boil.
Using the rest of his shirt for rags, it only took him a minute to wash away the dried blood. When he was finished, Roy soaked the rawhide string in the bottle of kerosene, took a gulp of whiskey and then he pushed the string into the exit wound he had made, feeding the rawhide through his shoulder with his fingers until he could reach over to his back and pull the cord through. Stoically, he closed his mind to the fiery pain and lifted the rawhide string to inspect it in the light of the fire crackling in the hearth.
No scrap of cotton clung to the cord.
Fighting a dizzy spell, Roy soaked the rawhide string in kerosene again, tied a knot to one end and repeated the process. On the fourth pass, a piece of fabric clung to the knot. His body shaking with exhaustion, his movements clumsy, Roy lined the scrap of cotton with the hole in the back panel of his shirt. It fit. Relief cut through the haze of pain that dulled his brain. He’d gotten all the cotton fibers out. He had a good chance now.
Three more times, Roy dragged the kerosene-soaked string through the wound, sipping whiskey in between to revive himself. When a man had someone else to do the doctoring, he could escape the pain into unconsciousness. A man alone had no such luxury.
Satisfied the wound was clean, Roy compared how much kerosene and whiskey he had left. About the same, a couple of inches. But there was no lamp, so he kept the whiskey for drinking and poured the kerosene over the wound, front and back.
Once more, he held the blade of his knife to the fire, keeping the steel in the flames until it glowed white-hot. Gritting his teeth, he pressed the tip of the blade to the exit wound to cauterize the skin and did the same to the entry wound, awkwardly reaching around to the back of his shoulder. Finally, he fished the horsehairs out of the boiling water. After checking they had softened enough, he cleaned the needle with a drop of whiskey, threaded it with a strand of horsehair and closed the holes in his flesh with a few crude sutures.
He longed for a cup of coffee, but his strength gave out. Barely able to muster up enough energy to rummage in his saddlebags, he took out his tin cup, scooped it full of boiling water, tossed in a few lumps of sugar, added a dollop of whiskey and drank the mixture as soon as it had cooled enough not to scald. Then he yanked his bedroll free from the straps behind the saddle, rolled into the single remaining blanket, laid his head down and let unconsciousness slide over him.
* * *
When darkness fell over the surrounding hills and filtered in through the closed shutters, Roy roused himself long enough to strip the bridle from Dagur and shove the door open. The horse wouldn’t stray far from the spring.
The fever came on the second day, drenching Roy in sweat and sending icy shivers through his battered frame. Days and nights blurred together in the shadowed interior of the dugout cabin. He ate nothing but drank plenty of water, boiling it first, in case it had gone stale inside the oak barrel. At all times, he kept his pair of loaded guns within an easy reach.
In dime novels, when an injured outlaw came to, there would be a pretty girl standing by his bedside, smiling down at him and patting his brow with a cool cloth. There was no girl with a cool cloth for him, and no soft bed, only the hard earth floor, but when Roy’s mind grew hazy, he imagined Celia Courtwood leaning over him, her gold-streaked curls tumbling down to his naked chest, a smile brightening her features. Then reality would intrude, and he realized it was only a dream—could never be anything but a dream.
* * *
Celia squatted on her heels by the oak counter of the bank, rubbing furniture polish into the ugly scratches the outlaws had made with the rowels of their spurs. She’d already scrubbed every inch of the floor, as if the violence had left behind a layer of filth she must remove. On the polished timber planks, a few drops of blood had painted a trail toward the exit.
His blood. The man who had protected her father. Before scrubbing away the dark stains, Celia had pressed her fingertips to them, relishing that small connection to the stranger whose memory filled her with a flurry of mixed emotions—from gratitude to disapproval, from resentment to fascination, and beneath all those other emotions a strange longing that felt almost like a physical ache in her chest.
With increased vigor, as if to banish the handsome outlaw from her thoughts, Celia smeared more polish into the wood. For two days now, she had worked—unpaid—helping her father and Mr. Northfield to restore order in the bank. In truth, her father wasn’t contributing much. Mostly, he was sitting down, gasping for breath, his hands clasped together in front of him, palms pressed to his belly.
Every now and then Celia noticed the bank manager casting a hostile glance in her father’s direction. She suspected Mr. Northfield was ready to overcome his scruples about dismissing a sick man, which would leave them to survive on whatever little she could earn in her part-time position at the mercantile.
Refusing to give in to despair, Celia straightened on her feet. She dropped the turpentine-soaked rag into the steel bucket on the floor, wiped her hands on a piece of clean linen cloth and raised her voice to carry across the cracked glass partition.
“That’s the best I can get it.”
Before Mr. Northfield had a chance to come around and pass judgment on her efforts, footsteps thudded by the entrance. All day, curious visitors had crowded into the bank. Celia moved aside. It was up to the manager to deal with anxious inquiries from customers who might be worried about the safety of their deposits.
The man who strode in was thin and wiry, with a walrus mustache and a piercing blue gaze beneath an expensive tan-colored Stetson hat. Celia noted the pistol at his hip, then homed in on the tin star pinned to the man’s rawhide vest. He must be the county sheriff from Prescott, fetched by one of the saloon keeper’s sons.
Mr. Northfield ushered Celia away with a flap of his hand. “You can leave now, Miss Courtwood.” The dismissive gesture conveyed no gratitude for her unpaid labor.
“Perhaps my father could leave, too?” Celia suggested, her brows lifted in a tentative appeal. “He is still very shaken up after the ordeal and could do with a rest.”
“No,” the manager replied, his tone sharper than the request warranted.
“It’s all right, Celia girl,” her father cut in. “I am needed here. I shall have to make a statement, tell the sheriff what happened.”
Celia glanced from her father to the bank manager. There was something going on between those two, some undertone of hostility she failed to comprehend. Since the robbery, Mr. Northfield had been looking at her father with a dislike that bordered on disgust, even though the two of them had always been on cordial terms before.
“All right.” Celia attempted a bright tone. “I’ll get supper started. I’ll expect you home shortly, Papa.” She nodded to the men and walked out past the wiry sheriff. At the hitching rail outside, a bay gelding stood basking in the afternoon sun. Iron shackles and a coil of sturdy rope hung from the saddle, in readiness for a prisoner.