Blackstone's Bride

But not a whole lot.

“Have at ’em, McGee,” Jed whispered, his hands closing over a river rock.

“We wanna talk about it, boys? ’Pears to me we got us a traipser.” Winchester grinned, revealing a total of three long, yellow teeth.

A traipser? Would that be a trespasser? Jed wondered.

“I might have got lost and—” That was as far as he got before the shovel caught him on the side of the head. From that point on, things went rapidly downhill. Later, he would dimly recall hearing a lot of hooting and hollering, rifles being fired and a gleeful suggestion that they tan his hide and nail it to the side of the barn as a warning to “traipsers.”

His head ringing with pain, he fought back, the fear of death lending him strength. He even managed to get in a few good licks, mostly with his feet, but five against one pretty much settled the outcome. At least they didn’t shoot him outright, but that damned spade was almost as lethal. All he could do was roll with the punches, try to protect his vitals and hope the sumbitches would fall down dead drunk before they managed to finish him off.

His boots… “Ah, Jesus, no!” he yelped, feeling his ankle twist in a way it was never meant to twist.

The smell of whiskey was everywhere. If they doused him with the stuff and set him on fire—

He tried to roll toward the creek. Someone kicked him in the ribs, and then the others joined in, cackling and shouting suggestions. On his hands and knees, Jed tried to crawl toward the bushes, but they followed him, kicking and jabbing him with the butt of a rifle.

“Git that there hoss ’fore he gits away!” one of them shouted.

“Hit ’im wi’ the shovel ag’in, it won’t kill ’im!”

“You git the hoss, them boots is mine!” The voices came from all sides, like buzzards circling over a dying animal.

“I got ’is hat. Gimme yer jug, ’Laska,” someone yelled.

“Go git yer own jug, mine’s empty.”

They seemed to come from a distance now, the voices…but then everything came from a distance. Either they were leaving or his head wasn’t working properly. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, but God, he hurt!

For what could have been minutes, could have been days, he lay facedown in the dirt, hurting too much to move even if he could have found the strength. He could still hear the bastards, but the voices came from much farther away now. Unless his ears were playing tricks on him.

He was afraid to lift his head to look around, afraid that damned spade would connect with the side of his head again. Better to play possum until he felt like taking them on.

Oh, yeah…that would be right after Sam Stanfield apologized for any discomfort he’d caused him eight years ago and invited him to take dinner with him and his family at the Bar Double S ranch.

“McGee?” he rasped. God, even his voice hurt.

No answering whinny. If the damned horse would just move in close enough, he might be able to reach a stirrup and haul himself up. In the bottom of one of his saddlebags he had a Colt .45, but it wasn’t going to do him much good unless he could get to it before they came back.

“Git that hoss.” Had he heard them correctly? McGee would eat them alive if they laid a hand on him. Wouldn’t he?

Jed listened some more. Had little choice, lacking the strength to move. From time to time, hearing the sounds of drunken revelry from farther and farther away, he called to McGee, but either the horse had taken off or he was ignoring him.

Or he’d been stolen.

“Hellfire,” he muttered. Groaning, he rolled over onto his back and blinked up at the treetops.

The sun had moved. He was maybe twenty-five feet from the creek now, and there was no sign of McGee and his saddlebags. Or of his boots.

Sunovabitch. They’d stolen his boots, Jed thought, fighting the urge to rid his sore gut of the only meal he’d had since yesterday.

Now what? Lie here like a lump of buzzard bait until they came back and finished him off? It wasn’t his nature to run from a fight, but five against one, even when the five were drunk as coots, that was just asking for trouble.

Downhill would be easiest. Trouble was, downhill was where the sound of all that hooting and hollering was coming from. The storekeeper had said it was rough country. Like a fool, Jed had thought he meant the condition of the road.

Varnelle set the basket of supplies on the edge of the porch and turned to go without a single word, despite the fact that Eleanor was standing in the open doorway.

“Varnelle? Do you have to leave? I could make us some tea.”

No answer, unless the toss of a mop of red hair could be construed as a reply. Of the entire clan, the shy, peppery Varnelle had always been her favorite. Any sign of friendship had ended when the bachelor parade had begun. “Is it because you’re jealous?” she called after the retreating figure, not expecting an answer, not getting one.

Why on earth would such a pretty girl be jealous of a plain woman nearly ten years her senior? It could only be because they considered her an heiress, the sole beneficiary of Devin’s unwritten will. Unwritten only because the Millers didn’t bother to write their laws, but obeyed some primitive slate of laws all their own.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, this is beyond absurd,” she muttered. “If I don’t soon get away, I might do something desperate.”

Like shoot her way out. She didn’t even have that option any longer since the men had gone through the house and shed, claiming everything of Dev’s except for his tooth powder. They had taken his guns, his clothes and every bit of mining equipment he owned, most of it bought with the proceeds from the sale of her house and furniture.

She hadn’t argued at the time because—well, because one didn’t argue at such a time, one simply went through the rituals, a few of them rather bizarre, and quietly made plans for the future.

For all the good her plans had done her.

“Help me, Varnelle,” she whispered to the glossy dark rhododendrons. “Come back and tell me what to do. Help me to get away and you can have anything of mine you want, including this cabin.”

Her clothes? Varnelle was short and nicely rounded, while Eleanor was tall and skinny as a walking stick. If anything could be made over to fit her, Eleanor would gladly hand over every stitch she possessed, even the rose-colored silk she’d been married in.

Oh, yes—especially that.

Her books? Varnelle could read and write—just barely. But she had never expressed the least interest in borrowing any of the books Eleanor had brought with her.

They could have found something to talk about, though, Eleanor was sure of it. “You could tell me how you manage to make your red hair so shiny and smooth,” she whispered, touching her own hair, which she managed to tame only by ruthless brushing, braiding and pinning it up before the braids could unravel.

“I’m no threat to you, Varnelle,” she said plaintively, seeing a glimpse of faded pink some five hundred feet below as the younger woman left the laurel slick and hurried past Alaska’s cove. “In my best day, which was too long ago to recall, I was never anywhere near as pretty as you are. Why do you resent me so?”

Dropping down to sit on the edge of the porch, she nibbled a cold biscuit from the basket and wondered idly how close the kinship was between Varnelle and Hector. Hector was easily the best looking of all the Millers now that Devin was dead. He’d been guardedly friendly to her whenever he’d been the one to bring her supplies.

Miss Lucy had explained when Devin had first taken her down the hill to introduce her to his family, that for years she’d been responsible for keeping track of such things in order to prevent inbreeding amongst the clan. The old woman had seemed pleased at the time that Devin had married an outsider, saying that new blood in the clan would make arranging marriages easier in the future.

Come to think of it, she had mentioned Varnelle and Hector at the time. Eleanor remembered thinking that Varnelle was still a child. She was definitely no child now, not the way she had filled out her faded gowns. As for Hector, Devin had once told her that his cousin had gone all the way through the third grade.

My God, Eleanor thought—she had taught the third grade.

“One day, when Heck makes his strike,” Varnelle had confided back in those early days when she hadn’t been quite so resentful, “he’s a-gonna marry me and move to Charlotte or maybe even New York, and we’re not niver comin’ back here n’more.”

“Then who would work Heck’s share?” Eleanor had asked. The gold shares were vitally important to everyone in Dexter’s Cut, whether or not any more gold was ever found.

“They’s plenty that would for a cut.”

Share and share alike, that was the Millers. Hound dogs and chickens, moonshine and occasionally even women, but not the gold. At least not with outsiders.