CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The day wore on, and Clementine Rathmore thought the darkness would never come. In the late afternoon several women talked to her about getting Asher to kill and butcher another of the stage horses for meat, but later they decided to wait for a couple of days until he was no longer on guard duty. Then more gossip—Esther Rathmore was sick with female hysteria and a wandering womb, but she hoped to feel better soon. And one of the men had seen a pack of gray wolves near the arroyo and had scared them off with a rifle shot and . . .

Clementine didn’t listen but nodded in all the right places and waited impatiently for darkness, when she’d wear the gloom like a cloak.

With agonizing slowness, the sun dropped lower in the sky, shadows lengthened in the arroyo, and the light shaded into an ashen gray. She slipped a knife into her pocket and prepared to do what she must, make another bid for freedom.

Full dark. The stars were out, and the moon had started its climb into the night sky. Out in the wilderness where scuttling and squeaking things lived, the hunting coyotes were already yipping their hunger. A silence fell over the arroyo and only the fluttering flames under the perpetual cooking pot moved.

Four words, casually spoken, sealed Clementine’s fate that night . . .

“She’s up to something.” Reta Rathmore, one of the women who’d talked to Clementine about killing a horse, said those words to her husband.

“Up to what?”

“I don’t know. But it’s something.”

Women are sometimes more sensitive than men to the emotional state of other women. But Reta had thrown the observation out there as a passing comment at a time when topics of conversation in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the arroyo were few.

Since Papa Mace had a paranoid fear of any of his followers “getting up to something” and challenging his authority, Reta’s husband thought the comment important enough to pass it on to his father.

And so it was that Clementine thought she’d made it to the mine shaft unseen . . . unaware that the night had eyes.

* * *

It was dark in the mine shaft, and Clementine felt her way to the recumbent forms of Red Ryan and Buttons Muldoon. She made out Buttons’s stocky bulk and shook him awake.

“You have to leave,” she said, the knife in her hand. “You must bring help.”

Buttons struggled to regain consciousness. The woman stood over him in the murk, her long hair wild, her face a pale oval, the eyes sunken in shadow.

“Did you bring water?” Buttons’s voice sounded raspy to his ears.

“No water. I’ll cut you free and then bring some. A canteen. I’ll bring a canteen.”

“And a gun,” Buttons said. “Can you find a gun?”

“I don’t know,” Clementine said. “Maybe I can.”

The knife blade glinted in the gloom . . . and then turned the color of bronze as a pair of lanterns splashed the shaft with light. Buttons heard the woman’s sharp intake of breath as she turned and then her body stiffened, frozen in place.

“What the hell are you doing here, woman?” Papa Mace said. He held a Winchester. Asher and another son held lanterns.

Asher spoke. “You were going to free them, wife, weren’t you?”

Her throat paralyzed with fright, Clementine did not respond. After a moment she found her courage, or plumbed her madness, and said, “Yes, I was going to cut them free. I planned to make them say a solemn vow that they’d come back for me and free me from this terrible place and rid me of you, Asher. Yes, above all, rid me of you.”

Asher Rathmore roared his rage and tried to grab the rifle from his father’s hands, but Papa Mace pushed him away. The fat man’s voice was a serrated knife blade. “Woman, out of your own mouth you are condemned, and you must surely die.”

“Let me shoot her, Pa,” Asher said. “She’s my wife and I got the right.”

“I’m the only one with rights here,” Mace said. “If there’s shooting to be done, I’ll do it.”

“Then kill me and get it over,” Clementine said. “I’d rather be dead than suffer this living death any longer.”

Asher’s hate-filled eyes were fixed on the woman. “Pa, it was me jumped the broom with her. I got the right.”

“No,” Papa Mace said. “The women have the right. They are the ones that have been betrayed. Bring them in.”

“Pa . . .”

“Bring them in, Asher, or by God you’ll feel the butt end of this rifle.”

The Rathmores had a firewood shortage, but there seemed to be no lack of wood for clubs. When the six women stepped inside, their eyes immediately went to Clementine, read what had happened, and slowly advanced on her. The eyes of Ella, the youngest and prettiest, were malevolent, her smile wicked.

Buttons Muldoon watched in horror as Clementine was beaten to death. More dreadful still was the sight of Asher Rathmore’s sadistic, grinning face as he savored every blow, took pleasure in every shriek that came from his wife’s mouth.

When it was all over, and the woman’s broken body had been dragged away, Buttons Muldoon, for the first time in years, whispered a prayer . . . for Clementine, for himself, for Red Ryan . . . and for a blessing on the terrible vengeance he intended to bring down on Papa Mace Rathmore.