MARY-ANN SLATTERY WAS gone before dawn that Monday morning. And so was the Colt Hartford revolving rifle with the inscribed gold plate on the fire charred rosewood stock.
When they re-entered the mine tunnel the previous night, the woman had been apathetically amenable to doing whatever he asked of her. It was as if the weight of all that had happened to her since she heard about the death of her husband suddenly melded into a single mass to burden her both mentally and physically. He could have taken her without protest, but it would also have been without feeling except for his own lust—that diminished, anyway, when he realized the degree of her exhaustion.
So he had simply unfurled his bedroll and she had compliantly stretched out beneath the blanket, not even making a token protest that he had no such comfort. And she was breathing very deeply, coming close to snoring, before he had donned his sheepskin coat and stretched out on the rock floor a few feet from her, head resting on his saddle, hat tipped over his face and rifle under the palm of his right hand.
Sleep came to him almost as quickly as to the woman. He did not usually sleep deeply, but when he awoke to the weak light of the morning sun entering the mine his first instinct was to think that he was deluding himself. For he knew instantly that something was wrong, and if he had been taking his usual light rest that was just below the surface of awareness, his sixth sense for danger would have alerted him before sun-up.
He closed his gloved right hand into a fist, and there was no rifle frame to prevent this. He raised his left hand and tilted his hat onto his head, and saw the bedroll where he had unfurled it but without the slender-framed woman between the blankets. He lifted his head off the pillow of his saddle and looked over his shoulder. And the sight of the black stallion served to defuse the anger that was threatening to expand from ice-cold to hot: a potential fury that would have been more than adequate to share liberally between Mary-Ann Slattery and himself. The woman for stealing his most prized possession and himself for allowing his guard to drop so that she had the opportunity.
But, he acknowledged as he got to his feet and flexed muscles stiffened by the many hours of inactivity on the hard rock floor of the mine, her act of taking his rifle had not placed him in immediate jeopardy. There had never been any reason not to trust her when they bedded down last night and so his subconscious had failed to trigger a warning when she eased the rifle from beneath his sleeping hand and moved stealthily out into the night—taking from him no more than she needed to do what she felt she must.
Now, moving toward his horse with the saddle, Adam Steele vented a low grunt of satisfaction with the outcome of this line of thinking. But he had to work at keeping a scowl off his face as he completed the saddling of the horse and then fixed his bedroll on behind. And he wasn’t entirely successful, he knew: felt from time to time his mouthline being involuntarily pulled out of its usual impassive set as his cold anger for the woman rose close to the surface.
Then he led the saddled stallion outside and stood for a few moments gazing up at the clear blue sky and breathing the clean air of the new morning. Until the simple pleasure of merely being alive and alone was not enough and he looked at the wreckage of the Slattery shack; and his nostrils caught a vestige of the stale odor of old burning that still clung to the low mound of blackened debris under the fire scorched face of the cliff. When, although he did not go so far as to forgive Mary-Ann for stealing from him, he allowed, as he clucked his horse into motion, that she had suffered compelling provocation.
In leading the stallion across the wreckage-strewn clearing and onto the trail, he became aware of his own smell. But, as he rasped the back of a gloved hand over the heavy growth of mostly white bristles on his jaw, he found it easy to break with habit. For a wash up and shave—and everything else, come to that—could wait until he had retrieved the Colt Hartford that was all he had left of his birthright. Could wait, he reflected wryly a few seconds later, even on a day when there was a good chance he was going to a wedding. And, some minutes after this when he had mounted the stallion and followed the woman’s sign down the spur and onto the main trail at the lake, the odds on him attending the Rexall wedding were shortened considerably. For she had taken the south trail, toward Barclay.
Almost certain of Mary-Ann’s destination, Steele rode at an easy pace in the same direction. But occasionally as the morning got brighter and warmer he paid closer attention to the broken surface of the heavily used trail than he did to the sunlit country that surrounded him. For he could not be entirely sure that Mary-Ann had it in mind to spring something in front of the people of town. For there was the possibility that during the cold and dark of night inside the mine she had conceived a vengeance plan to simply strike at those responsible for her grief and misery, without consideration for the consequences. A plan that had gained in attraction in the brightening dawn, as she got closer to Barclay where so many people owed their livelihood and prosperity to the Rexalls and where she was a virtual stranger. Or maybe such an idea could have first occurred to her as she made the long trek on foot over a trail on which she had been ambushed. A trail, on either side of which, there were countless places she could wait in hiding for the wedding party to show. And the fully loaded rifle in her skilled hands …
But what dark thoughts had crowded into the homeless widow’s mind as she took the long walk to Barclay was academic, for each time the Virginian checked on her sign, he found it. And the last time he looked was at the point where the trail swung around the curve between the bluff and the stand of timber, beyond which the single street of Barclay began. Mary-Ann Slattery had moved around the curve and gone off the open trail and onto the street.
Steele had not thought this far ahead and for a second or so was undecided about what he should do. But then, with an icy smile that turned up the corners of his mouth but failed to put light into his dark eyes, he led his mount into the mixed timber to the west, across the trail from the seventy-foot-high cliff face. Where he found a spot that was shaded and had good grass for the stallion to graze without any danger of being spotted unless somebody came looking among the trees.
Maybe he had not been aware of reaching a decision, he reflected, as he attended to unsaddling his horse. But his subconscious had taken care of it. For why else had he not ridden hard and fast to catch up with the woman and reclaim his rifle? Hell, if he had not deep down been wanting and even willing Mary-Ann Slattery to give to the Rexalls and their conspirators what was coming to them, he would have come instantly and angrily awake when she tried to steal the Colt Hartford. The seeming anger at her and at himself and the constant checking and double checking that she was heading where he thought … that had all been pretense. A smoke screen laid between his better judgment and a gut reaction from an experience of the long ago past.
When a father rather than a husband had been wantonly murdered because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a mansion instead of a shack was reduced to a smoldering ruin. And the rifle Abraham Lincoln gave to Ben Steele had been carried down a vengeance trail to be used against the killers. While a friend named Jim Bishop who thought he knew better rode out behind the would-be judge and jury and executioner. Bish was unable to prevent the killings, then failed in the worst possible way to see that Adam Steele paid for taking the law into his own hands. There had been many dark days since then when the Virginian considered he had paid more than a court of law could ever have extracted from him. But never once would he have traded a lifetime’s peace of mind for that moment of ecstatic satisfaction when he knew he had shot dead the men who lynched his father.
And so now he was able to sympathize with Mary-Ann Slattery, understand her instinct to kill and even condone her act of taking his most prized possession from him.
‘Yeah,’ he drawled softly as he ran a gloved hand slowly down the smooth neck of the black stallion. And there was a glimmer of light in back of his coal-black eyes when he parted his lips to show a faintly boyish grin. ‘Stealing from Steele, that really put you on your mettle, Mary-Ann.’
The horse vented an irritable snort and jerked his head away from the gloved hand in a gesture of seeming impatience.
‘Sure, feller,’ the Virginian allowed absently, glancing up through the spring-leafed timber at where the sun was well advanced on its morning climb. ‘It’s not just the iron lady who has a pressing engagement.’