CHAPTER 28

Thomasina Spencer paced restlessly around the bank. The worry she felt for her father wouldn’t let her stay still. Some of the women tried to comfort her and get her to sit down, but she wasn’t having any of it.

Her pa was in trouble. She was sure of that. If he hadn’t been, he would have showed up here by now. They had agreed to meet at the bank, and it wasn’t like Rufus Spencer not to do what he said he would.

Windy came over to her and said, “Child, you’re givin’ me the fantods with all this pacin’ around. Why don’t you just take it easy for a spell and try to get a little rest? It’s liable to be a long night, and I don’t expect any of us’ll be sleepin’ much.”

“You know my pa pretty well, Mr. Whittaker,” she said. “Doesn’t he always keep his word?”

“Well . . . in the time I’ve known him, I reckon he has.”

“Then the only reason he’s not here is because he can’t be here. And nothing would stop him unless it was pretty bad.”

Windy scratched at his whiskers and made a face. “I ain’t sayin’ you’re wrong, missy. But even if you’re right, there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”

Tommy blew out a disgusted breath and turned away. Windy let her go.

The wheels of the girl’s brain were still revolving a mile a minute as she sat down with her back propped against the bank’s rear wall, close to the group of women and children but not really a part of it. She had her Winchester carbine with her and placed it on the floor beside her.

The argument about whether to lock and barricade the bank’s front doors had continued. Tommy watched and listened as the men finally reached a compromise. Edward Warren agreed that they could lock the doors, and Mr. Hawkins didn’t insist that they shove desks in front of the entrance to block it. Those would take too much time to clear away if they needed to get the doors open in a hurry, which was a good point, Tommy thought.

The outlaws could still bust the doors down if they wanted to, but that would take long enough that the defenders could be ready for them when they broke in.

The latches on all the windows were fastened on both floors of the building, and the bar was in place on the back door. If anybody wanted to get in here, chances were they would come from the front. Loopholes had been cut in the windows there so the defenders could fire out.

The bank had a couple of pot-bellied stoves in the lobby for warmth. Both had fires going in them. A woodbox filled with chunks of firewood was located in a rear storage room. Once the doors had been closed again for a while, the lobby warmed up until it was pleasant in there.

Charlotte Shaw had brought a coffee pot and some bags of Arbuckle’s when she came to the bank from the café. Since her husband was resting comfortably now, she got a pot boiling on one of the stoves and soon the aromatic smell of coffee brewing filled the room.

If it wasn’t for the fact that dozens of bloodthirsty outlaws might be lurking right outside, it wouldn’t seem so bad in here. That was true for most of the folks in the lobby, Tommy reflected.

Not for her, though. She couldn’t rest until she knew that her pa was all right.

Which was why a plan had started forming in her mind.

Even in a blizzard, even threatened by a horde of outlaws, people had to take care of their bodily needs. Several buckets had been placed in a back room to serve that purpose, since nobody would have wanted to go out in the storm to visit the privy even if there hadn’t been outlaws in Salt Lick.

Tommy waited patiently, even though the fear she felt for her pa gnawed at her guts like a hungry rat. Time passed, agonizingly slowly. She watched as every now and then a man or woman would sidle discreetly down the hallway toward that back room where the buckets were, or a woman would hold her kids’ hands and take them to tend to business. After a while, nobody paid any attention to that.

Also, as the minutes crept past, weariness began to take its toll. People stretched out and rested their heads on pillows made from wadded-up coats. The lamps burned low, and nobody turned them up. Some of the men stayed awake and alert, self-appointed sentries for the others, but a good number of the folks who had taken refuge in the bank dozed off, despite what Windy had said about nobody sleeping much. Tommy heard several people snoring softly.

Other than that, and a few whispered conversations, it was quiet in the bank lobby. Nothing to do now but wait for morning and hope the storm blew over.

Judging by the way the wind was still wailing outside, it was even money whether or not that would happen.

Tommy felt her own eyes getting heavy. Her head drooped forward a little toward her chest. She jerked it up, mentally berating herself for letting weakness almost overcome her. Her pa might need her help, she reminded herself, and she had a plan that would let her provide that help.

She just had to wait a little while longer . . .

Finally, she thought it might be late enough to make her move. Nearly all the women and children were asleep now. So were most of the men. Old Windy Whittaker and Mr. Warren, the newspaperman, were talking in low tones on the other side of the lobby. Neither man so much as glanced in Tommy’s direction as she got to her feet.

The next bit was tricky. She bent down and picked up the carbine, being careful not to bang the barrel or the stock against the wall. She turned so that her back was toward Windy and Warren and held the carbine straight up and down in front of her so it wouldn’t be conspicuous as she started toward the hallway.

She expected to hear one of the men start after her or call to her and ask where she was going. If they noticed, however, they must not have wanted to embarrass her by asking the question with its obvious answer.

Tommy slipped into the darkened corridor, unchallenged.

She had been back there earlier, not long after coming to the bank, and she’d noticed the narrow rear staircase leading to the second floor. After casting a glance over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching her, she turned and hurried up those stairs. It was really dark in the stairwell, so she couldn’t go too fast or she’d risk falling, which might make a racket, but she didn’t waste any time, either.

She didn’t know what the rooms on the bank’s second floor were used for. Offices of some kind, most likely, along with storage. But nobody was up here right now, and that was all Tommy cared about. Working by feel, she fumbled her way into one of the rooms on the back side of the building. She found the window, pushed the latch to the side, and slid the pane up.

Instantly, she winced as the icy wind clawed at her face. But she forced herself to lean forward into the wind so she could look outside.

There was nothing to see except blowing snow. Tommy held the carbine outside the window and dropped it. She didn’t hear it land. Whether that was because the wind was so loud or because the rifle had fallen into deep, drifted snow, she didn’t know. She risked not being able to find it once she was down there, but she hadn’t figured out any other way to do this.

The next step involved climbing out the window. She tugged her cap down tighter on her head so it wouldn’t blow off and then lifted her right leg over the sill. She clung to the sides of the window with her gloved hands as she maneuvered herself into a sitting position. She shifted her grip to the sill and twisted around, then slid off the sill and hung from her hands. The strain of supporting her weight made her arms and shoulders protest.

That didn’t last long, though, because Tommy took a deep breath, let go, and fell toward the alley below.

She knew she was taking a big risk. If she landed wrong, she could break a leg, an arm, or even her neck. If she hurt herself and couldn’t get up, they probably wouldn’t hear her inside the bank no matter how loudly she yelled for help. That meant she would freeze to death out here, more than likely.

But she was young and athletic and had jumped from the hayloft in the barn before without hurting herself. This wasn’t any higher than that.

Even so, the couple of heartbeats it took for her to drop to the ground seemed a lot longer. Then her feet hit and she let her muscles go limp and the momentum of her fall carried her over backward. She rolled as she landed.

The snow was close to a foot deep back here. She wound up face down in the stuff and jerked her head up, feeling for a second as if she were suffocating. She shook her head, and her hair flew around her face. Her cap had come off when she landed.

Gasping from the cold, Tommy pushed herself to her feet. She walked around in circles, shuffling her legs through the deep snow. She couldn’t afford to stay back here for a long time, looking for her carbine. Sooner or later, somebody inside might realize she had been gone for a while and come looking for her. The wind blowing from that open window down through the rear stairwell was bound to be noticed eventually, too. She had to find that carbine and get started on her mission . . .

Her left shin clunked against something solid.

Tommy bent, pawed through the snow, and closed her hands around the carbine’s barrel. Feeling a fierce satisfaction, she straightened.

She would have liked to find her cap, too, but she thought the likelihood of doing that was a lot smaller, so she wasn’t going to waste the time. Gripping the rifle in her gloved hands, she stood there for a moment getting oriented.

Then, fairly certain she was going the right way, she set out toward the livery stable, hoping she would find her father there.

And if any of those outlaws had hurt him, they were going to be damned sorry, she vowed as she disappeared into the blizzard.

* * *

Eventually, Snake Bishop figured out that he couldn’t count on being able to stay awake and keep an eye on Rufus Spencer all night. That meant he needed to do something about the blacksmith, either go ahead and kill him or figure out a way to render him harmless.

O’Shannon still cursed and complained about the pain in his left shoulder and arm, but he could use his right hand all right. Bishop told him to draw his gun and cover Spencer. O’Shannon did so, then Bishop circled around, got the rest of the rope he had used earlier to immobilize O’Shannon’s wounded arm, and came up behind Spencer.

“Put your arms behind your back,” he ordered.

“I told you already, I’m not going to cooperate with you.”

“You can do what I tell you, or Paco will go ahead and shoot you. It’s your choice. I told you before, you’re not so valuable to me that I’m going to a lot of trouble to keep you alive.”

Spencer growled some curses of his own, but he put his arms behind his back.

“If he tries anything, go ahead and drill him,” Bishop told O’Shannon as he moved in.

“That’ll be a risky shot with you so close to him, Snake.”

“Then don’t miss,” Bishop snapped. He bent to wrap the rope around Spencer’s wrists and pull it tight.

The blacksmith didn’t try anything. In a few minutes, Bishop had his arms tied tightly behind his back. He pushed Spencer over, ran the rope down to his feet, and lashed them securely, too. With wrists and ankles connected that way, the rope pulled Spencer into what had to be an uncomfortable, backward-bowed shape. He lay on his side, glaring at the two outlaws as Bishop resumed his seat on the crate.

“He can’t pull any tricks now,” Bishop said. “We can get some rest.”

“It would still be a good idea if we took turns sleeping,” O’Shannon said. “You go ahead and see if you can doze off, Snake. I’m hurting too much to sleep right now, anyway.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It’ll be fine.”

Bishop thought about it for a moment and then nodded. He stood up, went over to one of the posts that held up the hayloft, and sat down with his back against it. He tipped his hat forward and pulled it down. It wasn’t long before his chest was rising and falling with a deep, regular rhythm that indicated he was asleep.

* * *

Tommy had grown up in Salt Lick and knew every inch of the town. But finding her way around under normal circumstances was nothing like the nightmare journey on which she found herself tonight.

She tried to keep a hand on one of the buildings at all times so she wouldn’t become disoriented and wander off aimlessly into the storm. But that really wasn’t possible, she soon realized. There were too many gaps where she had to step out with nothing around her but the howling wind and blowing snow. Even though she tried to visualize the surroundings in her head and plot her course, every time she took her hand away from a building and moved into the storm, she was afraid she would be lost forever.

Her father wouldn’t have wanted her to give up, she told herself sternly. She had to conquer that fear and keep moving.

Of course, her father wouldn’t have wanted her to risk her life in this storm, even if it was to save his. He would have gladly sacrificed himself to keep her safe.

Each time she ventured out with nothing to anchor her, she found another building, and she was relieved for a little while, until she had to risk it again. But she was confident that she was on the right track and making steady progress toward her destination.

Time meant nothing in circumstances such as these. She could have been fighting the storm for hours, or it could have been only a short time since she slipped out of the bank. Tommy didn’t know or care.

But it seemed like she had been at it for a long, long time before she bumped into a wall and got a whiff of a very familiar odor from the other side of it.

Even a storm like this one couldn’t completely dispel the distinctive smell of hay, manure, and horseflesh. Her instincts had led her straight to the stable, as she had hoped they would.

Now she needed to figure out exactly where she was. Her objective was the rear of the stable. A small door was cut into that wall, up on the same level as the hayloft. A beam stuck out from the wall above that opening. Attached to it was a pulley arrangement that was used to lift bales of hay, which were then pulled in through the opening and stacked in the loft.

In addition to the ropes attached to the pulley, another rope hung down from the beam. This rope had knots tied into it at regular intervals. Tommy had been climbing up and down on that rope for as long as she could remember.

The door would be closed and latched in this weather, but there was a trick to opening it from outside, and Tommy knew that trick, too.

She fumbled her way through the storm until something brushed against her face that wasn’t the wind-blown snow. She found it with her hand and could tell it was the rope she was looking for.

She took off her coat and removed the pair of suspenders she wore, then used it to rig a sling for the Winchester, which she draped around her neck once she put the coat back on. With the carbine hanging down behind her back, she gripped the rope with both hands, lifted a foot and rested it against the wall, and started to climb. With the storm causing so much racket, she hoped the small sounds she inevitably made wouldn’t be heard inside.

This was the hardest climb she had ever made. Even in gloves, her hands were so numb she could barely feel them. The carbine’s weight threw her a little off-balance. The hard wind caused her to sway back and forth.

She had to ignore all that and keep going. She thought about her pa, how hard he had worked and how he had devoted his life to raising her after her ma died. Maybe he wasn’t in there. But she wasn’t going to rest until she knew for sure, one way or the other.

When she reached the top, she found the little catch she had to work to open the door. It opened outward, so she had to lean far to her left and hang on with one hand while she used the other to pull the door toward her. The wind caught it and tried to whip it closed. Her grip slipped slightly, and for a second she thought she was going to fall.

Then she hung on harder and tighter, and the door cleared her. She lifted her leg and got it inside, hooked her foot against the side of the opening, and pulled herself in. It felt good to sprawl on her belly for a moment.

Then the urgency of her mission drove her to push up on hands and knees. She reached back and pulled the door closed behind her, then crawled toward the edge of the hayloft. A yellow glow rose from a lantern down below.

She paused when she was still a few feet from the edge and listened intently. She didn’t hear anybody talking, but she thought she heard someone breathing. It was hard to be sure. Some of the horses were moving around in their stalls, snuffling and blowing, and it was difficult to sort out any other sounds.

She had come this far, she told herself. She couldn’t stop now. She edged forward, toward the ladder that led to the loft.

She was just about to risk a look over the edge when a man’s face suddenly appeared at the top of the ladder. He leered at her, and his hand shot out to grab the collar of her coat. Tommy cried out in surprise and fear as the man hauled her toward the edge. She tried to stop herself, but she was no match for his unexpected strength.

He yanked her over the edge into empty air and let go of her.

Tommy screamed as she turned over in mid-air. The cry was cut short as she crashed to the hard-packed ground on her back. As if the fall weren’t bad enough already, landing on the carbine like that made extra pain lance through her. It felt like her back was broken. Whimpering, she rolled onto her side and forced her muscles to work as she tried to reach back for the weapon.

A boot toe dug into her ribs in a vicious kick. She gasped in agony and twisted in an attempt to curl up around the pain. Somebody ripped the carbine away from her. The man planted a boot against her shoulder and slammed her down so she lay on her back again.

From there, she blinked up at him through pain-blurred eyes and saw him pointing her own carbine at her face.

“We’ve got ourselves another visitor, Paco,” the man said to somebody Tommy couldn’t see. “Or maybe I should say, another hostage. If people in this town place any value on the blacksmith’s head, I figure they’ll value a pretty girl even higher!”