CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

And you’re really certain about this?”

Jasper looked over at the shotgun rider beside him. The time to ask that would have been before they had left Sonora, not when they were six miles out from Long Barn. But he supposed the man hadn’t been given much of a choice but to come along. He worked for the mine, and the man in charge down in Sonora was the one who had sent them up with this stagecoach, set Jasper on as its driver. This was as good a place as any to have second thoughts.

“Sure as a man can be.”

He’d answered plenty of questions down in Sonora. Yes, sir, he’d been with Westin when he died. No, sir, he didn’t have it straight from Alec Casey’s mouth that he was due to hit the payroll run, but the information was as good as the gold that Buck Simmons was stealing from the mine. Yes, sir, he was certain about that as well. Westin’s papers had helped convince them his word was simon-pure. Jasper supposed they had Alec Casey to thank for that. He’d been able to read Westin’s strings of numbers better than Jasper could.

“How’d you find out what Casey was planning?” the shotgun rider asked.

“His brother told me.”

Jasper didn’t have to turn again to see the surprise on the man’s face. He wondered if maybe he should have left that part out, if he wanted the man to trust him.

“How’d a jehu get mixed up with the likes of Slip Casey?” the man asked.

Jasper let out a chuckle. “Well, that’s a long story.”

The man tensed beside him. “I don’t think we have time for that.”

Jasper had seen it too—a cloud of dust and, inside of it, riders. There were six of them, coming head-on.

The Casey Gang.

The shotgun rider beside Jasper turned around and thumped the coach. “Heads up!” he called.

They were being attacked.

Jasper picked out Alec Casey in the middle of the group. He’d been right, he thought. Casey wasn’t the type to hide away up on a cliff or come from behind to shoot.

Jasper wondered if they had cleared roads from their camp to get to and fro here in the mountains, or if they’d just trotted off road from Sonora. That was where Alec had been, Slip had said, and just on time, he was here.

These horses didn’t bolt at the sound of gunfire. They stayed steady, and Jasper gave a silent thanks to whoever had picked out the team. Jasper reacted just as any jehu would have reacted to a surprise attack: kept the team steady, trusted the man beside him to take some shots, and hoped that they could make it through this.

What he wouldn’t do, if the attack was truly a surprise, was divert off course.

They were five miles from Long Barn. A jehu would have normally sped through the ambush and tried to get to the town where lawmen might have guns at the ready if they had heard the shots. Jasper had to hope that what they’d planned to do didn’t read too obviously like they were trying to lead the Casey Gang into a trap of their own.

Five miles west of Long Barn was where that shortcut they’d taken a few days ago would have let them out. The stage was fast approaching the turnoff. He could hear the pounding of the horses’ hooves and the crack of gunfire. Close to his head, the wood of the stage splintered. He drove the horses as hard as he dared so close to a turn.

There it was right in front of him, as unremarkable a path as the other side of it. He turned the team as narrowly as he could, but surprise course changes weren’t the purview of a stagecoach. The riders saw it coming, and they’d drawn closer when the stage lost some of its speed in the turn.

He hoped this was going to go the way he wanted it to go. If not . . . Well, he’d almost died twice in the last week running this route. They said the third time was the charm.

This part of the road was as rough as the other end was. It was narrow, and Jasper kept to the center, trying to give the riders as little space as possible to pass. Two of them did, drawing even with the stage and shooting at the carriage, then taking a shot at the driver’s box. Their aim was off, and Jasper was glad Bell wasn’t among them. Casey had wanted him for his aim, after all; Jasper couldn’t imagine him missing.

In the distance, Jasper could see the rocks in the middle of the road, the ones he’d nearly crashed into last time he rode the route. Knowing they were there, even before a sharp turn like that, he could have gotten by them without trouble. He was certain of it.

But this time, he didn’t want to.

He pulled back on the reins, hard enough that the jar of the horses rushing to a stop caused the stage to shimmy and jolt. It must have looked like he had stopped in a panic. It certainly felt like it; he felt the shuddering through his teeth and down into his bones.

The two riders who had gotten ahead of them turned around, trotting back toward them, one of them giving a whoop of laughter.

And then Jasper heard his voice.

“Boys, seems to me it’s payday!” Alec Casey sounded as pleasant as when he had said it was good to see Jasper, and twice as cheerful.

Jasper wasn’t sure if it was the cheer that was the signal or the words themselves, but after Alec was done speaking, the outlaws opened fire.

Jasper and the shotgun rider ducked down into the driver’s box. There wasn’t much protection there, certainly less than from the heavier wood of the coach itself, but they didn’t have to hold out for long. Just a few more minutes.

“Alright, alright, don’t waste the ammo,” Alec called, and the shooting stopped. “We can get the rest up close.”

Jasper couldn’t see them swing down from their horses, but he knew that was what was happening. Boots crunched on gravel; an open hand thumped the door of the stagecoach.

“Might as well open up if you’re alive in there,” said a voice, the same one that had let out the laughter.

No one replied. Not with words anyway.

The man inside replied with a shotgun blast.

By then Jasper could hear the horses. They thundered closer from both sides of the road.

Alec Casey had led his men right into an ambush.

As soon as the deputy inside the coach took his shot and Jasper heard the hoofbeats, he moved. He grabbed his father’s rifle and slid out of the driver’s box. His eyes found Alec Casey almost immediately like there was no one else on the road but them.

He didn’t look upset. He’d read the situation already and was halfway back to his horse. A couple of his men were too. Two got on; one managed to wheel his horse around, get off the road, and the other got shot, fell from his horse.

Before Alec could get to his horse, someone shot it.

The horse gave a scream and fell. Alec’s eyes scanned the line of deputies and found the one who’d shot her. He raised his revolver, found his target, and shot. The deputy fell from the horse, and the horse bolted, running into the one beside it, breaking the line of fire. Alec didn’t go for another horse. He stood in the midst of the firefight, finding a target, shooting at it, always moving, but never in a hurry. It almost looked like the bullets didn’t want to hit him.

Well, Jasper always knew Alec Casey was never going to make it easy for them.

“Casey!” he called, his voice as loud as he could make it so it would carry over the bullets, the shouts, the sharp whinnies of the horses.

Alec heard him. Jasper saw the moment he realized who it was. He hadn’t recognized him while he was driving, but Jasper had kept his hat pulled down. It had been knocked off when he took cover in the driver’s box, and now that Alec saw his face . . . Of course he recognized Jasper, had recognized him after six years. Maybe the face of the one person he’d ever let go had stuck.

Jasper had hoped that seeing him would draw Casey over. He was right to hope. Casey started toward him, walking leisurely, taking the occasional shot at one of the deputies around him. He usually hit his target, though it didn’t seem to bother him when he didn’t.

Jasper was standing where the road bent, just out of the heat of the fight. He watched Alec come, walking right through the firefight, until he felt something slam into him, hot, stabbing into his left arm and leaving him gasping.

Someone had shot him.

Jasper hadn’t seen it coming. Barely saw who had done it. Hot pain ratcheted through his left arm and it was all he could do to keep a grip on his rifle with his right arm.

Jasper staggered a few steps backward. It reminded him of the first time he’d faced Alec, dropping backward on his rear, then falling from the porch. Then he hadn’t had a hole in his arm. Then he hadn’t had ahold of his rifle. He started to raise it, but did just what he’d done so many years ago, and fell backward.

A rock, he realized distantly as he hit the ground. He’d tripped over a rock.

Alec stopped his advance, turned to his man who’d shot Jasper, and volleyed a bullet back at him. Dead straight between the eyes. The outlaw fell over.

He had to get up. He had to. Jasper forced himself to his feet, made his arms lift the gun where he’d need it.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked Alec.

“Plenty of people to shoot,” Alec said with a wave of his hand. “And I was obviously coming for you. I can’t countenance stupidity.”

Jasper let out a laugh. “Of course you can’t.”

“How’d you get out?” Alec asked, his head tilted to the side and eyebrows raised like he was trying to work it all out. “How’d you know what I was planning?”

“Your brother.”

“Slip? What’d you do to him?” Alec asked, but before Jasper could answer, he seemed to put it together. He almost looked grudgingly respectful. “He let you go. I never thought he’d do it.”

“Honestly, neither did I.”

Alec nodded a couple of times. “Is this what you aimed to do?” he asked, jerking his head back toward where the shooting was still going on. “Bring down the Casey Gang?”

“I never much cared about the Casey Gang,” Jasper said. He shifted, changed his grip on his rifle. His left arm felt like someone had stabbed him with a hot poker, but his right arm was steady. “Mostly, I wanted you.”

Alec nodded again like he had known Jasper was going to say that. “I should have killed you myself back there.” Somehow that didn’t sound like a regret; it sounded like Alec was sorry he had underestimated Jasper for Jasper’s own sake. Like killing him back in that camp would have been an honor.

Jasper didn’t think he’d ever understand Alec Casey. After today, he didn’t think he’d ever need to try.

“You said the Casey brothers pay their debts. Well, so do I.”

Alec gave a slow nod. “I suppose you do,” he said, raising his revolver. “Assuming you can—”

Jasper’s shot rang out before Alec could finish his sentence. Alec dropped to his knees, just like he’d done so many years before when Jasper’s father had given him that scar on his shoulder. His hand still held the gun, but even though his fingers twitched against the metal, he clearly couldn’t raise it.

His eyes were cloudy with pain and confusion. He didn’t seem to understand that he was dying. Jasper took a step closer, reached down, and pulled the gun out of his hand. Alec’s fingers put up a fight, and it took whatever strength he had left right out of him. He slumped over onto the ground, his eyes still open, life leeching out of him just like the blood from his body.

“You’re a little bit too much like your brother,” Jasper said. “Shouldn’t talk so much.”

Jasper might have been fooling himself, but he thought he saw a little spark of laughter light up Alec’s dark eyes before leaving them entirely.

Jasper took one breath, two, and Alec Casey’s chest didn’t heave in time with his.

He’d done it.

Jasper felt the rifle slip from his fingers and hit the ground. Hitting the ground sounded like a good idea, so he lowered himself down as well, taking a seat on the stone he’d tripped over.

Alec’s body lay in the dirt in front of him, and Jasper had the passing thought that he would probably have hated that. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d wanted to die this way, shot through the heart on a warm spring day, facing an enemy who wanted nothing more in this world than to kill him. As ways to die went, Jasper supposed there were worse for men like Alec Casey.

Around the bend, the gunfire seemed to have stopped. A strange stillness settled on Jasper. Quiet. Even the pain in his shoulder seemed more distant.

He’d spent six years chasing Casey, and now it was over. He’d breathed the idea of revenge, drunk it down like his whiskey. It had been the last thing he thought about at night, and usually the first thing he thought of in the morning.

And now it was over.

Should he have felt happy? Jasper thought of the outlaw whooping with laughter when he shot a man down and realized he didn’t feel like doing that. He remembered again what the sheriff told him back then—You could kill Alec Casey a hundred times and it won’t help you feel better about losing your pa. He’d needed to kill Alec, yes, but in the end, it wasn’t going to bring his father back. It wouldn’t bring any fathers back.

But then he thought of the man who would have been driving this payroll stagecoach, the one who would have been beside him, and realized maybe that wasn’t necessarily true. They were probably fathers. He had saved those sons from the pain he’d gone through.

Maybe the jehu in the parlor was wrong; it wasn’t revenge that was sweet, but knowing you’d done some good with it.

Footsteps approached. A set of boots stopped in front of Alec Casey’s body. “You alright, Duncan?” a man asked. His shotgun messenger for the day. Jasper recognized his voice.

He looked up and gave a nod. “Yes,” he said. “I’m alright.”