CHAPTER 11
“It’s a rather humble place, I’m afraid,” said Cynthia McCloud as they reined up on a cedar-stippled rise and stared down at a small ranch headquarters sprawled at the bottom of the hill. “When my father died, I returned here to try to keep the Ironwood up and running. My mother moved to Denver some years ago. She refused to return. She didn’t want me to either, but . . . Those men you met are my only hands. Just me here . . . and them. They’re good men, all in all.”
The cabin was all chinked log, tin-roofed, one story and rambling, smoke unfurling from the stone hearth abutting the far side. There was a small log bunkhouse, log stable attached to a small barn, and a corral. The place had likely been built before the Little Misunderstanding and not much had been done to it since. Still, it appeared neat and well-tended. A few fine-looking horses milled in the corral, some eating from a hay crib.
“My father built the place but had trouble keeping it due to falling stock prices and rustlers, not to mention the occasional Indian attack. I was raised here, but my parents sent me away to read for the law back east. They wanted better for me. Instead, I studied with a surgeon I met in a Christmas ball. That seemed to be my calling.” Cynthia clucked her Palomino on down the ridge. “Come on, gentlemen. Let’s get those ribs tended!”
Hunter grunted as he booted Nasty Pete down the ridge after the young woman, whose beauty and sophistication he was having trouble marrying to the humility of the shotgun ranch she’d grown up on. No wonder her parents had wanted better for her. He knew from his own experience that even a shotgun ranch was not a bad place for a kid to grow up. But then, when he and his father and brothers had come north after the war and built the Box Bar B, Hunter had been a veteran Confederate guerilla fighter albeit one not yet twenty years old. He’d been a rustic young man running off his leash, just like his brothers. Not a beautiful, precocious girl who’d likely yearned for broader horizons.
There was only one man about the place—a willowy young Indian named Vincent, who’d come out of the barn to tend Cynthia’s and the newcomers’ horses. Then Hunter and Powwow followed Cynthia to the sprawling, humble, rustically yet comfortably appointed cabin, and she promptly ordered Hunter to take off his shirt and sit down at her long eating table in the kitchen part of the dwelling that was fairly filled with comfortably slumbering cats—some on cushions, some in wicker baskets, some on shelves, two on a badly faded and tattered fainting couch in the living room part of the cabin.
“We have very few mice here at Ironwood Creek,” Cynthia quipped when she saw Hunter regarding the sleeping felines.
She poured him and Powwow, who also took a seat at the table, each a cup of coffee and then got to work mixing up some sort of stinky poultice at the kitchen’s rear counter. A stew pot bubbling over the fire in the hearth took some of the edge off the stench, but just some.
She laid what almost appeared a lady’s corset on the table and then dolloped a goodly portion of the poultice onto the corset. Then she gently removed the strips of sheet holding Hunter’s ribs in place. Hunter groaned at the release in pressure. She tossed the sheet stripes aside and then examined Hunter’s ribs closely, gently probing with her fingers, leaning so close over Colter that he could feel her long hair brushing his chest.
Some places she probed hurt more than others. Hunter set his jaws against the pain.
“Hmm,” she said finally, straightening. “You took a good beating, all right. I would say no dangerous breaks but a few cracks. Mostly bad bruising. I think you must have strong bones, Hunter.”
“Well, they’ve been through the mill, Miss Cynthia. I reckon they had no choice.”
She chuckled throatily, fetchingly. She wrapped the corset poultice around Hunter’s chest and belly and tied it tightly behind his back, grunting as she drew it tighter and tighter until he could barely breath.
Powwow chuckled.
“Shut up, kid.”
“That’ll be uncomfortable for a while,” Cynthia said, a little breathless with her efforts. “It will loosen some, but it should make those ribs feel a whole lot better.”
“They already do, thank you.”
“This will make you feel even better.”
She pulled a bottle down from a shelf and set three goblets on the table. She uncorked the bottle and, filling one of the glasses, said, “My father’s own homemade chokecherry wine. He was a master fermenter. This pretty much cures anything that ails you. I know. I’ve indulged a few times myself. Found a whole cache of the stuff in the root cellar.”
She filled the other two glasses, set the bottle on the table, and raised her glass. “To success in getting your wife back, Hunter.”
“To success,” Powwow said.
“To success,” Hunter said.
They clinked glasses together.
* * *
Hunter slept fitfully after a goodly portion of the strong wine and a large bowl of beef stew. He and Powwow occupied the room in which Cynthia’s parents had slept together albeit in separate beds. Powwow snored loudly, peacefully, in the bed on the opposite side of the room from where Hunter lay, restless and thinking of Annabelle.
Annabelle . . .
His ribs felt better now. Cynthia had taken at least half the pain away. He and Powwow would ride at first light, which couldn’t come soon enough for Hunter.
Too restless for sleep, he rose, pulled on his pants, stepped into his boots, and donned his hat. Quietly, he left the room, stole quietly across the dark cabin, and stepped out onto the cabin’s front stoop. He stood staring into the night, toward the northeast where Saguaro Machado was headed with Annabelle, wondering what was happening to her now, wondering if she was alive or . . .
No.
He couldn’t even think it.
Worry mixed with the rage inside him as well as a keen frustration at his not having been able to catch up to Machado by now because of the beating he’d taken at his hands.
He jerked with a start when the cabin door opened behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder to see Cynthia McCloud step out of the cabin and quietly draw the door closed behind her. She was clad in a ratty, oversized, plaid robe that Hunter assumed had belonged to her father. It looked lovely on her, her prettily disheveled hair curling onto her shoulders.
“Hope I didn’t wake you,” Hunter said.
She shook her head as, arms crossed on her chest, she walked up to stand beside him. “I couldn’t sleep, either.”
“Why’s that?”
She smiled sheepishly, shook her head. “You don’t want to know.”
“Sure, I do.”
She gave a husky chuckle as she gazed up at him, standing a whole head taller than she, admiringly. “No. You don’t.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.”
“Been awhile?”
“Yes. Anyway . . . I know what’s going through your head. Your wife . . . what is happening to her.”
Hunter gazed to the northwest once more, beyond the dark bunkhouse and the corral in which a half-dozen horses either lay or stood sleeping, still as statues. “Yeah, I just don’t know. Whether she’s alive or . . . if I’ll find her somewhere along the trail.” He shook his head. “Just never expected this. We’ve been through so much, Annabelle an’ me. After surviving all that . . . a bloody feud between our families when we made plans to marry . . . being trapped in a mine shaft together . . . having a stake of gold dust I built up for us stolen . . . having survived all that, I guess I was just fool enough to believe we wouldn’t be tested anymore.
“She’s very lucky to have you. To have a man who loves her so much.”
“I’m lucky, too.”
“You are.”
Hunter sighed.
“You don’t mind my feeling jealous, do you?”
Hunter gave her a tender smile, gently slid a few strands of her hair from her cheek. “Nah. You must be very lonely out here.”
“I was lonely back east, too. I reckon it’s just my fate.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing compared to what you have on your mind. Still, I’m jealous of your history . . . of your love for Annabelle.”
“That’s all right.”
She looked up at him, her eyes dark beneath the porch’s awning. “I hope you make it, Hunter. Honestly, I do. You and Powwow.”
“I do, too.”
“Do you think you have a chance?”
“I reckon we’ll find out.”
“Do you know where this Machado fellow is headed with her?”
“He holes up along the Missouri River. I have a feeling he might be intending to sell her to slavers who work along the river . . . selling women to woodcutting parties who work in that remote country most of the year to fuel riverboats. I’ve heard marshals have worked for years to break up that ring, but they’ve had little luck. It’s remote country. Remote, savage country filled with savage, downright uncivilized men the slavers sell kidnapped girls and women to. Soldiers among them.”
Cynthia squeezed herself and shuddered.
“Yeah.” Hunter turned to the northwest again. “I’ll find her. Sooner or later, I’ll find her.” He gritted his teeth. “And I’ll find Machado, too.”
Cynthia slid her arm around his waist and canted her head against his chest. “I’ll prepare trail food for you and Powwow. I know you’ll want to leave early.”
“You’ve done enough, Cynthia.”
“No, I have not.”
She returned to the cabin and closed the door quietly behind her.
Hunter stood staring toward the northwest.
* * *
He sat on the porch until dawn.
He could smell coffee and fried bacon emanating from inside the cabin, could hear the clatter of pans and dishes. When he went inside, Powwow was already at the table, hunkered over a plate of eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes. Hunter wasn’t hungry. He hadn’t really felt hungry since his last meal with Annabelle. But since Cynthia had gone to the work to feed him and Powwow, he sat down and ate a full meal and drank two cups of coffee.
When they were finished, he and Powwow went outside to see that their horses were saddled and tied to the hitchrack fronting the cabin. Young Vincent was walking back toward the stable. Julia came out behind him and Powwow. She handed Hunter a burlap sack bulging with foodstuffs.
“Thank you, Julia,” Hunter said, accepting the bag. “Truly. For everything.”
She smiled. “Anytime. Good luck.”
Hunter pinched his hat brim to her.
Powwow said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and then he and Hunter mounted up and rode out of the yard, toward the northwest.
They’d ridden only a hundred yards or so when Hunter stopped Nasty Pete and told Powwow to ride ahead. “I’ll catch up to you.”
He rode back into the Ironwood Creek headquarters.
She stood in her plaid robe at the foot of the porch steps, waiting for him, a beguiling smile quirking her mouth corners.
Hunter checked Pete down, stepped down from the saddle, took her in his arms, and hugged her very tightly, very closely to him. She groaned against him, returning his hug. He held her for nearly a minute, rocking her gently, then kissed her cheek, gave her one last parting smile, mounted up, and headed back out on the range toward Powwow and, hopefully, Saguaro Machado and Annabelle.