CHAPTER 47
Steve Markham tried to swallow the sick feeling that welled up his throat. Pointing a gun at Denny Jensen was the last thing on earth he wanted to do, but she wasn’t giving him any choice. Didn’t she know that he was just trying to save her life?
Well, probably not. There was no way for her to know that, he realized. She didn’t know that Bert Rome and the other men with him were attacking the Sugarloaf cowboys. Rome hadn’t told Markham exactly when the ambush would take place, only that it would occur near the middle of the day, so he had gotten Denny away from the herd as soon as he could after they’d stopped at noon.
And just in time, too, because Rome would have carried out the attack even if Denny was still there. Rome had made it clear that he didn’t want anything to happen to her—if they took her prisoner, they could demand a big ransom for her, too—but when bullets started to fly, anything could happen.
She stared at him, speechless for a few seconds, then demanded, “Steve, what the hell are you doing?”
“Keepin’ you from gettin’ hurt, Denny,” he told her. “You’re gonna come with me now. We’ll ride on up this canyon, around that bend where we’ll be safe, and then we’ll wait until all this trouble is over. You’ll see that I’m just thinkin’ about you—”
“No!” she cried. “You’re thinking about you! If you think that kidnapping me will make me love you, you’re crazy!”
No, not crazy. Instead of turning her over to Bert Rome, Markham had realized that the two of them could just keep riding, far away from there. It would mean giving up whatever his share of the profits from the scheme would have been, but the certainty was growing inside him that Denny Jensen was worth it. All he had to do was make her understand how he really felt... “You’ve just got to give me a chance—”
A shot fired somewhere nearby made Markham interrupt his plea and jerk his head around. The rider who had followed them into the canyon was galloping toward them again, and as Markham turned his horse that way, he saw the man fire a second shot into the air.
Too late, Markham realized the man was trying to distract him, and it had worked. Denny jabbed her boot heels into her mount’s flanks and sent the horse lunging forward wildly. Her horse’s shoulder rammed into Markham’s horse and the collision staggered both animals. They almost lost their footing and went down. As Markham hauled on the reins with his left hand and tried to regain control, Denny left her saddle in a flying leap and tackled him.
He outweighed her by a lot, and she never would have been able to knock him out of the saddle if he’d been expecting it. But he was taken by surprise and felt himself slipping. He dropped the reins and grabbed for the horn, but that just allowed his already spooked horse to start capering around even worse. Markham toppled off with barely enough time to kick his feet out of the stirrups.
He hit the ground hard with Denny on top of him. That was enough to jolt the air out of his lungs. Gasping, he shoved her away. The fall seemed to have stunned her, so she didn’t put up a fight. He rolled onto his belly and got his knees underneath him.
As he pushed up, he saw the rider pounding closer and recognized that damned deputy marshal, Brice Rogers. A part of Markham’s brain was stunned by that recognition. What was Rogers doing all the way up there in Montana?
Markham’s instincts still worked, he still had the Colt in his hand, and he lifted it.
Denny hit him again before he could pull the trigger. Either she had recovered quickly or hadn’t been as stunned as he’d thought. She grabbed his wrist and forced the gun back down as she threw her shoulder into him and tried to knock him to the ground again. He saw that the holster on her hip was empty. The Lightning must have fallen out when they took that spill from the horse.
He started to backhand her and knock her away from him, but he realized that was the wrong move and grabbed her instead, looping his left arm around her neck. She writhed in his grasp, but he was too strong for her. She couldn’t get loose. Twisting so that her back was to him, he dragged her squirming body against him and shoved his gun hand under her right arm so the weapon pointed toward Rogers, who was reining up hurriedly about twenty feet away.
“Let her go!” the lawman called as he leaped out of the saddle. He couldn’t risk a shot as long as Markham had Denny in front of him like that.
“Go to hell, law dog!” Markham yelled back at him. He tightened his arm around Denny’s neck.
She stopped struggling, evidently realizing that it wouldn’t take much effort for him to choke her into unconsciousness or even snap her neck.
Markham was about to open fire on Rogers—there was no reason to stand around and flap his jaws about this—when the deputy marshal ducked behind one of the boulders littering the canyon floor. Markham still had a shot at him, but not a very good one.
He had Denny, though, and she was the winning card in any hand.
“Throw your gun out, Rogers! I got no interest in killin’ you, as long as you don’t try to stop me and Denny from leavin’ here.”
“I’ll never go . . . anywhere with you!” Denny forced out past the forearm clamped like a bar of iron across her throat.
“You’ll figure out I love you, if you’ll just gimme a chance,” he told her.
“Let her go,” Rogers said again. “If you hurt her, I swear I’ll kill you, Markham!”
“I’d never hurt Denny!”
“You’re . . . hurting me now,” she grated.
“I’m sorry about that, I truly am, but I don’t have any choice.” Markham gestured curtly with the gun. “What’s it gonna be, Rogers? All you have to do is throw that iron down and not try to stop Denny and me from ridin’ away from here. If you do that, I promise I won’t shoot you.”
Rogers laughed coldly. “You think I’d ever believe the son of a vicious killer like the Santa Rosa Kid?”
* * *
Denny’s mind whirled dizzily. First she’d been stunned by the fact that Steve Markham would pull a gun on her, then she had been every bit as surprised as Markham by Brice Rogers showing up. The herd was under attack by unknown ambushers, too, and Denny wanted to get back and help Cal and the others fight off the assailants.
But even with all that spinning around in her thoughts, she was aware of the way Markham stiffened suddenly at the mention of the Santa Rosa Kid, a name she had never heard before.
“Shut up!” Markham said. “You got no right to talk about him. It was lawmen like you who hounded him to death!”
“And you’re following in his footsteps, is that it?” asked Brice from behind the boulder. “A thief and a murderer and who knows what else? You think Denny’s going to fall in love with you after you’ve kidnapped her and helped butcher her friends?”
“I’m gettin’ sick and tired of you, Rogers. I reckon maybe I will kill you after all. You can’t stop me, not without shootin’ this gal—”
Denny stomped down hard on the top of his foot. She wasn’t going to do any real damage that way, but the blow hurt enough to make Markham yelp in pain and bend forward a little. At the same time, Denny jerked her head back and it hit him squarely on the nose with enough force to make blood spurt from his nostrils. Markham’s grip on her slipped just enough for her to get both hands under the arm around her neck, force it down a little more, and twist away from him.
He bellowed a curse and triggered the Colt. Shots boomed out from it, but he wasn’t aiming at her. The slugs whined off the rock where Brice had taken cover. As Markham blazed away at the deputy marshal, Denny’s frantic gaze fell on the Colt Lightning that had fallen from her holster. She dived toward it, scooped it up, rolled over, and came up on one knee.
Flame geysered from the muzzle of the .38 caliber double-action as she pulled the trigger three times as fast as she could. The slugs pounded into Markham’s chest and rocked him back a couple of steps. He didn’t drop his gun, but his arm sagged and that gave Brice the chance to return his fire. Two shots crashed from Brice’s .45. Those bullets ripped into Markham’s body and slewed him halfway around.
He fell to his knees and dropped the gun as he put his hands out to catch himself. For a long moment he stayed there like that on all fours, and Denny felt sick as she saw blood running from the holes in his body and pooling on the ground underneath him. With a groan, he fell over onto his left side and seemed like he was trying to curl up around the agony that filled him.
She got to her feet as Brice rose from behind the boulder. With their guns still pointed toward Markham, they advanced slowly toward him. Denny’s eyes flicked toward Brice as she asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” His voice showed the strain he was under. “How about you?”
“My throat’s going to be a little bruised where he choked me, but I’m fine. What the hell’s going on here, Brice?”
“He’s an outlaw,” Brice said. “And that’s probably his gang trying to steal the horse herd right now.”
In fact, the gunfire still continued out in the basin where Cal and the rest of the crew had been driving the horses. Denny wanted to go to them and help them, but something compelled her to holster her gun, kneel beside Markham, and ease him over onto his back.
“Careful, Denny,” said Brice as he continued pointing his gun at Markham.
“He’s shot to pieces, Brice. I don’t think he’s a danger to anybody anymore.” She paused. “Not even himself.”
Markham’s breath rasped in his throat. His eyes were closed. At the touch of Denny’s hands and the sound of her voice so close to him, he forced them open and blinked up at her. Struggling to talk, he said, “I . . . I’m not . . .”
“Not what?” she asked. She tried not to look at the bloody ruin that was his chest, a lot of the damage inflicted by her own Colt Lightning.
“Not . . . an outlaw. Not . . . really. My pa was . . . an owlhoot . . . the Santa Rosa Kid . . . just like . . . the lawdog said. But I never . . . never did anything . . . all that bad . . . rustled a few cattle . . . here and there . . . stuck up a store . . . or two . . . but then Bert Rome . . . and Sam Brant . . . came to me . . . They used to ride . . . with my pa . . . said they had a plan . . . make us all rich . . . said if your pa was dead . . . your ma would pay a fortune . . . to get your brother back . . . alive . . . but they needed an inside man . . . workin’ on the Sugarloaf . . .”
Denny’s eyes widened in horror at the enormity of the plan spilling from Markham’s blood-frothed lips. In the back of her mind was the knowledge that she had actually started to care for this man and she ought to be sad that he was dying right in front of her eyes, but what he was saying forced out any other thoughts.
“Denny . . . I’m . . . sorry,” Markham managed to get out. “I never wanted . . . to hurt you . . . Never figured on . . . fallin’ in—” The words choked off as his eyes went glassy. A final shudder went through his body as his head tipped slowly to the side.
Denny knelt there in silence for a long moment before Brice said quietly, “He’s gone, Denny.”
“I know.” She took a deep breath and stood up. Opening the Lightning’s loading gate, she shook out the empty brass from the rounds she had fired and started replacing them with fresh cartridges from the loops on her shell belt. “But his no-good friends are still out there trying to kill my friends, and I intend to go put a stop to that right now.”