Sheriff Gale decided he’d never met a woman who could change her mind as suddenly as Emma Vertrees. Earlier she had said yes when he’d invited her for a stroll in the moonlight. Now, upon his return, clean shirt, string tie, and all, she acted as if the two of them had never even discussed it. “I’m too tired tonight, Sheriff,” she’d said coldly, at the back door, acting as if she didn’t want him inside her house.
Now it’s “Sheriff,” Gale noted to himself, dumbstruck by this manner of treatment. Yet, in spite of his disappointment, Gale took a patient breath and said, “I understand, Emma. We’ll just have to make it some other time, when the moon is full again.” He paused there on her back porch, his freshly brushed Stetson clenched in his hands. “Are you all right?” he queried. “I mean, it’s not something I did or said, is it?”
“No, Sheriff,” Emma said, giving him a tolerant smile. She reached out through the barely opened door and cupped his cheek. “Thank you for being such a patient gentleman. These past few days have been a whirlwind for me. So much has happened…and so fast. I just need some time to collect myself and do some thinking.”
Gale cupped his strong hand over hers on his cheek and said, “Some thinking about us, I hope?”
“Yes, about us,” Emma said, sounding sincere, “and about the future we both want.” She pulled her hand gently away from his.
“If I can say anything to persuade you, just let me know.” Gale grinned.
“I’m certain I won’t need any persuasion,” Emma said softly. “Good night, Sheriff.” She kept her eyes on his, warm and suggestive, as she eased the door closed in his face.
For a moment Gale stood facing the door. Inside, Emma stepped over and peeped guardedly out the window at him. Seeing him from the side, standing there blankly in the dark, she shook her head. He seemed to have no idea she had just skillfully brushed him off. Well, she’d had to get rid of him, and she didn’t want him suspecting that she had another man in her house. She breathed in relief when he finally turned and walked down off the porch and around the house toward the street.
Walking into the bedroom, she looked at Memphis Beck, who had only just awakened and propped himself up on a pillow when they’d heard the knock on her kitchen door. “He’s gone,” she said, closing the bedroom door behind herself.
“Good.” Beck nodded. He took his Colt from under the blanket and slipped it behind the pillow. “I don’t want to put you on a spot with your beau, Emma. Soon as I get some strength up, I’ll cut out of here.” He looked at the half-packed carpetbag sitting on the floor beside the dresser. But he wasn’t going to ask her where she was going. When he’d been awake earlier, she’d told him she had to go move a rental buggy. If she wanted him to know, she’d tell him, he thought.
“There are some important things I need to tell you, Memphis,” Emma said, reaching into the pocket of his coat hanging from a chair back and taking out a bag of tobacco and rolling papers. “Sheriff Gale is not my beau. The fact is he never really was.” She sat down in the chair with a sigh.
“Oh?” Memphis watched her pause as if in reflection, the rolling paper in her fingertips formed into a trough. At length she shook a line of chopped tobacco into the trough and continued, saying, “I suppose he should have been my most natural choice after Dillard.” Whatever she’d been thinking she let go of with a shrug. “Anyway, Gale wanted to be a suitor.” She rolled a smoke and struck a match to it.
“But you weren’t interested?” he asked.
Emma stood up, carried the cigarette to him, and placed it in his lips. “No,” she said quietly, sitting down on the side of the bed.
“Then what was he doing—”
“Please listen, there’s a lot to this,” she said, bowing her forehead in her hand. “The day before you arrived in Little Aces, I had spent the night with a young cowboy named Omar Wills….”
Beck smoked the cigarette and listened intently as she told him everything. When she’d finished, he blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling and said, “So I’m wanted for murder now, for killing the man you killed and the sheriff helped you get rid of?”
“Yes, as it turns out.” Emma studied his face, but saw no anger or even harsh judgment. “Doesn’t that upset you, Memphis?”
“What? Being wanted for murder?” He took another draw on the cigarette. “Yes, a little, I suppose.” Now it was his turn to shrug. “But you didn’t do it to me, at least not on purpose, right?”
“No, of course not on purpose,” Emma replied. She took his hand, raised the cigarette to her lips, and took a draw for herself.
“Then I have no cause to complain,” Beck said. “It’s not like you and the sheriff jackpotted me. It’s just that neither of you told anybody any different when those two detectives blamed me.”
“For all I knew you were dead,” Emma replied. “Besides, I don’t think it would have mattered what either the sheriff or I said. According to him, the colonel was pleased to have a charge against you with living witnesses to make it stick.”
Beck offered a weak smile, still needing time for his blood to replenish itself. “I spoiled everything for everybody, not dying out there when I should have.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Emma said. “Besides, had I known things were going to turn out this way, I would have left with you. We would have put this place behind us and never looked back.” She leaned down beside him, careful of his wounded side.
“Just like the old days, eh?” Beck whispered. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “The two of us, sleeping under the stars, hand to mouth, taking whatever we want, to hell with the rest of the world? We can still do that, you know.”
“I know we can,” Emma said, “and that’s what I want. I wanted it the minute I saw you ride into Little Aces. Now that there’s nothing stopping us, I want to go with you, Memphis Beck. Wherever it takes us, I’m ready for it.” She took the cigarette from his fingers, took a long draw for herself, then turned and snubbed it out in an ash tin on the nightstand.
“Then let’s do it,” said Beck. “I have a big job set up with the rest of the gang. They’re waiting for me right now. My cut will be enough to take us anywhere we want to go from now on.”
“That’s perfect.” As she spoke she rested her face on his bare chest. “Because I wouldn’t want to go back to living hand to mouth, saying to hell with the rest of the world,” she whispered. “But the rest sure sounds good.” She closed her eyes dreamily.
“Yes, it does sound good, my outlaw’s lady,” Beck whispered. He reached down and brushed a loose strand of hair from across her forehead and studied her face in the soft circling glow of an oil lamp. “Better than anything I’ve known for a long, long time.”
Instead of riding into Little Aces in the middle of the night, Sam had made a camp and spent the night five miles from town. Before turning, he’d eaten some jerked elk and drunk some hot coffee while he cleaned and inspected his Colt, his repeating rifle, and the sawed-off shotgun he carried beneath his sleeping roll.
In the light of morning, he rode into Little Aces leading the two horses with the bodies of Tom Cat Weaver and Bennie Drew lying across the saddles. From the front porch of the Little Aces Hotel, Pale Lee Hodges took the cigar from his mouth and said to the colonel, who sat in a large rocking chair beside him, “Speak of the devil….”
Colonel Elgin turned from having the hotel clerk refill his coffee mug and looked toward the ranger. With a thin smile of satisfaction, the colonel watched the early street traffic spread apart and give plenty of room for the ranger and his grizzly procession. “Tell me, Pale Lee,” he asked curiously, “did you have the telegraph wires cut and taken care of, like I ordered?”
“I did,” Pale Lee answered, sipping from his coffee cup and leaning his straight-backed chair against the clapboard hotel front.
After a moment of muse, the colonel asked, “Do you suppose a ranger like Burrack ever gets tired of the dead always following him around, the flies, the smell?” He made a sour face.
Pale Lee deftly adjusted the butt of his revolver that stood in the long holster tied to his thigh. “I like our new way better, take their photo and leave the rest to the buzzards,” he chuckled.
“Speaking of buzzards and photographs, where’s Filo this morning?” the colonel asked, watching the ranger intently as he stopped out in front of the telegraph office, stepped down, and walked inside.
“He’s at the livery barn, doing whatever he does in the dark to make sure the photos come out clear,” said Pale Lee.
The colonel nodded and said to Jack Strap, who sat leaned back on the other side of him, “I hope this was the right thing, just firing a couple of shots to scare the ranger away, yesterday. He looks as if he awakened with his bark on this morning.”
Pale Lee stifled a sarcastic laugh. “It takes more than a couple of shots to scare a ranger off the job. Strap, I think you meant to shoot him dry-gulch style, but missed.” He looked across the colonel at Strap, who sat glaring at him. “What say you to that?”
“If I meant to kill him, he’d be dead,” Strap said flatly. “As dry-gulch style goes, I say the element of surprise is the only advantage a man gets out here when it comes to who lives and who dies.”
“Ordinarily, I would agree,” Pale Lee said, giving a sly grin and pointing his finger at Strap and clicking his thumb as if it were a pistol. “But as we see, even dry-gulch style, Burrack is still alive.”
Responding in the same pistollike gesture, Strap said stiffly, “Only because I knew the colonel didn’t want me to kill him. I knew the colonel would want those two Hole-in-the-wallers, which Vlak and I handed to him on a platter.” He let his thumb drop with finality.
“But we still don’t have Memphis Warren Beck, now, do we?” said Pale Lee, his thumb falling too, both men shooting it out finger to finger, the colonel in the middle.
“Stop it, both of you,” said Colonel Elgin. As he spoke the ranger walked out of the telegraph office. He watched Burrack step into his saddle and lead the bodies toward the hotel. The colonel did not like the dark look on the ranger’s face as he watched him draw nearer. “Where is Frank Skimmer?” Elgin asked. “Has anyone seen him?”
“I saw him at breakfast,” said Pale Lee, smoothing down his shirtfront with his hand, and flicking a bit of cigar ash from it. “He’s still smarting over his brother’s death.”
“One of you go find him, bring him here right now,” the colonel said, sounding urgent, as the ranger veered toward the hitch rail in front of them. But as Jack Strap started to stand up, Elgin said, “No, wait. I may need you right here beside me. Get the rest of the men out of the lobby. Quickly now.”
The ranger saw the detectives step out onto the front porch as he slowed to a halt out in front of the hotel. He pushed up the brim of his pearl gray sombrero and stared at Colonel Elgin knowingly for what the colonel considered an uncomfortably long time. Not wanting to squirm and look worried in front of the ranger, Elgin broke the awkward silence and called out, “Top of the morning, Ranger Burrack.” He gestured at the two bodies. “It appears you’ve had a productive trip since last we met.”
Sam only stared, knowing how much it troubled a man, especially one who knew why he was being stared at so intently.
Unable to simply sit still and stare back in silence, the colonel called out, “Will you step down and take breakfast at the hotel this morning? I—that is, we, all of us here, will vouch for its fine quality.” He spread a hand toward the rest of the posse, to make sure Sam saw how many guns were facing him, the ranger figured.
“I’m particular about who I eat with,” Sam said flatly with no attempt at courtesy. “I cut these bodies down from a tree last night. I’ve never believed in a lynching. I always call it the work of cowards.”
“Who the hell are you call—” Pale Lee started to say before he caught himself. On the colonel’s left and right, both Lee and Strap leaned the chairs forward off the front of the hotel and rose halfway before Elgin’s arms spread in each direction, stopping them.
“Easy, gentlemen,” said the colonel. “He wasn’t calling us cowards, since none of us had anything to do ambushing him or hanging these men.”
“Who mentioned an ambush?” Sam asked, his cold stare fixed like spearheads on the colonel. He swung down from the saddle and stepped sidelong from in front of his stallion, letting the reins of the other two horses fall from his hand. Without making any fast move, he lifted the Colt matter-of-factly from his holster, cocked it, and tilted the barrel up until it pointed at the colonel.
Elgin’s face reddened. “I must have assumed there had been some sort of—”
“Save your breath, Colonel,” said Sam, cutting him off. “You’re a liar, and you and your men are craven cowards.” He looked back and forth along the men facing him, seeing that they wanted to spread out, but had been caught so quickly by surprise that they didn’t know quite how to go about it now.
“Easy, Detectives,” Elgin said, his arms still spread as he stood up from the big rocking chair. “The ranger here is only goading us. He obviously has a mad-on over someone hanging his prisoners. We happen to be the closest targets.” He gave a smug grin. “Sorry, Ranger, we’re not going to fall for your crude invitation to a gunfight.”
As the colonel stood talking, Filo Heath came hurrying along the street from the livery barn, sheets of heavy photograph paper in his hand. “Colonel, I have them, they’re stunning!” he said.
“Not now, Filo,” Elgin said, his breath turning tight in his chest.
The photographer slowed to a halt, seeing the look on everybody’s faces. But where he stopped was close enough to the ranger that all Sam had to do was take a step sideways and grab the stiff photos from his hand. Without lowering the barrel of his Colt, Sam looked at the top photo, seeing Tom Cat Weaver and Bennie hanging dead from the tree limb.
“All right, Ranger,” said Elgin. “Yes, we did hang those felons! But we were within our rights to do so. But we had nothing to do with ambushing you. If you feel we did, prove it. Otherwise, that’s all I’ll say on the matter. We work for the railroads, we don’t answer to you or anybody else!”
“I just came from the telegraph office,” said the ranger. “You don’t even answer to the railroads if you can keep from it.”
“Are you implying we cut the lines, Ranger?” Elgin asked indignantly.
“I’m not implying, I’m accusing,” Sam said bluntly. He held the photographs out and let them fall from his hand into the dirt. “I intend to let the railroads know what you’ve done up here.” He rubbed his hand up and down his shirt as if to clean it. “Even the rail barons went beneath themselves, hiring a bunch of gutless thugs like you,” he said brazenly, looking back and forth along the porch. Finally he centered his stare on Pale Lee Hodges, the one who had taken the greatest offense. “We all know who I’m talking to when I say craven cowards.”
The colonel held his men in check with a raised hand as the ranger walked away.
Beside the colonel Pale Lee said, “He’s not interested in telegraphing the railroads. He just knows that saying so will make us have to kill him.”
“Then he’s about to get what he’s pushing for,” the colonel growled.