Toward the Dawn, page 22
SEPTEMBER 1873
A bullet smashed into a boulder, ricocheted off, and burned Dakota Harlan’s cheek. He threw himself backward, landed hard, flipped over, and was crawling on his elbows, shoving forward on his belly as another shot fired, then fired again. He moved without thinking.
A Winchester 73. Dakota recognized the rifle because he had one of his own. He gripped his Winchester now, always keeping it close to hand, and he was relentless about that since the day he’d survived an earlier attack.
Judging by where the shooter was located, and Dakota knew this land well, he crawled farther, keeping himself low. He slithered more like, not wanting to give the shooter anything to aim at.
At last he reached a row of sheltering stones, each of them half the height of a man. These boulders hadn’t found their way here by accident. He’d ringed the edge of the pasture with them. It was months of brutally hard work in the hot sun. In fact, two years of Dakota’s life had been spent getting the boulders dragged around into this shelter. He had many such shelters all through his valley.
He’d analyzed the entrances to this meadow, the lookouts where a sneaking gunman might set up, the likely places—and a couple less likely—where a man might open up on him from cover. He’d hoped to never need them, but right now he was grateful for every hard hour he’d spent, every blister he’d earned.
The rifle stopped firing. That fool out there had emptied his weapon, even one that held as many bullets as the Winchester 73. He was probably reloading now. Dakota had counted the shots. Thirteen rounds, the number of bullets in a fully loaded Winchester with the longest barrel and the smallest caliber.
Dakota crawled on, angling, keeping in mind his assailant’s position. He wondered if the fool would decide to move. Probably not. Most likely he thought he had Dakota pinned down. But Dakota knew exactly where the would-be killer was hiding.
His breathing slowed as he crawled, circling the meadow, closing the distance between them. He needed to leave this meadow, get to higher ground. He headed toward a fall of rocks that were perfectly placed, also there by the sweat of his brow. He’d use the rocks to conceal himself while he climbed into position.
His pulse slowed. His mind focused on something so sharp, so vivid, it was nearly painful. Dakota drew from all his years of accumulated knowledge, from his time spent on the wagon train, the miserable year homesteading, the wandering he’d done. And finally the decision to find a quiet, safe place near a good friend and start a ranch.
The rifle picked up firing again. The shots shattered rock and ricocheted all over with ugly pings, but they were one hundred feet behind him and fifty feet below.
It was a harsh reminder that he hadn’t managed the quiet, and he sure as all get-out hadn’t managed the safe.
For this wasn’t the first killer to come calling.
Inching along with his Winchester, he made it to the rocks that would shelter him as he moved upward while that fool unloaded his gun again into the place where Dakota had vanished from.
The man must dearly love the sound of gunfire. Or maybe he loved buying bullets because he was wasting a lot of lead.
Climbing, shielded by the massive stones, Dakota went up and up until he knew he’d gotten high enough. Surely the gunman wouldn’t unload his rifle again, would he? Maybe he figured he’d winged Dakota with one of his shots.
A trickle on his chin had him swiping his face with his shirtsleeve. Sure enough, his hand came away red. The sidewinder had grazed him! He thought of the bullet earlier that struck the boulder near him and ricocheted. Thankfully it hadn’t done much damage.
A few moments later, Dakota reached the spot he was aiming for and stopped. Lying on his back, his rifle clutched in both hands across his chest, Dakota listened, waited, and then, sure as the sunrise, the shooter opened up again. He’d be focused on those same rocks, now far away from Dakota.
Dakota could have gone higher and come up behind the varmint shooting, but he wasn’t about to shoot anyone in the back. Instead, he leaned forward to a perfectly located crack between two rocks, where he saw the reckless, bullet-wasting fool emptying his gun again. He’d climbed out of a decent hiding place and was now in plain sight.
Slowly, Dakota closed the space between them until he was only about twenty feet away. He’d circled a good portion of the meadow, closed in on his assailant, and could finally get a good look at him. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want a life of always being on edge.
A life of fight or die.
The gunfire ceased when the rifle was empty once again. Gathering himself, Dakota sprang to his feet and leveled his rifle on the man. “Drop your gun! Get your hands in the air now.”
Dakota’s eyes stayed locked on the man. Something about him hit a nerve, but Dakota didn’t allow himself to be distracted by whatever was buzzing around in his head.
The man lowered his rifle, taking his time with dropping it. Rage glinted in the varmint’s eyes, and it seemed like more than just fury that Dakota had gotten the drop on him. The rage was personal. Yet Dakota didn’t know this man with the silver-gray hair and black eyes. He had a weathered face and a strange hawklike nose. Something about him, though, niggled Dakota’s memory.
The rifle clattered when it hit the stony ledge the man stood on. Dakota had him under his control now. He’d tie him up, then haul the man to the sheriff nearly a full day’s ride away.
After the man let go of the rifle, his right hand swept up lightning fast. In the hand was a pistol he’d pulled from a holster under his coat.
“No!” Dakota howled, then pulled the trigger of his Winchester.
Bright red bloomed on the man’s chest.
The pistol fired into the ground over and over, the gunfire echoing off the walls of Dakota’s canyon.
His eyes met those black ones. “Why? You had no chance. Why would you want me dead?”
Then the eyes and the beak nose clicked in his memory. Two memories, in fact. Dakota had faced off with two men very much like this one. It could just be chance, but with a sinking stomach Dakota knew it wasn’t.
The man pitched forward and fell. He’d been high up on a rocky ledge, and now he plunged forward.
With a cold feeling in his gut, Dakota noticed he hadn’t fallen far from another grave. Sickened, he realized he had his own cemetery now. Or he would once this man was buried.
The smell of gunpowder faded. The breeze wafted with the scent of pine. A cow mooed down on the grasslands of his meadow. This beautiful place Dakota had found and now owned. Heavily wooded in spots, a rich piece of land full of belly-high grass. A stream nearby ran with cold water teeming with trout. Mountains stood all around, arranged in such a way that they cut the wind even in the bitter-cold Idaho winters.
It was the perfect place to make a home. But not if killers came calling.
Sighing, Dakota went over and stared down at the dead man, a grizzled old-timer. He wished he’d had a chance to reason with him.
The ice he felt in his chest was hard enough, and cold enough, he wasn’t sure how his heart went on beating. The way this man had shot at him from cover was too much like the other one. And he held a strong resemblance to the man who’d attacked before.
Dakota knelt beside the man, wondering if he could find anything to learn who he was. Who were they? He searched the body and came up with a letter, folded and still inside an envelope.
Slumping to the ground to sit, Dakota opened the letter and read the name Darnell. Closing his eyes, he didn’t read on. Not yet.
Darnell told him enough.
The bank robber he’d run afoul of during his year of wandering was called Vic Darnell. And he’d been a dark-haired man with a hawkish nose and black eyes.
And this letter was a call to kinfolk. A blood feud. With Dakota’s name in it and precious little else. Which might explain why it had taken this man so long to find him.
Of course, Dakota hadn’t known where he was headed when he’d stopped Vic Darnell and a few other townsfolk from a wild killing spree when Vic had been cornered after a murderous bank robbery gone bad.
Dakota had been wandering. Who would have known to find him here? It’d taken a lot of work and some skill to track Dakota to this meadow. He hadn’t even bought it yet, though he intended to. He’d found the spot, knew it was near his friend Jake, and had moved in and set up ranching.
He looked down at the letter again. Crude handwriting, full of misspelled words, from a man who barely knew how to write.
Mort,
Yer boy Vic’s bin kilt by a man name’a Dakota Harlan. I’m writin t’others and coming west to put this right. No one kills my grandson, your son, and lives. See if you can pick up the scent. It hapend in Oregone, but the vermin what kilt our kin is runnin’ skeered, or he had oughta be. A blood feud. I’m callin’ fer it.
If’n you find him first, it’s yer right to settle this on yer own. If’n you don’t find him, help’s a-comin’.
Pa
Dakota flipped the envelope over and saw Ezra Darnell scrawled in one corner and the letter addressed to Mort Darnell.
How many of these letters had been sent? How many more Darnells were out there searching for him?
He’d have to live his life on a razor’s edge from now to the end of his days to survive because, judging by the two who’d come here, these weren’t face-to-face kind of men. They didn’t stand before you and challenge you. They were back-shooting coyotes. And that kind wasn’t much on talking.
Dakota was a man of faith. He hadn’t wanted a life that was surrounded by the need to kill. He had no idea how to end this feud. It seemed he was trapped in a cycle of danger and death. He had no hope he could convince one of these Darnells to reconsider the back-shooting and live a peaceable kind of life.
He went and got a shovel and, half an hour later, had a hole dug. Dakota dropped the man in the hole and buried him. He left a small heap of dirt on the grave. The other grave had nearly disappeared back to meadow grass.
By the time he was done, the day had worn down. The sun slanted steeply in the west over the jagged tops of the mountains that guarded the west side of his ranch.
Those mountaintops reached for him like claws, sent toward Dakota by God to grab ahold of him and crush him before he could hurt anyone else.
His chest ached as he stood and let himself be cast in shadows, just as his whole life had been cast in shadows. He stood staring at the pair of graves, unmarked because it seemed blasphemous to put a cross on the graves, and unwise to risk drawing attention by posting the Darnell name on them.
He stood there alone. And because he was alone, because he would always be alone, he thought of a pretty redheaded Irish girl who might have joined her life to his at one time in the past.
Before her father had died and before Dakota had treated her wrong. Before he’d told her the unhappy truth that they had to roll on and leave her father far behind on the lonely prairie. His grave by now was as vanished from the world as these would soon be.
He’d had no choice, and yet she hadn’t seen it that way.
And all the anger that so often followed death got landed straight on Dakota. His shoulders were strong enough to take it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t sorry he had to do it. And that was before Dakota’s life had become something he could never dare let anyone share.
She’d seen him as a heartless brute.
He wondered if maybe she was right. If Maeve O’Toole could see this crude little graveyard of his, she’d know she was right and would set her heart even more against him.
Dakota sat down hard on the ground and studied the final resting place of the ones who’d come with intent to kill. His cold heart thawed a bit, and he felt the pain. His throat hurt. His soul ached with loneliness and the utter belief that God couldn’t want Dakota to kill like this.
But he had no notion of how to stop it.
Mary Connealy writes romantic comedies about cowboys. She’s the author of the BROTHERS IN ARMS, BRIDES OF HOPE MOUNTAIN, HIGH SIERRA SWEETHEARTS, KINCAID BRIDES, TROUBLE IN TEXAS, WILD AT HEART, and CIMARRON LEGACY series, as well as several other acclaimed series. Mary has been nominated for a Christy Award, was a finalist for a RITA Award, and is a two-time winner of the Carol Award. She lives in eastern Nebraska with her very own romantic cowboy hero. They have four grown daughters—Joslyn, married to Matt; Wendy; Shelly, married to Aaron; and Katy, married to Max—and seven precious grandchildren. Learn more about Mary and her books at
MaryConnealy.com
facebook.com/maryconnealy
petticoatsandpistols.com
BETHANY
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Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title Page
Books by Mary Connealy
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Sneak Peek at Book 3 in the Series
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
List of Pages
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