Cheyenne's Lady, page 36
That was the moment Maria had been waiting for. The rear of the platform was too high for her to climb, but Sean and Joshua lifted her up without difficulty. Intent upon the condemned man and the deputy attempting to swing the rope over a branch, few people noticed Maria’s slight form. Not until Joshua and Sean joined her did fingers point.
By that time it was too late. Maria had her shotgun aimed at Manuel’s heart and both Joshua and Sean held six-shooters in their hands. The sheriff turned to stare at them in disbelief.
“My God, woman, have you gone loco? Get down from there!”
Maria didn’t take her eye off Manuel as she responded coolly. “I’ll get down when the trial’s finished, Sheriff. Try to remove me before then and three men die. That’s a promise.”
Chapter 12
The targets of their weapons realized the trap instantly and edged backward out of the crowd. Maria held out her hand to Sean, who slapped one of Luke’s Colts in her palm. The shotgun had only two barrels, but the Colts had bullets to spare. With her mouth set in a grim line that warned all who knew her to beware, Maria aimed the revolver and pulled the trigger.
Manuel yelped and slapped a hand over the burning hole in his coat sleeve. People around him jumped as the bullet hit the ground. Maria returned the weapon to Sean and held up the shotgun again.
“That was just a warning,” she called into the fascinated crowd. “Stay right where you are, señors, or the next bullets will go through your evil hearts.”
Cries of “Lynch him” again rang from the back of the crowd where the Vasqueros’ cowards hid. But the sight of a pregnant lady wielding a shotgun quieted the mob to murmurs of speculation.
The sympathetic sheriff still regarded Maria cautiously. “You can’t get away with this, you know. He’s been found guilty in a court of law. If you shoot anyone, you can’t run anywhere that I won’t catch you.”
“Look at me, Sheriff. Do I look as if I can run? I just want the whole story told. You and your judge and jury have been railroaded.” Refusing to look at Luke, Maria scanned the crowd until she found Consuela again and gestured for her to come up.
Whistles and hoots followed Consuela up the stairs, but no one interfered with her progress. Although Dallas and the Vasqueros had gone livid with rage, they did not dare signal their men, not while three guns pointed at their heads.
“Gentlemen of the jury.” Maria found the men whose faces she had memorized this day. “There is one last witness you must hear before you can give a true verdict. Consuela makes a living in the only manner men allow her, but this does not make her any less of a witness, not when we’re dealing with the kind of people that Peg Owens and Dirk Jones were. Consuela, tell these good people where you met Peg.”
“Peg Owens was a friend of mine, of sorts,” Consuela said as she reached the platform. “She had her own room above the saloon in San Pedro and a rich boyfriend who bought her fancy gowns. She told me she had gone to a mission school in Albuquerque until her father died, and then Señor Vasquero asked her to come back to San Pedro with him.”
None of this meant anything to the Stockton crowd. They did not know the Vasqueros or San Pedro, although several glanced toward the handsome Spaniard clutching his upper arm. The mask of fury on his face caused more murmurs.
“Peg liked pretty things,” Consuela continued. “She was young and innocent so when the patron bought her a new gown and asked her to dine with his son, she was excited and agreed. When the son raped her right there in her new room, she did not go to the sheriff. The patron gave her gold to keep quiet.”
The crowd gasped and several of the women covered their ears, but Consuela was an excellent storyteller. She held them fascinated. “Peg told me all this much, much later. She found me on the street and brought me to her room and loaned me one of her dresses and introduced me to this patron’s son. I did not understand why she would do this. The patron’s son scarcely looked at me when Peg was around, and he always ordered me to leave after he arrived. Afterward, when he was gone, and I returned to Peg, I would find her crying, and her nose was often bloody or her eyes blackened. I asked her why she did not leave, but she said she could not, he would come after her and kill her.”
Maria watched in satisfaction as Manuel’s face darkened with fury. Consuela was endangering her life by standing up here and exposing his perfidies to the world, but he was helpless as long as Maria held a gun on him. He knew her aim and her temper too well—both were better than his.
“One day this Dirk Jones came to San Pedro. He talked fast and sweet and stayed for many weeks. I was his lover first and Peg was jealous, but when she was not with her boyfriend, she entertained Dirk in her room. When Dirk left, she left with him.”
Consuela’s glare shifted to Manuel, and necks craned to find the object of her wrath.
“It was then that the patron’s son came to me. He beat me, trying to force me to tell where Peg had gone. He raped me, many times, all the time calling me Peg and swearing vengeance. This went on for many weeks. I could not escape. I had no money and nowhere to go. After Peg left, he placed guards in the saloon. Every time he came to me he would tell me what he would do to Peg when he found her. When he finally heard about Dirk, he went crazy. That night I learned he had men out searching for them. I wished to hell he had found them because he nearly broke half my ribs in his rage.”
The murmurs in the crowd grew to a low rumble as the spectators understood the direction of this story. From the corner of her eye Maria noted several respectably dressed ranchers pushing to the front of the crowd with their hands near their guns and their eyes on Luke and Manuel. The men she associated with Dallas were growing less vehement in their drunken cries for lynching and were retreating toward their horses. Consuela’s story roused both the forces of good and evil. A confrontation seemed imminent. She hoped she could hold on to the shotgun long enough to stop it.
Consuela took an unconscious step toward Luke, putting herself between Luke and Manuel. “All this happened many years ago. I was young and afraid. One spring this man, this patron’s son came to me with an evil grin and said he had found Peg, and he was going to fetch her. I was happy for me, but frightened for Peg. He is a large man and even a slap from his hand can knock a woman down.
“He was gone several weeks. When he came back, he did not bring Peg. I asked if he found her and he said he had, that he had gotten even with her and her new boyfriend, and he never wanted to hear their names again. And so I heard nothing of them again until a gentleman by the name of Mr. Hume came to me last month and told me Dirk Jones and Peg Owens were dead. They had died that same spring when Manuel Vasquero told me never to mention their names again.”
Had Consuela practiced this speech for weeks, she could not have improved the response. Señor Vasquero seemed to explode from within, his leathered face falling into drawn wrinkles as his hand clutched at his chest. His vaqueros caught him before he fell, and they carried him away, leaving Manuel to fend for himself.
Manuel grabbed for the gun on his hip and several of Dallas’s men reached for theirs, but Luke’s friends had already surrounded the platform. Manuel faced not only Maria’s shotgun, but the fury of men brought up to think of women as fragile commodities to be treated with respect. Consuela and Peg might have been whores, but they were first and foremost women. Men who beat women and then framed another man for their misdeeds did not live long in this environment.
Already the cries of the crowd roared for blood, Manuel’s blood if not Luke’s. The men who had been shouting “String him up!” of Luke had slunk away, but new voices took up the refrain.
Maria smiled grimly as she faced the jury. “Well, gentleman, would you care to vote again on the verdict?’’
One of the merchants tugged nervously at his galluses and glanced at the sheriff while the crowd waited impatiently. “Bill, we can’t do that, can we? Can we do this damned thing over?’’
“If you hang Luke Walker now, hell, we’ll hang that Mexican varmint over there and you with him, Bill Jackson! Get Luke down from there!” bellowed an angry voice from the crowd.
Maria heard the shouts through a haze of pain. It was becoming more difficult to stand upright. Her knuckles turned white around the shotgun. The roar of the crowd receded to a distance, and she could no longer focus on Manuel. She had to reach Luke and free his hands, but when she stepped in that direction, agony tore at her midsection, and she stumbled with a cry.
She heard Sean shouts and her father-in-law’s boots on the wood. Then blackness closed around her. She only registered the mystery of Luke’s hard arms holding her and his warm curses in her ear.
Luke finally had the knots on his wrist loose. He’d run through so many emotions these last hours that he’d thought himself drained dry. Maria’s cry plunged him to new depths.
The sheriff had started to grab him when Luke broke free, but he halted once Maria collapsed in his prisoner’s arms. At Luke’s fiercely protective expression, he nodded, “Take her back to the hotel, but remember you’re still my prisoner.”
“I’ll not be running while my child is being born,” Luke replied with withering scorn. He saw his mother and Sara running toward the hotel to gather the necessities for a premature birth. His arms closed tighter around his precious burden as he walked down the steps he thought never to touch again. He could feel the wetness of Maria’s gown against his arm, and he clenched his teeth against panic. He knew that wetness was blood, and he knew it was too soon. Tears misted his eyes as he ran down the street after the women.
Behind him, Luke heard the shouts of “Hang him!” This time the mob’s anger had found a different focus. He couldn’t waste any sympathy on Manuel.
Hours later, Matthew poured a tumbler full of whiskey and passed it to Luke to stop his pacing. The small parlor they had appropriated off the hotel’s lobby was not large enough to accommodate his pent-up energy and emotion. His brother eyed Luke as if it was akin to being caught in a cave with a wounded cougar.
Luke gulped the liquor as if it were water. Both Sean and Matthew stared at him in amazement, waiting for him to fall flat on his face. When he only set the glass aside to stalk up and down the threadbare carpet again, they both reached for their own drinks.
At Joshua’s entrance, all three men waited expectantly, but he merely shook his shaggy head. “Nothing. They won’t tell me nothing.”
Sean looked gray as another faint cry drifted from above. Luke resumed pacing. Matthew refilled his own glass.
“Caroline would be screaming like a gut-shot coyote by now,” he muttered to no one in particular. “1 think I’ll see how the weather is in ’Frisco when her time comes.”
His father shot him a less than sympathetic glance. “Your mother went through hell delivering you. I almost swore off having babies after that.”
Sean beamed an inebriated grin and nodded at Luke. “You should have stuck to your word, Josh. It would have saved us all a heap of trouble.”
Luke pinned the Irishman to his chair with a glare. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then you’d have one more female to add to your harem. I ought to bust your bloody nose for you, but Sara would have my hide for hurting your pretty face.”
That turned the tide from the anguished cries above, and Matthew eagerly joined the fray. “He’s right, you bastard. How much longer do you think you can dally after Sara without stating your intentions? We should have had you hog-tied and whipped and rode out on a rail a long time ago. When are you going to ask her?”
Sean looked desperately from Luke to Matthew to Joshua’s stern expression and reached for his glass. Taking a reviving gulp, he appealed to Luke. “Tell them I’d make a lousy husband. Sara’s too good for the likes of me. She wouldn’t have me. I can’t shoot, I hate cattle, I don’t have any occupation she approves of.”
Luke grunted. “You got the first two right, but the rest is a lot of bull. Sara would take you if you were a bartender in the saloon. Why in hell don’t you tell her you’re rich as Diamond Jim and don’t need no damn occupation?”
This declaration exploded like a cannon shell. Matthew shot upright and Joshua stared at his younger son.
“Where would the no-good son of a wild turkey get that kind of cash? Rob a bank?” Matthew reached for the bottle again. His dark hair fell in disheveled tangles across his brow much as Luke’s did, and the whiskey brought a flush of heat to his weathered face.
“No, a gold mine. The bastard owns a piece of a gold mine. He doesn’t work it, mind you.” Luke sent his friend’s slumped shoulders a disdainful glare. “He just collects a percentage of what they find in it. And even if they’re cheating him blind, he’s got enough to pave a pathway to heaven if he had a mind to. If he had a mind.”
Sean seemed to take no offense at this slur. He simply tipped back the remainder of his drink.
Joshua settled his large frame in the sturdy chair by the stove and regarded his younger son speculatively. “Are you on his payroll or is he on yours?”
Luke almost grinned at his father’s perceptiveness, but Maria’s scream caused him to reach for another glass of whiskey instead of answering.
“We share in the proceeds,” Sean acknowledged. “The mining company doesn’t dare cheat Cheyenne Walker. He goes out there every once in a while and gives them that icy glare of his, and money comes rolling in for months afterward.” Sean hiccupped and covered in his mouth in surprise. “Damn,” he whispered and set his glass aside—until another scream echoed from overhead. He grabbed the nearly empty bottle from Luke’s hand.
Luke started for the door, but Joshua caught his arm and held him back. “You can’t help her now. Be patient.”
Matthew in his besotted condition remained more interested in the gold mine. “So that’s how you two layabouts get by. Couldn’t you at least indulge yourself in a new suit of clothes once in a while?” He sent Luke a suspicious glance. “And why does Maria keep worrying about having to sell those gewgaws you gave her to get you out of jail? Hell, with a piece of a gold mine, you could have bought the damn jail.”
Luke didn’t reply. This scream seemed to echo on forever, reverberating inside his head until it halted abruptly, along with his heart. A deadly silence followed. No one stopped him this time as he dashed for the stairs.
The doctor blocked him at the door. Luke stared helplessly over his shoulder, unable to glimpse Maria through the phalanx of women around the bed. The wails of an infant emerged from a corner of the room. The doctor shoved him back into the hall, stepped out, and closed the door on the occupants.
Luke staggered, then caught himself. Clenching his fists, he met the doctor’s calm gaze with mixed panic and fury. “How is she?”
“Very brave. That son of yours could have killed her.” The doctor studied the notorious gunman’s face. He didn’t know Luke, had only heard the tales, and he judged him by his reaction now.
The liquor on his breath was unmistakable, but Luke stood with remarkable steadiness. An expression of pain flickered behind his eyes, but he met the doctor’s eyes without flinching. “I want to see them.”
“Your wife’s asleep and cannot be disturbed. Someone will bring the child out in a minute. I wanted to talk to you first.”
Luke felt fear rising in him. He glanced frantically at the door behind the bespectacled elderly gentleman, gauging the need to see Maria against his desire not to harm her. He just wanted to see that she was alive and well, that no one would take her from him, but the presence of death peered over this man’s shoulder.
“What is it? Why can’t I see her?”
“She is much weakened by the struggle to bear your child. She needs complete rest.” The doctor waited for Luke’s full attention.
When Luke’s gaze veered back to him, the doctor finished. “You have a son. If you want to keep your wife, it would be better if there are no further children. Perhaps in a few years, if she is stronger, but not before then and maybe not even then. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Luke stared blankly at the white-haired gentleman telling him he would never share Maria’s bed again. He had thought never to see her again, thought all of life lost to him, but Maria had given him this chance to see his son. To know she would live was more hope than he deserved, and Luke’s eyes glazed with relief.
“I understand. I just want to know she will be all right.”
The doctor nodded approvingly and stepped out of the way as the crying came closer and the bedroom door opened. Luke turned eagerly as his mother came out bearing the squalling bundle of blankets that was his son.
Letitia studied her younger son’s face as he reached for his child. The past months had marked him. His smile did not appear as he lifted the bundle from her arms, and his eyes had a haunted, faraway look that nearly broke her heart. There were new lines etched about his mouth and a sprinkling of gray among the tawny colors of his sideburns, but the gentleness of his expression as he pushed back the blankets with his finger made her weep. He was a changed man perhaps, but not all of it was for the worse.
“Michael. We will call him Michael Connolly Walker. I think Irish would be proud of him.” Luke touched his finger to the button nose, and the squirming babe seemed to quiet to study the sensation. The hank of fluffy hair brushed over his bald skull was dark, not so black as Maria’s but a mahogany somewhere between his own and hers. Irish-colored, and Luke grinned at last.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs brought his head up. The sheriff reddened and removed his hat as he realized what he interrupted.
“Sorry, ma’am.” He nodded at Letitia and glanced toward Luke. “A boy?”
“My son, Sheriff.” Luke continued holding the child, reluctant to part with him even though he knew what followed. The sheriff caught his eye and looked away.
