Bride's Flight from Virginia City, Montana (3 page)

Z
eph eased his horse over the ridge and down the slope. Cricket was making a lot of noise and grumbling into her bit. She didn’t like the slush, and she liked the ice even less.

“I know it,” Zeph said to her as she blew loudly through her nostrils. “But I’m keeping us off the trail because it’s even worse. We’ll be into some open grass in a bit.”

The sky was so blue and so bright it hurt Zeph’s eyes. It was February and ought to have been colder, but a thaw had come in with the west wind and melted all the snow back. Zeph liked the break from below zero, and so did his cattle, but when it cooled off at night you wound up with too many patches of ice—bad for horses, bad for the cows.

Cricket snapped her head back.

“Whoa!” called Zeph. “What was that for? You got grass under your hooves now.”

She reared. Zeph stared all around, trying to find out what was spooking her. All he saw was a thin line of smoke off to the left, coming from behind a clump of gray cottonwoods with their bare branches all tangled. That’s where some of the new homesteaders from out east had settled in back before Christmas. That wouldn’t be it. He looked down—there weren’t any snakes out in February, even during a thaw. What was going on with his mare?

She balked, didn’t want to go any farther. Zeph swung down and held her reins while he inspected the ground in front of them. Just dead winter grasses, brown as dust. Wet some from snowmelt, but that was about it. He got down on one knee—and saw the bloody footprint.

Not large. No boot. High arch. The wound seemed to be in the back by the heel. He squinted ahead. There were more of them, crossing over the grass and soft snow. Cricket protested, but he tugged her forward as he followed the prints.

“Two of ‘em,” he said out loud.

The two sets of tracks were obvious in the snow. The blood was pretty fresh. He kept walking, pulling Cricket along. The prints went into a gully. Cricket snorted. She had seen the two heads first.

“Hello!” Zeph called. “You all right?”

The heads ducked out of sight.

Zeph tilted his brown Stetson back and scratched at his head.

“One of you looks to have a cut. I have some bandage in my saddlebag. Good clean cloth.”

Still no answer. He rubbed his jaw and thought for a moment.

“I’m Zephaniah Parker. I own the Bar Zee, just a few miles west of here in the Two Back Valley. I’m out looking for strays. Been living by the mountains for five or six years. My brother’s the preacher at the church in town. And my other brother’s the federal marshal. You can come out. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

After a moment a boy stood up, tall and skinny, about twelve, Zeph figured. He seemed to totter on one leg. He didn’t say anything. Then a girl stood up and clutched the boy’s hand. She was half a foot shorter, straw-blond hair, maybe ten or eleven. Neither of them smiled.

“Can I come closer?” asked Zeph. “Take a look at that foot?”

The boy nodded. “All right.”

Cricket had calmed down, and Zeph brought her over to the gully and wrapped her reins around some thick scrub. He smiled at the girl and boy. Up close now, he could see their faces were scratched, their cheeks hollow; they looked tired and gaunt. He rummaged around in one of his saddlebags while Cricket munched grass. He finally held up some strips of white cotton cloth.

“Told you I had some.”

He knelt by the boy.

“You wanna show me your sore foot?”

The boy lifted his left foot, and Zeph saw the cut on the heel. It was pretty clean from all the melted snow, but he wiped some mud and grass away before he started wrapping.

“Neither of you have shoes?”

“No,” said the boy.

“What happened to ‘em?”

“I don’t know.”

Zeph shrugged, finished the wrapping, and stood up.

“The next thing is to get you home. Where are your parents? They’ll likely be worried about you, won’t they?”

The two kids stared right through Zeph. He’d seen that look before on ten or twelve-year-olds, but that was back during the war and coming through a town that had been fought over by both sides. He glanced at the pencil line of gray smoke.

“That your place over there? Your mom and dad with the new settlers?”

Still neither of them spoke. Zeph looked more closely at the girl. Her eyes were bluer than the sky. But the skin around them was swollen and red. She’d been crying, a lot.

“You don’t need to be scared,” he said to her gently. “I’ll get you back to your folks just as soon as you tell me where they are.”

“We hain’t got folks,” she said. “We hain’t got a home.” Zeph smiled as warmly as he could. “Now, what do you mean by that? Everybody’s got folks and a home.”

“We hain’t.”

Her voice had a trace of an accent. From another country. One part of Zeph’s mind worked on that while another part tried to figure out what to do next.

“Well, look, I tell you what, let’s go to that farm over there behind the cottonwoods, and maybe they can help us out. Do you know them?”

The girl began to cry. She buried her head in the boy’s arm.

Now what did I say?
Zeph asked himself.

“Mister Parker,” said the boy, “we can’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“We can’t.”

Zeph looked up at the sun. It was about three o’clock.

“The sun’ll be down in a few hours. We’ve got to get to someplace. Now Cricket here’ll take you both easy. How about we go into town and get you some food and a safe place to stay, and then we’ll figure out the rest of it?”

“Don’t leave us!” the girl suddenly blurted, tears running muddy down her cheeks.

Zeph shook his head. “I won’t leave you. I’ll stick right with you. Now let’s get you up on Cricket and into town. You hungry?”

“Yah, sir,” she answered. “What would you like to eat?” “Potatoes and meat.”

“I guess it’ll be easy enough to rustle up some of that. You got a name, young lady?”

She didn’t answer. He held out his hand to help her onto Cricket, and she slowly stepped forward and took it. He hoisted her into the saddle. She was as light as a snowflake.

“No name?” he asked again.

But she just sat on the horse and clung to its mane. The boy came up and put one hand on the pommel. “I can get up myself, Mister Parker.” “Help yourself.”

The boy winced when his left foot touched the stirrup, but he swung his leg over Cricket as if he’d been born to the saddle.
He has that accent, too,
thought Zeph.
What is it?

Zeph started leading Cricket cross-country and to their right.

“You like horses, boy?”

“Yes.”

“Have any of your own at your place?” The boy didn’t answer.

Zeph walked for a while in silence. The sun dipped lower.

“We’re not far from the town,” he told them. “We cut across the fields like this, and we’ll be there in another hour. You seen it yet? Not a bad little place. Iron Springs. For the iron ore the miners been pulling out of the earth. Used to be a lot of gold here in the ‘60s. I think we’re making more money now off the iron and the beef. You’ll catch sight of it in a little while.”

“Thank you, Mister Parker.”

“You’re welcome, son. How about you? Your folks drop you into this world without a name, too?”

But the boy didn’t say anything. Zeph looked at his dark hair and green eyes a moment and then glanced ahead.

“Well, I got to call you something. How about I give you each a nickname? So I don’t have to say, ‘hey, boy’ or ‘hey, girl’ the whole time?”

They didn’t respond.

“I come from out of Wyoming. They’ve got some nice towns there. I grew up just north of what’s now Cheyenne, the Magic City of the Plains. If you don’t mind, young lady, I’ll call you Cheyenne Wyoming. That’ll be your name just for this trip. Is that all right with you?”

She stared straight ahead.

Zeph nodded. “Glad you like it. Now, son, do you want a town name, too?” “It doesn’t matter.”

That accent again. Zeph had his head down while they plowed through a snowdrift.

“There’s a man I greatly admire that I met in Wyoming a few years ago. Cody was his name. He rode for the Pony Express when he was hardly older than you. Then he was a scout. They gave him the Medal of Honor for the work he did. How about we hang his name on you until we reach town?”

“All right.”

“Well, there we have it then. Cody Wyoming and Cheyenne Wyoming. Brother and sister. I guess I should have asked—you are brother and sister, aren’t you?”

But no one spoke. And Zeph did not open his mouth again until the three of them spotted the riders coming at them over the snow and the dead grass. There looked to be six or seven men, and they were riding hard. Zeph was sure he recognized the lead horse.

Cricket reared. Zeph glanced behind him. Both the kids had jumped off the horse and were running away as fast as they could.

Chapter 3

H
ey! Wait! What are you doing?” Zeph shouted. But they didn’t stop. Zeph dropped Cricket’s reins and lit out after them. The boy was already staggering because of his wounded foot, yet he showed no signs of stopping. The girl was racing ahead of him, blond hair flying.

Zeph got to the boy first, because he had collapsed in the snow, blood all over his foot. “What are you running for?” “They’ll kill us!” “Who’s gonna kill you?”

“Those riders killed our families, and they’re going to kill us, too! They said they would!”

“No one’s gonna kill anybody, boy. Those are men from town, and the lead rider is my own brother, the federal marshal. They won’t hurt you. Now stay put before that foot of yours falls off.”

Zeph went after the girl as the riders bore down on them. He caught her and wrapped his arms around her as she kicked and screamed.

“Nay! Nay! Nay!” She shrieked and sobbed.

“Settle down!” snapped Zeph, struggling to hold on to her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you. Those are men from town. It’s the marshal and a bunch of others, all good men who have kids of their own.”

“They’ll shoot us!”

“No, they won’t!”

She broke free and ran a few yards before Zeph grabbed her around the waist again and picked her up off the ground, legs and arms swinging. The riders reined up right in front of them.

“Looks like you got a handful there, Z,” said his brother the marshal.

“You could say that.”

“What’s going on?”

“Matt, I don’t know what’s going on. I found these kids over by the new homesteads a couple of hours ago, and nothing’s made sense since.”

“The new homesteads?”

“Yeah. Down in the flats by the river.”

“Young lady,” said Matt kindly, “I am the federal marshal, and I am here to help you. All of us are. We rode out to give you as much help as we can. That’s why I’m here talking to you right now.”

She had stopped squirming and was looking up at him through the blond hair that had fallen down over her face. The marshal took off his hat.

“I am Matthew Parker, but you can call me Matt. The man that’s got ahold of you is my younger brother, Zephaniah T. Parker. Now this here”—the marshal swept his hat back toward the men sitting on their horses behind him—“this here with the long black coat is another one of my brothers, Jude, and he is the preacher in town, and these other three are all brothers, too. We got a special on brothers today. This is William King, and Samuel and Wyatt.”

The man with the thick black beard smiled with a big row of white teeth and lifted his black Stetson. “Billy King,” he said, “barrister and solicitor and attorney-at-law for the Montana Territory. I have long sticks of peppermint candy in my coat pocket. Would you like one? Or are you too old for that sort of stuff? I usually keep ‘em for myself; it’s my belief they make me smarter, but sometimes I share if I run into someone special.”

He swung down off his large black horse and stood by the little girl. He took a long red and white stick of candy from inside his sheepskin jacket and offered it to her in his gloved hand. Zeph had set her down. Slowly she reached out and took the candy.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“You’re very welcome, young lady. Would you like to walk with me and give one to your brother?”

She nodded, and they headed back across the snow to where two other men were off their horses and looking at the boy’s foot. The marshal watched them for a moment then tilted his Stetson back and scratched at his head and sandy-blond hair.

“We got news by telegraph that some marauders were in our neck of the woods. Then Abe Whittaker came in and told us he’d heard shooting down in the flats the day before yesterday. So I got some of the boys together, and we were heading out there to take a look. You see anything?”

Zeph shook his head. “Just these two kids.”

Matt glanced over at them. “They say much?”

“They don’t say anything at all, not where they live or who their folks are, nothin.’”

Matt rubbed his jaw. “See any smoke?”

“No. Well, a bit from a chimney, I guess; that’s all.”

“Abe figured the homesteaders were burned out.”

“Did he see that?”

Matt shrugged. “You know Abe. He tells you what he wants when he wants. I don’t know what else he knows. But he’s got that dugout by the river, so he must’ve seen something.” He pulled his hat down again. “Now, look, we got to get out there before it’s dark. We brought along three extra horses, so why don’t you take the gray here and put the kids on it? Then you can get back on Cricket and all ride into Iron Springs and get warmed up.”

“That’s where I was heading, Matt.”

“Well, now you can do it faster.”

“Why’d you need all those extra horses anyway?”

“Why do you think? The telegram said it was Seraph Raber’s crew.”

“Raber. The Angel of Death. They sure?”

“Whoever they are, they’ve left a trail of dead bodies between here and Dakota. Looks like Raber’s work. No one likes killing as much as him.” Matt glanced down at Zeph’s waist. “No gun, I see.”

“No need, brother.”

“Suppose Raber jumped you while you were taking care of the kids? How would you have saved them then? The war’s been over a long time, Z.”