Chasing Rainbows (2 page)

A hushed, anticipatory silence fell over the crowd.

The deputy wavered for a moment, as though paralyzed by the enormity of his task. Visible beads of sweat glistened on his forehead despite the cool air. He swallowed hard and set his hand on the horse’s withers, only to have the animal skittishly shy away from him. As the animal moved, the rope jerked hard around the prisoner’s neck and forced a strangled moan from his throat.

The gruesome sound was enough to goad the deputy into action. Resigned to his duty, or perhaps just anxious to have it ended, he tried again. He raised his hand and brought it down hard against the horse’s hindquarters. The horse shot out from beneath the condemned man.

Jake held his breath, waiting for the bone-shattering crack that indicated the man’s neck had snapped on the drop.

Nothing.

The rope ran taut as the prisoner plummeted toward the ground, and then sprang back. Instinctively the man began to thrash about in a vain struggle against the noose. Frantic gagging sounds emerged from his throat.

He was still alive.

A collective gasp rose from the crowd and filled the air. The deputy turned an unnatural shade of green and backed away, clearly horrified at the consequence of his botched job with the rope.

Anger tightened Jake’s gut. He had been to hangings where it took over twenty minutes for the life to run out of a body, and had hoped to never see it again. “You might have shown your deputy how to tie a noose,” he said.

The sheriff shrugged. “I did show him. Maybe next time the damned fool’ll pay attention and get it right.”

Jake shifted in his saddle, disgusted by both the spectacle and Sheriff Cayne’s stony indifference. The prisoner was a member of the Mundy Gang, and perhaps, for that reason alone, he deserved to die. But not like this. Not gasping and choking for air before a titillated crowd. As for Jake’s own interest in the proceedings — well, that had expired the second the noose had dropped. Since it was too late for him to question the man, he figured he might as well ride on. He’d seen enough death in his time for it to limit its hold on him as pure entertainment.

Just as he urged Weed forward, the prisoner writhed in a violent, painful spasm against the rope. The man’s hat tumbled from his head…releasing a long mane of pale-brown hair.

Jake Moran had spent a lifetime reading other people’s faces, judging the cards they held by the expression in their eyes. The vital necessity of that skill was matched only by the importance of keeping his own features carefully neutral. He’d become a master at hiding his emotions, for his profession demanded it. But at that moment, astonishment struck and left its mark on his face.

The condemned man was a woman.

Without any clear goal in mind, he urged his mount forward, but the sheriff caught his reins before he could move. “Easy,” he murmured, his eyes focused intently on the prisoner.

“Hell, Roy, you’re hanging a woman?”

“I’m doing what the court says I gotta do. Now, you just stay easy, Jake.”

Jake shook his head, sickened. This certainly wasn’t the first woman to be hanged in the Colorado Territory, but such hangings were rare indeed. They generally only took place if the crime was exceptionally violent — or the woman exceptionally notorious. Jake pieced together the information he had collected on the Mundy Gang of Blackwater Canyon. They were infamous for their sharp-shooting, their ruthless brutality, their contempt for the law… and for Outlaw Annie, who rode with the gang.

Outlaw Annie.

A woman with a reputation nearly as wild and wicked as that of Calamity Jane. A woman who had faced down savage Indians and angry lawmen with equal aplomb. A woman so good with a knife she could skin the belly off a rattler before the snake ever felt the blade; so good with a gun she could knock the feathers off a migrating goose with a single shot. A woman who liked her whiskey rotgut, her bear meat raw, and who could bed the devil himself without even scorching the sheets.

Jake had never really believed she existed. To him, the legend of Outlaw Annie had merely been one of many tall tales of the frontier, stories that were swapped from trader to trader at night as a way to pass time in front of a lonesome campfire. But she was real all right, and now he’d seen her — choking at the end of a noose.

Annie continued to thrash against the rope, but her motions were getting weaker. It wouldn’t be long now, he thought. But just as that notion formed in his mind, the noose, poorly tied as it had been, began to pull apart under the combined strain of the woman’s weight and her desperate struggles.

The buzzing whir of fraying jute was immediately followed by the dull thud of a body hitting dirt. Outlaw Annie collapsed in a motionless heap at the base of the ancient oak.

The crowd strained forward, breathless and excited, transfixed by the grisly spell death holds over those who get to stand back and watch it descend upon somebody else. Jake tensed, waiting. Was she alive or dead? Sheriff Cayne peered anxiously at his prisoner, clearly absorbed by the same question.

Finally, after endless seconds of agonizing suspense, Annie moved. She was still alive. Jake felt his muscles slowly unclench. Beside him, Sheriff Cayne let out an audible sigh of relief. Jake glanced at him sharply.

The deputy who had tied the noose reluctantly stepped forward and helped Annie to her feet. A chorus of boos and hisses greeted her.

“String her up again!” shouted a voice from the crowd. The bloodthirsty cry was immediately taken up by the rest of the assembly. “String her up! String her up!”

Sheriff Roy Cayne waited, indulging his taste for drama. Once the shouting had reached nearly a fever pitch, he raised his pistol and fired off a round. As the echoing blast ripped through the air, a hushed silence fell over the mob. The sheriff wordlessly nudged his horse forward. The crowd parted as seamlessly as a river around a rock, allowing the big man and his mount to glide through the masses.

Once the sheriff reached Outlaw Annie and his deputy, he turned to face the citizens of Stony Gulch. “It’s finished,” he stated flatly. “Judge Carter ordered a hanging at noon, and that’s what you got. You folks can all go home now.”

Howls of protest instantly rose from the crowd.

Sheriff Cayne greeted the noise with a fierce scowl. “I said, the hanging’s over. Go home, all of you.”

The court had ordered a hanging, and the sheriff had given it to them. But Jake knew that if Sheriff Roy Cayne had really wanted the woman dead, he’d have tied the noose himself. Instead he’d depended on the incompetence of his deputy, and the bumbling fool hadn’t let him down. Jake’s respect for the sheriff’s cunning doubled; he had obviously been planning this from the beginning.

The townsfolk, however, clearly had a different feeling on the matter.

“A hanging means killing, Sheriff, and she’s got it coming!”

“String her up!”

“You don’t want to do it, we will!”

The sheriff stared down the mob for a long minute. “That a fact?” he drawled. He spit out a long stream of tobacco juice, then unpinned the battered tin badge from his vest and held it up. “In that case, you can have this too. I want nothing to do with a town that goes vigilante.”

The townsfolk fell silent, weighing the threat. Before Roy Cayne had taken the job of sheriff, Stony Gulch had been a haven for rustlers, thieves, outlaws, and renegade Indians. With Cayne gone, it would be only a matter of weeks before the town slid right back into the same lawless morass. Faced with that possibility, the righteous steam that had driven the mob quickly evaporated into the bitter gloom of petulant defeat.

“If we let her go,” a voice demanded, “what’s to stop her from bringing the whole gang back to town looking for revenge?”

“She says she has property out in Cooperton,” the sheriff answered. “That’s a good hundred miles from Blackwater Canyon, and a hundred miles again from here.”

“How do we know that’s where she aims to go? How do we know she ain’t lying?”

Sheriff Cayne frowned. He tipped back his hat and scratched his head, mulling the problem over as though he hadn’t considered it before. “Now, there’s a good point,” he said. “Appears to me the only way to see that she gets there is to take her there personally.” He paused and surveyed the crowd. “Who’s gonna volunteer to do that?”

“That’s your job, Sheriff,” a voice answered immediately. “You and your men oughta go.”

“Fine. We’ll just do that. Then you all can go against the Pete Mundy Gang by yourselves if they do come to town looking trouble.”

“We got families of our own to protect,” answered a voice from the crowd. “We can’t go off halfway across the territory, risking our skins for the likes of her.”

The sheriff stared at the citizens of Stony Gulch for a long, shameful minute. “So that’s how it is,” he said. “There’s not one man here willing to see this woman as far as Cooperton.”

Jake Moran hesitated only briefly. He had learned long ago that the secret to winning wasn’t luck but knowing how to play the cards that he was dealt. This might just be the break that he had been looking for. He had already wasted three months on the trail of the Mundy Gang. Not once had he been able to get close to them. Riding side by side with Outlaw Annie might finally give him the edge he needed to close that gap.

He paused, considering the task he was about to volunteer for. In all likelihood, it would be nothing but a lengthy ordeal and a major pain in the ass, but even a pair of deuces was better than a handful of nothing. In any event, how much trouble could one woman cause?

With that thought in mind, he nudged Weed forward. “I’ll see that she gets to Cooperton.”

A shocked buzz swept through the crowd as all heads immediately swung toward him. Jake ignored the townsfolk’s excited voices and prying eyes, focusing instead on the prisoner.

Hostile. There was no other word to describe her. Annie’s gaze snapped toward him, responding to his words like the play of gunfire. Her hands dropped to her hips and balled into tight fists, as though she’d been seeking her revolvers and came up instead with only empty air. Undeterred by her lack of weapons, she boldly gave him the once-over, surveying him from head to toe. Her lip curled in naked contempt as she finished her appraisal.

Jake dismounted and returned her stare. The woman’s clothes were filthy, her face smudged with dirt, her hair lank and flat. Her brown eyes burned with scorn. She was young, just as the sheriff had said, probably not much older than twenty. Despite her relative youth, she exuded a cool confidence that she could handle anything or anybody. A confidence that was ridiculously unfounded, Jake thought, given her present circumstances.

So this was Outlaw Annie.

He had heard that she was six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. He had heard that she had once wrestled a grizzly with nothing but her bare hands — and won. He had heard that she once swam up the Niagara Falls. But the truth belied every rumor he had ever heard. The legendary female gunslinger looked neither immense nor intimidating. She looked like a scrawny pup who had been kicked around one time too many and was determined to fight back.

He watched as she lifted her hand to brush her hair from her face. Her fingers, he noted, were surprisingly long and sculpted; her wrist was fine and delicately molded. It was difficult to get a read on the rest of her body. She was about average height for a woman, that was all he could tell. There may have been curves beneath her baggy clothes, there may not have been. Not that he gave a damn one way or another.

The bottom line for him was that she looked manageable. Rough, stubborn, and pure hellion through and through, but manageable.

“I’ll see that she gets to Cooperton,” he repeated.

The sheriff studied Jake, as though weighing his words, then looked to the crowd. “Any man here object to Jake Moran seeing Outlaw Annie out of town? Speak up now if you do.”

Uneasy silence answered him. “It’s done then,” he pronounced decisively.

Sheriff Cayne reached for his rope. As he pulled it from her throat, Annie flinched and closed her eyes. Then, as though shamed by her show of weakness, she opened her eyes and threw back her shoulders.

The sheriff gave no sign of noticing either her fear or her bravado. Instead he towered over her, saying in a tone capable of intimidating even the toughest outlaw, “I’m giving you a second chance, missy, but this is the last one you’ll get. I ever hear you’re in trouble with the law again and I’ll hunt you down and hang you myself. Is that clear?”

Annie simply stared at him, her expression mutinous.

Sheriff Cayne waited. “You can thank me if you want to.”

She swallowed hard and, in a raw voice, choked out, “Go to hell, lawman.”

The sheriff studied her for a long moment, then let out a weary sigh. He turned and drew Jake forward. “Jake Moran, meet Miss Annabel Lee Foster.” He gave Jake a hearty clap on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Jake, she’s all yours.”

Annabel Lee Foster shook her head in stunned disbelief. It had to be a trick. They were just trying to fill her mind with hope, to make her believe them, then they were going to string her up again. The fact that they had left the hanging tree and returned to town did little to ease her fear. That was nothing but a low-down, dirty lawman’s trick. She was going to be hanged again, no doubt about it.

Annie swallowed hard and forced the thought out of her mind. Her stomach was tied in a thousand tight knots, and her knees shook so badly she could barely stand up, but she’d be damned before she would disgrace herself and let her fear show. If it was time for her to leave this earth, she would go the way Doc Mundy had taught her: proud and tall, not cowering and begging for mercy.

But no matter how hard she tried to turn her thoughts away from the hanging she couldn’t ignore the burning ache that filled her throat. With each breath she took, it felt as though a nest of angry hornets was buzzing around inside her neck. The painful sensation served as an inescapable reminder of the dry, searing sting of jute. As if she could ever forget the feel of a rope digging into her neck. With shaking fingers, Annie touched the tender, swollen flesh. No real damage there, she supposed. Not yet, anyway.