Daisies In The Wind (2 page)

When she’d looked at him, despite her anger
and her fear, something had happened inside. A topsy-turvy feeling.
It had been real hard to breathe.

It wasn’t only because he was so handsome,
she mused, as the pinto galloped up a steep rocky incline bordered
by mesquite and scrub. He’d been nice. Decent.

And there had been something kind in his
cool, clear eyes.

Don’t think about him
, a little
voice inside instructed.
He’s a lawman. He’s no good. Think
about how he wanted to put Bear in jail.

But later that night, reunited with Bear and
the rest of the gang at the hideout on the Rim, Reb couldn’t stop
thinking about the tall stranger with the cool gray eyes. She
huddled on the ground before the campfire while the men played
cards and drank whiskey and argued under the trees, and she found
herself gazing up at the wishing star. She wanted to make a wish,
but she didn’t know exactly what it was—and anyway, she decided,
tossing her heavy hair back from her face, wishing was for
babies.

And she was no longer a baby.

She didn’t understand it. She didn’t
understand what was happening to her. Her body was changing in
strange, unnerving ways. It scared her. It was confusing. All she
knew was that everything was different, and she wanted everything
to stay the same.

The red flames of the fire danced in the
cool, pine-scented night. Reb stared moodily into the glowing heart
of the fire and saw a face, a lean, strong-jawed face she knew she
should forget.

“Go away,” she whispered, and hugged her arms
around herself.

But the face in the campfire remained,
shimmering and clear, and something ached deep inside her
heart.

She was possessed suddenly by a sweet, hard,
powerful yearning.

“Wolf Bodine,” she whispered in wonder to the
dark, empty Arizona night.

It was the first time she ever spoke his
name, as the longing and the loneliness welled up in her, but
through the years of Rebeccah Rawlings’ growing-up it would not be
the last.

Powder Creek Montana

1874

“Stage’s late.”

Ernest Duke shifted from one foot to the
other and peered into the rolling, green distance as if trying to
conjure the stagecoach out of thin, crystal-clear Montana air. But
there was nothing, no sign, no sound other than the usual town
sounds, of horses’ hooves and creaky plankboards and children
hollering and folks greeting one another in passing. “Stage is
mighty late,” he reiterated nervously, drawing wrathful stares from
the little greeting party of Powder Creek dignitaries who waited
uneasily alongside him outside Koppel’s General Store.

“We know that, Ernest,” snapped Myrtle Lee
Anderson, head of the town social committee. Her doughy cheeks
flushed a deep, ruddy shade that matched her stiffly pinned-up
hair. She plopped her hands on her ample hips and glared at him.
“Question is,
why
is it late? You tell me that, or keep
your thoughts to yourself.”

“My dear Mrs. Anderson,” Ernest said with
injured dignity, puffing out his spindly chest and casting her a
pained look from beneath gray brows that arced in an inverted V
over eyes as black as the Montana night sky. “If I knew the reason
why
the stage is late, I could do something about it. I
could help Sheriff Bodine round up a posse to ride out and find
‘em, in case they’ve lost a wheel or overturned, or—”

He broke off, not wishing to continue with
any of the other possibilities, such as an Indian attack or a
holdup by one of the brutal outlaw bands roaming Montana and
preying on unprotected citizens. No one wanted to think about that
yet. As mayor of Powder Creek it was his responsibility to see that
things ran smoothly, properly, according to schedule, plan, and
recognized procedure. Late stages were not all that uncommon, he
tried to tell himself, but this one was nearly four hours late, and
he, Myrtle Lee Anderson, and Waylon Pritchard had been waiting in
the hot sun for a good portion of that time ready to welcome Powder
Creek’s new official schoolteacher—only now they were wondering if
this might turn out to be a burying party instead of a welcoming
one.

They were wondering it, but no one wanted to
say it.

Still, as the late-afternoon sun inched
across the sky, and the brilliant August day ambled on toward hazy
sunset, each of them knew that something was wrong.

Ernest Duke felt it in his bones. Myrtle Lee
Anderson sensed it in the air. And Waylon Pritchard, son of the
most prosperous rancher in this part of Montana, detected it in his
gut.

Waylon, whose pa had insisted he make up part
of the welcoming committee, glanced in disgust at his gold pocket
watch, then stuffed it back into his black Sunday-best suit. He
scowled out at the lush, emerald-green horizon that dipped and rose
and curved in every direction past Powder Creek, at the majestic
splendor of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains to the west, and
thought yearningly of all the fun he could be having with Coral
right now in the little room above the Gold Bar Saloon, ‘stead of
wasting his entire afternoon waiting for some prissy schoolteacher,
like his pa insisted.

“Damn Pa anyway. He’ll never let me marry
Coral, just because she’s a dance-hall girl. Well, I’ll be a lizard
‘fore I saddle myself with some mousy little schoolmarm for life,”
Waylon reflected resentfully, and glanced up at the window of the
room Coral shared with three other girls. Even as he looked, she
appeared magically in the window, lovely in a low-cut crimson gown.
She waved to him briefly before disappearing.

“Dad gurn it,” Waylon exploded, knowing he
didn’t have time to visit Coral now and still get home before his
ma served supper, “why don’t we git Sheriff Bodine to send out a
search party? It’s been long enough. I’m goin’ home. Maybe you have
nothing better to do, but I’m not standing here one more blasted
minute—”

But Waylon broke off as from a distance came
the low rumble of hooves and coach wheels, and a dust cloud
billowed up far down the road.

“Here she comes!” Ernest crowed, wiping the
sweat from his face. Myrtle Lee gripped her parasol in both hands
and squinted down the road.

“Slim’s comin’ mighty fast,” she muttered,
and stepped forward to lean over the boardwalk railing for a better
look.

It was true. The stagecoach driver was
whipping the team of six horses to a furious lather as the stage
roared up with a thunder of hoofbeats, ringing gunshots, and shouts
of “Whoa!”

When the dust cleared, the driver hollered
down at the welcoming committee: “We was held up! Got a dead man on
top!”

Sure enough, a corpse was strapped to the top
of the coach, wrapped in a blood-soaked horse blanket beside a pile
of baggage.

“That a passenger, Slim?” Waylon asked as
Myrtle gasped in horror beside him.

“Nope. One of the varmints who tried to rob
us!”

“You shot one?” Ernest gazed approvingly at
the sweating, dust-caked face of the driver as he leaped down from
the coach and threw open the door. “Good work, Slim—”

“ ‘Fraid I cain’t take credit for it, or
Raidy neither,” the driver said, interrupting. With one quick
motion, he let down the stagecoach steps.

“Well, if you didn’t shoot him, then
who—?”

“
She
did.” He jerked his thumb
toward the door of the coach as a bright-eyed young woman
gracefully alighted.

Behind her straggled a batch of other
passengers: a portly silver-haired man; a matron in black bombazine
and high-laced boots, and a gawky young fellow with spectacles
perched on his thin, high-bridged nose and carrying a satchel over
his arm. But no one in the welcoming committee paid any of them the
least heed—they all stared with varying degrees of amazement at the
slender, dark-haired girl in the sapphire-blue silk traveling dress
who paused in the street and regarded them with quiet appraisal.
For a moment there was silence as the sun beat down, the horses
tossed their heads, and the wind whistled down from the
mountains.

Then the girl straightened her shoulders,
pushed back a loose tendril of her heavy hair, and strode across
the street with brisk, assured steps. She addressed the welcoming
committee curtly.

“Someone kindly send for the sheriff. I would
greatly like to finish this business at once and be on my way.”

Thus Rebeccah Rawlings arrived in her new
hometown of Powder Creek. While the townsfolk looked her over with
good old-fashioned curiosity, gaping and whispering among
themselves, she gripped her reticule in weary fingers and managed,
as she had for the last several hours, to keep from retching.

She’d never killed a man before. She’d shot
at some and target-practiced at tin cans, tree stumps, and even
coins tossed in the air, but never had she aimed her gun at a man
and meant to kill him. Until today.

But that desperado had actually fired inside
the coach—he could have killed any one of the passengers, herself
included, and no one else had seemed inclined to do anything. So
she had done what Bear had taught her to do—shoot back, defend
herself. Afterward she’d wanted to scream, moan, and vomit out her
guts, but she couldn’t. Too many people around. She’d have looked
like a weak little fool.

And she was hardly that. She forced her
shoulders straighter. She was Bear Rawlings’s daughter. She was far
too tough to flinch or cry or even ponder about the life she’d
snuffed out with the squeeze of a trigger.

And she couldn’t ever forget it, even for a
moment. She had too many enemies now, she reflected. For a moment
her stomach clenched as she remembered the man who had accosted her
in Boston before she set out. Neely Stoner had sent him to scare
her. As if she were a sniveling coward who would have turned over
the papers to the silver mine even if she had them!

But Neely’d tried to get them anyhow. She
knew he—and the others—would try again. It was possible, Rebeccah
acknowledged with a cold pinprick of fear, that she had even been
followed to Montana, that somehow the men who were after those
papers had found out about the ranch. And that meant that sooner or
later—probably sooner—some mean, greedy hombres would show up to
steal them or force her to hand them over.

She couldn’t let her guard down even for a
moment, couldn’t let herself go soft or weak. If she did, Neely and
the rest would close in for the kill.

Through her weariness and the bilious waves
of nausea, she exerted every effort to appear brisk and
unconcerned. She allowed herself a swift glance around the town and
drew comfort from what she saw. In all the years she’d been away in
Boston, she’d forgotten just how rough and primitive frontier towns
were. This one was as rough as any of them. But something inside
her lifted at the sight of Koppel’s General Store with its large
swinging sign and false front, at the apothecary and dry-goods
stores alongside it, even at the numerous saloons lining both sides
of the narrow street. She gazed quickly about at the rough wooden
boardwalk and hitching posts, at the water troughs and the dusty
street filled with cowboys, merchants, horses, chickens, and dogs,
at the women in homespun calico clutching babies in their arms. Her
gaze rose to sweep over the wide-open stunning blue horizon.

The sky was huge as heaven. The towering
Rockies loomed majestically in the distance, dotted here and there
by tiny crystal lakes that glimmered like miniature sapphires among
the high firs and pines. At the feet of the cobalt mountains the
valleys were lush and breathtaking with late-summer flowers:
poppies, asters, Indian paintbrush, lilies, and white and purple
heather.

Montana was a land of glittering beauty—sharp
mountains, jade prairies, bluegrass, laurel, red cedar, and
spruce.

And space—shining clean, tingly, wide-open
space, where she could breathe and ride free and lose herself—and
lose her memories, every single one of them.

Her gaze returned almost dazedly to the scene
before her—the street with its wandering chickens, the dogs,
children, horses, and buggies all part of this raw little town
before her—and she took hold of herself with quick effort. But deep
inside she felt glad—quietly, joyfully glad.

She was free. Free of Boston. Free of Miss
Elizabeth Wright’s Academy for Young Ladies, free of that horrid,
stuffy brick building trimmed in ivy, free of the cramped little
room that she’d called home the past two years. She was free now of
the dry, tasteless meals at table, the prim stares of the rest of
the teachers, any of whom would have probably fainted away at the
sight of this wild western town. No more schedules, prissy gowns
buttoned up to the neck, long days teaching literature to girls who
never bothered to pick up a book. This was home now. Not this town
precisely, or any of these staring people. But once she rode out to
the ranch, found it in its lovely little valley, threw open the
door of the ranchhouse her father had bequeathed to her, and
stepped inside, she would be home. And the moment she unpacked her
own belongings, her books, her piano music, her paintings, she’d be
free for good.

Weary as she was from her journey, from the
violence of what had happened this very afternoon, from the
bloodshed in which she had been forced to play a part, she knew a
taut pulling of anticipation, of longing as she thought of the
ranch. She couldn’t wait to get there, to be alone, at peace in her
very own home.

“Ma’am, are you telling us that you shot that
varmint up there?” Ernest Duke couldn’t believe his ears. This
elegant, spectacularly lovely female dressed in all that silky,
lacy finery, with those feathers sticking out of her little blue
velvet hat, and her dress so fine—a little crumpled but
rich-looking for all that—this
girl
had killed an outlaw?
He peered at her incredulously, unable to conceal his doubt. “With
what, may I ask?”