Daisies In The Wind (32 page)

And he was gone quick and light as an Indian,
vanishing through the door and down the stairs like a ghost in the
night. Molly sighed and fell back against the fringed velvet
pillows. She hoped that skinny, tart-tongued, black-haired
schoolteacher knew how lucky she was.

Wolf mounted Dusty and turned the horse
toward Rebeccah’s property. The sun was sinking, and the vast
Montana sky was turning into a rainbow of rose and orange and gold.
He told himself there might not be any immediate danger—Russ Gaglin
might have no idea that Rebeccah was in Powder Creek—but every
instinct told him that the buzzards were swarming in for the
kill.

But was Gaglin alone? Or were one or two of
his former pards—maybe even his long-lost pard, Neely
Stoner—closing in on Rebeccah too?

That does it
, Wolf decided, his
fingers tightening on the reins as he spurred Dusty to an all-out
gallop.
Rebeccah is not spending one more night alone on that
ranch until this business of the silver mine is settled. I don’t
give a damn how good a shot she is or how many derringers she keeps
hidden on the place, she’s coming to the Double B until these
hombres are either all locked up or dead.

For the hundredth time since Rebeccah had
confided her danger to him, Wolf damned Bear Rawlings for leaving
her in this mess. Wolf didn’t know if there was or wasn’t a mine,
but either way it meant trouble for Rebeccah.

There was no sign of her at the ranch. She
must not have returned from the schoolhouse yet—maybe she was
keeping one of the students after school. Wolf headed toward the
schoolhouse, a prickle of apprehension growing inside him. He
didn’t like the looks of the sky. More snow was coming. A storm
maybe. He’d better get Rebeccah Rawlings all packed up and moved
someplace safe before it hit. Yet when he reached the schoolhouse,
he found the little building closed up and empty.

Now what?

Wolf didn’t like the feel of this. He told
himself there could be an explanation—that maybe she had gone to
one of the nearby ranches for supper —it was customary for families
to take turns having the schoolteacher to supper. But a sixth sense
warned him that something was wrong. Calling on his training and
experience to keep his sudden fear for her at bay, he counted with
cool precision the ranches within a five-mile radius.

He decided to try the Moseley place
first.

Wolf spurred Dusty forward as the first heavy
snowflakes began to fall.

* * *

They surrounded her before Rebeccah even had
a chance to scream.

One moment she was headed at a fast trot
toward the Moseley ranch, admiring the sunset sky while uneasily
sifting through her thoughts about Chance Navarro, and the next she
was ringed by three dark-garbed, weather-beaten riders, who left
her no space in which to escape.

“Howdy, Reb. I wonder if you remember me?”
The man on the dun horse edged closer as Rebeccah glared at them.
Her team was tossing their heads and pawing the ground
nervously—sensing trouble every bit as much as Rebeccah did.

“I’d never forget you, Russ!” she replied
evenly, trying to look more nonchalant than she felt. Her swift
gaze had taken in the faces of all three men, and she recognized
the other two as well.

Fred Baker and Homer Bell. The three
surviving members of the Rawlings gang. She didn’t have to wonder
what they wanted now.

If Bear were alive, not a single one of them
would have had the courage to look sideways at his daughter, much
less accost her like this on the road. But now that he was dead,
Rebeccah realized grimly, their greed was too much for them. They
thought they’d get that silver mine from her and then live high on
the hog for the rest of their days. And it didn’t matter that
they’d be stealing from their former leader’s daughter to do
it.

“I know what you want, Russ, and I can’t help
you—any of you. Homer, Fred—I don’t have the deed to any mine—or a
map. The mine doesn’t even exist!”

“Well, we know for a fact it does,” Homer
Bell retorted. He scratched the blond stubble covering his long
chin. “So you’re lying, Reb. Can’t say I blame you. Bear taught you
real good, didn’t he? But it won’t get you nowhere. Bear promised
us all a piece of that silver mine one night when he was drunk as a
skunk and feeling grateful because we saved his hide from getting
shot by a Pinkerton detective who had him trapped upstairs in a
fancy house. We killed the hombre and got Bear out the window. He
told us we would all be rich men.”

“And then he died,” Fred Baker continued, his
prune-black eyes boring into her, “died without leaving us a clue
as to how to get our hands on that silver. But we knew he’d leave
it to his little gal. He sure was fond of you—talked about you all
the time, Reb.”

Russ cut in. “Bear promised to share that
silver mine with all of us, and I think out of respect for his
memory, Reb honey, you ought to fork over the deed and do the
same.”

“There is no mine!”

“Don’t be greedy, Reb,” Homer warned, his
milky blue eyes peering out from beneath a filthy mop of pale hair.
“It’ll only get you buried.”

“Are you working with Neely Stoner?” she
asked in a sharp tone. Snow had begun to fall thickly around them.
It dusted her cheeks and eyelashes. It slid down the back of her
neck, inside her cloak, chilling her.

Or was she shivering from fear—fear of these
men she had once ridden with and lived with on a daily basis, men
she’d cooked for and played cards with around a campfire and from
whom she’d learned how to lie, steal, and run? She’d never been
afraid of them before—but then, Bear had always been there, and no
one had dared cross Bear.

Except Neely Stoner.

“Stoner?” It was Fred who answered her, his
thin mouth forming a sneer. Those black eyes seemed to burn with
malice in the last quickly fading rays of daylight. “We ain’t seen
him in years. But we heerd that he wanted that silver mine too.
Thought Bear owed him something, after kicking him out of the gang
all those years ago and nearly killing him.”

“But the way we figure it, Reb,” Russ said,
leaning forward in his greasy gray duster, “Stoner was clean out of
the gang when we helped Bear out of that tight spot—he had no part
in it—so he don’t deserve to get chicken shit.”

Neither do you
, Rebeccah thought,
but she didn’t bother saying it. These men understood only one
thing, so she’d better give it to them.

With one smooth, rapid movement she scooped
the rifle from the floor of the buckboard and cocked it straight at
Russ Gaglin’s egg-shaped face.

“Anybody moves a muscle, Russ, and you get it
right between the eyes,” she said coolly. Somehow she managed to
keep the arm that was steadying the rifle from shaking.

She heard their sharp intake of breath, saw
the surprise register in their eyes and something else, the sneaky
look of men planning an attack. “Russ!” she bit out sharply, “Tell
them to drop their guns, or you’re a dead man!”

“Now, Reb, no one’s goin’ to end up dead,” he
began in a wheedling tone, but she could see that he was nervous.
“Maybe you should just put that thing away and—”

“Drop your guns!” she ordered. “I’ll kill
Russ and at least one other of you before you can drop me, and you
know I can do it too!”

It might have worked if not for a deep voice
shouting suddenly from the edge of the woods that bordered the
trail.

“Miss Rawlings? What’s wrong?”

Toby Pritchard and Louisa Moseley, arm in
arm, had emerged from the clump of winter-bare trees. Rebeccah knew
that the strapping, gentle Toby had been carrying fifteen-year-old
Louisa’s books home for her every day the past two weeks. They must
have been walking in the woods together, holding hands, maybe even
kissing, when they’d seen her surrounded by the three men, pointing
her rifle at one of them. In a flash she realized they must have
been alarmed and called out to her without thinking. But it was as
far as they got.

Fred drew his heavy Remington revolver and
spun automatically in the saddle to fire at the masculine
voice.

“No!” Rebeccah screamed as he pulled the
trigger.

She jerked the rifle toward him and fired,
knocking him out of the saddle. Homer yelled something she couldn’t
understand, and then he and Russ both charged her at once. Before
she could fire again, Russ yanked the rifle from her and backhanded
her so hard, she nearly fell out of the buckboard.

“You’ll pay for this, Reb,” he was shouting
at her through the pain drumming between her ears. “We could have
done this nice and easy, but now ... Look it, you’ve killed Fred!
Damn it, Homer, grab her onto your horse and let’s get out of
here!”

“What about those kids?” Homer Bell rasped,
pointing toward the woods, where Toby had collapsed on one knee and
Louisa was crouched in frozen terror beside him.

“Toby, Louisa! Run!” Rebeccah screamed.

Russ cursed her and tried to hit her again,
but she ducked aside just in time. To her immense relief she saw
Louisa and Toby scurrying back into the copse of trees from which
they’d come.

“Son of a bitch! I’ll get ‘em,” Homer
muttered, but Russ stopped him with a shout.

“Let them go! They don’t matter. Take Reb and
let’s get the hell out of here!”

She clutched at the reins and tried to urge
the frightened team forward, but Homer Bell plucked her off the
seat before she could manage it and plunked her down hard in the
saddle before him.

“Don’t say a word, or cry, or cause one bit
of trouble, Reb, or you’ll be sorry—and I don’t care if you
are
Bear’s daughter! Ride, Gaglin, ride!”

The last thing she saw was Fred’s inert form
bleeding into the snow in the road. Then they were galloping hard
away from everything familiar, riding hell-bent toward the
snow-dusted foothills that rose to the north, looming gray and
white and purple against the darkening winter sky.

“Calm down, Toby, and tell me everything you
saw.”

Wolf placed both hands on Toby Pritchard’s
shoulders and studied the young man’s desperate face. A few feet
away, in the rapidly falling darkness, a dead man sprawled in a
bloody heap across the trail.

“Those men won’t kill Miss Rawlings, not
until they get what they want from her, so don’t worry. I’ll find
her before then. But you have to tell me everything that happened.
How many were there? Did you see which direction they headed? What
did their horses look like?”

Wolf had come upon the dead man just as
Culley Pritchard, Waylon, and Toby had ridden up. Rebeccah’s team
and buckboard stood over to the side of the road, the horses
foraging in the snow-dusted winter grass, and at the sight of them
an iron band had tightened around his lungs. He was too late!

But he remained deadly calm as Toby told him
what he and Louisa had seen and how they had come tearing back to
the Pritchard ranch after Toby had been shot at, alerting his
father and brother that Miss Rawlings was in trouble. With every
word the boy spoke, Wolf’s grimmest fears were confirmed. It took
every ounce of his self-control to think clearly, to put aside his
fears for her and the dread that filled him when he thought of all
the ways they might hurt her, and to concentrate on what must be
done to find her.
Stay calm. Think. You can catch them in
time.

If they hurt her ...

No. Don’t let yourself think that way.
You’ll find her.

“And then this hombre shot at me, and then
Miss Rawlings shot him. The other man hit her, and then they
dragged her onto one of the horses and rode off. Damn it, if I’d
had my six-shooter on me none of this would’ve happened,” Toby
exclaimed, running a hand in frustration through his sandy hair.
“Miss Rawlings would be safe, and Louisa wouldn’t have had to be
scared to death!”

“Do you think you can find them, Wolf?”
Culley Pritchard interrupted, casting a worried glance at the
densely falling snow.

Wolf nodded, his face coldly set.

“Want some company?” Waylon offered.

“No. I don’t know how long this will take.
But you could help. Will you take care of that hombre over there?
And then there’s Miss Rawlings’s horses and her buckboard.”

“Consider it done,” Waylon said.

“There’s something else. Billy.”

Culley cleared his throat. “What do you want
us to tell him?”

“Tell him everything will be all right, but I
want him to stay with the Bradys until I get back. He’s there right
now, matter of fact. I sure hope Emily doesn’t mind if this visit
is extended for a day or so,” Wolf muttered.

“He’s welcome to stay at our place if it’s
not convenient for her,” Culley said, clapping a hand on Wolf’s
shoulder. “Don’t worry about the boy, he’ll be well taken care of
while you’re gone.”

“How long do you think it’s going to take?”
Toby asked. He appeared now more angry and frustrated than
frightened—his “wound” was only a slight grazing above the knee,
already bound up and hurting him hardly at all. His concern for
Rebeccah, and for Louisa, badly shaken, overshadowed whatever
discomfort he’d endured from his injury.

Wolf shook his head. “We’ll see. They don’t
have too much of a head start on me, I’d reckon, but it’s getting
dark fast. I may not catch up with them until tomorrow.”

“Give those low-down bastards hell!” Culley
Pritchard growled as he glared over at the dead man in the
trail.

“I intend to,” Wolf answered softly. Then he
mounted again with easy grace and turned Dusty toward the foothills
to the north.

“Tell Billy not to worry!” he shouted over
his shoulder, and then he was riding as hard as he could across the
sloping land, cursing the late hour, the clouds and whirling
snow—and the approaching darkness.