Outlaw Hearts (52 page)

Miranda felt a glimmer of the satisfaction of revenge, but it was dimmed by the fact that Gentry's death had come too late to help her husband. “Yes,” she answered. “It's just too bad that didn't happen a few years earlier. If it had, my husband wouldn't be rotting away in prison right now, and we would still have our son with us.” She faced the man squarely. “Don't bother me again, Mr. Chadwick, unless you have news about my son.” She turned away and headed toward town with the preacher and Brian and Evie.

So, she thought, Lieutenant Gentry was dead. What good did that do anyone now, except the satisfaction of knowing perhaps he had never even got to spend all his bounty money. She hoped he was tortured longer than any of the others, that he was now burning in hell!

***

Jake stayed on his cot when the new prisoner was brought in along with a second cot. Two guards positioned the legs of the upper cot into the holes in the legs of Jake's cot to create a bunk bed for the new man who would share the tiny cell with Jake. Jake made no move to get up, stared at the springs overhead, hated the closed-in feeling that engulfed him when he had to look up at another bed.

“You get to stay with somebody famous,” a third guard told the new man. “Your bunkmate is Jake Harkner. Used to be the fastest gun anywhere around till he busted up his own hand in a temper fit.” The guard chuckled and the other two left the cell. The third man closed and locked the door. “Next meal is at six, Peterson. Try to get along with Harkner. He gets a little ornery sometimes. Maybe the two of you can practice drawing on each other to keep busy.” He laughed again and turned away.

“Fuck you,” the one called Peterson muttered. He turned to Jake. “You
really
Jake Harkner?”

Jake felt the cough coming again and he sat up to clear his lungs. This cough was getting worse, and he wondered if he had tuberculosis, or maybe he was dying from the same lung disease that had killed Jess. Poor Jess. Jake had gotten the news in a letter from Miranda. His best friend was dead, and he had wanted to die himself at the news. Another ray of hope was gone, and now Miranda was even more alone. He coughed for several seconds before he could answer his new cellmate. “Yeah, I'm Jake Harkner,” he finally answered, “and I'm not feeling too great, so don't try to strike up a conversation.” He felt like he was burning up with fever, yet he felt cold at the same time. He pulled a blanket around his shoulders.

“I'll be damned,” the one called Peterson answered. “Ain't that a coincidence? I get put in with Jake Harkner. Hell, man, you
are
famous! I read about your trial and all.” The man rubbed at the scratchy prison suit he'd been given to wear. “These things ever get any softer?”

“Never,” Jake answered, lying back down, shivering in spite of the sweat on his brow. “You'll get used to it.”

Peterson looked around the small cell. “I don't think so.”

Jake watched him a moment, always hating having to get used to some new man. Peterson was perhaps a little younger than he, not quite six feet tall, he guessed. He was freshly shaved, a requirement of every new prisoner, although once inside, the opportunity to bathe and shave came up only once a week. He looked like a man who had led a hard life. His face showed several scars from cuts, probably from fights, and two teeth were missing on the bottom. His dark hair was thinning, and he had the paunchy look of a man who drank too much and didn't take very good care of himself.

“This is what I get for stealin' a few horses,” he grumbled, standing at the bars and trying to see down the narrow hallway of cells. “I couldn't help killin' that damned rancher. The guy was shootin' at me. What was I supposed to do?” He turned and faced Jake. “Hell, there was a time when a man could get away with murder out here. Not anymore. The West is gettin' too damned civilized, you know it? Too damned civilized. I expect you feel that way too.” He rubbed at his chin. “I've heard a lot about you. Men on the old Outlaw Trail talk about you a lot.”

“I said I didn't want to carry on a conversation right now.” Damn the pain in his chest. God, it hurt just to breathe.

Peterson shrugged. “Fine with me.” He sat down on the one stool in the cell. “I guess that means you don't want to hear about your son.”

The mention of Lloyd made Jake sit up so suddenly that he hit his head on the frame of the top bunk. He winced and put a hand to his head, glaring then at Peterson, forgetting about his cough, his fever and chills, the pain in his chest. “My son? You've heard of him? Seen him?”

Peterson grinned. “I figured as much. The kid ain't been to see you, has he? How long you been in here?”

“Four years.” Jake rose, walking over to stand at the cell door, grasping one of the bars. The cough overcame him again, and it took him several seconds to find his breath again. “What about Lloyd? What do you know?”

Peterson frowned at the sudden desperate look in Jake's eyes. He shook his head. “The kid ought to come see his pa. He's carryin' a big grudge, ain't he? That's too bad. You don't look too good, Harkner. You got TB or somethin'? The boy ought to know you've got that cough.”

Jake ran a hand through his damp hair. “I'll be all right. Just tell me what you know about my son. Where is he? I'll give you a month's ration of cigarettes if you'll tell me what you know.”

Peterson chuckled. “Hell, you don't have to pay me to tell. Men like us, we have to stick together. Hell, I feel honored just bein' in the same cell with you. How long you in for?”

“Four more years. You?”

“Ten. Ten fucking years.” The man let out a sigh and rose. “You want a smoke?” He walked over to his little sack of supplies and took out a cigarette.

“I'll smoke my own. Right now my chest hurts too much.” Jake coughed again, wondering if he could get himself well enough to break out of this place and get to Lloyd. “What about my son?”

Peterson lit his cigarette and sucked on it for a moment. “I seen your boy at Brown's Park, on the Outlaw Trail. The kid has taken to drinkin' rotgut whiskey, pretty heavy.” He saw the pain in Jake's eyes. “Maybe you don't want to know it all, seein' as how you're cooped up in here and can't do nothin' about it.”

Jake turned away. “You can tell me.”

Peterson sighed. “Well, he's carryin' a big chip on his shoulder. Goes around spoutin' to everybody about how his father is the notorious Jake Harkner, how he killed a lot of men, killed his own pa, robbed trains and banks. He wears your guns, shows them off to people, brags about how he's just as good with them as you were.”

Jake felt the nausea growing in his stomach. Lloyd was doing the very thing he had dreaded most, doing it just to hurt him, he was sure. “
Is
he as good?”

“Well, I ain't never seen you in action, so I can't compare. I will say, the boy's good. He killed two men who tried to prove otherwise. He's ridin' with cattle rustlers now.”

Jake literally bent over in pain. He moved back to his cot and sat down, putting his head in his hands.

“Hey, I'm sorry, Harkner. You asked.”

“It's all right.” Jake coughed again. “I've got to find him,” he said then. “I've got to get out of here somehow and find him, stop him from throwing his life away.”

“You ain't gonna get out of this place except by some miracle, mister. Do you know how fast they'd shoot you down if you tried to escape? Besides, you don't look in any shape to be tryin' to break out of here and run. Fact is, you don't look too good at all.”

Lloyd! Jake hardly heard what the man was saying. Lloyd was out there somewhere, asking to get himself shot or hanged or thrown in prison just like himself. What was he going to do with Jess dead? Who was there to go and find Lloyd? He didn't dare tell Miranda what he knew. The damned, stubborn woman would be crazy enough to try to find Lloyd by herself. It would be just like her to take that Winchester and that stupid little pistol and ride into outlaw country to find her son. She was brave enough and he knew she'd do anything to find the boy.

Boy. He wasn't a boy anymore. He was twenty-two years old and asking to die young. Things were different now than when he was Lloyd's age. There was more law now. Men didn't get away with things like they used to. If some gunslinger didn't get Lloyd, some lawman would, if he wasn't stopped.

What the hell was he going to do? God, how he missed Jess! Jess would have gone after the kid if he could have. There was no other man he knew who could have gone into outlaw country and knew how to handle himself. Jess had lived in those places before, knew how to handle those kind of men. He sure couldn't expect that Eastern doctor husband of Evie's to go after Lloyd. Brian wouldn't last two days in country like that, around men like that.

He lay back on the cot, wishing his chest didn't hurt so much, wishing he didn't feel so dizzy all the time. He needed to be stronger, needed to get out of this place and find Lloyd. It had been hard enough keeping insanity away, penned up in this place, but now, knowing where Lloyd was, what he was doing, he really
would
go crazy being stuck here and unable to do anything about it. The hell of it was, he couldn't even tell Randy.

“Damn!” he groaned. He sat up again, and Peterson backed into a corner at the dark look in Jake's eyes. Jake walked over and picked up the short stool Peterson had sat on earlier. He slammed it against the cell door, busting it into several pieces. “Guard!” he screamed. He turned and ripped the mattress off the top bunk, threw it down. He lifted the frame, springs and all, and threw it at the bars. “Get me out of here!” he roared.

Two men came in to see what the commotion was about. “What the hell—”

“Get me the hell out of here!” Jake yelled. “I've got to go find my son!” He grasped the bars, his eyes wild and menacing.

“Hey, do somethin' with this maniac before he turns on
me
,” Peterson hollered.

“Calm down, Harkner! You've got four years to go before you get out of here! Pick up that bunk and put it back where it belongs!”

Jake reached out and grabbed the man's shirt, slamming him up to the bars. “You get me out of here—
now
!”

One of the other guards slammed a nightstick down over Jake's wrist, bringing new pain to the already partly crippled hand. He cried out and let go of the first guard's shirt. He turned then, picking up the slop bucket and throwing it at the guards, showering them with urine and excrement.

“Goddamn sonofabitch!” one of them cursed. He unlocked the cell door, and the second guard called for help, then joined the first man in trying to wrestle Jake to the floor to get handcuffs on him. Other men in the prison began rooting for Jake as he fought the men wildly. Peterson moved out of the cell and backed away as more guards rushed in. Jake held his own for the first few seconds, getting in some solid blows with a fierce strength few thought he had for being so sick; but there were too many guards and he was too weak to hold up for long.

Jake was quickly showered with fists, feet and nightsticks until he lay groaning in a pool of his own blood. The prison warden hurried into the wing where he'd heard there was trouble, and he winced at the sight and smell. “What the hell happened here?” he demanded.

“I don't know,” one of the original guards answered, his mouth bleeding badly. He wiped at the blood and turned to Peterson. “What the hell did you say to him when we put you in here?”

Peterson shrugged. “I just told him I'd seen his son at Brown's Park, told him he was good with guns now, shot two men in a gunfight. He went crazy.”

“What a damn mess,” the warden growled. “Hell, everybody knows he asks about that son of his all the time.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Damn. His wife is due to visit him tomorrow. What's she going to think when she sees him like this? That woman can be a real she-cat when it comes to how we treat her husband.”

“We'd better get him to the hospital ward. He's been burning up with fever as it is,” one of the guards told him.

“Why wasn't I told?”

The man shrugged. “Men get sick all the time. You know that, Warden.”

The warden stepped closer, glowering at the guard. “Yeah? Well, they aren't all Jake Harkner either. They don't have the public asking about them all the time, or a watchdog of a wife coming to see them.” He sighed, looking down at Jake's battered face. “Get him to the hospital ward and see what you can do with him. Find that doctor we use, and I'll try to find some excuse to keep his wife from seeing him tomorrow.”

Four men moved to pick up Jake and they carried him out.

“Clean up this mess!” the warden barked to those remaining. He turned to follow the others. “I'll have one hell of a time keeping this from his wife.”

Miranda ignored the cold mountain wind that chilled her to the bone. It seemed that winter just did not want to let go this year, and the weather over the last couple of warm spring days had turned again to a damp cold, with a mixture of sleet and snow spitting through the air. For the moment she was too angry and worried to care that she was standing in the ugly weather while Brian and Evie waited in Brian's enclosed buggy at the prison gate.

“I want the truth,” she demanded of the guard at the gate. “Why can't I see my husband? I've never been refused before!”

“Ma'am, it's the warden's orders, that's all.”

Miranda saw the look of nervousness and guilt in the guard's eyes. She stepped closer, her eyes on fire. “Well, you go back and tell the warden that I am going to stand right here until I'm allowed inside! I don't care if it takes all night or if I die from the exposure! And you tell him that if I'm not allowed in by morning, I will phone or wire or write every damn newspaper in every major city in this country, as well as the judge for Jake's case and Congress and anybody else who will listen! I'll tell them all kinds of stories about this place, some true and some
not
true; but by God, your warden will get more attention than he'll ever want! Something has happened to my husband that he doesn't want me to know about, so you just tell him that if he'll let me see him, I'll keep quiet! If he doesn't, he'll be out of a job! I'll make sure of it! I have already been writing letters to Washington about prison reform, mister, and Wyoming is going to become a state soon. When it does, I'll be among the first to see about better treatment for prisoners at
this
facility! You tell your warden he can save himself a lot of headaches if he lets me see my husband right now!”

The man scowled at her, then turned and left.

“Mother, what's wrong?” Evie shouted.

Miranda walked back to the carriage. “I don't know yet. Something has happened to Jake. They won't let me see him, but I'm not leaving until they do! You two wait here. I'm staying right at that gate!”

Miranda stormed back to the gate and Brian shook his head. “She's something, isn't she? It's not good for her to be out in that cold, you know.”

Evie smiled. “She'd walk through fire to see my father. I guess it's her love for him that helped me forgive his past. If she could love him that much, marry him in spite of his past, I guess as his blood child, I certainly had no reason not to love and forgive him. He was always good to me and Lloyd, Brian. I just don't understand how Lloyd could stay away. It's killing Father.”

“Feelings are different sometimes between men than women. I think a boy expects more of his father than a girl. There's a special bond between a father and a son. From what you tell me, your father and Lloyd were pretty close. Lloyd must have felt betrayed when he heard the truth, maybe thinks he's no good now because his father and grandfather were no good.”

“But Father
is
good. He was
always
good to Lloyd. I think Lloyd is angrier over losing Beth because of all this than anything else.” Evie watched the guard return and begin unlocking the gate. She smiled. “I don't know what Mother told him, but they're letting her in.” A few more words were exchanged between Miranda and the guard, and then Miranda turned and walked back to the buggy, a kind of terror showing in her eyes.

“You can both come. Bring your bag, Brian. Jake's been hurt, and he's even sicker than the last time I was here! The guard says you can look at him. I don't trust the prison doctor.”

Brian and Evie climbed down, and Brian tied the buggy horse. They followed the guard inside, and Evie shivered at the cold dampness of the place, wondering if all the cells were this cold. They were led through a narrow hallway to a door where a man in a suit waited for them.

“Mrs. Harkner.” The man nodded.

Miranda folded her arms. She had met the warden a few times before, and there were no good feelings between them. She saw the look of anger mixed with worry in his dark eyes. He was a short, balding man, with a hard mouth and a round, fat face. It irritated her that he obviously ate well, while most of the prisoners looked malnourished after several months in his prison. “Warden Pruett,” she acknowledged. “What has happened to my husband?”

The man glanced at Evie and Brian, then back at Miranda. “I trust you will keep your word, about not spreading lies and rumors about this place?”

“I will. But I'm not so sure I can keep quiet about the truth,” Miranda answered boldly. “What
is
the truth, Mr. Pruett?”

The man sighed, putting his hands on his hips. “The truth is your husband brought this on himself. I was about to put him here in the medical ward anyway because of his cough and fever, but he went into a rage yesterday, tore bunks apart, broke a stool to pieces, threw a chamber pot at the guards and showered them with the filth in it. He had to be stopped before he hurt the other man in his cell or hurt himself.”

“Stopped? What did your guards do to him? He's fifty-three years old, for God's sake!”

Pruett scowled. “Look, Mrs. Harkner, when your husband loses his temper, he fights like a
twenty
-three-year-old! I have a few guards with split lips and cracked ribs to prove it! It took six men to get him under control, and the only way they could do it was to beat him into unconsciousness. I'm sorry, but they had no choice. He's come around a little, but he's in pretty bad shape. If you'll keep quiet about this, I'll let your son-in-law here take a look at him, and I'll allow you to stay with him through the night, if you like.”

Miranda put a hand to her chest, feeling literal pain. Jake, sick and beaten. She struggled against tears. “I would like that very much. What brought this on, Mr. Pruett?”

The man ran a hand over his balding head. “I'm not sure. We brought in a new prisoner to his cell yesterday. The man apparently had some news about your son Lloyd.”

“Lloyd!” Evie stepped closer. “What about him? Can we talk to this other prisoner?”

“We'll see. All I know is what he told me—that he'd told Jake he'd seen Lloyd along the Outlaw Trail, at Brown's Park, I think. Said Lloyd was drinking heavily, wearing his father's guns. He shot two men in two separate gunfights and he might be riding with rustlers. Your father just went kind of crazy then, yelling for the guards, demanding he be let out so he could go to his son.”

“My God,” Miranda whispered, turning to Evie. “It's all the things he dreaded most, that Lloyd would turn to the kind of life he once led.” She closed her eyes. “With Jess gone, he must feel he's the only one who could find and help Lloyd now. He'll want to stop him before it's too late for him. He must feel so helpless, so desperate.”

“He's going to have to live with it or be chained in solitary,” Pruett told her. He opened the door to a long, narrow room with ten cots in it. Only three of the cots were occupied. A guard stood at the other end of the room. “He's in the third bed over there.”

Miranda hurried inside, her whole body aching with dread, for both her son and Jake. Lloyd! Her little boy, that was how she still thought of him, her precious son. She could still remember vividly the look on Jake's face when he first held him, the desperation in his eyes when he made her promise never to tell his son about his past. What a terrible mistake that had been! Now Lloyd was out there risking being shot, drinking heavily. It wasn't the Lloyd she had always known, her sweet, trusting, loving son. If only he hadn't lost Beth on top of everything else. He might have been all right if not for that.

She drew in her breath and made a little choking sound at the sight of Jake, his face bruised and swollen. “Oh, God, Brian, look at him! God only knows where else he's hurt.”

Brian quickly moved to Jake's bedside and opened his medical bag. He pulled the covers away to see the man was shirtless. His arms and chest were covered with bruises, but Brian noticed with a bit of surprise that Jake's body still had a hard, lean look to it, the chest and arms of a much younger man. He'd never met his notorious father-in-law. He was a big man, dark. There were several scars on his body. He'd heard about some of them, how Jake's own father had put that scar on his neck, that there were more on his back from belt-whippings. He had laughed and shaken his head when Miranda told him and Evie how the first time she'd met the man she'd shot him. There was the scar from that wound, on his lower left side.

He moved his hands over the man's arms, ribs. “I don't feel any broken bones,” he told Miranda, “but I don't doubt he's got more than one cracked rib. His ribs should have been wrapped.” He took out a stethoscope and listened to Jake's breathing.

“He's so hot, Brian, and his breathing sounds so labored.” Miranda smoothed Jake's still-thick, dark hair back from his face. She leaned close. “Jake? You'll be all right,
mi
querido
. I'm here with you and I'm not leaving.”

Brian examined Jake for several minutes, pressing the stethoscope to his chest again. He looked across the bed at Miranda. “Sounds like pneumonia, Randy. We've got to get him into more of a sitting position or his lungs will fill and he'll suffocate.”

Evie hurriedly gathered pillows from some of the empty beds and the three of them worked to prop Jake up higher. Randy and Brian wrapped his ribs, and Randy shivered with fear when he began coughing, a deep, prolonged cough that was obviously painful, from both the pneumonia and the cracked ribs. The pain was written on his face, and he groaned with every breath for several minutes after the coughing stopped.

“Dear God, don't let him die,” Randy whispered, kneeling beside the bed. She took hold of his hand, which was closed into a tight fist, tighter than she had ever seen him close the crippled hand. He was clinging to the rosary beads.

“Lloyd,” Jake muttered. “Got to…help…my son.”

***

Jake breathed deeply for Brian, who held a stethoscope to his back. “He sounds a little less congested,” Brian told Miranda, who sat on the other side of the cot. He still could not get over feeling a chill at the sight of the scars on Jake's back, always recalling the horrid vision of a grown man beating a little boy with the buckle end of a leather belt.

“This is one hell of a way to meet your father-in-law,” Jake said, lying back against the pillows. He glanced at Evie, overwhelmed by her utter beauty and by the realization she was a grown, married woman. “Have you really all been here for three days?”

“Slept right on the empty cots over there,” Brian answered. “Can't you tell by our wrinkled clothes? They at least gave me shaving equipment. Randy and I used it to shave that grizzly beard of yours.” He grinned. “Randy told me what a handsome man you were. I knew you had to be because of how beautiful Evie is, but under that beard and all those bruises, it was hard to tell.”

Jake put a hand to his hair. “I'm a beat-up, half-crippled
old
man is what I am.” This morning was the first he'd awakened knowing who and where he was, and who had been talking to him in his dreams, that the woman he had thought was his mother was Evie.

A fit of coughing hit him, and he grasped Randy's hand tightly until he could get his breath again. He held his ribs and lay back, groaning with pain, and Miranda brought his hand up to her lips and kissed it. Brian pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed. “You should know you've got pneumonia, Jake, so you've got to stay in a sitting position. Don't lie all the way flat or you could suffocate. If you take it real easy and they let you stay in this bed with plenty of blankets for warmth, you'll be all right in time. What you really need is fresh air.”

Jake looked at his son-in-law, a handsome, clean-cut young man who he supposed had never seen any of the ugly side of life he had seen. He glanced at Evie, saw the glow on her face. “This man being good to you?” he asked.

“Can't you tell?” She smiled. “We're very happy, Father. That's partly why I wanted you to meet Brian, see us together. It gives you that much more to come home to. By the time you're free, you'll have grandchildren to meet.”

Jake frowned. “You sure you want them to know me?”

Evie rolled her eyes. “Of course I'll want them to know you. You're my father, and you've been a very good father. That's all that's important. I'm proud of the man who raised me. I don't care what he did before that.”

Jake smiled sadly, looking at Randy, squeezing her hand. “Lloyd
does
care. He's throwing his life away because of my past.”

Miranda reached out and stroked his hair. “The warden told us what that prisoner said about Lloyd.” She felt him tensing.

“I've got to find a way to get to him, Randy. I can't stay in this place four more years while he's out there either drinking himself to death or risking being caught by the law and put in a place like this. If I didn't have this need to find him and help him, I'd let myself die right now, or find a way to end my life for what's happened to him.” He closed his eyes. “It's my fault. It's all my fault.”

“Jake, if you did anything wrong, it was to love him too much, shelter him too much from reality. You taught him the right way to go in life. If he's chosen another way, it's
his
doing. He's being a foolish, stubborn young man who is going to come around someday to face the truth, and the truth is he can't deny how much you loved him or how much he loved you. This won't last. He's too good a man deep inside.”

Jake tried to breathe deeply against unwanted tears, but his lungs would not allow it. The result was another coughing spell that led to deep, jerking sobs. Randy tried to comfort him, but he wouldn't let her touch him, embarrassed to be so weak and sick and in such an emotional state. He took a handkerchief Brian handed him and managed to control his despair, wiping at his eyes with a shaking hand.