Texas Lucky (17 page)

Iris came out of the stagecoach, moaning over and over at the carnage surrounding her. Suddenly she ran to Joe and threw herself at his back, clutching him fiercely. “Hurry, please. Get me out of here. My father will reward you. I’ll see to it. Please. Leave the others. We have to go fast.”

Disgusted, he shrugged her away. “I’m not leaving them ’cause I want to, lady, and your daddy ain’t got enough money to make me, neither. It’s just how it is. Now shut your mouth.”

He slung her up on the horse’s rump, then looked at Tess. “Last chance to change your mind. We’ve got to go. There’s no way of knowin’ how far away the Indian camp is. They could already be on their way back here.”

“Help me take him up there.” Tess pointed.

“What for?”

“If we stay here, we don’t have a chance. Up there, we can hide. The Indians will think we all left. They don’t know how many we were, anyway. They never saw me or Iris.”

Joe started toward Ben, who had raised up on his elbows. “Good thinking. Hide me and take her with you.”

“No,” Iris cried. “We can go faster without her.”

“Ma’am, I told you to shut up,” Joe yelled, then, grasping Ben’s shoulders, he directed Tess, “Try to lift his feet and help what you can.”

Maneuvering up and along the jutting rocks was not easy. Now and then Ben was bumped, and Tess saw he was biting his lip to keep from crying out.

“Here,” Joe said finally, placing Ben beneath a thick shrub. “You’re high enough they ought not to spot you.” He dropped to one knee and checked the wound again. “Do you want me to break the arrow off at the skin?”

“No. It might make it bleed more to mess with it.”

Joe stood. “You’re probably right. Now listen, we’re goin’ to ride like the wind, and as soon as we get to Pyramid, I’ll get the Army back out here quick as I can.”

Ben said, with a nod toward Tess, “Make her go. I’m hidden now. I’ll be fine.”

Tess pointed out, “You need me to put a gag in your mouth in case the pain gets so bad you start hollering.”

She watched, puzzled, as Joe stood and unbuckled his ammunition belt. “What’s this for?” she asked when he handed it to her, along with his gun.

“If they come for you, hit as many as you can, but save the last bullet for yourself. Don’t let ’em take you alive. I’ll take Sulley’s gun, and I’ve also got a rifle.”

She shuddered as he placed the cold steel in her hand.

“Don’t worry,” Ben grimly assured them. “I’ll shoot her myself before I let that happen.”

“One more thing.” Joe left them but returned quickly with a bottle of whiskey. He gave it to Ben. “This’ll help with the pain.”

They shook hands, and Joe left.

Overhead, the vultures circled ever lower.

It was a clear day, not a cloud in the sky, the sun mercilessly blazing down.

Suddenly, struck by the irony of it all, Tess gave a soft laugh and shook her head.

Ben asked, “What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking how all of this started because my father needed money. I wind up with a dead fiancé, spend weeks locked in a mine shaft charged with being a horse thief, finally escape to rob an assay office, and now I’m waiting to be attacked by Indians.

“Maybe—” she laughed again—“I’ll wake up back in my bed in Philadelphia and find it’s all a horrible nightmare.”

Ben propped his head against a small rock. Opening the whiskey, he tipped it to his mouth and drank long and deep, staring at Tess all the while. Then, swiping his lips with the back of his hand, he asked, “Did I just hear you right, li’l lady? Did you just say everything I think you did?”

She nodded. “You did.”

“Well, I’d like to hear the whole story, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll think I’m awful.”

It was his turn to snort. “I’ve lived a full life, and I doubt there’s anything you could tell me that’d shock me. And nobody knows better than me that sometimes a body’s got to do whatever it takes to survive.”

With a tug at her heart, Tess was reminded of Curt. His sentiments, exactly. For an instant, she dared to wonder where he was, how he was, and whether he ever thought of her. Probably not. He’d gotten everything he wanted, and—

“Tess…”

She snapped back to the present.

“Talk to me,” Ben urged. “It’ll get my mind off the hurtin’.”

She supposed it would and decided it didn’t matter, if he heard her tale of woe, anyway. If they lived through their predicament, she would never see him again once they parted.

She sat down next to him, took a deep breath, and began, “Well, as I told you before, I came out here in the first place to get married, and…”

She fell silent, sat up straight, eyes going wide as she remembered.

Married.

Wedding.

Wedding dress.

Her
mother’s
wedding dress.

It was in her trunk, which was in the luggage rack on top of the stagecoach.

Alarmed, Ben grabbed her wrist and squeezed. “What is it, girl? What’s wrong? Did you hear something?”

She looked down at him sharply. “Tell me. What will the Indians do to the stagecoach? Will they steal it?”

“Steal it?” he echoed, baffled. Then, “No. They won’t do that.”

“But they’ll rob it? Take everything?”

“Most likely. Then they might set fire to it.” She was on her feet before the last words were out of his mouth.

“Tess, where you going?” he cried. “Don’t you go down there. It’s too dangerous. The Indians could be here any time, and—”

But Tess was not listening as she picked her way as fast as she dared down the rocks and boulders.

Trying not to look at the bodies, she stepped up on a horizontal spoke, then to the top rim of the wheel itself. Grabbing the rails of the luggage rack, she hoisted herself to the top.

Her trunk was beneath Iris’s, which was bigger and heavier, and she had to shove with all her might to get it to one side.

Dear Lord, she was glad she kept her money sewn in her hem and didn’t have to worry about retrieving that, as well. Though it was quite a chore to have to remove it and sew it back in every time she changed clothes, she felt that was the safest place to keep it.

At last she was able to reach her trunk and was about to unfasten it when her blood turned to ice; she heard the faint, distant sound of horses coming her way at full gallop.

The Apaches.

Breath coming in quick, ragged gasps, and every nerve in her body screaming to hurry, her fingers, suddenly stiff and cold, worked frantically at the latch.

With a loud squeak, the lid flew open.

“Tess…get back up here. I hear ’em coming.”

She threw a glance upward, toward the hiding place, willing him to be silent, then continued rummaging in the trunk till she found the white gown.

Rolling it in a ball, she tucked it under her arm and started down, but in her frenzy her foot slipped as she tried to feel for the wheel rim, and she fell to the ground with a painful thud.

She landed on her stomach, and the wind was knocked from her lungs.

She could not breathe.

She could not move.

And, with the side of her face pressed to the ground, panic washed her from head to toe, and she froze as the earth seemed to vibrate beneath the frenzied staccato of the Apache ponies bearing down.

She tried to suck in air, but it was like ice picks stabbing at her lungs.

Her stomach was a boiling, white-hot knot of pain. Slowly, ever so slowly, her fingers began to move, digging into the gravel and dirt.

The wheezing sound she made as she tried desperately to draw air into her starving lungs was like air being blown over the mouth of a cider jug.

Closer.

The ponies were closer.

Ben was yelling again. She could barely hear him and clung to the hope the Apaches would not be able to at all.

With a great, tearing grunt, she was mercifully able to at last draw air and then manage to get to her knees.

They were almost upon her—screaming, howling, like demons might sound calling from the very pits of hell.

Knees wobbling, Tess was finally able to stand, remembering to retrieve the wedding gown and once more tuck it beneath her arm.

One step.

Two.

It hurt terribly, but she shuffled along.

“Tess…oh, God, child…”

Moving as fast as her body would allow, Tess prayed the Indians would not come charging into the clearing and see her…prayed for the strength to make it a bit higher, to the brush, where she could crawl the rest of the way unseen.

And then they were there, just as she dropped beneath the first clawing, tearing branches of the overgrowth. But there was no time to be cautious, to go easy in order to keep from being scratched.

She dove headlong, and felt flesh tearing from her knees as her dress became tangled about her waist in the brambles.

“Here…” Ben called hoarsely, having spotted her from where he craned his neck to look downward. “Here. Come on. Fast.”

On hands and knees, unmindful of her injuries, Tess gave one last thrust to land facedown beside him.

They both fell still.

From below they could hear the angry cries of the Apaches as they discovered their prey had gotten away.

Tess listened to them speaking in a language alien to anything she had ever heard before. “I wish…” she dared whisper, lips moving against the ground, for she was not about to raise her head, “I knew what they were saying.”

Ben whispered back, “I understand most of it. They’re arguing about whether to go after ’em or plunder the coach, take their dead, and go home.”

More debate, fired back and forth between several different voices.

Suddenly, his face screwed in rage, Ben spewed the oath, “Oh, you goddamn savages. I’d kill you with my bare hands if I could…”

Tess looked at him, eyes round.

“They’re scalpin’ Sulley,” he whispered brokenly. Tess squeezed her eyes shut at the image.

Then more yelling, and they could hear the trunks being smashed on the ground.

Tess sought, and found, Ben’s hand and she squeezed as tight as she could, not letting go until the Indians had finished and loaded their dead and left…which seemed like forever.

“It’s over,” Ben said finally, gratefully.

She saw that the instant she let his hand go, he went back to clutching himself about the protruding arrow.

Then, sweeping her with a condemning glare, he demanded to know, “What in hell was so all-fired important that you nearly got yourself killed over?”

She sat up, still sore from her fall, and unrolled the wedding gown to show him. “It was my mother’s. It’s all I have left of her. I’ll probably never wear it, but I’ll treasure it all the same.”

He grunted. “Who says you won’t wear it? You’ll find a husband one day, pretty thing like you.”

“Well, I’m not thinking about that now. I’m not thinking about anything except getting help for you. How long do you think it will take Joe to return with the soldiers?”

“Not before tomorrow at the soonest.” He turned up the bottle for another much-needed drink, then said, “Now tell me about yourself like you were planning to before you remembered that danged gown.”

And she did. When she spoke of Curt, it was in a precise, necessary way. She was not about to confide what they had shared, for that was something she would keep in her heart to treasure…and the rest of it—how he’d taken half her money and abandoned her—that she had locked away to try never to think about.

When she had finished, Ben could only stare at her incredulously.

Tess saw how he was looking at her and cringed inside. She hated to ask, but had to know. “Do you think less of me now?”

At that, he threw back his head and laughed long and loud before declaring, “Think less of you? Why, little lady, I couldn’t think more of you if you were my own flesh and blood. In fact, you might as well be, ’cause you sure got enough of mine on you after all we been through.”

She let her breath out in a relieved rush. “I was hoping you’d understand.”

“I do. And I got something to tell you, too. The truth is, I didn’t pay any mind to what you said about wanting to learn western ways, ’cause I figured you for a giddy little thing who’d scream at a spider.”

Especially if it was big, fat and ugly
, she remembered with an annoyed pang. She had obviously grown up since then…and was very proud she had.

“Well, I’m glad you know different,” she said.

“Yes, and after what you did for me—having the grit to stay with me like you did—I reckon I’m going to have to muster some of my own to stand up to Portia.”

Hope was a crawling thing, working its way up Tess’s spine like the spider he thought she’d scream over. “What…what do you mean?” she stammered.

His grin was broad and confident. “I mean, li’l lady, that I am going to stand up to my daughter-in-law, ’cause if you still want me to teach you what I know about ranchin’ and ridin’ and shootin’, I’ll do it.”