The Outlaw And The Runaway. Tatiana March
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chairs and papers strewn about completed the scene of destruction. In the air, the acrid smell of gunpowder mingled with the familiar scents of beeswax polish and lemon cleaner.
Anger flared in Celia, the edge of it dulled by a sense of guilt and shame. In her bitterness toward the townspeople, she had secretly welcomed the disaster, had gloated over having figured out what no one else seemed to have the brains to suspect.
Now, regret flooded her conscience. Her father loved his job. It gave him dignity, a position in the community. During the robbery, his place of business, the citadel of finance in which he took such pride had been violated, equipment damaged, order and precision replaced with chaos and lawlessness.
She turned back to the men. “I heard a gunshot.”
Her father swallowed, his thin throat rippling. “That’s the damnedest thing, Celia girl. One of the outlaws, the gang leader, pointed his gun at me. I believe he was going to shoot me, but another one of the robbers got in the way. The Indian, with long black hair. I think he got hit.”
Celia’s thoughts reverted to the stranger with mismatched eyes. She’d been waiting for him to return, and for the briefest of instants out there in the midday sun, as she jumped down from the boardwalk and her eyes locked with one brown eye and one blue, the thrill of recognition had made her forget everything else.
Just as she had suspected, the stranger had come back to rob the bank. And he had protected her father. Why had he done it? Was it to rule out the prospect of being hanged for murder if the gang got caught? Or had he known the teller was her father? Had he done it for her, to protect her from the loss of a parent?
“He got hit?” she asked, urgency in her tone as a new worry seized her mind. Such concern for one of the robbers might appear unwarranted, but she had to know. “The man with long black hair who stepped between you and the gunman got hit?”
Her father nodded. “A bullet in the shoulder. He walked out on his own steam, but he was in pain. I could tell.”
As her mental processes sprang back to their normal clarity, Celia recalled hearing rifle shots out in the street while she’d been kneeling to examine her father for injuries. In her mind, she played back the image of the man with different-colored eyes. He had struggled to get on his horse while his companions were already making their escape. The last one to get away, he’d have been the target for those rifle shots.
Fear closed around her, startling in its intensity. She jumped up to her feet and spoke in a breathless rush. “I need air. I have to go outside.”
As she whirled about and darted toward the exit, she noticed Mr. Northfield studying her father with a sharp, assessing look. Perhaps the manager was concerned about her father’s fragile health, the impact the frightening events might have on it.
Out in the street, the bright sunshine made Celia blink. Vaguely, she worried about not wearing a bonnet, an omission that would deepen the tan on her skin and cause her scar to stand out even more vividly.
“Did you shoot him?” she cried out to the cluster of men who stood staring into the distance. There was Mr. Selden, her boss at the store, and Mr. Grosser, who ran the barbershop, and three ranchers, one of them holding a rifle. A crowd was gathering around them, but no one was shooting or going to fetch their horses.
“Sorry, Miss Celia,” Mr. Grosser replied. “He got away.”
He got away.
Her hand went to her chest, where her fingers felt the round shape of the gold coin she’d hung around her neck in a tiny pouch sewn from a scrap of silk. The stranger with mismatched eyes had managed to escape. A sense of destiny, a sense of an inevitable crossing of paths, solidified inside Celia. Every instinct told her that their fates would be intertwined.
Roy hung grimly in the saddle, pain burning in his shoulder, the blood-soaked shirt sticking to his back, cold shivers racking him. He ought to have packed his wound to stem the bleeding, but he daren’t stop, not even to take off the itchy black wig and put his hat on.
He’d slipped the cotton patch back in its place, to protect his brown eye, unused to daylight, from the glare of the sun. Already, his body was shutting down, making him light-headed and giving him a tunnel vision that closed out everything except the trail ahead that led to a place of safety.
At last, the small log cabin, half dug into the hillside, with an earth roof over it, hovered in his sights. With one final burst of effort, Roy urged Dagur up the path, reined in and slid down from the saddle. He stumbled to the entrance and kicked the door open. Ducking his head, he stepped in through the low frame and pulled the buckskin inside after him, then kicked the door shut again.
Darkness filled the cramped space. The horse gave a frightened whinny. Leaning against the heavy flank of the animal to steady himself, Roy stroked the lathered coat.
“Easy, boy. Easy now, Dagur. We’re safe.”
He tugged aside the patch that covered his brown eye. Protected from light, the eye needed no time to adjust to the darkness, allowing Roy to survey his surroundings.
The place was just as he’d left it two weeks ago. Sturdy log walls, floor of hard-packed earth swept clean, the single window firmly shuttered. Some previous occupant must have burned any remaining furniture for firewood, but they had left the water barrel that stood in the corner next to the primitive stone chimney.
A standard-sized whiskey barrel, it held fifty-three gallons. During his earlier visits Roy had painstakingly cleaned the timber container and filled it from the spring outside, spending hours shuttling to and fro with nothing but a canteen to transport the water.
To complete his preparations, he’d gathered firewood into a tall stack along the rear wall, and with handfuls of desert sand and grit he had scrubbed away the layer of grease from the rusty iron pot that stood on tripod legs inside the stone hearth.
Now he turned to Dagur and pulled his hat from the folds of his bedroll where he had tucked it away, pushed the crown back into shape and sank to his knees beside the water barrel. Using a piece of firewood to knock loose the wooden plug, he lined his hat beneath the hole in the barrel and filled the hollow of the crown to the brim. After replacing the plug on the side of the barrel, Roy held up the hat for the buckskin to drink.
“Good boy,” he murmured. “Rest now. Later, when it gets dark, I’ll let you out to graze. There’s a strip of grama beyond the spring, much better than the desert grass you’ve been eating recently.”
The horse blew and snorted, as if to agree. Twice more, Roy filled his hat and let Dagur drink. Then he took out his canteen and quenched his own thirst. After allowing himself a moment of rest, he poured water into the iron pot in the hearth, arranged firewood beneath the tripod legs and took out his tin of matches to start a fire.
The pain closed around him, burning like a hot poker in his shoulder and streaking down his side with every move he made. He needed to get the wound cleaned and dressed before he passed out. The bullet wouldn’t kill him, but the fever that followed might, if he didn’t manage to stem the bleeding and prevent an infection.
As the flames caught in the hearth, a warm yellow glow danced over the log walls. The reassuring scents of wood smoke and pine resin, familiar from a thousand campfires, filled the cabin. Roy imagined primitive man, living in caves, hunting and gathering. For him, a bonfire must have meant life, just as much as water and food did, and more—a fire must have been the first step toward civilization, mastering the elements of nature.
Sitting cross-legged in front of the stone chimney, Roy pulled a knife from the scabbard in his boot and sliced away his shirt. Easier than trying to lift his arms overhead to undress. The coarse white cotton was matted with blood but the bleeding had slowed to a trickle.
Gently, Roy felt the wound in his shoulder with his fingertips. There was no exit hole, but high