Mckettrick's Choice. Linda Lael Miller
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to hang.
She’d ridden behind Holt all the way down from Waco and refused to stop at the Cavanagh place to rest, put on dry clothes and wait for the rain to let up. Watching her now, Holt wished he’d taken her there anyway.
She shivered in the downpour, hair dangling in wet strands down the sides of her face, looking bedraggled and small in Holt’s coat.
Still mounted, the Captain lifted the collar of his canvas duster. “Warm as bathwater,” he said of the rain, his voice pitched low. “Just the same, we’d best get that woman someplace dry.”
Holt swung a leg over the Appaloosa’s neck and jumped to the ground. He said her name quietly, reached out to lay a hand on her slight shoulder.
She shrugged him off. “I want to see Gabe,” she said. “Right now.”
“There he is,” the Captain said. “That window, yonder.”
Both Holt and Melina looked up. Sure enough, Gabe was gazing down at them, his face like chiseled stone, his hands grasping the bars.
Melina took a step toward him, staggered a little.
Reaching out, Holt caught hold of her arm.
“Where is the way in?” Melina wanted to know.
“Tomorrow,” Holt reasoned.
She shook her head, and water flew from the thick tendrils of hair. “Now,” she said, laying both hands on her belly.
“Might as well show her inside,” the Captain said. “If you don’t, we’ll be at this all day.”
The old man was right. Melina was already prowling back and forth like a caged cat, and she looked as though she’d climb the drain pipe if that was what she had to do to get to Gabe.
Holt took her arm, and this time he didn’t let her pull away. Gabe stared down from his cell, looking as if he might chew his way past those bars and jump two stories to the ground. “This way,” Holt said.
“I’ll tend to the horses and then join you,” the Captain said, leaning from the saddle to catch hold of the Appaloosa’s reins. “After that, I’d accept a drink if you’re offering one.”
Holt merely nodded.
The Captain set out on his errand, and Holt squired Melina into the courthouse and up the stairs to the jail.
“No women allowed,” announced old Roy, sitting in a corner next to the window, watching the rain and whittling.
Holt ignored him. Took the keys down off the hook next to the inside door.
“Wait just a minute,” Roy protested. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“I heard,” Holt replied, working the lock and then putting the keys back in their place. “I just don’t give a damn.”
Melina streaked through the opening, and Holt followed.
“I could send for the marshal!” Roy called after them.
“He’s just downstairs, testifying in Judge Fellows’s courtroom.”
“You do that,” Holt replied, quickening his pace to catch up with Melina.
She strode past the other cells as if she knew exactly where Gabe was—and maybe she did.
Gabe was waiting at the front of his cell. “I told you I wanted her to stay in Waco!” he hissed, glaring at Holt.
“Maybe you should have told her,” Holt retorted.
“Why didn’t you send word, Gabe?” Melina asked, getting as close to the bars as she could with that stomach of hers. Holt could still feel it pressing against his back, during the long ride from Waco. “I did send word,” Gabe answered. His voice was harsh, but his eyes consumed Melina, and he reached through the bars to lay a hand to her cheek. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Melina, you shouldn’t have come here.”
“How could I stay away?” she demanded, covering his hand with her own.
“I’ll see if the Cap’n’s back from the livery stable,” Holt said, turning to go.
Gabe drew in a sharp breath. “The Cap’n? He’s with you?”
“I ran into him in Waco. He’s getting the horses some water and feed. He’ll be in for a word once you and Melina are through talking.”
Gabe nodded. “Did you ask him about Frank? Has the Cap’n seen him, or heard anything?”
Holt had broached the subject to Walton on the way out to the Parkinson place. Now, he shook his head. “He’s got no more idea where Corrales is than we do.”
A ruckus started up out in the front office, and Holt figured the Captain had completed the horse business. He backtracked with some haste, for fear Walton would lose patience with old Roy and get them all thrown in jail.
Sure enough, the Captain had the other man by the shirt collar, slammed up against the wall. Roy’s eyes were bugging out and he was sputtering, his wind cut off by Captain Jack’s grip.
“Let him go,” Holt said, without particular urgency.
“You left that star behind in Waco, remember?”
With a flourish, the Captain released the jailer and watched with interest as he struggled for breath.
“We got rules around here!” Roy wailed. “And you can’t just go around chokin’ folks!”
“The hell I can’t,” the Captain said. “You got any whiskey in this place?”
CHAPTER 13
THE FREIGHT WAGON had already arrived when Lorelei, Angelina and Raul got to the ranch, and it was stuck up to its axels in mud. Raul drew the buckboard up alongside and leaped down.
“I put the load inside that old house there!” the driver shouted, in an effort to be heard over the torrent. “Help me unhitch this team.”
Raul nodded, and Angelina and Lorelei climbed down on their own. Lorelei would have stayed with the men, but Angelina took her arm and dragged her out of the rain.
“It’s an omen,” the older woman said, with conviction, when they stood under the relative shelter of the leaking roof.
Lorelei bent to open the rusted door of the woodstove, and it creaked on its hinges. “Is that a mouse’s nest?” she asked, peering inside.
“Madre de Dios,” said Angelina.
Lorelei shut the stove and turned to survey the piles of provisions, mostly in crates stacked helter-skelter around the room. She picked up a shiny new ax and tested its heft, then set it carefully in a corner. “We won’t need a fire, anyway. It’s hot as the far corner of Hades, even with this rain.”
Angelina went to the door, probably watching for Raul.
Lorelei bent over the tent pole, thinking it was the size of a ship’s mast, and wondered if the canvas could be unwrapped and draped over the roof. Then she picked through the crates until she found the shiny new coffeepot. It was good-sized, for she expected to entertain as soon as she was settled. And the ranch hands—once she hired them and bought some cattle—would want their coffee.
“We’ll have to have a fire after all,” she said, starting for the door.
Angelina turned to look at her. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Why, to set the pot in the rain,” Lorelei said, surprised.
Angelina opened her mouth, closed it again, and went out to join Raul and the driver, who were hobbling the horses.
Lorelei centered the pot in the middle of the dooryard, pleased with the prospect of hot coffee, and went back inside. Purposefully, she emptied a crate, splintered