Megan ran out of air, and Jenny just said, “Yes. What Megan said, I mean.” She felt herself flush hotly and took a quick sip of her soda pop.
It was Abigail who saved her. She reached over and put a hand on Rafe’s arm. “Can I get you somethin’, honey?”
Rafe picked a little chunk of ice out of the bowl and ran it over his forehead. “A beer, if you wouldn’t mind, Abby.”
She said, “No problem at all,” and stood up. Before she left, though, she said, “Rafe, honey, why don’t you tell the girls, here, how you just beat the dust storm to town? I swan, I would’a been scared to death!”
He grinned. “Don’t take much to scare you, does it, Abby?”
She laughed, and he just kept grinning, even as he turned back toward the girls. “How old are you two? Unless it’s uncalled for to ask, I mean.”
Megan said, a little too proudly, “I’m twenty-one. Jenny, here, is only nineteen.”
Oh, terrific. Now she was marked as the baby of the group. She was going to have a word or two with Megan later. That was for sure! As calmly as she could, she said, “But I’ll be twenty come June.”
There. That was better.
“And your brother’s the famous Jason Fury I been hearin’ so much about?”
Jenny had never heard that he was famous, but she said, “Yes, I guess so. But he’s just my brother.”
Rafe Lynch ran the last of his ice over his forehead again, then popped it into his mouth. He pointed an index finger at Jenny and said, “You’re funny. Why, I heard about him back in California! Somethin’ about a couple a’ Indian attacks. And yeah, somethin’ else . . .” He smiled and thumped his temple. “It’s gone right outta my head for the time bein’.”
Abigail was back, and slid his beer across the table before she sat down again. “You tell ’em yet how you beat the dust storm?”
Jenny wanted to know what the other thing was that he’d heard, but held her tongue while Rafe took the first sip of his beer. Megan, she noticed, was leaning forward eagerly. Way too eagerly for somebody who was supposed to be soft on her brother, Jason, she thought. That was something else she was going to have to talk to Meg about later on.
Rafe started talking about the storm, how he saw it coming on the horizon and nearly stopped. But then he saw signs of Apache far to the south, and hightailed it . . .
Jenny listened as raptly as Megan. He was so handsome and charming, and had little lines that fanned out from the corners of his deep blue eyes when he smiled or laughed. Even his name was wonderful. She’d never known anyone called Rafe before.
She was smitten.
Over in California, near the Pacific coast and the upstart town of Los Angeles, Ezra Welk sat at the back of his room at Maria’s place, listening to the morning birds singing over the desert while he smoked a cigar. He was a tall man, although he preferred to think of himself as compact, and studied the ash on the end of his cigar before he rolled if off on the edge of the sole of his boot.
He was alone in the room, and had been ever since seven, when the little spitfire he’d spent the night with had left. Her name had been Merlina, he thought. Hell. She was probably servicing some caballero downstairs right now, behind the back bar.
That’s where he’d found her, anyway. Quite the little bucking bronca, that gal.
He hoped her next “rider” was as satisfied as he was. He rolled the ash off the end of his cigar in the ashtray, this time—cut glass pretending to be crystal, he thought—and let out a sigh. He wasn’t that tired. Well, maybe a bit tuckered out from Senorita Merlina, but that’d pass. No, if he was tired of anything, he supposed it was just life itself.
That was a funny thing, wasn’t it? He couldn’t think of another way to put it, though, when a feller was sick and tired of, well, everything.
He took another drag on his cigar, then put it out before he stood up and gave his collar a tug. He supposed he’d best see about finding himself some breakfast, and then think about what to do.
This is all Benny Atkinson’s fault, he thought unpleasantly as he left his room and started downstairs. Why in hell did Benny have to show up in the first place?
West of Fury, the wagon train sat forlornly, broken and wind-whipped. Two of the wagons had blown clean over during the night, killing the occupants of one of them. The Banyons had managed to fall asleep somehow, Riley Havens guessed, and when their wagon went over, they were crushed by Martha’s chifforobe.
Ferris said it had taken two men with shovels to scrape up Darren’s skull.
Three of the other men had set off to dig a couple of holes, and it wouldn’t be very long before he was asked to come out and say some words over the dearly departed. What could he say? That Darren Banyon was the second to the cheapest cheapskate he’d ever met, but that he was a good man with his horses? And Martha Banyon . . . That she could be sharp tongued and had already caused more than one blowup in the troupe, but that she could sing so sweet and pretty that it could make a grown man go all gooey?
He supposed he should just say the best parts. He’d leave the Bible-thumping to a couple of the other travelers. They sure enough had a crop of them on this journey, including a real Catholic priest.
But he supposed that Sampson Davis, wherever he was, leveled the field, good and evil-wise. There was something just plain nasty about the man. It wasn’t in his voice or his looks or the way he carried himself, and so most people in the train liked him all right. But there was something . . . evil, that’s what it was, downright evil . . . lurking behind those eyes. Riley seldom wished any man ill, but, may the good Lord forgive him, he hoped Sampson Davis had died in the dust storm.
“Mr. Havens?” Young Bill Crachit, a sixteen-year-old on his own, and with his own wagon, stepped around to the tailgate where Riley was sitting. “I guess we’re ready for you, sir.”
Riley hopped down, then ground out his smoke under his boot. “Thanks, Bill,” he said as the two of them started toward the burial site. “Sampson Davis show up yet?”
