Blood Bond: Deadly Road to Yuma

“Thanks, Cyrus. That’s all we’re asking.”

Wiley left the office, and Matt barred the door after him. He shook his head and looked disgusted as he turned back to the others.

“You can’t blame them for feeling that way,” Sam said, knowing what his blood brother was thinking. “They’re worried about their businesses, their homes, and their families. They’ve been through one attack by that bunch, and they don’t want to have to go through another.”

“I suppose.” Matt shrugged. “And in the end it doesn’t really matter where Shade gets hanged, as long as he winds up at the end of a rope.”

“You can count on that,” Flagg said.

The next day dawned bright and hot. The air was so clear that Willard Garth had no trouble seeing with the naked eye what was going on in the town from the top of the hill where he hunkered about half a mile away.

He used a spyglass anyway, just to give himself a better view. He was careful to stay in the shade of a scrubby pine tree, though. He didn’t want the sun to reflect off the glass and maybe warn the townspeople that somebody was watching them.

“Have they started building a gallows?” Jeffries asked. He was sitting below the top of the hill with his back propped against another pine tree. His legs were stretched out in front of him, with the ankles crossed casually.

“No, no gallows,” Garth replied. A frown creased his forehead. “I thought they would’ve started by now.”

“Maybe they’re just going to hang Joshua from a cottonwood limb, or something like that,” Jeffries suggested.

“They ain’t gonna hang him at all,” Garth snapped. “We see anything like that fixin’ to happen, and we’ll be down there on top o’ those damn townies before they know what’s goin’ on.”

They had been unsuccessful at finding anyone else they could force to go into the settlement and spy for them. Garth had made the same mistake Shade had made before him—he had gotten rid of prisoners when they might have still been of some use to him.

But brooding over that misjudgment wouldn’t do any good. All they could do now was wait to see what happened…and hope that they got a chance to free Shade before it was too late.

The rest of the men, except for Gonzalez, had gathered at the bottom of the hill to wait for Garth’s orders. They were playing cards, checking over their guns, or just sitting on rocks and logs.

Gonzalez had ridden off a short time earlier to check on some dust he had seen rising in the distance to the northeast. Garth had agreed when Gonzalez told him he wanted to go have a look.

Garth was still peering through the spyglass when Jeffries suddenly muttered, “What the hell?” A commotion started down the hill among the other men.

Garth moved back so that he would be below the level of the hilltop before he stood up and turned to see what was going on. Up a draw that led to the bottom of the hill, a covered wagon trundled along. Gonzalez rode beside the wagon, his gun out and covering the man at the reins.

A grin creased Garth’s rugged face. A woman with a baby in her arms sat beside the driver of the wagon.

Gonzalez had found them another spy, a man who would be willing to do anything they asked in an effort to save the lives of his wife and child.

Of course, in the end, it wouldn’t do the poor bastard a damned bit of good…but he didn’t have to know that just yet.

Jeffries had gotten to his feet, too. “That Mexican’s got a nose for trouble,” he said with a grin of his own.

“Yeah, and now we got somebody to go into Arrowhead and find out what’s goin’ on down there,” Garth agreed. The two outlaws strode down the hill to join the others.

The wagon had come to a stop by the time they got there. The outlaws crowded around it, leering at the young woman on the seat, who was quite pretty and had blond curls peeping out from under her sunbonnet.

She probably would have been even prettier had she not been so pale and frightened-looking.

“Look what I found, Garth,” Gonzalez crowed with a big grin on his face. “These pilgrims were bound for Arrowhead. Gonna make a fresh start for themselves, si!”

Garth studied the face of the young sodbuster, who was as scared as his wife but also had anger lurking in his eyes.

“Forget about tryin’ anything funny, mister,” Garth warned him. “You wouldn’t have a chance, and then there’s no tellin’ what might happen to that wife and young’un o’ yours.”

“What do you want?” the man asked tightly. “We don’t have any money, if that’s what you’re after. It took all we had to outfit for the trip West. But if there’s anything in the wagon you want, it’s yours if you’ll just let us go.”

“You’ll be goin’, all right,” Garth told him. “Right on to Arrowhead, in fact. But you’ll be goin’ alone, and on one of our horses, not in this wagon.”

“Why shouldn’t he take the wagon?” Gonzalez asked. “As long as we keep the senora and the nino here, he got to come back.”

“People might notice a fella drivin’ into town in a wagon and then leavin’ a little while later,” Garth said. “But the town’s crowded today. They won’t pay no attention to a man on horseback who wanders in for a while and then wanders back out again.”

Jeffries nodded. “That’s a good point. I think you’re getting smarter, Willard.”

Garth felt like backhanding the smug son of a bitch, but he controlled the impulse. Instead, he reached up, grabbed the pilgrim by the shirt, and jerked him off the wagon seat. The woman screamed as Garth flung the man