Matt shook his head. “No, there were a couple of other punchers there, and they said they’d tell the marshal what happened. I gave those fellas every chance not to turn it into a corpse-and-cartridge session.”
Thorpe grunted and said, “You walk a fine line, Bodine. All you gunslingers do. If it was up to me, I’d disarm the lot of you so you couldn’t go around killing each other.”
“Not in our lifetime, Marshal,” Matt said with a shake of his head. “And if something like that ever happened, I might just have to hunt me a new place to live, because this sure wouldn’t be the same country I grew up in.”
“Just try to stay out of trouble the rest of the time we’re here,” Thorpe said.
“Sure, Marshal. I always do.”
Sam just rolled his eyes at that.
A mile north of town, Maggie Winslow was riding along when several dark shapes suddenly appeared out of the shadows around her. She hadn’t seen them coming, and she gasped as she instinctively jerked back on the reins.
“Take it easy, girl,” Garth’s harsh voice said. Maggie recognized it instantly, and even though she knew the man was a cold-blooded killer, she relaxed a little.
Better the devil you know, as the old saying went, than one you didn’t know.
“What did you find out?” Garth asked. “Is there a train comin’ in tonight?”
“First, tell me about Ike and Caleb,” Maggie said with more than a hint of stubbornness in her voice. “Are they all right?”
“Sure they are. The tyke’s sound asleep.”
“What about Ike? Is he awake?”
“Not yet,” Garth admitted grudgingly. “I’m sure he’s gonna be fine, though. Like I told you, when a fella gets walloped on the head like that, he needs some time to sleep it off.”
Deep down, Maggie didn’t believe him, no matter how much she wanted to. She had a terrible feeling that Ike would never wake up, that she would never hear her husband’s laugh or feel his arms around her again.
But there was nothing she could do for him other than what she was already doing, so when Garth asked again about the train, she said, “There won’t be a train. Not tonight, and probably not tomorrow either. A flash flood washed out a trestle east of here, at a place called Bowtie Canyon. The trains aren’t running in either direction until it gets repaired.”
One of the other men who had met her was Gonzalez, who seemed to be at Garth’s side most of the time. Maggie suspected that was because the Mexican was ambitious and was watching for a chance to take over the gang. Jeffries was the same way.
Gonzalez said, “That’s lucky for us, no? Gives us more time to figure out a way to get the rev’rend away from them.”
Garth didn’t answer Gonzalez. Instead, he asked Maggie, “Where are they holdin’ Joshua? The local jail?”
She shook her head. “No, I saw the wagon they have him in. They were taking it into a barn, probably the local livery stable.”
“Are you sure they weren’t just puttin’ it away after lockin’ up Joshua somewheres else?”
“I don’t think so. The door on the back was still locked. I saw the padlock, and it was fastened. And the way the marshal and the other men were watching, they were still on guard. To tell you the truth, I didn’t see a jail, and I looked up and down both sides of the only street.”
“So the place is too small to have a jail,” Garth mused. “They’re fortin’ up inside the livery instead. That ain’t a bad idea. What’s the buildin’ made of?”
“Adobe.”
“What about the roof?”
“I’m not sure. Some sort of tile.”
Gonzalez made a disgusted sound. “So we can’t burn ’em out very easy.”
“How many windows does the place have?” Garth asked.
Maggie took a deep breath. She hadn’t even realized that she’d been noticing such things, but she was certain she was right as she replied, “I don’t know, but not many. I didn’t see any on the front, and maybe one or two on the sides.”
“So they can cover ’em all,” Garth said. He scratched his jaw in thought. “If we rush the place, we’re gonna lose a lot of men, especially with Bodine and Two Wolves in there.”
Maggie caught her bottom lip between her teeth. She hadn’t said anything so far about meeting Matt Bodine, and she decided it would be better not to. She didn’t want Garth and the others suspecting her of some sort of double cross, even though her encounter with Matt Bodine hadn’t had anything to do with Joshua Shade.
“We’ll have to think of some other way to flush ’em out into the open,” Garth went on. “At least we’ve got a little bit of time.”
He reached toward her. Maggie flinched, but Garth just took hold of her wrist, pulled her hand toward him, and pressed something into her palm. She felt the crinkle of money.
“Ride on back to town,” he told her. “Find a hotel or a boardin’ house or some such place to stay. Keep your eyes and ears open, and if you hear anything about a train comin’, you hightail it out here and let us know.”
“How…how will I find you?”
“Don’t worry about that. We’ll be keepin’ an eye on you, and if you start in this direction, we’ll know it.”
