Blood Bond: Deadly Road to Yuma

Gonzalez didn’t take offense. He had been called much worse in his time. He nodded and said, “I can go to the saloon and tell the hombres there that somebody offered me a bounty if I helped bust into the livery stable. I can pretend that I turned it down.”

Jeffries rubbed at his chin. “You really think that folks will be willing to help free Joshua when just about everybody in the territory is afraid of him?”

“Make the money high enough and they will,” Garth declared. “I was thinkin’ about offerin’ a thousand dollars.”

Gonzalez let out a whistle. “That’s a lot of dinero, all right.”

“Of course, we won’t actually pay it,” Garth went on. “And when Joshua’s free, we’ll loot the town like always.” He looked around at the others. “Sound like a good plan?”

“It does,” Jeffries admitted.

“Head on into town,” Garth told Gonzalez. “Remember, though, you’re not an owlhoot. You’re just a driftin’ vaquero.”

Gonzalez nodded. “Si, I can do that.”

He rode off, and Garth turned to the place in the shade of a cutbank where Winslow was stretched out with his wife and baby now beside him. Maggie held the little one like she never intended to let him go.

“All right, you’ve seen ’em,” Garth said to her. “You’d better get on back to town so’s you can keep an eye on things for us.”

“Please, just a little while longer,” she said as her arms tightened around the kid. “I’ve done everything you told me to do, haven’t I?”

“Yeah, you been pretty good about it,” Garth admitted. “But somethin’ could happen this afternoon that we need to know about.”

Maggie had used some of the money Garth had given her to buy a riding outfit. She was cute as she could be, he thought. Cute as a speckled pup, folks used to say. It fit her.

Garth ignored the pang of sympathy that went through him when he looked at her, though. He couldn’t afford feelings like that. He had to keep his attention fixed on the goal of freeing Joshua.

Like everybody else in the gang, Garth had been an owlhoot before joining up with Joshua Shade, but he’d never been a very successful one. That had all changed because of Joshua’s audacity and planning and leadership. Most folks probably thought Joshua was crazy, but Garth knew better. Joshua Shade was actually the smartest man Garth had ever known.

That was why they couldn’t take a chance on losing him. Garth motioned to Maggie Winslow and said, “Come on now. You got to go.”

She sighed, leaned over to kiss her unconscious husband on the forehead, and gave the young’un another hug. Then she stood up and handed him to Garth, taking the outlaw by surprise. Garth hung on to the kid, frowning.

“Take care of both of them,” Maggie said. “If you don’t…”

By Godfrey, was she threatening him? The gal had a lot of brass, Garth thought. More backbone than her husband, more than likely, which meant Ike Winslow was a lucky man…or at least, he would be if he survived.

Maggie mounted up and rode off, dust trailing from the hooves of her horse. Gonzalez was already gone on his errand. Now all Garth and the others could do was wait to see what happened.

“There’s bound to be a flag stop somewhere west of here,” Sam went on. “If we can get Shade out of here tonight without anybody knowing about it, we can flag down the train when it comes through there tomorrow and board it there.”

“We can’t move him in that wagon without folks seeing it,” Thorpe pointed out.

Sam shrugged. “We won’t use the wagon, unless it’s as part of a distraction so folks won’t know what we’re doing.”

“We can put him on horseback,” Matt said, eagerness showing in his voice as he grasped what his blood brother was talking about. “Stage some sort of ruckus to keep the town occupied and slip Shade out of here while that’s goin’ on.”

Thorpe looked back and forth between them. “Do you know how loco this sounds?” he demanded.

Matt and Sam both grinned. “We’ve been accused of bein’ a mite touched in the head before,” Matt admitted.

“But we’re still here when a lot of hombres have tried to put us in the ground,” Sam added.

“All right, I’ll listen,” Thorpe said with a sigh. “But I’m not making any promises about whether or not we’ll actually do it.”

“First of all,” Sam said, “we need to find out more about the railroad. We have to make sure the train will really be coming through tomorrow, and we’d better find out exactly where the next flag stop is.”

“I can do that,” Matt volunteered. He glanced at the gap between the shutters that were closed over the nearest window. The light that had been there earlier was fading. “It’s startin’ to get dark outside. I’ll head down to the depot and try to make sure not too many people see me.”

“All right, but don’t be gone long,” Sam said. “And be thinking about what we can to do throw everybody off the trail.”

Matt slipped out the back door, hearing Sam bar it securely behind him as soon as he was outside in the gathering twilight. From what Lopez had said, the cowboys who had a grudge against him for shooting Dub and Court were drinking in the saloon, stocking up on liquid courage. Their grudge against him, plus the bounty that had been placed on his head and the heads of those with him, would be enough to make the mob storm the livery stable, Matt knew, but it would probably take them at least a couple of hours to work themselves up to actually