sit down on that bench over yonder.”
“I’ll keep you company,” Jeffries said to her. He had been guarding her most of the night. Garth wondered idly if Jeffries had taken any liberties with her. She didn’t seem any more upset than usual, so he supposed not.
If Jeffries wanted the woman, he could have her as far as Garth was concerned…but only when this was over and Joshua was free again. Until that goal had been accomplished, nothing else mattered.
Garth looked at the clock again. Time sure passed slow when you were waiting to kill people.
Chapter 36
Maggie couldn’t get Ike and Caleb out of her mind. Images of her husband and son filled her brain, threatening to crowd out everything else. She imagined them both dead, lying on the barren sand. Or else savaged by scavengers…
She knew she couldn’t afford to give in to despair, so she forced those thoughts out of her head as she stood there in the train station, waiting. In addition to Garth and Jeffries, three more of the outlaws had joined them on the platform, leaving nine men to guard the prisoners in the hotel. The remaining outlaw was sitting in the clerk’s cubicle, out of sight, with a gun in his hand to make sure the man didn’t try any tricks.
Garth had picked three men who didn’t look quite as hard-bitten as the others. In their worn range clothes, they could have been cowboys catching a ride on the train in hopes of finding jobs somewhere else. In his dusty black suit, Jeffries looked like a businessman, or possibly a gambler.
Garth himself had the most sinister appearance of those who would be boarding the train. It might have been smarter for him to trust that job to someone else, but he wasn’t going to do that. He was too worried about something else going wrong, Maggie knew.
It did seem that every time Garth and the other outlaws tried to free Joshua Shade, Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves ruined those plans, along with Marshal Thorpe and the other deputy, of course. Having seen Bodine in action, Maggie knew just how dangerous he was, and from what she had heard the outlaws saying, Sam Two Wolves was almost as fast and deadly with a gun.
Eventually, though, the odds had to catch up to them. They couldn’t keep on defeating a much larger force again and again. Maggie wasn’t even sure she wanted them to. It was only a slender hope that the gang would reunite her with Ike and Caleb and then let them all go if they rescued Joshua Shade, but it was better than no hope at all.
“Train’s comin’,” Garth said from the edge of the platform where he was peering eastward.
Maggie moved forward and looked in that direction herself. She saw smoke rising from the locomotive’s stack as the wheels churned along the rails. She couldn’t make out the train itself very well at first, but as it came closer, she could see it better.
In less than five minutes, the train rolled into the station, the huge, noisy locomotive pulling on past it so that the passenger and freight cars lined up with the platform. As the cars jolted and clattered to a stop, the conductor, in his blue suit and black cap, swung down from the steps attached to one of the passenger cars.
“Howdy, Harry!” he called to the clerk behind the ticket window. “Any freight goin’ out?”
“Not today, Brett,” the clerk replied. “Just a few passengers.”
The conductor looked surprised. “With the trestle being down and no trains rolling for a while, I figured the freight would’ve backed up.”
“I guess nobody’s shipping anything right now,” the clerk said. He looked and sounded nervous to Maggie, but the conductor didn’t seem to notice. She supposed she might be imagining it.
“All right, folks, everybody on board,” the conductor called to Maggie, Garth, Jeffries, and the other men. “If there’s no freight to load, we won’t be stopped long.”
Maggie carried a carpetbag that had some clothes stuffed in it just to give it some weight. The outlaws had their saddles, rifles, and warbags. A porter slid back the door of the baggage car and loaded the bags while the passengers climbed on board. The clerk had prepared authentic tickets for all of them, so the conductor had nothing to be suspicious about there.
He punched the tickets and ushered the passengers into the car. As Maggie passed him, he touched the brim of his cap and said, “I hope you’re comfortable traveling with us, ma’am. If you’d like a pillow or a blanket, just let me know.”
“Thank you, sir,” Maggie forced herself to say. She hoped her voice sounded normal. She thought it did.
“Next stop where you can stretch your limbs will be Tucson. We stop once between here and there, but only to take on water.”
She wasn’t sure why he was telling her this, maybe just to make conversation, but she managed to smile and nod and say, “That will be fine.”
She sat down on an empty bench. There were quite a few of them, because the train wasn’t crowded. Garth lowered himself onto the bench across the aisle from her, evidently wanting to keep an eye on her.
From the things she had heard Garth and Jeffries talking about, and the things that Garth had admitted openly, she had a pretty clear idea of the outlaws’ plan. After isolating the town by cutting the telegraph wires and hazing off all the horses in the settlement, the rest of the gang would follow the train. Garth and the other outlaws on board would take over the train as it approached the water stop where Thorpe, Bodine, and Two Wolves had to be waiting with Joshua Shade. They wouldn’t know anything was wrong until it was too late. Once they were on board and settled in for the trip, the outlaws would stop the train again and the rest of the gang would swoop in to reinforce Garth and his men. The marshal and his companions would be taken by surprise and trapped.
Maggie thought this plan stood a good chance of working, more so than the other attempts the gang had made to free Shade. They would probably rob the train while they were at it, just as they had looted Pancake Flats when the opportunity presented itself.
Once Shade was in charge again, the gang would rebuild itself in no time, replacing the men who had been lost in the fighting so far, and before you knew it, they would be terrorizing the territory again under the leadership of
