The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda

Chapter 6

Johnny Bronco didn’t carry a gun.

That was one of the conclusions Lauren came to after a thorough search of his saddlebags and bedroll. Left hobbled and alone, she’d wasted perhaps a minute feeling sorry for herself, after which she’d gotten down to business. The first order of which was to find herself some sort of weapon. If she could find one, something she could hide away, she’d bide her time…

He hadn’t had a gun on him when he’d left the tent, she’d swear to that. Because where would he have hidden it? In those Levis that hugged his hips and thighs like skin, or under the faded blue shirt, washed so thin it allowed the subtle sculpting of the muscles in his back to show through?

An ankle holster, perhaps? But she’d watched him pull on his boots, and hadn’t seen any evidence of such a thing.

So, if he had a gun, a weapon of any kind, she reasoned, it must be here among his things.

The search hadn’t taken long; how many hiding places did a tent offer? Which was a good thing, Lauren thought, considering how hard it was to navigate even the short distance from her sleeping bag to his. With her ankles cuffed together she had to improvise a sort of crablike movement, scuttling on her side while attempting to keep the insides of her knees from touching each other. It wasn’t pretty, and she worked up a good sweat, but it got the job done.

The first thing she did was roll out his bedroll, which, unlike her puffy zippered modern sleeping bag, consisted of a thin waterproof pad and a single woolen blanket that, even with the added bulk of the poncho, would roll up tightly enough to tie onto the back of a saddle. She took the pad, blanket and poncho, one at a time, and shook them. That netted her nothing but some golden dust motes to swirl in the shafts of sunlight that were just stabbing through the pine trees.

Next, she hitched herself onto the blanket, gingerly pulled the saddlebags across her lap, unbuckled the flaps and dumped all the contents onto the blanket beside her. She wasn’t careful; so what if he knew? Serve him right for leaving her.

One by one she explored and returned each item to the saddlebags. First the clothing: several pairs of socks, rolled into hard little bundles; two pairs of plain white briefs; one plain white T-shirt, an extra pair of jeans and two more long-sleeved cotton shirts; two large bandanna-type handkerchiefs. All these, which were very clean and neatly rolled, she shook out and then carefully rerolled-except for one of the shirts. Some unforeseen impulse made her bring it to her face, bury her nose in the soft folds and inhale the clean-laundry smells of strong detergent and desert sunshine.

Yes, she thought, as her breath caught, that was part of the scent she remembered, dancing with him. Indefinably stirred, she hurriedly wadded up the shirt and stuffed it back into the bag.

From the odds and ends on the blanket beside her, she picked out a bar of soap wrapped in a clean washcloth. It was green with whitish streaks in it and had been about half used up. She held that to her nose, as well, prepared this time for the jolt of recognition. It smelled faintly herbal.

Yes-that’s part of it, too. He’d smelled so good-of soap and clean laundry, desert sunshine and new sweat, traces of horse and a hint of tobacco smoke from the bar.

She paused, frowning. Something about that seemed wrong. Something… But she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

And then a crow began to squawk indignantly somewhere in the pine trees, reminding her of the task at hand and the passing of time. She stuffed the remaining items back into the saddlebag-the soap once again wrapped in its washcloth, a toothbrush and battery-operated shaver, a plastic-bristled hairbrush.

Finally, only one last item remained. She hesitated, then reached for it, picked it up and held it in her hands. Turned it over, felt the smooth texture of old leather with her fingertips. His wallet, slightly curved, molded to the shape of the masculine buttock against which it normally rested. Did she only imagine that it felt warm, almost as if it had only just come from that intimate contact?

No, she thought. I can’t. It’s unconscionable. It couldn’t possibly conceal a weapon. There’s no earthly reason for me to look in his wallet.

But all’s fair in love and war-and this was definitely war!

With her heart thumping, she opened the wallet. And found herself staring at an Arizona driver’s license. How weird to think of Johnny Bronco with a driver’s license! She associated him with horses, and getting tossed out of a saloon on his backside, and Gil McCullough saying to his men, “See he gets home.”

John Bracco. So that was his name. Not Johnny Bronco, after all. And no surprise there. It was such a theatrical name, come to think of it, not a real name at all.

How weird it felt, strangely disorienting, sobering, to see the man summarized like this-like his clothes, all rolled into one neat package. To Lauren, raised by society’s rules, educated to believe in its conventions, trained in the practice of law, this commonly accepted proof of identity seemed like a verification of his humanness. It made him real, finally. Not only that, it made him ordinary. Not the Indian mystic on horseback, the cowboy charmer in the honky-tonk bar. Not a misguided revolutionary quoting the Declaration of Independence, or heartless kidnapper. Only a human being. A man named John Bracco.

There were credit cards in that same name-American Express and a VISA that was also an ATM card-and a discount card for a supermarket. A social-security card. And tucked away out of sight behind an expired hunting license, a tattered military ID. Forty-seven dollars in cash and two folded-up credit-card receipts for gasoline-and a single photograph.

It was a black-and-white snapshot, old, the corners softened and bent, of a man and a boy. The man was narrow-hipped and barrel-chested and had the broad cheekbones and faintly Asiatic features of the Apache. He wore dark jeans and a long-sleeved dark Western-style shirt, with a lighter-colored bandanna tied around his neck, and a light-colored straw cowboy hat with the brim rolled almost to a point in front. He was smiling, and he faced the camera with a cocky impatient air, as if he was only humoring the photographer for that one moment, no more. Come on, take the picture already. One hand rested on the head of a boy, probably six or seven, with thick straight black hair chopped short but defying discipline. The child had fierce dark eyes and a shy sweet smile.

Half-breed. The word flashed unwanted into her mind, shaming her. It was a hateful term, as bad as any of the ethnic slurs she’d been taught all her life to loathe and reject, but in spite of that, she couldn’t make it go away. Half-breed.

All right, since it wouldn’t leave her alone, she would think about it, plunge into the enigma that was John Bracco.

He was half Apache, half white-she already knew that. For some reason-and at that moment she couldn’t think why-she’d just assumed it was his father who was white, his mother Apache. But the man in the photograph was almost certainly Bronco’s father, the drunk who had died in a car crash, according to Gil McCullough, when Bronco was twelve. Probably, Lauren mused, it was his mother who had been the photographer, indulged by her menfolk out of love and familial obligation. Lauren had seen the same smiles, fixed and long-suffering, on her own father’s and brother’s faces.

Where was his mother now? McCullough hadn’t mentioned her. So what had become of her? As she stared down at the photograph in her hands, Lauren was seized by a certainty that the answer to that question was somehow important.

“Find what you were looking for?”

She started violently and uttered a sharp swear word, one her own prim-and-proper mother would never have tolerated but still one of the most satisfying available. Instinctively, she had flattened the photo against her chest as if to hide it from view. I won’t apologize, she thought. I won’t.

“Dammit, you scared me.” She glared indignantly at Bronco, crouched in the tent opening with a cardboard box balanced on one knee. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people.”

“Looks to me like maybe I should,” he said mildly as he set the box to one side, clearing the way for his own entry. He rose but had to duck his head as he came through the opening.

Lauren followed him with her eyes, heart thumping, primed for battle.

But he barely glanced her way and didn’t acknowledge the photograph at all. Instead, he crouched beside the box once more and began taking things out of it, one by one. His movements were unhurried, businesslike. Did she