A Big Sky Christmas Read online

  Bodie shrugged. “That’s not up to me. Mr. MacCallister is the wagon master, and the immigrants have a captain they’ve elected. They’d be the ones to decide who comes along and who doesn’t.”

  Something nagged at Jamie, just a vague feeling that maybe not everything was as it appeared to be on the surface. But having three more experienced men along on the journey might not be a bad idea. The wagons were bound to run into trouble somewhere along the way, the sort of trouble that meant gunplay. Even though Mahaffey and Pearsoll had a rough, hard-bitten look about them, they might make good allies. “If it’s all right with Captain Hendricks, it’s all right with me. That is, if you vouch for these fellas, Bodie.”

  “Sure,” Bodie said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  That was something Jamie wondered about, and he resolved to ask Bodie about it later, in private.

  “One thing,” Jamie went on. “You boys will have to earn your keep if you travel with this train. Bodie’s signed on as a scout, and I could use some more pairs of eyes and ears, if you’re interested.”

  “Why, that sounds like a bang-up idea, Mr. MacCallister,” Jake said. “We’d be glad to work as scouts, wouldn’t we, boys?”

  “Sure,” Mahaffey said, and Pearsoll just shrugged and grunted his assent.

  Jamie turned Sundown toward the front of the train again. “Come on,” he told the newcomers. “We’ll go see Captain Hendricks and make sure it’s all right with him. I expect it will be, though.”

  In a matter of moments, he had gone from having barely enough scouts to maybe having too many, Jamie thought as he rode toward the front of the train. But considering the wild country they would be traversing before they reached their destination, maybe it wasn’t possible to have too many scouts.

  Or too many men who were good with a gun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Bodie’s head was spinning. Of all the people he might have run into on the way to Montana, Jake Lucas, Clete Mahaffey, and Dave Pearsoll were just about the last ones he would have expected. He had a bunch of questions for them, starting with their reasons for leaving the gang . . . and whether or not they had managed to get their share of the loot from Eldon Swint.

  That had to wait until later, though. He couldn’t say anything about it while Jamie or the other scouts were around. He didn’t want to reveal his outlaw past to them. The wagon train was his chance to start over. Maybe his last chance.

  When he dared to let himself think about it, he thought that Savannah might be a chance to start over, too. She needed one, and so did he.

  Why not together?

  Bodie put that thought out of his head for the time being. When they talked to Captain Hendricks, he acknowledged that he and Jake and the other two men had been acquainted for a while and that he trusted them.

  “That’s good enough for me, I suppose,” Hendricks said. “I realize I’ve known you only a very short time, Mr. Cantrell, but Mr. MacCallister seems to trust you. That carries a great deal of weight with me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Bodie said. “I’ll try to live up to his trust, and yours as well.”

  He didn’t get a chance to talk to Jake privately until the wagons had stopped for the midday meal and to let the teams rest again. Jake was standing on the riverbank, watering his horse, when Bodie walked over to join him.

  “I don’t reckon I’ve ever been as surprised in my life as I was when I saw you,” Bodie said quietly.

  “Why?” Jake asked. “You didn’t think I was gonna stay with that lobo wolf Swint forever, did you?”

  “You never said anything about leaving.”

  “Maybe that’s because you never put the idea in my head until now,” Jake said with a shrug. “When Swint told me you were gone, I asked myself why not? It was as good a time as any to make a break. I’ll be honest with you, Bodie. Sooner or later, Eldon was gonna land us smack-dab in some trouble that we couldn’t shoot our way out of. I don’t want to wind up dancin’ at the end of a rope, thrown in a cheap pine box, and stuck in some potter’s field. That’s what was gonna happen if we kept ridin’ the owlhoot.”

  “Where we’re going, wolves may wind up scattering your bones.”

  “That’s a chance I’ll take. When I said I was leavin’, Clete and Dave wanted to come with me. They’re as tired of Swint’s bull as I was.”

  Bodie lowered his voice to a whisper. “What about the money? Did you get him to give you your share?”

  “We did better than that,” Jake said with his quick grin. “We talked him into givin’ us your share, too, so we could deliver it to you when we caught up. He tried to pull that ol’ business about how if somebody left the gang, they didn’t get what was comin’ to ’em. That didn’t fly, and we told him so. He backed down.”

  Until his own confrontation with Eldon Swint, Bodie might not have believed that was possible. He had seen for himself, though, that Swint might be more bluster than real threat, especially when the odds weren’t overwhelmingly on his side. He could believe that Swint hadn’t wanted to stand up to Jake, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll.

  “You must have been mighty sure I was with the wagon train, if you figured on bringing my share of the loot with you.”

  Jake chuckled. “Well, if we guessed wrong and hadn’t found you, I reckon we would’ve just had to keep that money ourselves. It would have been a shame, but we could’ve brung ourselves to do it.”

  Bodie let out a wry laugh and shook his head. “Well, you’re here now, and that’s all that matters, I reckon. You plan to stay with the wagon train all the way to Montana?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see about that. Right now all that matters is that we’re on the move again, and it feels mighty good. I was already tired of that town. Too many people crowdin’ around all the time. I’m a Texas boy. Used to wide open spaces all around me, you know.”

  Bodie nodded. “From what I’ve heard, there’ll be plenty of those where we’re going.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Back in Kansas City, Eldon Swint stirred in the grimy sheets of his hotel room bed. Somebody muttered and moaned beside him. Unable to recall which of the soiled doves he had brought from the Bella Royale the night before, he raised himself on an elbow so he could look over at his companion.

  The tangled mass of hennaed hair on the other pillow looked vaguely familiar. Harriet? Hermione? Helen, that was it, he told himself . . . not that it really mattered to him what the dove’s name was.

  He reached over and smacked a beefy hip under the sheet.

  Helen groaned again, rolled over, and opened her eyes to slits, wincing at the morning light coming in through the gap between the threadbare curtains over the room’s lone window. “What time is it?” she muttered.

  “Time for you to get up and haul yourself out of here,” Swint told her.

  She didn’t seem to have heard his answer. “You can’t expect to go again this mornin’. You didn’t pay me that much, honey.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to go again. I said you need to get out.”

  To emphasize his point, Swint planted a bare foot against her rump and shoved. Helen let out a yelp of dismay as she slid out of the bed. The thud as she hit the floor cut off her cry.

  She came up angry, exclaiming, “You son of a—”

  Swint had already swung his legs out of bed and stood up. Standing on the far side of the bed, his bony frame clad only in the bottom half of a pair of long underwear, he turned his head to look at her. The ice-cold menace in his slate-gray eyes made her shut up in a hurry.

  “You don’t have to treat me so mean.” Helen pouted as she started looking around for her dress. She still wore stockings rolled just above her knees, and those stockings, her slippers, and the dress were the only things she had been wearing when Swint brought her to the hotel the previous night.

  The bare wood floor was cold against the soles of Swint’s feet as he went over to a small table where some of his gear was piled. He pawed through it until he fou
nd one of the thin black cheroots he favored and a match. He snapped the lucifer to life with his thumbnail and set fire to the gasper. He didn’t have any interest in watching the soiled dove get dressed. The night before, he had thought she was beautiful, but a bottle of rotgut whiskey improved any woman’s looks immeasurably.

  “Are you coming to the Bella Royale tonight, honey?” Helen asked behind him.

  “More than likely,” Swint replied without looking around. He stared out the window instead.

  “Well, I’ll be there. You’ll look for me, won’t you, honey?”

  “We’ll see,” Swint said dully.

  His mouth tasted like something had crawled into it and died. His head was throbbing a little from all the who-hit-John he’d guzzled down the night before. His guts roiled unpleasantly. He had hoped the cheroot would help with those problems, but it wasn’t doing a blasted bit of good.

  Helen tried again. “I had a mighty fine time with you last night.”

  “Forget it,” Swint snapped. “Just get out.”

  She sniffed angrily, and a moment later the door slammed behind her on her way out of the room. Swint grimaced as the noise made his head throb harder. It felt like imps straight from Hades were capering around inside his skull, banging on it with ball-peen hammers.

  Another memory stole back into his thoughts. Bodie Cantrell had quit the gang last night, he recalled with a scowl. That infuriated him. After all he’d done for Cantrell, only to be treated like that!

  At least Cantrell hadn’t insisted on getting his share of the loot. Swint would let the rest of the gang think that he had. That way Swint could pocket it for himself.

  Thinking about the money made him turn away from the window. When he’d brought Helen back to the hotel, he had hefted the saddlebags before they got down to business. No matter how drunk he was, he always checked on the loot.

  As the cheroot dangled from his lips, he had the urge to let some of those double eagles trickle through his fingers. That always made him feel better. He went to the wardrobe where he’d stashed the saddlebags, reached inside, and picked up one of them. The weight was comforting, and so was the clink of coins as he set the bags on the table. He unfastened one of the pouches and thrust his hand inside.

  He knew instantly that something was wrong. His fingers touched coins, all right, but they weren’t the right size to be double eagles. And there was something else in the pouch . . .

  Rocks.

  Swint’s teeth clamped down on the cheroot so hard that he bit off the end and the thin black twisted cylinder fell onto the table next to the saddlebags. Swint ignored it and spat out the piece left in his mouth. He upended the pouch and stared in shock and disbelief at the rocks that fell out onto the table, along with a handful of pennies.

  After a moment, he ripped the other pouch open and dumped its contents as well. More rocks and pennies spilled out. Bellowing a curse, Swint lunged for the wardrobe to get the other saddlebags.

  A minute later, he had confirmed the awful truth.

  Somebody had stolen all the loot.

  Choking with fury, Swint yanked his revolver from the holster attached to the coiled shell belt lying on the table. He threw the door open and ran out into the hall, still wearing just the long underwear.

  Two doors down the corridor, Swint hammered on the panel of Charley Green’s room and yelled, “Charley! Damn it, Charley, get out here!”

  When Green opened the door wearing a pair of baggy long-handles, he looked just as bleary-eyed as Swint had been upon first awakening. He coughed and cleared his throat. “Eldon, what’s wrong?”

  Swint started to blurt out that the loot was gone, but then he stopped himself. It might not be smart to let the others know what had happened until he figured it out himself. He grated, “Who was standin’ guard here last night?”

  Green raked his fingers through his tangled hair and frowned. “I dunno,” he said after a second. “You must’ve seen ’em when you came in.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t remember—” Swint stopped short as a couple faces locked into place in his mind. “Wait a minute. Mahaffey and Pearsoll. They were the ones.”

  “Well, there you go, then,” Green said as he started to turn away and close the door. Clearly, he didn’t grasp the depth of the problem.

  Swint slapped his free hand against the door. “Where are they?” he demanded.

  “What? Who?” Green gave his head a violent shake as if he were trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain. “Oh, you mean Mahaffey and Pearsoll. Shoot, I don’t know. I don’t keep track of where everybody is.”

  “We’ve got to find them,” Swint said. “Get dressed. Now!”

  He stomped back to his room and started pulling on his clothes. Once he was dressed and had his gun belt strapped around his hips, he rousted out the other members of the gang. Green, still confused, helped him.

  Within ten minutes, everybody was gathered in Swint’s room, with three notable exceptions: Clete Mahaffey and Dave Pearsoll, who had been guarding the loot the night before . . . and Three-Finger Jake Lucas.

  Swint questioned his men, his angry voice lashing them like a whip. Nobody admitted to having seen Mahaffey, Pearsoll, or Lucas since the previous night. Swint ordered them to spread out through the area and conduct a search. There were plenty of saloons, brothels, dance halls, and gambling dens where the three men might be.

  He had an unhappy feeling that they wouldn’t be found in any of those places.

  By mid-morning the conclusion was inescapable. Lucas and the other two were gone. Only one reason for their disappearance made sense. They had stolen the loot from the train robbery and lit a shuck out of Kansas City.

  Swint had no choice but to break the news to his men. They took it with startled curses, followed by bitter anger.

  “What are we gonna do, Eldon?” Charley Green asked when the hubbub in Swint’s room subsided.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna find those damned double-crossers and get our money back! And when we do . . . those three are going to wish they’d never been born.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Gideon Kane was in the habit of rising late. There was no reason for him not to, since he had never done an actual day’s work in his life. Things like that were for lesser men.

  In the mansion on the outskirts of Kansas City, breakfast and coffee were waiting for him on a table covered with a fine linen cloth in the sitting room next to his bedroom, even though it was late enough that most people were starting to think about their midday meal. He belted a silk dressing gown around his waist and sat down to eat.

  A bell pull hung within reach. Kane tugged on the cord, and a moment later his butler, Jenkins, appeared in the doorway. “Yes, sir?”

  Kane sipped from the fine bone china cup and then asked, “Is Harrison here?”

  “Yes, sir, he’s in your study. He arrived a short time ago and said that he had a report for you when you woke up. I assumed that’s where you would want to receive it after you’d eaten.”

  “Normally, yes. I’m feeling rather impatient this morning, however. Send him up here.”

  Jenkins inclined his head forward. “Yes, sir. Right away.”

  Kane went back to his breakfast.

  A few minutes later a knock sounded on the partially open sitting room door. Kane called, “Come in.”

  Eli Harrison stepped into the room. He was a tall, heavy-shouldered man with massive fists and a face like a slab of raw meat. He had worked for the Kane family in a number of capacities over the years, starting out as a stableman.

  Now he worked exclusively for Gideon Kane as a troubleshooter of sorts. Whenever Kane had a problem, no matter what it was, Harrison found a way to take care of it. He was brutal when he had to be and utterly ruthless.

  Without looking up, Kane said, “I hope you’re here to tell me that you’ve located that girl and brought her here.”

  “I wish I could, Mr. Kane,” Harriso
n said bluntly, “but my men haven’t turned up any sign of her yet.”

  “You kept watch on the hotel where that troupe of entertainers is staying?”

  “I sent a couple men to do that.” Harrison didn’t sound happy about what he had to say next. “They got sidetracked. One of ’em felt like he had to stop and pay off a gambling debt. They wound up, ah, gettin’ mixed up in a game for a while.”

  Kane frowned as he laid aside the spoon he had been using. “So the hotel went unguarded?”

  “Not for long. Only about an hour.”

  Kane felt his face warming with anger. Harrison knew as well as he did that a lot of things could happen in an hour.

  “I want those two fools fired,” Kane snapped.

  “Already done it, sir.” Harrison lifted one of his huge fists. The knuckles were skinned and raw. “Had a talk with ’em about falling down on the job, too.”

  “You have men watching the hotel now?”

  “Yes, sir. If she’s still there, we’ll pick her up whenever she goes out.”

  Jenkins stepped into the doorway behind Harrison. He cleared his throat. “A note was delivered for you earlier this morning, sir.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  “I don’t know.” Jenkins lifted a piece of paper that was folded and sealed with wax. “I have it here.”

  Kane pushed his empty plate aside and made a curt gesture toward the table. Jenkins crossed the room and placed the note on the linen. Kane picked it up and ripped the seal open.

  His eyes scanned the words written in a feminine hand on the paper. More anger welled up inside him. He started to crumple the note, then stopped, set it down again, smoothed the creases from it. “Bring me O’Hanlon,” he said softly.

  “Sir?” Jenkins murmured.

  “I’m talking to Eli.” Kane stared coldly at Harrison. “O’Hanlon, the head of that acting troupe. Bring him here. Now.”