A Texas Hill Country Christmas Read online

  But if Porter was part of that effort, it might make her think more kindly toward him, Ace mused. Maybe she wouldn’t be so set on marrying Oliver Hudson, who had allowed them to be captured. From the sound of what the driver had said, there really hadn’t been anything Hudson could have done to prevent it, but a woman might not take that into account.

  Ace broke out the last of his jerky and shared it with his two companions as they followed the trail deeper into the rolling, heavily wooded Hill Country.

  There were still patches of blue sky overhead, but clouds were gathering, too, as they seemed to almost every afternoon recently, and promised more rain later on.

  Evelyn Channing had to bite her lip to keep from whimpering. She was a mass of pain from the waist down, but of course it wasn’t proper for a lady to acknowledge that or even think too much about that region of her body.

  Every step the horse took made her discomfort worse, though. She had ridden before, but never for so long and never astride like a man. That humiliation was bad enough, but the way it made her hurt was worse.

  Weren’t they ever going to reach their destination, whatever it might be?

  Hudson looked over at her and asked, “Are you all right, my dear? You look a little pale.”

  Why wouldn’t she look pale, she thought, snatched off a stagecoach the way she had been and forced to endure hours of torment?

  She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of admitting just how miserable she really was, though, so she gritted her teeth instead and said, “I’m fine. I’m just ready to get wherever it is we’re going.”

  “It shouldn’t be much longer,” Hudson told her. “Tate, how much farther?”

  “Another mile or so, I’d say, boss,” the outlaw responded.

  It still boggled Evelyn’s mind when she heard one of the hard-bitten criminals address Hudson as “boss.” Yet she accepted that he really was the leader of this gang. There was no possible mistake about that.

  “The hideout’s a good one?”

  “You bet,” Tate said. “We got all the comforts of home in that cave.”

  Cave? Evelyn thought. They were taking her to a cave?

  A short time later, she found that was true. They rode across a creek and then up a slope toward a rocky bluff that bulged out like a grotesquely deformed skull. As they came closer, Evelyn saw a dark opening at its base. The sight caused a shiver to run through her. The skull-like formation made the opening resemble a mouth. A mouth waiting for an unwary victim to come close enough before snapping shut....

  She tried to put that thought out of her mind. It was just a cave, she told herself. Just a feature of the landscape that had nothing sinister about it.

  She didn’t quite succeed in making herself believe that.

  Besides, from what Hudson and Tate had said, this was where the outlaws had their headquarters and that was sinister enough in itself.

  A man appeared on top of the bluff, holding a rifle in one hand. He used the other hand to take off his hat and wave it back and forth over his head.

  Tate said, “That’s the all clear. We’ve got guards up there around the clock.”

  “Excellent,” Hudson said. “Have any lawmen come poking around up here?”

  Tate shook his head as they continued walking the horses toward the bluff.

  “Not so far. Of course, stoppin’ that stagecoach today is really the first job we’ve pulled in these parts. We’ve spent our time findin’ a good place to hole up and lookin’ for Brant.”

  “And now you’ve found both.”

  “Yeah. The church is a few miles from here. You want us to go ahead and grab him?”

  Hudson appeared to think about it for a moment and then shook his head.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I know how stubborn Sam can be. If we try to force him to tell us what we want to know, he’s liable to get all stiff-necked and refuse.”

  “Give me a sharp knife and an hour, and I’ll bet I can make him talk,” Tate said with an evil grin.

  “Maybe, maybe not. I can see him being so stubborn that he’d die before telling us. I’d like to have something better to use against him than just torture.”

  “What’ve you got in mind, boss?”

  “I’ll have to think on that,” Hudson said. He tipped his head back and looked up at the thickening clouds as thunder rumbled in the west. “It’s going to start raining again soon. Let’s get inside out of the weather.”

  Now that they had almost reached the cave, Evelyn could see that the opening was about twenty feet tall and maybe twice that wide. The bluff loomed over it for sixty or seventy feet. It was impressive, no doubt about that. The light was fading, but she could see far enough into the opening to know that there was an actual cave beyond it, not just an overhang. She couldn’t tell how far the chamber went into the earth.

  “You’re keeping the horses in there, too?” Hudson asked.

  “Yeah,” said Tate. “It’s plenty big enough. There are some natural chimneys farther back, so the air moves through all the time and keeps it from smellin’ too bad. That takes care of the smoke from the fire, too.”

  “You’ll need to put up some blankets and make a separate area for Miss Channing. She’ll need some privacy.”

  Tate grinned and said, “Already ahead of you, boss. We’ve got that done. Fixed up a nice bunk for the lady and everything.”

  Hudson looked over at Evelyn and smiled.

  “You see?” he said. “It’s not going to be so bad. In fact, I’m sure you’ll be quite comfortable here.”

  “I’m sure I will be, too,” she said. She hoped her words didn’t sound as hollow and despairing as she felt.

  She saw a red glow up ahead as they rode into the cave. That made her think it was like riding into the mouth of hell.

  The glow turned out to be a campfire that cast its light over a large chamber. The outlaws had used poles made from saplings to build a fence on one side of the cave. That formed the corral for the horses. Crates and kegs were scattered around to use as seats, and the men had rolled barrels into the cave to serve as tables. Blankets were spread over branches brought in from outside, then bedrolls were arranged on top of them to form bunks. Bags and boxes of supplies were stacked against a wall.

  Ropes were stretched and more blankets flung over them to make the private room Hudson had talked about, on the opposite side of the cave from the horse corral. The blankets were pushed back at the moment to reveal several crates arranged to form a rectangle, with blankets and padding on top of them. That was the bunk they had made for her, thought Evelyn.

  As crude as it was, she was so tired and sore right now it looked as inviting as a feather bed to her. She would have loved to throw herself on it, groan, and not move for a while.

  Instead she dismounted awkwardly, allowing Hudson to help her even though her skin crawled at the touch of his hand, and then stood there stiffly as she waited to see what was going to happen. Her leg muscles screamed in pain from the ride, but she ignored them.

  Thunder boomed again outside, so loud that Evelyn felt the stone floor vibrate a little under her feet. Rain began to fall so hard that it was a continuous roar.

  “Aren’t you glad you’re snug and warm in here instead of out in that downpour?” Hudson asked her.

  “Yes, I am,” Evelyn said, and that was true, anyway. Getting soaked would have just made her more miserable, if that was possible.

  “We’ll have supper in a bit,” Hudson went on, “and then I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you for a while.”

  “Leave me?” Evelyn couldn’t hold in her surprise or her fear. As much as she had come to despise Oliver Hudson in the past few hours, at least she knew him. These other men were strangers and ruthless outlaws as well.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her as he smiled. “You can go behind those blankets, and no one will bother you.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Because every man here knows that
I’ll kill anyone who lays a finger on you,” he said. “You’ll be safer here than you would be in the best hotel in Fredericksburg.”

  “But . . . but where are you going?”

  Hudson still smiled, but an icy glitter appeared in his eyes as he said, “To see an old friend who thinks he’s left us all behind.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “And there were shepherds abiding in the fields by night,” Seth Barrett said as he stood in the little study in the parsonage, “keeping watch over their flocks. And lo, an angel of the Lord came unto them—”

  He stopped and looked down at the paper in his hand, annoyed with himself for not being able to remember exactly what came next in the Scripture. Of course, he was at a disadvantage compared to most preachers, he reminded himself. He had come to this rather late in life. He hadn’t grown up going to church and studying the Bible.

  He had been too busy trying to stay alive and not starve to death.

  A frown creased his forehead. He didn’t like to think about those days when he had been a boy alone in the world, no family, nobody to care for him. He had done things to get by that he was ashamed of now. Stealing from stores had been the start, and it had just gotten worse from there.

  He gave a little shake of his head. Tomorrow morning he would be preaching his first Christmas sermon. He thought what he had written was pretty good, but he had to commit it to memory, or at least enough so that he wouldn’t get lost and have to stand up there in the pulpit with a blank look on his face like an idiot. The members of the congregation had accepted him as their pastor, and he didn’t want to disappoint them.

  “Glad tidings,” Seth muttered to himself. “Unto you this day—”

  Pounding on the front door interrupted him.

  Seth stiffened. He thought about the confrontation with Andrews and the other two cowboys from Felix Dugan’s ranch. Maybe Andrews had come back to take up the fight again.

  Then he heard a familiar voice calling through the door, “Seth! Seth, you in there?”

  That was Hoyt Larrabee, one of the church’s deacons. Hoyt wouldn’t be here to cause trouble. Seth dropped the pages of his sermon on the desk and hurried through the house to the front door.

  Hoyt stood there on the porch in slicker and dripping hat with the downpour behind him. He said, “Sorry to bother you, Brother Seth, but the creek’s startin’ to rise. Some fellas are headin’ down here with sandbags to make sure it don’t get into the church buildin’.”

  Seth reached for his own slicker and hat and said, “How close is the creek to getting out of its banks?”

  “Pretty close, I think. We’d best hurry.”

  Seth felt some guilt as he put on his slicker and hat and followed Hoyt into the rain. He was right here, less than a hundred yards from the creek, and he hadn’t realized that it posed a danger to the church. He had been concentrating on his sermon and the possibility of flooding hadn’t even occurred to him.

  His eyes adjusted somewhat to the darkness as he and Hoyt hurried around the church. The creek ran between tree-lined banks on the other side of the road, about fifty yards away. Seth heard something that sounded a little like a train in the distance and asked Hoyt, “Is that the creek I hear?”

  “Yeah, it’s runnin’ good,” the deacon answered.

  A wagon with a pile of sandbags in its bed pulled up at the side of the road nearest the creek just as Seth and Hoyt got there. The man at the reins called, “Howdy, Preacher!”

  “Hello, Dave,” Seth responded, raising his voice a little to be heard over the rain and the swift-flowing creek. “Thank you for coming out on such a terrible night!”

  Dave Buckland was another of the deacons. He swung down from the wagon seat and said, “Keepin’ the flood waters out of the Lord’s house is doin’ the Lord’s work, I reckon.”

  “It certainly is!” Seth agreed. He reached into the wagon and took hold of one of the heavy sandbags. Grunting with the effort, he lifted it out and started toward the creek.

  Hoyt and Dave joined him, each with a sandbag as well. Hoyt said, “We’ll start stackin’ ’em up about five yards back from the edge. Don’t want to get any closer than that ’cause the bank might wash out in places. I reckon this little low spot here by the church is all we really got to worry about. Ground’s high enough east and west of here to hold back the water.”

  The three men worked steadily, forming a line of sandbags about fifty yards long. Then they began adding to it on top, building it up into a rampart.

  More men arrived, some on horseback, some driving wagons loaded with more sandbags. The work quickly turned into a team effort, with men lining up to pass the sandbags from the wagons to the makeshift barrier.

  All the while, rain sluiced down and the rumble and roar from the rising creek grew louder.

  Women had come with their husbands to help out, and while the men were dealing with the heavy sandbags, the ladies went into the church and lit the lamps. Seth wasn’t sure what they were doing in there until some of the women came out later to bring cups of coffee to the men.

  One of the ladies, shrouded in a hooded slicker and carrying a cup with a piece of oilcloth over it to protect it, came up to Seth and said, “Drink this, Mr. Barrett. It’ll help warm you up a little, I hope.”

  Seth recognized Delta Kennedy’s voice. He leaned closer and saw her lovely face peering out from under the hood. That made warmth go through him that had nothing to do with the coffee she was offering him.

  He caught a whiff of the coffee, though, and instantly craved it. He took the cup from her, and the heat that seeped through it to his half-numb fingers felt wonderful. He moved the oilcloth back enough to take a sip of the potent brew and savored the taste and warmth of it.

  “Did you make this?” he asked her.

  “I did.”

  “It’s the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.”

  She laughed and said, “You’re just saying that because of the circumstances.”

  “Doesn’t make it any less true,” Seth told her.

  “Do you think the church is going to flood?”

  Seth glanced at the wall of sandbags, which was now about three feet tall in places.

  “I doubt it. If we can make that barrier a little higher, it would take a flood of, well, biblical proportions to get over it.”

  “You mean like Noah.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll bet no one around here has thought to build an ark.”

  That brought a laugh from Seth. He said, “If it looks like it’s going to keep raining, maybe I should suggest that in my sermon in the morning.”

  “Maybe you should,” Delta agreed with a laugh of her own.

  Seth drank the rest of the coffee, handed the cup back to her, and said, “Thank you. You’ve restored my strength. I can get back to work now.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I think these sandbags might be too heavy for you,” he said.

  “You’d be surprised.” She set the cup on the lowered tailgate of a wagon, reached into the bed, and took hold of a bag. She pulled it closer, got her arms around it, and lifted it, swinging around to plop the heavy bag into Seth’s waiting arms. “See?”

  He passed it on to the next man in line and told her, “I see that it wouldn’t be wise to underestimate you.”

  “That’s right.” Delta reached for another bag.

  Seth put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. He knew he was being forward but hoped she would forgive him.

  “There’s really no need for you to do this, though. We have plenty of men out here working on the wall.”

  “Well . . . all right. I suppose I should go check on Charlie, anyway. I left him in the church.”

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll see you later.” Seth’s hand still rested lightly on her shoulder. Since he had already been daring enough to touch her, he went one step further and squeezed, just for a second.

  That made Delta look down, but Seth c
aught a glimpse of her face in the light coming from the church and thought she looked pleased. She picked up the cup and headed toward the building but not without glancing back at him.

  Seth was still cold, wet, and miserable on the outside, but what he was feeling inside made the sandbags seem a little lighter as he resumed his efforts to block the rising waters.

  The creek overflowed its banks, but the higher ground to the south, plus the wall of sandbags, forced it to spread mostly over the fields to the north. When the rain tapered off to a drizzle and then finally stopped, Seth knew the water wouldn’t get much higher before it began to go down. The threat was over . . . for now.

  The members of the congregation who had come to fight the flood now gathered inside the church to dry off and warm up. There were four stoves, one in each corner of the sanctuary, and the ladies had fires going in all of them. Water dripped from the men’s soaked clothing and formed puddles on the floor that the women began mopping up.

  “That can wait,” Seth told them. “I’d like for us all to sing a hymn. I think ‘Amazing Grace’ would be appropriate, since it was the Lord’s grace that saved our church tonight.”

  “And some mighty hard work from all of us, Brother Seth,” one of the men said.

  Seth smiled as he asked, “And who was it that gave us the strength to do that work, Brother Fred?”

  The man just shrugged, grinned sheepishly, and said, “I reckon you’re right, Pastor.”

  One of the ladies sat down at the piano and began to play, and a moment later the beautiful strains of “Amazing Grace” filled the church.

  Since the rain had finally stopped, the man sitting on horseback under the trees about a hundred yards from the sanctuary could hear the music. It was faint, but he recognized the tune. It put a grin on his face.

  “You once were lost, Sam,” Oliver Hudson said, paraphrasing the lyrics of the hymn, “but now you’re found. And you’re going to wish you had kept running instead of stopping here where I could find you.”