A Colorado Christmas Read online

  “You . . . you swear to that, Bleeker?”

  “I’m a man of my word.”

  “Then you can just ride on,” Doolittle told him. “I’m sorry, and now it’s all square between you and me, right?”

  “Sure. But our business isn’t quite done.”

  As if events had been waiting for that cue, a crash sounded at the back of the house, followed by a scream. Doolittle yelled.

  Hearing the guard’s feet pound on the floor, Bleeker lifted his right leg, pulled it back, and kicked the door open. He drew his gun as he went through the doorway.

  He leveled the revolver at Doolittle’s back and snapped, “Stop right there, Harry!”

  Doolittle stopped. Wide-eyed, he looked over his shoulder and stammered, “Y-you said you weren’t gonna do nothin’.”

  “I said I wouldn’t hurt you,” Bleeker told him with a smile. “I never said anything about your wife and those brats of yours.”

  Morley came through an open door leading to the rest of the house. He had his left arm around the neck of Doolittle’s wife, a plain-faced woman in her thirties. He pressed the barrel of the gun in his right hand to her head. Herded along in front of them were the couple’s three children, a boy about eight and girls of twelve and fourteen.

  “Now then, here’s the deal, Harry,” Bleeker went on. “You can stand there and watch while we kill your boy and have our fun with your wife and daughters before we kill them, too . . . or you can put the barrels of that shotgun in your mouth and pull the triggers.” Bleeker shrugged. “It’s entirely up to you. But either way, I’m not gonna lay a hand on you, just like I promised.”

  “P-Please,” Doolittle forced out. “Don’t hurt them. Let ’em go—”

  “Maybe I will . . . if you do what I suggested.”

  The prison guard’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets, but he was able to turn the shotgun around and lift the barrels toward his own face. His hands shook so badly that the barrels wavered back and forth several inches.

  “P-Promise you won’t hurt them?”

  “Harry!” his wife screamed. “No! Oh, God, no!”

  “Just do it, Harry,” Bleeker said quietly. “It’s for the best. You don’t want them to suffer.”

  Doolittle steadied the shotgun and closed his lips around the twin barrels, then stretched out his right arm, trying to reach the triggers. His wife and all three of the children screamed and cried. The woman struggled against Morley’s grip, but she was no match for the outlaw’s strength.

  Morley was starting to look a little green around the gills, Bleeker thought. He knew the man wouldn’t lose his nerve, but he hoped Doolittle wouldn’t take too much longer. . . .

  The boom of the shotgun was like the loudest thunderclap anybody ever heard. It momentarily deafened everybody in the room, so they didn’t hear what was left of Harry Doolittle thud to the floor. The roar of shots from two revolvers followed instantly and added to the din.

  Bleeker’s ears were still ringing a few minutes later when he and Morley stepped out onto the porch. Behind them, flames had begun to crackle. Morley had brought some kerosene with him, and they had put it to good use.

  He muttered something under his breath.

  Bleeker asked, “You all right, Ray?”

  “Sure,” Morley replied. “It’s just . . . that was pretty raw, Jim, even for us.”

  “Well, they didn’t suffer, just like I promised Doolittle. I keep my word, Ray.”

  Morley wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I know that.”

  “Just like I swore to get even with that damn gunny who left us high and dry in San Antonio.” Bleeker went down the steps with Morley following him. The flames inside the house were brighter, casting a garish orange light through the windows. “What I’ve got planned for him will make this look pretty tame.”

  “You know where to find him?” Morley asked as they mounted up.

  “Damn right I do.” Bleeker turned his horse away from the burning house. “A few years after he double-crossed us, he pinned on a lawman’s badge, believe it or not. Monte Carson’s the sheriff of some place in Colorado called Big Rock.”

  CHAPTER 5

  New York City, New York

  The buildings of the city formed canyons through which a cold wind whistled. Mercy Halliday ducked her head against it and felt it tug at the black bonnet she wore. The wind whipped the skirts of her drab black dress around her legs, as well. She was chilled to the bone. Luckily, she had almost reached her destination.

  Another block and she was standing in front of the entrance to the headquarters of the Children’s Aid Society. She opened the door and went in quickly so as little icy air as possible entered with her.

  Once the door was closed behind her, she untied the bonnet and took it off, revealing a thick mass of auburn curls. She knew that vanity was a sin, but she couldn’t help being a little proud of her hair. It was her best feature, she thought, although she had been told by suitors that her green eyes were rather compelling, too. The bolder ones had said that her figure was quite striking.

  Despite their flattery, none of those suitors had ever won her heart. It was devoted to the great and noble work in which she was engaged.

  “Cold out there today,” Peter Gallagher commented from the desk where he was working with a welter of papers spread out before him.

  “Indeed it is,” Mercy agreed as she started toward her own desk. She was aware that he was watching her. She could feel his eyes following her movements. If she were to glance at him, though, she knew he would look away quickly and pretend he hadn’t been regarding her with such intensity.

  Mercy wasn’t offended. She knew he was devoted to his wife and fellow missionary Grace . . . but it was in the nature of men to look at women. What was important was that they didn’t allow those baser urges to rule them.

  “I’ve been to the train station and made the final arrangements,” she went on. “We’ll be able to depart tomorrow as planned.”

  Peter put his pen back in its inkwell, leaned back in his chair, and smiled. He was a slender man with dark hair parted in the middle, pince-nez perched on his nose, and a mustache that drooped over his mouth. “I don’t know what the Society would do without you, Miss Halliday. You’re perhaps the most efficient person among our ranks.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. You and Grace do a great deal of the work yourselves.”

  “Yes, but you’re the one who keeps things functioning smoothly, no doubt about that.”

  “Well, I try.” There was no false modesty in Mercy’s tone or in the way she looked down at her desk. That was just the way she was.

  “The representatives of the railroad understand that we’ll have twenty children traveling with us?”

  “Yes, of course. I turned the draft for payment of our passage over to the general manager of the line.”

  “And he gave you a receipt for it?” Peter held up a hand to forestall her answer. “What am I saying? Of course he did. You wouldn’t have left without one. You’d never overlook such a vital detail.”

  “Yes, I have it,” Mercy said with a smile, “showing that our passage to California is paid in full, as well as return fare to New York for you and your wife and myself.”

  “Excellent. Soon those poor children will be well on their way to new homes.”

  “I’m a bit concerned,” Mercy admitted. “This will be the farthest we’ve ever taken one of the orphan trains.”

  The members of the Society had adopted the term used in the newspapers for the effort to place orphaned children in new homes. Unfortunate children with no one to care for them had been rescued from the squalor and desperation in the slums of New York and housed in a dormitory owned by the Society until they could be taken west by train. In St. Louis, Kansas City, Wichita, Denver, and other western cities, announcements were placed letting people know that children were available for adoption.

  Mercy knew
that some people wanted to adopt simply so they could have more workers for their farms or businesses, but the Society did its best to weed out those applicants and place the children with families that truly wanted them and had love to give them. That was perhaps the most important job she and Peter and Grace had as they accompanied the youngsters on their westward journey.

  The group they would be leaving with the next day was bound for Sacramento, in California. It would be a long trip, but Mercy thought it was important to open up as many new possibilities for adoptions as they could.

  One thing was certain. There would always be orphans in need of a good home. Sometimes the city seemed to be a great beast, grinding up people between its teeth and spitting them out, leaving their children to fend for themselves. She had experienced something similar when she was young, losing both of her parents in a tragic carriage accident. Luckily, she’d had relatives to take her in. The children the Society helped didn’t have that luxury.

  She sat down at her desk and began going through the stack of papers in front of her. Each sheet listed one of the orphans and gave the details of how the child came to have no family, if that information was known. In all too many cases, that background simply wasn’t available. The children were too young to tell where they had come from or what had happened to their parents. Some had been captured by the police while they were engaged in criminal behavior and refused to talk. Most of those were like feral animals at first, until they realized they no longer had to fight merely to survive. Some of the orphans seemed simply not to know their origins.

  Mercy paused with one of the sheets in her hand. A boy who appeared to be around six years old had been found huddled on the back steps of the dormitory one morning. He had refused to talk and hadn’t said a word since the Society had taken him in. Perhaps he couldn’t talk, although the doctor who examined the children seemed to think there was nothing physically wrong with him. His clothes were rags, and the thick layer of grime that covered his hands and face testified that he had been living on the streets and in the alleys for quite some time. Obviously, he had no home or family.

  The workers at the dormitory had named him Caleb. He seemed to respond to it, and so the name had stuck.

  If they could find a good home for him . . . if they could place him with a family that would love him and bring him out of whatever malaise gripped him . . . all the hard work would have been worthwhile, Mercy thought as she added the paper to the stack.

  “Oh, the little boy who doesn’t talk,” Peter said from beside her.

  She tried not to jump in surprise. She had been caught up in her thoughts and hadn’t heard him come over. “That’s right.”

  Peter leaned over and tapped the paper. “We’ll find a good home for him.” The movement took him closer to Mercy.

  Close enough, in fact, that she could smell the bay rum from when he’d shaved that morning.

  “Of course we will.” She felt a bit uncomfortable with him hovering so close to her. She wasn’t attracted to him in the least, but she knew that he admired her. She told herself that his admiration stemmed solely from her devotion to their shared cause, but she wasn’t sure.

  Another door opened, and Grace Gallagher came into the office. Peter straightened quickly and turned toward her. She was a pale, blond woman in the same sort of sober black dress that Mercy wore. Somehow it didn’t quite look the same on her.

  “Miss Halliday and I were just going over the list of children who’ll be leaving with us tomorrow, dear,” Peter said to his wife. “Our passage is paid for, and everything is ready for us to go.”

  “Splendid,” Grace said. “We can always count on Miss Halliday, can’t we?”

  Coming from her, that sentiment didn’t sound quite as admiring, Mercy thought. Yes, this trip to California might turn out to be quite a long one . . . but it will be worth it if we find good homes for all those children, she told herself again. Especially the enigmatic Caleb.

  * * *

  Elsewhere in the city on that chilly December day, a man in a dark overcoat and a brown fedora strolled apparently aimlessly along a sidewalk, although as cold as it was, the odds of a man being out for a casual walk were small.

  Ed Rinehart knew that, and the knowledge bothered him. He ought to be moving briskly, but instead he had to wait until the man he was going to follow came out of the bank across the street.

  Rinehart had his head turned away so that he wasn’t watching the bank directly. Neither was he using the window in front of him as a mirror. Behavior like that was a dead giveaway to someone trying to spot a tail. He had excellent peripheral vision, a valuable quality for a private operative to possess, and he could see the bank’s front doors from the corner of his eye.

  One of the bank’s heavy doors swung open. A man came out carrying a satchel and strode along the sidewalk toward the east. Rinehart followed on the other side of the street, half a block behind.

  The detective was a tall man around thirty years old, with thick sandy hair under the fedora. He walked with his hands in the overcoat pockets, but not just because the weather was cold. The pocket on the right contained a shot-filled leather sap, and Rinehart curled his gloved fingers around its grip.

  He didn’t like guns, although he could handle a pistol fairly well and was an excellent shot with a rifle. The sap was usually the only weapon he needed, since most of the altercations in which he was involved happened at close range. He preferred not to fight at all, unless he didn’t have a choice.

  The man he was following sported muttonchop whiskers and a red nose that indicated he drank too much. His drinking had gotten him in trouble, since he’d been inebriated when he succumbed to the charms of a woman named Seraphine DuMille. That was what she called herself, anyway. Rinehart had a pretty strong hunch she hadn’t been born with that name.

  The man with the satchel, E. G. Halliwell, was a vice-president of the bank from which he had emerged. He was married to a stern-faced woman named Edna, whose father was the president of the bank, and had three stern-faced children. E.G. was active in church and civic affairs and couldn’t afford to have it known that he’d been dallying with a French hussy. The only way he could keep Seraphine from paying a visit to Mrs. Halliwell was to fill a satchel full of negotiable securities taken from the vault and turn them over to a confederate of hers, a man named Binder.

  It was the same sort of sordid arrangement Ed Rinehart had seen numerous times in his career. Halliwell’s father-in-law had grown suspicious of the man’s increasingly erratic behavior and had hired the agency that employed Rinehart. As an experienced detective, it hadn’t taken him long to get to the bottom of things.

  It was a matter of extricating Halliwell from the mess he had gotten himself into and keeping him from ruining his life. If that wasn’t possible, Rinehart would retrieve the securities, at the very least. Protecting the bank was the most important objective as far as the agency was concerned.

  Up ahead, Halliwell turned and started down an alley. Rinehart paused across the street from the opening between buildings. He pretended to be lighting a cigarette and struggling with it in the wind. That peripheral vision of his allowed him to see a man step out from an alcove and confront Halliwell.

  Recognizing Binder, who was large and brawny and none too bright, Rinehart turned and walked quickly across the street as the man stretched out a paw and motioned for Halliwell to give him the satchel.

  “Don’t do it, Halliwell,” Rinehart called, startling both men into turning sharply toward him. “If you do, next month they’ll just ask for something else.”

  “Get outta here, mister,” Binder rasped. “This ain’t any o’ your business.”

  “Actually, it is.” Rinehart poked his hands forward in both overcoat pockets as if he were aiming pistols from them. “You’ve got a choice, Binder. You can go back to Seraphine empty-handed and tell her it would be wise to forget about Mr. Halliwell here, or you can both be behind bars before the sun goes
down. It’s up to you.”

  Halliwell was gaping at him, opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water.

  Binder just glared. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, bub, but if you don’t turn around and leave—right now—you’re gonna wish you had.”

  Rinehart shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  The threatening words and the implied threat of non-existent guns had kept Binder distracted until Rinehart was fairly close. The big tough grimaced. He was thinking, and he didn’t like doing that. Rinehart could see him make up his mind. Binder had decided to use his muscles . . . as he always did.

  He lunged at the detective, swinging a massive, rock-hard fist.

  Rinehart ducked under the blow, pulled the sap from his pocket, and snapped it against Binder’s right shoulder. The man yelped in pain and that arm flopped loosely, gone numb from the impact. In a smooth, backhand move, Rinehart slapped the shot-filled leather against the side of Binder’s head. Not hard enough to crush bone, but with plenty of force to drop the man, out cold.

  Halliwell was still staring at Rinehart.

  The detective told him, “Take those securities back to the bank, put them back in the vault, and don’t say anything about this to anyone. Not ever.”

  Halliwell found his voice and stammered, “B-but that woman . . . that terrible woman . . .”

  “Don’t worry about her. I’ll have a chat with her . . . after I’ve tipped off the coppers where to find her friend Binder. He’s wanted on a number of charges. So is she, for that matter. Once she finds out she’s lost her helper and that I know where to find her, she’ll almost certainly decide the climate in New York is too cold for her this winter and leave for somewhere more pleasant.”

  “But she said she’d tell—”

  “She won’t say anything if there’s no profit in it for her. She’s smart enough to realize that a plan hasn’t panned out and move on.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just a friend,” Rinehart said with a smile as he replaced the sap in his pocket. “I’ll give you some friendly advice, E.G. Stop drinking so much. Spend more time at home with your wife and children. Do your job at the bank and enjoy the breaks you’ve had in life.”