Savage Country Read online

  “Attempting to trap us and murder us effectively takes away your rights, I believe.”

  “Look, maybe I was wrong to do that,” she snapped.

  “Maybe?” Conrad repeated, sarcasm in his tone.

  “Ah, go to hell,” Rebel said under her breath.

  Conrad looked around. “Judging by the desolate nature of our surroundings, I believe we may already be there.”

  Frank said, “You two don’t intend to keep up this wrangling all night, do you? I was planning on getting some sleep sometime.”

  “I’ve said all I have to say,” Conrad replied.

  “So have I,” Rebel said.

  Frank would believe that when he saw it and heard it for himself.

  The two of them seemed to call a truce and ignore each other, though, which was a welcome surprise to Frank. They ate supper in relative peace and quiet, and then he put out the fire while Rebel cleaned the pan with sand. She replaced it in the pack herself.

  “How do you feel about standing first watch tonight?” Frank asked Conrad.

  “All right. I can do that.”

  “Not going to doze off?”

  “Of course not. I stayed awake during my turn last night, didn’t I?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Morgan,” Rebel put in. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “Hah!” Conrad said. “As if I need an enemy to do watch over me.”

  “I thought we called a truce.”

  “You’d still like to see us both dead.”

  “Well . . .” Rebel hesitated. “I’m not so sure about that anymore.”

  That took Conrad by surprise. Frank too, but he didn’t show it. Conrad said, “Do you mean you’re giving up that quest for vengeance after all?”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” Rebel said with a sigh. “I’ve spent a day with you fellas now, and you don’t seem like such bad sorts. A mite prickly maybe . . .” She cast a meaningful glance at Conrad as she said that. “But I believe Mr. Morgan when he says he didn’t want to kill Jud or Simon. They forced him into it. And even though I didn’t ask you to, Mr. Browning, you did try to protect me when those Indians jumped us at Mimbres Tank. I won’t say that I’m sorry for anything that I did, but if I could talk to Tom and Bob and Ed now, I think I’d tell them they ought to just forget about it.”

  “You said they won’t do that, especially Ed,” Frank pointed out quietly.

  “I don’t think he will. I don’t think he’ll ever give up trying to avenge his brothers’ deaths. But if it was up to me . . . well, I’d call the whole thing off.”

  “That’s an awfully quick change of heart on your part,” Conrad said. “Why should we believe you?”

  “Maybe because I don’t give a damn if you do or not,” she snapped.

  Frank spread his bedroll on the ground and looped his lariat around it to keep snakes out. “We’ll hash this out some more in the morning,” he said. “Right now I’m going to get some shut-eye, and I reckon you ought to as well, Miss Callahan.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, call me Rebel. Miss Callahan sounds like my old maiden aunt, if I had one, which I don’t.”

  “All right.” Frank stretched out on his blankets, resting his head on his saddle. He tipped his Stetson down over his eyes. “Wake me up in four hours or so. Night, Rebel. Night, Conrad.”

  “Good night, Frank,” Conrad said.

  The boy still didn’t want to call him Pa. He could live with that, Frank told himself as he dozed off. Anyway, with Apaches on the warpath and three gun-toting hardcases probably still on his trail too, it was downright foolish worrying about such things.

  Might sound nice, though, just for a change.

  Chapter 10

  The three of them reached Lordsburg two days later, riding into the settlement in the early evening. The town lay at the foot of the Peloncillo Mountains, a small range of rounded peaks that were little more than hills. They formed a black backdrop against which the lights of Lordsburg stood out brightly, however.

  There had been no sign of either the Apaches or Rebel’s relatives. During the long hours the travelers had spent in the saddle, Conrad and Rebel had begun to talk to each other more often, simply because there was nothing else for them to do, no other way to pass the time. She asked him quite a few questions about Boston and Harvard and life back East. Conrad didn’t know if her interest was genuine or not, but he didn’t want to be rude, so he answered her as best he could. In return—and just to be polite, of course—he asked her about the ranch she and her brothers had operated in Texas. Conrad had been unsure whether that part of her story was true, but after listening to her talk about the place, he was convinced that it was. She had loved the ranch, and losing it had hurt her. He supposed he could understand that. If something had happened to cause him to lose all the companies that made up the Browning holdings, he would have been upset too.

  From time to time, he caught Rebel looking at him with a speculative expression on her lovely face. Conrad knew what that meant, and it made him uneasy. As a rich, relatively presentable young man, he had been the object of the affections of numerous young ladies during the past few years. Though he was a bit ashamed to admit it even to himself, he had taken his pleasure with some of them, dallying with the ones who appealed to him the most. He had never been involved in a serious relationship, however . . . until recently.

  And it was the thought of that one that made him uneasy when he saw the interest in Rebel’s deep brown eyes. Rebel’s beautiful eyes. Rebel’s compelling eyes . . .

  He needed to stop allowing such thoughts to stray into his mind, he told himself firmly as he and Frank and that disturbingly beautiful young woman rode into Lordsburg.

  “Now what are you going to do with me?” Rebel asked as they pulled up in front of the town’s best hotel. “You can’t keep me prisoner anymore.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Conrad told her. “You don’t want to give people the wrong idea. My God, we didn’t kidnap you or anything! You’re the one who attempted to harm us.”

  “Yes, and I’ve told you I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I wish I’d never done it.” With a shrug, she added, “You can believe me or not. It’s up to you.”

  Frank said, “I reckon where you go and what you do is up to you now, Rebel. The main reason we brought you along is so that those Apaches wouldn’t get you. Now that we’ve reached Lordsburg, you’ll be safe enough.”

  “So I’m free to go?”

  “Sure.”

  She sat there on her horse for a long moment, looking back and forth between Conrad and Frank, before she said, “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Don’t want to what?” Conrad asked.

  “Go.”

  “What are you going to do then?” Frank asked.

  “Well . . . I could trail along with you fellas for a while, wherever you’re headed.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Frank said with a frown. “You’ve got your reputation to consider. A young, unmarried woman traveling with a couple of hombres she’s not related to . . . Things like that cause people to talk.”

  “You think I care about that? People can say whatever they darned well please. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  Conrad said, “Propriety is very important. If people just went around doing whatever they pleased, the world would descend into chaos and anarchy.”

  “I reckon the world wouldn’t fall completely apart just because I rode along with you and Frank, Harvard.”

  Conrad felt himself blushing. That was the first time she had referred to him by that mocking nickname.

  “Tell you what,” Frank said. “We’ll be spending the night here and stocking up on supplies in the morning. We’ll sleep on it and talk about it over breakfast. How’s that?”

  “Sounds fine by me,” Rebel answered without hesitation.

  “Well . . . all right,” Conrad said much more dubiously.

  T
hey dismounted and went into the hotel. Within a few minutes, they had rented rooms and arranged to stable their horses in the barn behind the hotel. Dog could stay there too, the clerk told Frank.

  Frank and Conrad had adjoining rooms on the second floor. Rebel’s room was right across the hall. As they opened their doors to go into their respective rooms, she said, “Why don’t we get together down in the dining room in a little while and have supper?”

  “All right.” Frank nodded. “Sounds like a good idea.”

  Conrad wished that Frank had consulted with him before agreeing to Rebel’s suggestion. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea for him and Rebel to spend any more time together than necessary. The feelings he had begun to have, the feelings whose existence he didn’t want to admit even to himself, might turn out to be a complication that he didn’t need.

  He had been relatively forthcoming with Frank about the situation in Ophir, but there were a few things Conrad hadn’t told him, a few things that Frank didn’t know about yet....

  Life out here in the West could certainly be complex, Conrad thought as he closed the door of his room. At times like this, he longed for the simplicity and elegance of Boston, where no Indians had gone on the rampage since the famous Tea Party more than a hundred years earlier, and where grudges were settled the civilized way, with sneers and cold looks and the occasional lawsuit, rather than guns and fists.

  Frank was already in the dining room when Conrad went downstairs. Conrad had taken the time to wash up and change clothes, but Frank still looked like he had when they arrived, except for the fact that he had brushed some of the trail dust off his clothes. He lifted a hand at the table where he sat, catching Conrad’s attention.

  Conrad went over and took one of the empty seats. “Rebel’s not down yet?”

  “Nope. I reckon it takes a mite longer for a lady to get ready to eat.”

  “Yes, but I was speaking of Rebel,” Conrad said with a smirk.

  Frank’s voice held a sharp edge as he said, “She’s a lady, and you’d do well to remember it.”

  “Oh, come now,” Conrad said defensively. “She’s little more than some wild frontier creature. She tried to help murder us, after all.”

  Frank shrugged. “She made some bad decisions because she was pressured into them by her brothers and her cousin, that’s all.”

  “Then you really believe that a few days of traveling with us has opened her eyes and caused her to change her attitude? Because I don’t.”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. “Figuring out what a woman really thinks is one of the hardest jobs on the face of the earth, son. Just when a man thinks he knows what he needs to do, everything up and changes on him.”

  “Don’t be so damned paternalistic,” Conrad snapped. “I can do without the fatherly advice.”

  He saw the hurt flare in Frank’s eyes, and for a second wished that he hadn’t spoken quite so harshly. Yet he hadn’t done anything except speak the truth. The time was long since past when he needed a father around to dispense such pearls of wisdom.

  “Suit yourself,” Frank said. “Since you’re so smart, I reckon you know how to handle this just fine without me.” He nodded toward the dining room entrance.

  Conrad turned his head and looked in that direction, and his breath seemed to freeze in his throat. His heart slugged heavily in his chest.

  Rebel stood there, wearing a dress dotted with little blue flowers that hugged her slim waist and swooped low on her shoulders, leaving them bare for the most part and revealing as well the gently rounded swells of the upper third of her breasts. She had brushed her blond hair until it shone in the lamplight as it caressed her shoulders. She was breathtakingly, heartbreakingly lovely.

  Lovelier than any of the women he had known back in Boston, Conrad realized with a shock.

  Without him quite knowing how it happened, he found himself on his feet, standing and waiting for her as she swept regally across the floor toward the table. Frank had stood up too, and he gave Rebel a friendly nod as she came up to them. “You sure I don’t need to start calling you Miss Callahan again?” he asked with an easy charm and grace that Conrad suddenly envied terribly. “You look too pretty to be calling you Rebel.”

  “Rebel will do just fine,” she said. “That’s my name, after all.” She turned and looked at Conrad, a cool smile on her face. “Good evening, Conrad.”

  “G-good evening,” he managed to say, hating himself briefly for that stumble. He didn’t want her to know how strongly she had affected him.

  She was a woman, though, so she probably already knew. Women had a way of being aware of everything that a man didn’t want them to know.

  “You look surprised,” she said. “What’s the matter, did you think that I wouldn’t clean up this nice?”

  “No, not at all. I mean, that’s not what I thought. I mean—”

  “Sit down, Conrad,” Frank said quietly. “Let’s just have some dinner.”

  He held Rebel’s chair for her, and Conrad cursed himself for not thinking to do that. When had Frank become such a gentleman? It just wasn’t right for a man such as him—a gunfighter, for God’s sake!—to be so courtly. Rebel seemed to be eating it up, though, smiling and laughing as she made small talk with Frank. No one watching what was going on at the table would ever dream there was a debt of blood and violence between Frank Morgan and the family of this charming, beautiful young woman.

  A waiter came over to take their orders. Conrad asked, “Do you have a wine list?” and immediately felt foolish because of the way the man looked at him.

  “Nope, sorry,” the waiter said. “We don’t have any wine, so it wouldn’t do any good to have a list.”

  “Just bring us three steak dinners with all the trimmings,” Frank said. “That’ll do fine, won’t it, Rebel?”

  “Yes, of course,” she answered without hesitation. “It sounds good. Wonderful, in fact, after being on the trail for days.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Conrad sat there trying not to seethe as they continued their chitchat. Clearly, neither of them knew—or cared—that he was considered a witty and engaging dinner companion back in Boston. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be ignoring him like this.

  Although Rebel was undeniably beautiful, she was no lady, despite what Frank said. She made occasional mistakes in grammar that showed her lack of a proper education, and when she laughed she was a little too loud about it, a little too brassy. She was probably the sort who would scratch herself or spit if the mood came upon her. A man would never be able to take her out and show her off in civilized society.

  But he might be able to keep her as a mistress. As he sneaked a glance at her breasts, Conrad thought that she was eminently suited for that role.

  The waiter arrived with their steak dinners, crude but hearty and filling food. Conrad found that he was hungrier than he had realized. He dug into the meal, and Frank and Rebel did likewise.

  They were still eating when a man came into the dining room, looked around, and then came toward their table after spotting them. Conrad noticed the man walking toward them and glanced at his father. Frank had seen the man too, of course, probably before Conrad had. One thing about Frank—he was constantly alert.

  The stranger was a blocky man in a black suit. His weathered face was decorated with white handlebar mustaches. The sheriff’s badge pinned to his coat lapel shone in the light from the oil lamps that illuminated the dining room.

  The lawman came up to the table, nodded to Conrad and Rebel, and then said to Frank, “You’d be Frank Morgan.”

  “That’s right.”

  “From the looks o’ things, you didn’t come to Lordsburg to hunt trouble.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said. “I’m just enjoying a meal with my young friends here.”

  “Passin’ through, are you?”

  “We’ll probably leave in the morning, after we’ve picked up some supplies.”

  The sheriff nodd
ed. “That’s good. Lordsburg’s a peaceful place most o’ the time. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Frank smiled thinly and said, “Don’t worry, Sheriff. I won’t start any trouble. You have my word on that.”

  “Won’t start any,” the sheriff said, “but you’ll dang sure finish it if it comes to you.”

  Frank shrugged. “I wouldn’t have much choice in that case, now would I?”

  “Do me a favor,” the lawman said without answering Frank’s question. “Finish your supper and make an early night of it. Buy your supplies, if you’re of a mind to, and ride out early tomorrow mornin’. Then we’ll all be happy.”

  “Sounds exactly like what I had in mind.”

  “In that case . . .” The sheriff nodded to Conrad and Rebel again. “You folks enjoy your dinner, and have a good night.”

  He turned and walked out of the dining room.

  Rebel took a deep breath, looked at Frank, and said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “You could have told him about what happened at Mimbres Tank.”

  Casually, Frank waved a hand. “That would have been out of his jurisdiction. Anyway, it’s over and done with, and Conrad and I came through it pretty much without a scratch.”

  “No thanks to me,” Rebel said.

  “Over and done with,” Frank repeated.

  Conrad folded his napkin and frowned. “That man was rather heavy-handed, don’t you think, Frank? He had no reason to accost you like that. You haven’t broken any laws here.”

  “Almost everywhere I go, some lawman comes up to me and has the same sort of conversation,” Frank said. “Somebody saw me and recognized me, or the clerk at the desk recognized my name when I signed the book. One way or another, the sheriff got tipped off that I was in town, and he felt like he had to warn me not to let any grass grow under my feet.”

  “But that’s not fair! You have a perfect right to be here.”

  “Fella just wants to keep his town safe for the folks who live here. He wouldn’t be much of a lawman if he didn’t feel that way.”

  “And this happens everywhere you go.”