Sweet Autumn Surrender Page 2

  Kale knew any move he made would draw fire. He also knew he was not going to draw on this kid. There had to be another way.

  Maybe there was. He caught Mack’s attention, winked, and muttered one word.

  “Mazón!”

  Santos Mazón was a mutual friend, a bear-cat of a man known from Texas to California for his love of a barroom brawl. While most brush-poppers went into a saloon for a little red-eye and rotgut and to catch up on the latest gossip, Santos went to enjoy the relaxation of a good old-fashioned knock-down-drag-out. The very mention of his name brought instant reactions from anyone who knew him, including, Kale was relieved to see, Mack McKenzie.

  The two men sprang forward as one, throwing the table into the soldiers.

  The towheaded soldier staggered sideways, regained his footing, and reached for his gun.

  At that instant Kale struck him, a left to the stomach, followed by a right under the chin. The boy reeled backward, catching himself against the bar.

  From the corner of his eye, Kale saw Mack holding the other kid in an arm lock. Kale lunged for Doric—grab him around the middle, throw him to the floor, pin him down.

  The kid would have learned a cheap lesson, Kale figured. But he was wrong.

  As he lunged forward, the boy pivoted suddenly with his right foot. Just before Kale’s chin hit the foot rail, Doric’s left boot made contact and drove him backward. Kale heard his jaw crack and his tongue tasted salty blood. He fell into the crowd; two fists grabbed his shirt and jerked him forward.

  Kale bent his knees, missing a smash to his chin, and struck an undercut to the kid’s midsection which sent the soldier tottering.

  The soldier was tough. Much better, Kale suspected, with fists than with a gun. He was young, seven or eight years younger than Kale, who was twenty-eight. He was powerfully built, like a farmer or a frontiersman, and he stood an inch or so taller than Kale, who was six-foot even in his stocking feet. Worst of all, he knew how to fight the right way, as if he’d been schooled at it.

  No doubt about it, Kale Jarrett had his work cut out for him. And he loved it. A good fight, a real fight…not a punch-drunk, Saturday-night brawler, this, but a worthy opponent. Anger never spurred Kale on as did the pure love of a fight.

  He lunged after Doric with adrenaline flowing. They clenched a moment, then broke and circled, breathing hard.

  Kale stepped in first, punching with his right, catching the boy’s jaw. Doric recovered quickly and countered with a left to Kale’s belly and a jarring right which caught him above the left eye.

  Kale stumbled, got his feet under him again, and came back slugging. His head roared. Streams of blood and sweat blurred his vision. He took another wicked left to the temple and somehow landed a roundhouse blow that sent the boy sprawling, while the roar in his own head built to a great crescendo, cutting out all other sounds, then breaking suddenly, as a wave breaks on the shore. The room spun wildly, knocking his feet out from under him, leaving him suspended on a soft pillow of blackness with only a distant roar in his ears.

  When Kale came to, he was lying on a cot in Molly Bank’s cabin. Mack’s voice reached him as from a great distance.

  “Listen to what Molly here has to say, Kale. I’ll fetch your horse.”

  Kale shook his head to clear the fuzziness. Pain shot up his left side, through his temple. Molly’s voice sounded urgent, but he couldn’t grasp her meaning—something about the soldier…

  “Did I kill him?” he asked.

  Molly shook her head. “A bad cut to the head. He’ll likely recover, but that won’t be much help to you now.”

  His mind reeled, searching for something to grab hold of. Molly shook him by the shoulders.

  “Listen to me, Kale. You’ve got to get out of here. That other soldier went after some of their friends. Sheriff Yates says he can’t afford trouble from the army. You know how they come down on us if their soldiers get hurt here at the crossing.”

  Three soft knocks sounded at the door, but before Molly could get to it a large man stepped inside, quickly closing the door behind him.

  “Sheriff Yates, what—?” she began.

  “I’m not taking him in, Molly.” The sheriff turned his attention to Kale, who had risen and stood facing him on unsteady legs.

  “My deputy was in the Bee Hive, Jarrett. Saw the whole thing. Says you avoided a shootin’ best you could. But I want no trouble with the army, and I understand they’re headed this way.”

  “Is Summer Valley far enough away, Sheriff?”

  “Summer Valley? Hell, Jarrett, there ain’t nothin’ between here and there ’cept lots of prickly pear and maybe a few red Injuns.”

  Mack came through the back door. “You’d better hit the trail, Kale. I seen dust comin’ down the hill from the fort.”

  Kale nodded. “Let me know how the kid fares.”

  Molly handed him a sack of food as he went out the back door. “Be careful, Kale. Don’t get caught by Injuns. And don’t go stealin’ your brother’s wife.”

  Kale tried to smile, but the pain was excruciating. “Any woman my brother married would be a lady, and I ain’t fit for nothing but—” He coughed to cover his embarrassment over the words he’d almost spoken, then finished in a lame fashion. “A lady would likely cramp my style, honey.”

  He stowed the sack of food in his saddlebags and mounted up, tossing a leather pouch to Mack.

  “Here’s two hundred dollars in gold for my stake. What part of California did you say?”

  “San Francisco,” Mack called after the departing horseman.

  Summer Valley lay almost due south of Fort Griffin, but no road ran that way. So Kale headed east, looking for the least likely place to cross the river. That wouldn’t stop the soldiers, he knew, but it might slow them down. And he needed all the time he could get.

  The Clear Fork of the Brazos River skirted the fort to the west and south. A mile east of town the river cut back north and then shallowed up to about knee deep. Kale waded his horse in, kept north for a hundred yards or so, and came out on a bank that was mostly gravel. He turned sharply south, touched spurs to the bay, and gave him rein. With luck he could reach Hubbard Creek before dark.

  Twice he glanced back. Nothing.

  They’d find the trail if they were serious about pursuing him. But not until after they searched north toward the Spinnin’ S, he hoped, and by that time he’d have a good head start.

  Only he knew he’d better hurry if it was to be good enough. He was about two miles from town now, but in this level country his dust could be seen a long ways off. And there was nothing to break the view.

  The mid-afternoon sun bore down on his beaten, bruised body. What remained of his shirt was caked with dried blood and sweat. His left arm still had a tingling, almost numb feeling, as if a nerve had been hit. His jaw worked enough that he figured it wasn’t broken, and Molly had washed his face, but that cut over his eye kept opening up. He dabbed it with his bandanna and considered this reputation that kept getting him into trouble.

  It all started when he was sixteen and shot that carpetbagger for tearing up Ma’s rosebush. Thinking back, it sounded like a damned foolish thing to have done. At the time…

  He sighed. Benjamin had always said his hands were quicker than his brain. But that rosebush was the only thing of beauty in Ma’s life. Pa had given it to her, and it was about all she had left to remind her of him, though heaven only knew why she wanted to remember a man who up and left her with six boys and two girls to raise, single-handed. Of course, he said he would be back to get her soon as he’d made his fortune, but she never saw hide nor hair of him again.

  Once in a while someone would pass through who had run into him someplace. Last they heard, he’d been seen up in Alaska, shuffling cards in some saloon.

  From the time Pa left, Benjamin, the oldest of the brothers, tended the farm and minded the other children, while Ma tended the rosebush, watering it, cultivating the soil, trimming its puny
branches. At first it produced right pretty roses, red as a dancehall girl’s painted mouth, he still recalled. As the years went by, though, the roses became fewer and more scraggly, and Ma became quieter and more withdrawn, until all she knew was that rosebush—as if she thought by coaxing it to bloom, she could coax her man back into her life.

  Then that carpetbagger came to the door saying they would have to pay all they got for this year’s crop to make up for last year’s taxes.

  The scene was carved into Kale’s brain as though it had happened yesterday instead of twelve long years ago. Benjamin stood at the edge of the unpainted, weatherworn porch. A gray stone slab served as a step down to the path where the carpetbagger stood. With rolled-up sleeves and black suspenders, he looked more like a bouncer in a saloon than a government agent.

  The rosebush grew beside the slab step; the ground around it was tilled and pliable in contrast to the hard-beaten, clean-swept path. The bush bore no roses and few leaves.

  Benjamin argued, persuaded, and tried to reason with the man. Carson and Kale came out the front door on their way to rustle up meat for supper. Just as Kale stepped even with Benjamin, the man on the path stooped, and with both hands near the base of the bush he jerked Ma’s rosebush from the ground and shook it in Benjamin’s face.

  “This is what we’ll do to your whole crop, Jarrett, if you don’t toe the line.”

  The rifle was fired from pistol position, suddenly, accurately. The bullet would have gone straight through the carpetbagger’s heart had the man not leaned to the right to toss the rosebush away. Instead it pierced his side.

  Kale Jarrett had shot his first man, and all he could think about at the time was how the thorns must have dug into that carpetbagger’s hands. Later, remorse set in—remorse for his family and for the man he had shot; and fear—fear for himself and for the man he had become.

  Within an hour of the shooting, Benjamin had sent him packing.

  “I understand what took hold of you, Kale, but the fact remains, you shot the man. They’ll hang you for it, regardless of whether he lives or dies. This is reconstruction—they’re right, we’re wrong. There’s nothing in between.”

  One by one the brothers shook hands; Ginny hugged him, and he stooped to kiss little Delta and to hug his ma.

  “Stay away from the outlaw trail, Kale,” Benjamin admonished. “Work on your temper and your self-control. You have an obligation to your family as well as to yourself. All we have now is our name and what we do with it.”

  At the end of the lane, Kale had turned around for one last look at the homeplace, a lump in his throat the size of that carpetbagger’s fist. Carson and Ginny waved from the porch. Benjamin stood stoically beside Ma, who sat on the step, cradling the rosebush and crying.

  Five years passed before he saw any of his family again…five years in which he grew to manhood and became more proficient with the handgun strapped to his side.

  The day wore on, and so did Kale and the bay. Once he stopped and poured canteen water into his hat for his horse. While the bay drank, Kale scanned the distant horizon for any sign of movement.

  Nothing yet. But he feared they would come. His hope now was that they were acting on impulse and not orders. That way they would be forced to turn around sooner or later to avoid becoming deserters, and Hubbard Creek seemed the logical place for them to turn back.

  He was sorry about the fight. Because of him, and because of an idiotic notion some folks had that a man could prove his prowess by facing down a known gunman, a kid lay near death. This had never made sense to Kale. If those people could see that reputation from behind the eyes of the man who held it, they’d likely understand better: always leery in crowds, always running, not from the law, necessarily, but from every harebrained man who thought he’d found a surefire way to prove his manhood.

  The sun began to set in the west. Several times he recalled the telegram in his pocket, but his throbbing head kept him from being able to think about the situation clearly.

  He knew however that if Carson said Benjamin and Ellie needed help, they needed help. He also knew he was in no condition to meet up with a fight just now. After he got to the creek and cleaned up some, maybe his head would clear and he could get the swelling down in his right hand. As a gun hand it wasn’t worth two bits, swollen this way.

  The moon was up when he finally reached the coarse, sandy bank of Hubbard Creek. He stopped long enough to rest the bay and soak his aching body. He hoped he was right, that the soldiers would turn back here. But right or wrong, it would not do for them to catch up with him, so he headed south, picking his way in the moonlight.

  A couple of miles off he bedded down in a cedar brake. He didn’t know how long he slept, but it was still plenty dark when he awoke. Thoughts of Benjamin kept tugging at his mind.

  Years ago, after Pa left, Benjamin stayed on to take care of Ma and the farm. The only time he ever left was to fight in the War Between the States; even then, he hadn’t been gone long. He caught a bullet in the leg, and by the time the wound healed, the war was over. He hadn’t married; instead, he raised his brothers and sisters, seeing that they tried their wings and left the nest in due time.

  Two years back Ma died, and Benjamin sold the farm and went to Texas to be nearer his family. Kale saw him once, just over a year ago. Benjamin hadn’t married Ellie then, but he did have the ranch started. Kale and Carson had spent some time helping him get things cleaned up around the place and catching up on family news. A few months after that, Benjamin met and married Ellie Langstrom. “A fine young woman,” Carson had written.

  Kale saddled up and rode on through the night, clenching and unclenching his right hand. Something told him he was going to need it.

  Chapter One

  Ellie lugged the bucket up the hillside, squinting against the magenta rays of the afternoon sun. All day she had intended to water the rose cutting at the head of Benjamin’s grave, but this was the earliest she had been able to make herself come up here. It was her guilty conscience, she knew.

  Benjamin Jarrett hadn’t deserved to die a brutal death. But try as she had these last two months since she’d found his body, she had not been able to banish her own feelings of guilt. Her life had been a steady stream of catastrophes; why had she believed marriage would be different? Why had she risked bringing her bad luck to a man who had been nothing but kind and good to her?

  Benjamin couldn’t have treated a daughter with more respect than he’d treated her, a girl raised in a house of prostitution. And now he lay dead—murdered—and she felt so very guilty.

  When she stubbed her toe on a limestone outcropping, half the water in her bucket sloshed down the front of her calico skirt. She stopped to tuck the tail into her waistband, taking care not to rip the portion she had mended the night before.

  Sewing was definitely not one of her talents. She trudged the rest of the way to the rock-blanketed grave. Not that Lavender hadn’t tried to teach her a few homemaking skills…but Lavender herself was dreadfully lacking in the day-to-day essentials of running a household—a regular household, that is.

  Once she married Benjamin, Ellie diligently mended his socks and patched his breeches and shirts, and even though her stitches were far from uniform, and the results bulky and unsightly, Benjamin never complained. Patiently, he assured her that she would learn in time.

  She tossed the remaining water on the rose cutting she had taken from her bush at the front step. Then she sank to the ground beneath the old oak tree, reflecting on her future. The very idea of what lay ahead for her brought tears to her eyes.

  The uniformity of her stitches wouldn’t matter, not working for Lavender. At least, she now had experience under a man.

  And it hadn’t been bad, actually…certainly not the ordeal she had imagined. From talk around the Lady Bug, she had fancied it a horrid, painful experience, giving in to a man’s physical needs night after night until one could hardly walk from the soreness.

 
; Of course the girls spoke of soldiers and cowboys. They especially dreaded the trail herds passing through. Some of those cowboys were as wild as their mounts, to hear the girls talk. And their lack of manners and decorum was a thing to dread. Why, some even refused to remove their boots and spurs. And some demanded privileges and wanton ministrations that brought a burning to Ellie’s cheeks even now, thinking on it here in the diminishing light of day.

  To be fair, she recalled, now and again a girl would entertain a gentleman, exclaiming afterward, “He can pay me to satisfy him any day of the week and twice on Sunday.” From time to time one girl or another had proclaimed a customer the kind to send shivers up a girl’s spine.

  Ellie plucked a stem of dried mesquite grass and chewed on it, smiling. Lavender’s first Poppy—all Lavender’s girls were named for flowers; when one girl left, Lavender the businesswoman always named her replacement for the same flower, so as to avoid redecorating the girl’s room or buying new costumes—Lavender’s first Poppy had actually fallen in love with a client.

  Ellie could still hear her giggles, giggles which turned to tears, tears which led to Poppy’s eventual disappearance.

  “The mere sight of him leaves me weak-kneed and dewy,” Poppy had enthused after her first encounter with her prince charming. “His lips light my soul,” she had sighed later. “I can’t live without him,” she cried one night when he hadn’t been around in two weeks. The next day she packed up and left, and no one ever heard from her again.

  “Silliest thing I ever saw,” Lavender had fumed. “Chasing a pair of pants halfway across the country when we have more of those things hanging around in here than snakes in a rattler’s den. I know men, and no woman needs one; not on a regular basis, anyhow.”

  But Lavender had changed her tune when Benjamin Jarrett turned up in Summer Valley. He came to the Lady Bug not to be entertained by the girls, but to drink a slow toddy, play a single hand of cards, and go home. It had been Lavender’s idea for him to meet, then marry Ellie Langstrom.