Kitabı oku: «Promised by Post»

Chapter One

California rancher, in good health, age 26, dark hair and eyes, seeks agreeable woman for purposes of matrimony. Interested parties send photograph.

San Joaquin Valley, California, August 1862

Today was the day. Anna O’Malley slid her damp palm over the silk of her skirt and darted a furtive glance at her good friend Selina’s pinched face. They would meet their future husbands in just hours, perhaps be married by nightfall.

The stagecoach rolled over a rut, and all the passengers swayed. “Are you nervous?” Anna whispered.

Selina pressed her lips together, looked at the other occupants of the coach, all men, and then gave a quick nod.

After traveling with the others night and day for twenty-one days straight on this last leg of their journey, they all knew as much about each other as they were willing to share. Across from Anna sat a California miner returning from a trip back east to settle his recently deceased mother’s affairs. Opposite Selina was a one-armed soldier, mustered out of the army and hoping for a better life out west. Seated beside the soldier, a slender man wearing a threadbare suit cradled a case of paint jars and assorted brushes.

On the far side of Selina, a preacher dressed soberly in black bent over his worn Bible and mouthed the scriptures as they rumbled along. He was headed to a new flock in San Francisco. Three farm boys from Illinois riding on the backseat preferred California over getting conscripted. The youngest brother looked as if he should still be in school instead of worrying about fighting in Mr. Lincoln’s war.

Anna and Selina had reluctantly shared with the other passengers that they’d worked in a mill until the cotton shipments dried up over a year ago. The lack of work had forced them and their roommate, Olivia, to answer advertisements for brides. Knowing all they wanted to know about each other, the passengers’ conversations had descended into banalities about the ever-changing landscape, the weather and the monotonous beans and bread offered at the eating stations.

Most of the trip Anna had been concerned that Selina’s secret would be found out. But Anna could scarcely contain her own worries anymore. With each passing mile, her misrepresentations to her future husband had grown into massive cankers. She leaned close and cupped her hand around Selina’s ear. “I didn’t tell Rafael that I worked in a mill.”

Selina’s gaze flicked to hers. “Why? You had nothing to hide.”

Who would want to marry a dirty Irish immigrant? Anna whispered, “I told him my family was well-to-do.”

“Oh, Anna.” Selina put her hand over hers and squeezed. “Anyone who knows the real you will love you.”

Anna shook her head. She didn’t believe that. She was nothing special. Not beautiful like her friends Olivia and Selina. Not American born as they had been. They hadn’t been spit on for merely being Irish.

Anna’s friends had at least come from respectable families with property before the deaths of their fathers had drastically changed their circumstances. Certainly no stranger with a spread would want a freckled working-class girl like her. She’d written that her father was a successful businessman and she was one of only four children instead of one of more than a dozen.

In reality, her four older brothers built railroads, dug canals or laid road, and they lived in shantytowns. Two sisters and her mother worked as maids for the kind of families she’d told her fiancé she came from. Her father had died of cholera barely five years after leaving their farm in Ireland. After his passing, they’d been evicted from their tenement apartment. She and the rest of her siblings had scattered to the mills and factories that would hire them.

Her parents had endlessly debated leaving Ireland for the land of opportunity. But that drawn-out decision had been one of the worst of their lives.

No Irish Need Apply signs had turned them away from the best jobs. Without their own land, they were powerless to gain stability. She was determined to marry a landholder. Selina might have found a store owner acceptable, and Olivia had wanted to be certain her future husband owned a real house, but Anna had quickly weeded through the newspaper until she found advertisers who owned land. With land came the power to live independently. She’d fired off responses pretending to be worthy of a good marriage before she’d thought about the dozens of ways her husband could eventually learn the truth.

The seemingly endless journey across the country had given her too much time to fret. She was better off when she just acted and didn’t have a chance to worry about making the right choice.

Outside, the coachman cracked his whip, and the stagecoach jerked forward as the horses broke into a gallop. They bounced on their bench seats and grabbed for the leather straps. Anna cast a glance out the window, wondering if hostile Indians had been sighted. Maybe they had hit a patch where the driver felt vulnerable, or they had fallen behind schedule.

A rocky hill rose up beside the stagecoach until she could no longer see the horizon through the small opening. She leaned forward to look out the opposite window. The ground sloped up slightly less steeply, a fringe of the grassy meadow still visible beyond the rise, but they were in a gully or tight valley nonetheless. The stagecoach drivers didn’t like these narrow spots and ran the horses through them. Her breath caught as she waited for the pace to ease when they reached safety.

“Ya, ya—get!” shouted the driver.

A shout in what Anna suspected was Spanish rang out. A shiver ran through her. Her husband-to-be was of Spanish descent, even though he wrote in flawless English and his surname was northern European.

Of course, there were a lot of Spanish-speaking people in California. Other than the Indians, the long-standing residents had arrived when Spain owned the land.

The brake was applied with a loud thump, and the thunder of the horses’ hooves ceased with a jangle of the traces. The stagecoach screeched and jerked as the horses neighed. Wheels slid, no longer rolling. The occupants bounced around like beads in a baby’s rattle.

As the skinny artist slid off the center bench with a thud, his bottles clanking, Anna leaned toward the window. Dust clouded the air, obscuring the road.

Selina grabbed her and tugged her back.

“We’re being robbed,” the miner said tightly.

They all sat still as stones as the driver replied in that same foreign tongue. They’d very nearly made it to Stockton without any of the incidents they’d been warned about: no scalping by marauding Indians, no breaking a wheel and being stranded dying of thirst in the desert, no toppling over and floating downstream in one of the many waterways they’d forded.

The preacher began a prayer, but the soldier shushed him.

The miner held up a hand. “He says he has accomplices in the rocks. If we don’t get out, they’ll shoot, but if we cooperate, no one will get hurt.”

He squinted and tilted his head as he strained to listen to the exchange. “He says he’s looking for a man who cheated him in Santa Fe, but if he’s not on the stage, he has no affair with the rest of us.”

Anna looked at the men one by one. The wide-eyed farm boys gripped each other’s hands, and the soldier glowered at the silently praying preacher, while the artist carefully moved off the floor. None of them lowered their eyes or reddened with shame, nor were any of them likely to have been in Santa Fe lately, except the miner.

“Did you?” Anna asked their translator.

He shook his head. “I didn’t cheat no one. Not in Santa Fe, not anywhere.”

“Ain’t me,” said the oldest farm boy. “I ain’t been to Santa Fe ever.”

“I was fighting until three months ago,” the soldier said. The pinned empty sleeve of his shirt moved as if to point out he’d been in a hospital until coming on this trip.

“He wants the passengers to get out,” the miner said.

Anna got up from her seat and opened the door. “Soon as he sees the man he’s looking for isn’t here—”

Selina grabbed a fistful of her skirt and yanked, and Anna landed back on the seat. She couldn’t risk ripping her only good dress, a dress Olivia had painstakingly made over from the stash of her mother’s old gowns. It wasn’t as if Olivia were there to sew the green silk back together again with her perfect tiny stitches. No, she was in Colorado with her mail-order suitor—likely her husband by now.

“It’s just a ruse to get us out so he can take our valuables.” The artist pressed his case of paints to his chest.

The driver shouted back.

“What did he say?” demanded Selina.

The miner held up his hand again. “He asked for the name of the man who cheated him.”

There was a pause, and the robber yelled.

“He says the name doesn’t matter. It was like as not false.”

The sound of scrabbling above her head had Anna looking up as if a skylight might materialize to allow her a view through the roof panel. She hated not being able to see what was going on.

“The coachman told him if he put his weapons down on the ground, he’d let the male passengers disembark to be inspected,” said their translator.

“I wish he would speak in English,” muttered the preacher.

“Filthy Mexicans,” the one-armed soldier mumbled.

Anna flinched. It was too close to the “dirty Irish” or “white Negro” epithets hurled at poor immigrant families like hers. Were those of Spanish descent looked down upon, too? Did they have to deal with the equivalent of NINA attitudes?

“We should just get out and get this over with,” blustered the oldest farm boy. He put his hand under his coat and swung out the door. Gunmetal glinted under the edge of his jacket.

Her throat tightened.

“Hands up!” came the shout. This time in perfect English.

“Well, if he knows English, why isn’t he using it?” the preacher asked.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” hissed the miner. “No one’s been hurt yet.”

The farm boy slowly raised his hands. His two brothers followed him outside, then the preacher with his Bible. The artist clinked his way out the door.

The miner and the soldier exchanged looks, then checked their revolvers. With their weapons tucked in the back of their pants, they climbed out. Unable to stand not seeing what was going on, Anna followed. Selina was half dragged, since she’d never let go of Anna’s skirts. The preacher reached to hand them down.

There was a low call from above. “Ladies, get behind the stage and get down.”

Anna looked up the road where the robber’s voice had come from. A large boulder shielded him, but the bandit focused on her.

A cold chill ran down her spine, and her hands tingled.

Perhaps he wasn’t looking for a man who’d cheated him, after all.

A shot blasted from the roof. A mule kick to the center of her chest wouldn’t have jolted her more. She’d heard guns fired plenty of times, even fired them herself, but never at a man.

The robber raised his rifle and aimed. Passengers dived for the dirt. Pistols came out. The preacher knocked off her picture hat as he pushed her toward the rear of the stage.

The artist covered his head and hit the ground as the miner, the one-armed soldier and the two oldest farm boys fired.

The robber wheeled his horse all the way behind the massive boulder. Bullets pelted the stone and dirt where he’d been. Selina jerked Anna down to her knees.

A pfft overhead made Anna duck; then she twisted to look up.

A lasso swung through the air. The loop swirled around the outrider’s shoulders. The rope tightened, and the rifle flipped out of his hands. The line snapped taut, toppling the man backward off the stagecoach.

The outrider hung in the air for the longest time. His hands wagged like flippers, the rope restraining his flails.

His gun thudded in the dirt, and the lassoed guard thumped down with a grunt. The panicked horses dragged the stagecoach forward, the locked wheels scoring the earth.

The rope from the fallen outrider led behind the stage to a man on a horse. A multicolored cape hid his lower face, and he was working swiftly to uncoil the line from his saddle horn.

“Anna.” Selina tugged her.

The man looked directly at Anna.

It felt as if time had slowed to a trickle as she met his dark eyes. He stared back at her, and his hands stopped moving. Anna’s heart turned over, and she couldn’t look away. He briefly closed his eyes as if he needed a physical action to sever their locked gazes.

The rope dropped, and he spurred his mount away. Horse and rider raced up the incline beside the road. Leaning close to the horse, he moved with the animal’s sleek muscular lines almost as if they were one melded beast. Then he was out of sight behind the grassy hill.

The breath whooshed from her lungs.

“The gun. Under my skirt,” Selina hissed.

The spell broke. Anna sprawled in the dirt and grabbed the wooden stock. With Selina between her and the first bandit, she pulled out the rifle and positioned it against her shoulder. Anna checked her aim over Selina’s shoulder. A thousand thoughts rolled through her head. That she hadn’t fired this gun and didn’t know if it would pull left or right. No wind to speak of. Roughly thirty yards’ distance.

The mad firing around her stopped as the men’s guns emptied. Her fellow passengers scrambled to reload. The bandit came out from behind his cover and took deliberate aim with his rifle. Methodically he shot. A crack. The hiss of a bullet. The miner spun. Another crack. The oldest of the farm boys yelped.

“On three, roll away,” Anna said.

Selina’s eyes met hers, and she gave a grim nod.

“One, two, three.”

Selina rolled. Anna sighted down the barrel.

The terrified horses reared and stomped, neighing wildly. The driver fought for control. She was in the open, but so was the robber. She squeezed the trigger.

* * *

Daniel galloped his horse behind the large boulder where Rafael half sheltered. He reined in. “Vamonos, you loco idiot!”

“She shot me,” said Rafael with such a mixture of shock and horror that something broke loose in Daniel.

He laughed. “Good for her.”

“It’s not funny. That puta shot me.”

“You deserved it. What were you thinking?” Daniel grabbed the bridle of his brother’s horse and spurred his own mount. If they decided to give chase, he wanted to be well away. But Rafael was right; it wasn’t the least bit funny. “You shouldn’t call her that. She was just defending herself.”

“I wanted to see—” Rafael took his reins, yanked his poncho down to his shoulders and spurred his horse alongside Daniel’s “—what my bride looked like.”

“La Madre de Dios, you have a photograph,” hissed Daniel. A photograph that showed her trim figure and her hair as light in color, but it failed to do justice to her.

“I’ve never seen a photo...graph...of her.” Rafael pressed the heel of his hand against his chest.

Ah, hell. He’d never seen the photograph because Daniel had tucked it in his saddlebag for safekeeping and never turned it over to his brother. He’d handed over the rest that had come, but that one he’d held on to for just one more good look at the girl.

Heaviness pushed at Daniel as he tried to assess his brother’s injury. Not that he’d ever expected Rafe to hold up a stage, but if handing over the picture might have prevented his brother from his foolhardy attempt to see what his bride looked like...

“We’re going the wrong way,” said Rafael.

“Because leading a tracker straight to the ranch is such a good idea.” Daniel risked a look back. No signs of pursuit yet. The enormity of what they’d done slammed into Daniel like a bull at full charge. He’d just participated in a stagecoach—well, not a robbery, because Rafael hadn’t planned to take anything—not that the law would be inclined to see it as anything less. A stagecoach holdup, then.

“Right,” answered Rafael.

Why had his brother thought stopping the stage to get a look at his bride was a good idea? Daniel’s stomach burned, and his head buzzed. “I can’t believe you did that. Why would you shoot at them?”

“They shot at me first. I was only defending myself,” Rafael said. Grimacing, he pressed his palm against his upper chest.

“If you weren’t shot, I’d shoot you myself,” muttered Daniel. He jerked down the poncho he’d pulled over his face.

When Rafael had taken his new rifle, Daniel had followed him to get it back. Only he’d had to saddle a horse and then chase after Rafe for miles. He’d nearly caught up to his brother when they’d both seen the stagecoach rolling toward Stockton. Rafe had shouted back he was going to stop it, then spurred his horse toward a ravine the road ran through. Daniel hadn’t wanted any part of stopping the stage, but his protests had been ignored.

“I knew you’d help.” Rafael managed a smile despite the blood dripping down his poncho.

“I was just trying to keep you from being killed.” Daniel jerked back on his horse’s reins and caught the other horse’s bridle, pulling it to a walk.

Daniel’s head spun. He had to get Rafael away from the scene and back home before a posse was sent after them. “They could have recognized us or our horses, or, damn it, you could have killed someone.”

A vee appeared between Rafael’s eyebrows, and his eyes narrowed. The look of pain cut short the berating Daniel wanted to give him.

The enormity of what he’d done—they’d done—poured over him in a cold wave, worse than the time they’d gone to the ocean and Rafael had pushed him into the frigid surf and left him gasping for air. Not for the first time he felt old, much older than his twenty-two years. Older than the hills, older than his reckless brother.

There were times Rafael didn’t make sense. Over the past year, he’d been almost totally disengaged from the process of getting an Anglo bride, but he’d said he needed one to help their land case in the district court. Now he was acting ridiculously anxious. Daniel hoped a wife would temper Rafael’s drinking, disappearing for weeks on end and gambling in the raucous San Francisco farther west. Holding up a stagecoach was far worse than anything Rafael had done before.

“Don’t think I killed anyone,” Rafael observed as calmly as if he were talking about shooting bottles.

“Did you hit any of them? And where is my rifle?”

“Dropped it when I got hit. I can’t believe my bride shot me.”

The moment Daniel had stared at his brother’s fiancée he’d felt a punch to his gut. For a second it was as if time had stopped and he couldn’t look away. They’d been too far apart for him to see the color of her eyes, but the way the sunlight caught in her hair, lighting gold and copper strands, had caused a shift inside him, almost as if the ground shook underneath him. “Well, at least she’s pretty.”

Rafael coughed and slumped in his saddle. “Not so much. Probably freckled.”

“You’d better hope she doesn’t recognize us.”

Rafael’s mouth tightened, and pale lines bracketed it. He coughed again.

As if Daniel had been lassoed the same way he’d roped the outrider, his chest squeezed tight. “How badly are you hurt?”

“Through and through.” He spit. “Might have nicked a lung.”

“I should have left you to die.”

“You should have,” said Rafael before he slumped forward.