Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Raise them hands up nice and high.”
As Caleb raised them, he looked steadily at the gunslick.
There was no doubt who he was facing, and there was something familiar about him.
Beneath the brown, wide-brimmed hat, the face was round and boyish.
He could have been sixteen or twenty-five; it was difficult to tell.
Gunslingers just kept getting younger, he thought.
But that didn’t mean they’d live to see thirty.
This one wouldn’t.
Just as Imala had described him at the cabin she shared with her dead husband, Dodger was wearing a dark-brown coat and a dark bandana.
His black vest was worn and missing buttons.
The tan wool pants he wore tucked into his scuffed boots were filthy.
He had a second Remington holstered on his right hip that matched the one pointed at Sheila’s head.
She’d lost her hat, and Dodger had a grip on her hair that he used to give her a good jerk, just as a reminder for her that he was there.
This burly gunslinger was not making a very good first impression on Caleb.
Nor was Caleb inclined to give him time to make a second.
“Now lower your right hand and ease that nice, shiny Colt out and lay it on the ground. And if your finger decides to go anywhere near that trigger, I’m gonna blow this pretty little thing’s brains all over this rock. And I know that ain’t something you wanna see happen.”
“Don’t do it.” Sheila’s eyes met Caleb’s. “He’ll kill both of us anyway. And if you think you’re doing me a favor keeping me alive…think again.”
“Shut up,” Dodger said, yanking on her hair.
Caleb did as he was told.
“Now the other one. And remember to move real slow.”
As he laid the second revolver on the ground, something about this fella tugged at a memory. It was something about the voice.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
Dodger smirked. “I’m the man who’s gonna put you in the ground.”
“We’ll wait and see how that plays out.” He shook his head. “But we ain’t met before?”
“You really don’t know me?”
Caleb wracked his memory. “I can’t recollect, but there’s something.”
“I’m Dodger Clanton.”
A face popped fleetingly into the back of his brain but didn’t take hold. “You famous, Dodger Clanton?”
“How about this name…Jack Clanton?”
Jack Clanton. Caleb reached back to see if he could catch the image of that face. The memory darted by like a swallow in April, so quick that it was gone before he even got a good look. Then, it set down in a nest on the wall of his brain, and Caleb threw a net over it.
“Jack Clanton,” he said.
It all pieced together like a nine-patch quilt. And that quilt had blood on it.
Jack Clanton was a drunken bruiser of a ranch hand who thought he was the meanest, toughest, quickest gunslinger south of the Badlands.
One night, while Caleb was playing nursemaid to a couple of touring dignitaries and delivering them up to Cheyenne City in Wyoming, Clanton and a few of his friends rode in to raise hell in Greeley.
And raise it they did. They started in one saloon, where after a few hours of drinking, they got into an argument at a poker table.
The fight that followed involved about thirty fellas and nearly wrecked the bar.
From there, his pals went on to another saloon with smaller but similar results.
Jack Clanton and one of the boys, however, decided that a visit to a brothel just off Maple Street was in order.
It was a place Jack had visited before, and the whore he was interested in still couldn’t hear out of one ear because of him batting her around.
She wanted no part of him. Instead of leaving, Clanton and his pal beat the hell out of the bouncer.
And then Clanton decided that the woman needed a beating as well.
Caleb arrived back in town in time to drag the filthy dog out of the brothel without anybody getting killed, which was a miracle in itself.
Clanton did have a few bruises himself, however, by the time Caleb got him stowed in the Greeley jail.
But at least he was breathing. If there was one thing he couldn’t stomach, it was a big man laying his hands on people who couldn’t defend themselves. He never could sit still for that.
The next morning, the madam running that brothel didn’t want to press charges. Bad for business, she said. The woman he beat up knew what would come of the trouble if she pushed it. He’d get thirty days, if that, and then he’d come looking for her.
So the end result was that Caleb had to turn him loose about noon, whereupon Clanton went down to a saloon he hadn’t wrecked, drank up some courage, and came back to the jail with his six-shooters loaded and loose in his holsters.
It was sheer luck that Caleb had been sitting out front when Jack Clanton came walking up the street with his friends mouthing off and goading him the whole way.
The fool called him out. He wanted blood for being “humiliated,” and Caleb couldn’t talk him down.
The man threw down, and that was that. Clanton lay in the dust, his own blood draining away in the street.
Curiously enough, Jack Clanton had been working on the same ranch as Grat Horner.
Sometimes life was like one big patchwork quilt. All connected.
And now his boy was following in his old man’s footsteps.
“I remember,” Caleb said. “You sound just like your pappy.”
“Well, this is the last voice you’re gonna hear.”
Caleb nodded at Sheila. “She don’t have nothing to do with this. Why don’t you let her go, and we’ll settle this. You and me.”
“She’s been getting at me since I first saw her in Elkhorn. The business I got with her is separate. Though it’s more pleasure than business.”
Dodger released her hair and grabbed her around the waist. Even if Caleb were able to get to his guns, the outlaw was using her as a shield.
The cold place inside Caleb went colder. But Sheila’s eyes stayed locked on his, steady and fierce, and he knew she understood exactly what he was trying to do. Keep him talking. Keep him angry. Wait for one breath of chance.
“Never mind her. You plan on killing me out of revenge for your old man?”
“I’ve been looking forward to this ever since you shot him in the back going out of that jail.”
“That’s what you think?” Caleb scoffed. “Jack Clanton came looking for me. And he wouldn’t be reasoned with.”
“That’s a lie. I heard it all from them ranch hands that saw it.”
“I don’t know what they told you, but if I shot him going out of that jail, there ain’t no way I would’ve stayed sheriff up there after that.
” Caleb held his gaze. “And when I went riding out to that ranch on other business a month or so later, why didn’t those ranch hands call me on it? I’ll tell you why. Cuz it ain’t true.”
“You’re a coward and a damn liar.”
“That so?” Caleb spat on the ground. “I don’t shoot men in the back, like your friend Grat Horner. And I don’t creep up and cut their throats from behind neither. Ain’t that the way Wendell got it?”
“Wendell was a pain in my ass. Always pushing me. Knocking me down in front of other people.” Dodger jerked Sheila off-balance but kept the Remington pointed at her head. “He got what he had coming.”
“I say you’re a low-down coward and a bully, just like your old man. He got a real thrill out of beating women.”
Caleb didn’t look, but he saw Sheila’s hand slip into the pocket of her duster.
Good girl, he thought. Easy now.
Dodger’s eyes grew wide, and the smirk was gone. “Don’t you talk shit.”
“I’d wager he beat your own mama, ain’t that right?”
The killer’s mouth was twitching, pulling to the side. “He never done nothing. My pa—”
“A man like that, always trying to puff himself up. Always thinking that beating on his wife or his children would make him a man.”
“Shut up. My pa was a real man.”
“Your pa was a stupid, low-life weasel and yellow-bellied, to boot. Just like you.”
Dodger stared, unable to say a word.
“If you’re waiting for Horner to tell you what to do now, little boy, you’re gonna have to ask him in Hell. Cuz that’s where he is, and that’s where you’re heading.”
“I don’t need nobody to tell me that you’re the one gonna die,” Dodger rasped, white with fury.
“You’re forgetting about the Code of the Gunslinger, Dodger,” he said coolly.
As the gunslinger began to turn the muzzle of his six-shooter from Sheila’s temple toward Caleb, he hesitated. “What Code?”
The moment he paused, Sheila’s hand flared out to the side. An instant later, she drove the blade of her knife into the outlaw’s thigh and pitched herself forward, grabbing for his gun hand.
Dodger let out a shriek of pain and outrage.
Jake Bell’s knife came out of Caleb’s boot and flashed through the Colorado night, striking Dodger square and hard.
The outlaw’s mouth dropped open in shock. For one stunned second, he seemed not to understand what had happened. Then his eyes cut back to Caleb, full of rage and disbelief.
With Sheila still hanging on to his wrist, Dodger reached for the other Remington, still pouched at his hip.
His pistol cleared leather and was coming up fast. But not fast enough.
Caleb snatched one of his Colts from his feet and with a single movement, fired.
The outlaw dropped backward, his burly body thudding as he hit the ground. He never twitched, never moved.
The sound of the gunshot echoed off the hills and peaks, like thunder in a receding storm, slowly subsiding.
For a moment, neither of them moved. The night seemed to hold its breath around them.
Caleb walked over, drew his knife from Dodger, cleaned it off, and slid it back into his boot. Taking Sheila’s knife from where it had fallen, he wiped it on the man’s coat and turned to her.
She was sitting close to the edge, holding Dodger’s revolver, staring at her foe. When Caleb held out his hand to her, she took it and got to her feet.
“I saw you put your hand in that pocket, and I was wondering if you were still packing that pistol I gave you.” He looked at the knife before offering it to her. “Wendell’s?”
She nodded and took it from him.
“Well, that’s sorta fitting, don’t you think?” he asked.
Sheila gazed at it for a long moment, then slipped it into her pocket before suddenly throwing her arms around his neck.
They stood there together, and Caleb felt the faint tremble running through her body.
It was only natural. They had come within a breath of disaster.
She’d spoken before about the dangers of New York City, but he doubted she had ever faced death staring her straight in the eye the way she had today.
This time, he did not back away. He held her carefully, one hand spread against her back, the other resting at her shoulder, feeling the tremors move through her beneath his hands. She had been brave because she had no choice. But brave in the face of danger did not mean untouched by it.
Slowly, she leaned back just enough to look up at him.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved my life.”
“You did real well,” he said softly. “Couldn’t have done it without you.”
Sheila smiled then—small and unsteady—and rose onto her toes to press a kiss against his cheek. But at that same moment, Caleb turned his head toward her without thinking, wanting to say something more.
Instead, her lips brushed his.
The touch lasted no more than a heartbeat, soft and startled and warm enough to send a jolt straight through him.
They both froze.
Sheila’s eyes widened, color rushing into her cheeks as she stepped quickly back out of his arms. Caleb felt heat climb the back of his own neck, his pulse suddenly hammering far harder than it ought to.
For one suspended moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Sheila turned abruptly and took several steps away before stopping near Dodger’s body. She frowned down at the dead man, though Caleb suspected she was trying to gather herself again. Probably as hard as he was.
“I’m glad you killed him.” She glanced back over her shoulder, her cheeks still faintly pink. “If you hadn’t, I would have done it myself.”
Without another word, she started back along the boulders and disappeared into the gathering dusk.
Watching her go, Caleb realized maybe Sheila Burnett truly was tough enough for frontier life after all.
And maybe that was going to be a problem for him. A serious one.