“Where is he?” Sully demanded, full of triumph.
“Right next door. Though I ain’t seen him for a while.”
Sully was confused. “Next door? You mean the Dunne place? I heard they burned that.”
Inwardly, he chuckled to himself.Heard they burned it…
The man couldn’t possibly know that Sully had hired the Teal gang to burn out the Dunnes after their daughter had refused Sully’s advances and publicly shamed him.
Jafford Teal was a useful man. A mercenary with no soul.
When the economy collapsed, Father had hired Teal to “rob” the bank. As directed, Teal and his men struck the bank at the appointed time, killed the tellers, and set the place afire.
Teal, of course, was confused not to find the bank manager, Godfrey Simmons, and angry when he discovered only worthless confederate money inside.
Father had already started to spread the rumor that ultimately redirected the rage of the bloodthirsty mercenary: that Godfrey Simmons had, knowing the bank was about to shutter its doors, run off with all the gold, greenbacks, and precious items locked within the vault.
Little did Teal or anyone else know, Father had already killed Simmons, who had foolishly considered father a friend and taken him into the vault early that morning to retrieve his personal wealth.
Father had coordinated everything perfectly. He killed the bank manager, stole everything worth anything, then slipped away well before first light the very morning he knew Teal and his men would ride into town upon the bank’s opening, kill everyone inside, and burn the evidence.
Sully was proud of his father for that.
That’s how the Weatherspoons had secured themselves against hard times: through forward thinking, expert planning, and flawless execution.
Later, after the lovely but insolent Maggie Dunne had disgraced him, Sully, inspired by his father, had hired Teal to do his bidding, too, and Teal and his raiders had burned out the Dunnes and shot them as they tried to escape the flames, just as Sully had told him to.
The public, of course, had believed the rumor that Sully had carefully spread. Teal’s gang had burned out the Dunnes because Maggie’s father had worn the blue.
In reality, Teal didn’t care about anything except blood and money, which made him incredibly valuable to Sully.
“No, not the one that burned,” the carpetbagger said. “He’s shacked up over there, on the other side of the creek, with I think his mother and sister and that red-haired woman.”
Sully was thunderstruck.
“Red-haired woman? What red-haired woman?”
“I don’t know her name. She’s a very attractive young woman. Reddest hair you’ve ever seen.”
The carpetbagger could be describing only one person: Maggie Dunne, the woman who’d broken Sully’s heart and humiliated him, the same woman he’d hired Teal to kill.
Sully filled instantly with conflicting emotions. Cold fury met red-hot desire, unleashing a cataclysmic storm within him.
Ignoring the carpetbagger, he turned and rode in the direction the Yankee had pointed.
If Maggie Dunne still lived, he would have her… no matter what.
CHAPTER 30
“You don’t have to escort us,” Will told Benny the next morning after breakfast. “I appreciate the offer, but I hate to put you at risk.”
“Pshaw!” Benny said. “I’d welcome a little risk right now. We’ve been siting around the Thicket too long. And I’m serious, Will. You try riding out here without us, you’ll have trouble. Those men you saw, they’ve ambushed folks before.”
“Well, then, I appreciate you and your boys riding along, Benny.”
After a meal of pork and beans, the raiders had made camp among Will and his friends, and this morning, after breakfast—pork and beans again—the men had continued the previous night’s conversations.
Mostly, it was the raiders wanting to know what was happening back in the world and especially the regions from which they hailed.
