Because Mama was attending to soothing her daughter, Remington addressed Mrs. Tyler. “Where are the other passengers who were in here?”
“I can’t say about the man wearing the bowler. He went forward early. If you’re talking about the farmer and sidewinders, they’re working to repair the track so the train can move on.”
“The farmer and the sidewinders.” He had no idea what that meant. “What happened to Phoebe Apple? Why isn’t she here?”
Mrs. Tyler regarded him narrowly. The severity of the expression did not favor her rounded features, but it clearly communicated suspicion. She did not answer his questions; she asked one of her own instead. “How do you know her?”
“I don’t.” Impatient, he asked, “Where is she?”
“She doesn’t know you. She told me so.”
“That’s right, but it has no bearing on what I’m asking. I need to find her.”
Mrs. Tyler’s suspicion shifted to confusion. “I don’t understand, but the answer is that I don’t know where she is. They took her.”
“They?”
“Who else? The robbers. They took her, or she went with them, I’m not sure any longer. It was all a muddle the moment she shot the leader.”
Remington closed his eyes briefly and rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. The ache on the side of his head was nothing compared to what was forming behind his eyes. “She shot someone?”
Mrs. Tyler nodded. “Him. The big fella.”
“The big fella.”
“That’s right. I figure him for the leader. Others thought the same.”
Remington tapped into a well of patience that he thought had gone dry. “Mrs. Tyler. I believe I need to point out that—” He stopped because she was shaking her head vigorously, one hand raised to her mouth, her eyes no longer suspicious but sympathetic. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking that you were unconscious for all of it, but it seems you were. Is that right?”
“I wasnotplaying possum,” he said dryly.
“Oh, I did not mean to imply that you were. That would demonstrate extreme cowardice in the face of Mrs. Apple’s actions.”
There was a steady thrum in his head that Remington was manfully trying to ignore. Behind his eyes, a hundred little men were all marching to the same drummer. “Mrs.Apple? You’re speaking of Phoebe Apple?”
“Yes. They took her wedding band same as they took myring.” Mrs. Tyler’s eyes were instantly awash in tears. She blinked them back while she searched for a handkerchief. “They have my bag, too. I have no—”
Remington dug his handkerchief out of a pocket and gave it to Mrs. Tyler. It was not the gesture of a gallant, more like the thrust of a combatant.
Madeleine, who had finally stepped outside of her mother’s skirts, took a step closer. In spite of that, she said, “They took Mama’s ring. One of the blue men said they would melt it into nuggets with the others.”
Remington looked to Madeleine’s mother for verification. When she nodded, he asked, “Blue men?”
“She’s referring to the blue scarves two of them wore to hide their features. I’m Mrs. Bancroft, by the way. My husband is Lieutenant Avery Bancroft. We’re on our way to Jackson to be with him.”
Madeleine knuckled her eyes. “And now Mama doesn’t have her ring. We are all very sad about that.”
Remington did not know what else to do except nod. Not for the first time he had cause to regret being in receipt of his father’s telegram. If only he had left Chicago when he planned, the message would have arrived too late for him to take any sort of action. He would have shown up in Frost Falls ignorant of his father’s request, and while Thaddeus would have been disappointed, he was not one to assign blame where none was warranted.
Thaddeus Frost was accounted by all to be a fair man, but Remington could not say how his father would view this. Remington had promised to see that the last leg of Phoebe Apple’s journey—in her case from the connector in Saint Louis through Denver and on to Frost Falls—was without incident. Here, then, by any measure, was failure on a grand scale.
Cursing softly so only his lips moved around the blasphemous words, Remington lifted his hat, plowed four fingers through his dark hair, and then resettled the Stetson on his head precisely as it had been. It was only then that he took notice that all three females were watching him with unnatural interest.
“What?” he asked, looking briefly at each one in turn. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” said Mrs. Jacob C. Tyler, though her audible sigh indicated otherwise.
Lieutenant Avery Bancroft’s wife blinked once and flushed pink, but she offered no explanation.
