She shrugged and turned back to our targets. I didn’t know how to make sense of such sorrow. But watching how the trauma of displacement haunted Niabi, I realized: I didn’t understand her story at all. And I wondered, once again, how men could be so brutal. Niabi gathered her basket to head homeward, and I invited her back anytime. “Visit me too,” she said. “I would welcome you.”
She straightened her blanket cloak, pulling her long black hair free from the wool. And then she walked across my meadow and into the woodland. As she disappeared into the forest’s shadows, an ache crept and bubbled across my back. I longed for her to return, but I also worried that she might. Niabi was vibrant and fresh—and in friendships, I only knew how to destroy.
And now, weeks later, I was out chasing that quickening of excitement in outlaw country. A twangy rattle sounded in the buckthorn, jarring me back to the present. I lifted my Winchester as something burst from the thicket.
The jake thrust through the bushes, head twisting about, a clutch of ten turkeys wobbling behind him. Being surrounded, while wandering the woodland, looked suffocating. The turkeys were almost in range when a bang ricocheted. The jake toppled.
I dropped to my stomach.
Shots rang out, my Winchester pressed beside me into the mud. By God and all high nation—the outlaws had sighted me.
A riot of shots, the squabble of birds, the silence of aftermath.
Chapter Eleven
Honey mesquite brush was all about me, my face smashed into the dirt, a rock cutting my cheek. If I survived this, if the bandits didn’t assassinate me, I’d blaze with fury—Ineededthat roost.
A sunray flickered low through slim sycamore trunks. Boot steps crinkled in the wood nettle, and I glimpsed wavy black hair, golden jaw, black slicker hanging like a cape.
I sputtered—that scallywag, in my way again. I jumped up, pushed back my hair, cowboy hat toppling earthward, and trained my Winchester on the Lawman.
“Minnie?” His low, resonant voice was easy and unhurried.
“Sakes alive, I told ya—it’s Amelia.” I steadied my weapon and groaned loudly, exasperated. “Miss Hoopes.”
The Lawman raced his gaze across my face, as if remembering my features. I didn’t lower my gun.
Well, Icouldshoot him. He knew my secrets. His glare lowered to my gun barrel, one eyebrow lifting. Mocking me as I pointed a rifle at his face.
He was the only one who knew about the cowboys—I had no reason to trust him. We were miles from our homesteads. Folks would assume the Bunch had finally got him. No one would know. The Lawman’s gaze was detached, unafraid as he faced death. I could shoot.
Well, of course I couldn’t. But Lord have mercy, part of me wanted to. To be rid of the worry, to allow this haunting to dim. If he told my secret, vigilantes would rise against me—and I’d be jailed or buried six feet under, clean and simple.
“You just tug back the little trigger,” he said, his voice without inflection. “That notch there on the bottom of the gun.”
“Gah.” I cursed. Flung the barrel earthward. He deserved to be shot for such audacity. For shooting my turkeys. “Those were my birds.”
“Yours? I’ve been scouting them all afternoon.”
“Like hell.”
“And you know where their den is?”
I flicked my hand westward. “In the woods.”
He settled his hands in his pockets, sable leather gun belt gleaming in the gloom of his oilcloth slicker. His silhouette diffused the light, sunrays filtering between the mustard-yellow leaves. Dark hair fell about his face in waves. It’d grown longer these months, long enough for him to tie back.
“I’m not a thief,” he said, voice hard. “I don’t like being accused of things I haven’t done.”
My eyebrows flung upward. The outlaw was miffed, not that I trained a long gun on him but that I accused him of stealing. Or was he alluding to the men I’d slain? A chill cinched around my forearms, a panic that he’d tell, a fear of what I’d do if threatened.
I stalked forward, heels scrunching fallen leaves. “Those birds,” I gritted through clenched teeth, “ran towardmycall.”
“Those pathetic caws were yours?” His gaze on the hardwoods. “I assumed it some injured magpie.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
His thumb brushed over his leather holster. “Did it, Minnie?”
