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  “We done some dreamin’,” Rat told her. “Nothin’ more. Now I’m mended, it’s time I was about my business.”

  “Rat … “

  “You sayin’ I made promises, Becky? Did I pledge myself?”

  “No,” she said, dropping her eyes to the floor. “But I thought we shared some feelin’s.”

  “We do,” he confessed. “But I forgot some matters. Best get ’em tended ’fore I do any more dreamin’.”

  She gazed with hurt eyes, and Rat wanted to draw her to him, stroke her soft cheeks and comfort her with kinder words. But come daybreak he’d still climb atop the westbound, and he’d be riding beside Pop Palmer for weeks, maybe years. It would be cruel to promise otherwise, and unfair to hint of a settled life without the cash money to make it so.

  “You ought to take her for a walk,” Busby scolded when they were alone in the little side room later. “She thinks Pa told you to keep some distance. Or else you’ve soured on her. Haven’t, have you?”

  “No, it isn’t her, nor her pa, neither,” Rat replied. “It’s me. Seems like the ground beneath my feet’s slippin’ away, and I got nothin’ to hold onto.”

  “You got us. Becky especially.”

  “Ain’t enough just now,” Rat told the boy. Busby’s eyes, as Becky’s had earlier, searched for an explanation that Rat couldn’t provide. He didn’t understand things himself. Only time could sort it all out, and Rat hoped he would have that time.

  Next morning he climbed atop the westbound coach. Where before he had felt oddly comfortable up there, Winchester in hand, he now found the rifle’s touch cold and foreign.

  “Feels good, havin’ you back,” Pop said when he maneuvered his considerable girth onto the hard wooden bench beside Rat. “Brought you some ham and biscuits for later. And a touch o’ spirits, too, in case the arm takes to hurt in’.”

  Pop drew out a corked bottle, and Rat nodded. They were only two miles out of Thayerville when he took his first sip.

  “Knew you were hurryin’ it,” Pop grumbled. “I had a broke arm myself once. Bouncin’ around atop a stagecoach ain’t no way to get it mended.”

  “I’m mended,” Rat growled. “Leastwise my arm is.”

  “Well, a man couldn’t tell it by yer humor.”

  “Sorry, Pop,” Rat said, returning the bottle. “I got no call to bark at everybody. I just got some figurin’ to do, and it ain’t gettin’ itself done.”

  “Had a fight with the sheriff’s gal?”

  “Not a fight,” Rat muttered. “Shoot, it ain’t her, neither, Pop. It’s me. I got myself twisted round, and I can’t seem to find my way. It’s like huntin’ a trail and findin’ a river what ain’t got fords.”

  “Well, nobody else’s goin’ to get you down that road,” Pop observed. “I had a crossroads myself once upon a time, though. It’s when I found my Varina.”

  “Had any regrets?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t make much of a trail cowboy, Rat. And there’s comfort at night, feelin’ her close, listenin’ to the little ones stirrin’. Cain’t say I never looked back, but it was the right trail for me.”

  “And me?”

  “I ain’t much for givin’ out advice,” the driver declared. “But Becky’s a mighty sensible gal. A man could make a worse bargain.”

  “Yeah, I guess he could,” Rat said thoughtfully.

  “Now I’ve said what I know to that business,” Pop remarked. “Let me tell you ’bout that scamp Tyler.”

  Pop rattled off one tale after another of his boys and little Velma, and the miles rolled along beneath the wheels of the coach. Except for a brief stop to satisfy nature’s demands and to give the horses a drink, the stage plodded its way west without a hitch.

  Rat found his uneasiness passing. By and by he settled into the swaying rhythm of the coach. His eyes kept watch on the adjacent rocks and hills, but not so much as a shadow attracted his attention. They rolled into Albany ahead of schedule, and Rat climbed down and bid the passengers farewell.

  The return trip started out the same way. But not five miles out of Albany Rat spotted a shadowing horseman.

  “Look yonder,” Pop called, pointing to a slender rider poised on the crest of a low hill just ahead.

  “One behind us, too,” Rat explained. “Could be trouble.”

  “More likely out o’ work cowboys,” Pop said nervously. “Not masked.”

  Rat saw it was true, but most cowboys would offer a friendly wave to a passing coach. These riders kept themselves to the shadows, and once the Western passed, the second rider galloped over and joined the other trailing horseman.

  “Figure another ambush?” Pop asked.

  “It’s the best way to do it,” Rat answered. “Plenty o’ narrow spots in the rocks up ahead. And we got a stop for water scheduled, too. They’d know that, I suppose.”

  “Well, if they suppose I’ll pull this coach to a halt with men followin’ along behind, they got another think comin’. My ma didn’t raise herself any idiots, and my kids expect more o’ their pop.”

  “Maybe I should throw a shot their way,” Rat suggested.

  “Better to save the lead,” Pop advised. “Anyhow, they could be peaceable characters after all.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Rat muttered.

  “No,” Pop confessed. “But it’d be a shame to put a hole in a poor cowboy just the same.”

  Rat nodded, but he continued to eye the stalking strangers as they appeared ghostlike in and out of the dusty cloud thrown up by the coach’s churning wheels.

  Bit by bit the coach pulled ahead of its pursuers. Rat expected an ambush in the hills south of the Brazos, but none came. It made no sense to string out a raid like this!

  “Ain’t so dumb,” Pop pointed out when he slowed the stage as they splashed across a rocky creek. “Look to the horses. They got themselves lathered proper. Cain’t drive ’em hard forever.”

  “Nor ourselves,” Rat added. “Got any notions?”

  “There’s a bend in the trail just ahead. Water for the horses, and good cover, too. We can pull off, rest a bit, and see what those dust-eaters got in mind.”

  Rat nodded his agreement, and Pop eased the pace.

  “We’ll be stoppin’ just ahead, folks!” Pop yelled to the passengers. “We picked ourselves up some company, though. Keep a wary eye out for trouble.”

  “That’s your job!” an elderly woman remarked.

  “We’ll do what we can,” Pop promised. “But you folks watch yerselves just the same.”

  There was a good deal of grumbling below, but Rat made little sense of it. Between the whining of the axles and the pounding of the hooves, he was lucky to hear Pop half the time.

  “That’s the place yonder!” Pop said, motioning to the turn in the trail just ahead. He then slowed the horses to a walk and allowed them to splash into the shallows of a stream before halting.

  “See anything?” Pop called.

  “Not a sign,” Rat answered as he crawled between the trunks and boxes tied atop the coach. He burrowed his way into the middle of them and swung the Winchester to bear on the trail behind them. The trailing riders had vanished, and no sign of trouble appeared elsewhere.

  “Maybe it was just cowboys,” Pop said as he clambered down from his driver’s bench and opened the door of the coach. He helped down the old woman, then beckoned the other two passengers out as well. One was a Ft. Worth cattle buyer named Johnson who traveled the coach regularly. The other was a Presbyterian preacher returning from an Albany wedding.

  “You staying atop there to keep watch?” Johnson asked as he stepped out onto the rocky ground.

  “Yessir,” Rat answered. “We had some company a ways back.”

  “Saw ’em,” the cattle buyer remarked. “Seen one of ’em before.”

  “Oh?” Rat asked.

  “Rode with the Oxen bergs.”

  Rat nodded his understanding. Nate Parrott had spoken of the Oxenberg brothers and their habit of raid
ing coaches and freight wagons along the Clear Fork of the Brazos. There was something else about them, too. Lem Cathcart had mentioned how Efrem Plank had taken up with that bunch. Ef knew the country ahead close to as well as Rat Hadley did.

  “They hit us before along here,” Pop said gruffly. “Let’s hurry ourselves, folks. I wouldn’t care to meet up with trouble.”

  “Boy, you yell out if you see anything!” Johnson urged when Pop escorted the other passengers down the creek a ways. “I’ve got a fair measure o’ cash on my person, and there are people in Albany knew it. I’m a good shot with a pistol, though.”

  “May need to be,” Rat replied. “But there’s open country ahead o’ us. We get through these hills, and we can hold our own.”

  Johnson nodded, then trotted off to tend to his needs. A quarter hour later Pop announced the horses refreshed, and the passengers hurried back inside the coach. Palmer returned to his place, and the stage resumed its journey.

  Rat began to believe the worry was all for naught. The riders had failed to reappear, and they hadn’t really threatened the coach anyway. But as Pop Palmer turned the stage northward and began to thread his way through the last of the low hills, a pair of rifle shots greeted them from the brush just ahead.

  “Yah!” Pop yelled, lashing the horses into extra efforts. “Yah!”

  What did you expect? Rat asked himself as he fired his Winchester at the white wisps of powder smoke. Fightin’s what you were hired for!

  The marksmen seemed to be aiming at the horses, hoping to halt the coach. But Pop got the team moving faster than the outlaws anticipated, and the shots mostly peppered the back of the coach. One did splinter the preacher’s oaken trunk, but in the end the real danger appeared from other quarters.

  To being with, the two young riders reappeared on Rat’s left. Another pair charged from the right, and three others blocked the trail ahead. Not a one of them had a weapon to match the Winchester’s range, though, and to use their handguns they had to close with the coach. Even an experienced hand had trouble hitting a target as he bounced along in the saddle, and none of the raiders seemed much past boyhood.

  Johnson, firing from the coach window, had the edge. The first outlaw to pull even with the stage found that out. A single bullet shattered the raider’s jaw, and he fell with a shriek onto the dusty trail. Rat’s rifle discouraged the pair closing in from the right flank. As for the three ahead, they opened up a withering fire.

  “Rat!” Pop Palmer cried as bullets tore into the coach and threatened the horses.

  Rat turned his rifle and waited an instant as the sights filled with the forehead of a masked outlaw. Rat squeezed his trigger, and had not the bandit’s horse turned, there would have been one less member of the Oxen-berg gang. As it was, the bullet struck the right-hand rider instead, but far from fatally. Rat’s second shot cut the middle rider’s reins and sent him on a wild ride atop his frantic mount. The remaining gunman fired a final shot before fleeing as well.

  “Get us through, Pop!” Rat urged as he fired at the retiring outlaws. “Keep ’em at it!”

  “I don’t need any encouragement,” Pop answered as he whipped the horses onward. “Those fool raiders went and broke my whiskey bottle!”

  Rat couldn’t help laughing as the driver held up a fragment of glass. It could as well have been Pop’s fat jowls that took that bullet!

  The Oxenbergs pursued the stage close to four more miles, but the shooting was from long range, and Rat had no more luck than did the raiders. Bullets flew back and forth, but they found only dust, rock, or prickly pear for targets. Ten miles shy of Thayerville the gang retired, leaving Rat a chance to wipe his forehead and clear the dust from his throat.

  “You folks all right down below?” Pop called to the passengers.

  “Not a hole in any of us,” the preacher shouted. “Praise the good Lord for delivering us from our trials.”

  “Praise Rat Hadley’s more like it,” Pop objected. “You sure broke up that bunch up ahead!”

  “Was lucky this time,” Rat muttered. “They had us cold, Pop, if they’d known how to shoot.”

  “Just boys’s all, Rat,” the driver said, shaking his head. “Boys that ought to be cowboyin’ if times weren’t so bad. If the Oxenbergs’d been up front, we’d known it. Likely they were back on that hill.”

  “Or maybe it wasn’t them at all,” Rat suggested. “I didn’t spy Efrem Plank, and I hear he rides with ’em now.”

  “You seen Ef lately?”

  “No,” Rat confessed.

  “Didn’t think so, Rat, ’cause that one you sent off on his horse had the look of a Plank to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d figure them to come back at us, too.”

  “Would seem likely,” Rat admitted.

  When the coach pulled to a stop at the Western office, Nate Parrott greeted them with a grin.

  “You’re early, Pop!” Parrott called.

  “Had some encouragement,” Pop noted, pointing to the bullet holes in the side of the coach. Two of the horses bled from holes in their sides, too, and Parrott’s smile faded quickly.

  “Was the Oxenberg bunch,” Johnson announced to the crowd that was collecting. “I dropped one of ’em, and the guard there hit a couple more. Kept ’em occupied a little while.”

  “Well, Rat, not much of a welcome back for you, was it?” Parrott asked.

  “Glad he was along, though,” Palmer commented. “He and that Winchester know their business.”

  Rat climbed down to the cheers of a fair-sized crowd. Tyler and Hollis Palmer shook his hand, and Billy Bedford grinned in admiration. Then Rat’s eyes spied Becky Cathcart. He found only grave concern in her eyes.

  “Let’s make some room now,” Sheriff Cathcart bellowed, and the people cleared the way. “I need to visit a moment with you folks. I could use a description of the raiders.”

  Rat nodded and motioned Pop and the passengers inside the office. Johnson and the preacher gave sketchy descriptions of the outlaws. The old woman pronounced them as young and left that to suffice.

  “Efrem Plank was among ’em,” Pop Palmer added. “And there was a youngster used to work at the livery, called himself Gill.”

  “Ted Gill,” Parrott muttered. “He tended horses for me last year.”

  “You add anything, Rat?” the sheriff asked.

  “I was pretty busy,” Rat explained. “And I don’t know much o’ anybody hereabouts anymore.”

  “Well, I’ll bring by some posters. You might match a face if it’s before you again.”

  “Might,” Rat agreed. “Mostly they looked young, though. And they didn’t appear to know the trade.”

  “I told you they were youngsters, Sheriff,” the woman barked. “Told you!”

  “Yes’m,” Cathcart answered with a bemused grin. “1 made note o’ it, too.”

  Johnson drew the sheriff aside then, and Rat seized the opportunity to make his escape. His hands still held the Winchester, seemed glued to the gun, in fact. He felt that need to wash away the dust and the powder smoke and the scent of death from his hide. And the memory, too, if that were possible.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rat rode guard four days a week thereafter, making the swing to Albany Tuesdays and Fridays, then coming back to Thayerville each Wednesday and Saturday. Each time he and Pop Palmer set out across the empty, rock-studded countryside, Rat expected the Oxenbergs to strike. But the outlaws devoted their attentions elsewhere. Winter came and went peacefully.

  Come spring Rat Hadley spent his off days as occasional deputy sheriff of Thayerville. It wasn’t particularly hard work, and he enjoyed accompanying Lem Cathcart on evening rounds.

  “Helps to have a man to watch your back,” the sheriff explained as they made their way up Front Street. “Not much to hazard a man in Thayerville, but there’s always the odd chance o’ comin’ across bad fortune. A peace officer can’t always make friends, and there are those who hold the law against
him personal. Those who’d break it as well. So you see, two pair o’ eyes beat one most every time.”

  The sheriff passed on other lessons, mostly as concerned watching and listening, knowing when to act and when to wait. Rat knew well the sounds of the range, the scents of the wild mustangs and longhorn cattle that roamed there. Town noises were a different thing, and the shelter to be found in doorways or behind woodpiles were fresh discoveries.

  “If a lawman’s to see his grandchildren reared, he’s got to know all these things,” Cathcart declared. And Rat took it as gospel, coming as it did from a man who had become a second father.

  The belonging Rat Hadley had found with the Cathcarts warmed him when the nights were cold and bitter. He found new reasons to smile daily. Among the town’s boys he was a sort of hero, and as he shared stories of his days driving cattle or chasing ponies, he read the same admiration in the eyes of Randy and Vesty Plank and the Palmer boys that he had found gazing at Busby Cathcart or Billy Bedford. More and more their elders tipped hats or spoke cheerful greetings to a man who not long before had been looked upon as scarcely better than horse leavings.

  Respect came more begrudgingly from other quarters, though. Strangers saw him only as a scrawny excuse for a deputy, and cowboys just in off the range resented the prosperity Rat enjoyed in hard times.

  “Best to step aside from trouble,” Cathcart advised when two Circle H cowboys blocked the walkway in front of the bank.

  “Ain’t got much talent for that,” Rat argued.

  “Can’t fight the whole world, son.”

  “Cain’t?” Rat asked. “Been doin’ it a long time.”

  In truth, though, he was learning to walk with an easier step. That was mostly Becky’s doing. She had a way of softening life, sprinkling each day with a bit of laughter. She eased him into civilized things, like Christmas sing-songs or sledding with the children. And when she suggested he escort her to the spring fiesta, he naturally agreed.

  “You’ll need some new clothes,” she then told him. “Shoes, too.”

  “Bet you spend a week’s salary gettin’ outfitted proper,” Buzz said, laughing.