Texas Bloodshed

CHAPTER 24

Scratch was cold when he woke up in the morning, which meant two things, one good and one maybe not so good.

The good thing was that he woke up at all, which meant he was still alive. Cara hadn’t killed him while he slept, after all.

The fact that he was cold meant that she was no longer huddled in the blankets next to him. He sat up quickly, thinking that she might have slipped away and taken both horses with her, leaving him stranded here. He hated to think that she could do such a thing without waking him, but maybe it was possible ...

“Good morning,” she said. He heard the crackle of a fire and suddenly smelled coffee brewing. When he turned his head she was there, hunkered on the other side of a small campfire. She had gotten the coffeepot from his gear and started the Arbuckles’ boiling.

“Where’d you get the water?” Scratch asked.

“There’s a little creek just the other side of these trees,” Cara said. “And I told you good morning. You ain’t very polite, old man.”

Scratch grunted, and then a grin spread across his leathery face.

“Good mornin’,” he said. “You sleep all right?”

“Better than I have in a while,” Cara replied. “You?”

“Just fine,” Scratch admitted. If he could just forget the errand they were on and the sort of woman she really was, this little adventure wouldn’t be so bad.

But he couldn’t forget. Not hardly.

“You want me to fry up some bacon?” Cara went on. “I’m not very good at it. I can make coffee, but that’s about all. So if you’re thinkin’ that just because I’m a woman I’m here to wait on you hand and foot—”

“The thought never crossed my mind,” Scratch said.

“Good. We’ll head toward Decatur today. I want to stay away from big towns like Fort Worth. Too many blasted people there. Somebody might recognize me.”

Scratch almost came out with Eighter from Decatur, the county seat of Wise, but he remembered in time that he wasn’t supposed to know this area, so he probably wouldn’t have heard that little saying about the town.

Instead he told Cara, “You lead the way, darlin’, and I’ll go along with you.”

He climbed out of the bedroll, his muscles creaking a little and his breath fogging in front of his face in the cold air, and got busy frying bacon and cooking some biscuits. They had slept until after dawn, and the sun was well up by the time they finished breakfast and were ready to ride.

They spent the day continuing to head southwest, avoiding farmhouses and little crossroads settlements and trying not to skyline themselves atop the rolling hills. Late in the afternoon they skirted east around the town of Decatur that Cara had mentioned that morning. They made camp alongside a slowly moving stream that Scratch guessed was one of the several forks of the Trinity River.

The day had warmed up considerably, enough so that Scratch had taken off his buckskin jacket while he was riding in the sun. Cara removed her coat, too, and paused from time to time to run her fingers through her thick, curly hair. Whenever she did that, Scratch thought, Lord, she was beautiful, but there were plenty of things in this world that looked pretty but could kill you in a hurry if you let your guard down, he reminded himself.

Once the sun was down it quickly started getting cold. After supper, Scratch and Cara once again curled up together in the bedroll. She went to sleep immediately. Scratch lingered on the edge of wakefulness long enough to wonder how Bo and Brubaker were doing and how things had gone with the sheriff in Gainesville. Scratch had every confidence in the world that when the time came, Bo would be there. In all the years they had traveled together, Bo had never let him down.

The next day they followed the river southward. Scratch grinned and said, “If we had a boat, we could float down to where we’re goin’.”

Cara snorted disdainfully. “Except when it’s floodin’, the Trinity’s not deep enough in these parts to float anything more than a little rowboat. Anyway, I’d rather be on horseback. I don’t like boats.” She sniffed. “I can’t swim.”

“You can’t?”

“Never learned. There was no place around where I grew up that was big enough to swim in. We had a little pond on our farm, but it was barely deep enough for the crawdads to paddle around.” She got a reminiscing look on her face. “One time up in the Nations, Hank wanted to go skinny-dippin’ in a creek. I told him I’d take my clothes off, but I wasn’t gonna swim.”

“You were quite a hellion, weren’t you?”

She grinned over at him.

“I still am. You got a problem with that, Scratch?”

He shook his head and said, “Nope, not me.”

They had gone only another mile or so when the horse Cara was riding suddenly broke its gait and started limping. She reined in and glared in annoyance.

“What’s wrong with this jughead?” she asked.

Scratch swung down from his saddle.

“Let me take a look,” he said.

He lifted the horse’s hoof that seemed to be causing the trouble and studied it. Taking a clasp knife from his pocket, he opened it and pried at the horseshoe with the blade.

“Shoe’s loose and it’s picked up a rock,” he announced after a moment. “We need to find a blacksmith.”

“Can’t you take care of it?” Cara asked.

“Maybe, if I had the right tools, which I don’t. Anyway, we’ll be better off lettin’ somebody who knows what he’s doin’ handle it. You don’t want to be left a-foot out here, and if we have to ride double we couldn’t get away very fast if we needed to.”

“I wanted to steer clear of towns until we got to the hideout.”

“I know,” Scratch said, “but this can’t be helped. We’ll see if we can find some little settlement where there’s no law and nobody will know you.”

“All right, all right,” she said with a disgusted tone in her voice. She waved a hand toward the west and went on, “There’s a wide place in the road over that way called O’Bar. Might be a blacksmith there. We needed to start headin’ in that direction anyway if we’re gonna avoid Fort Worth.”

“Sounds good,” Scratch said. “Why don’t you climb up here with me, so your horse won’t have to carry you? We can ride double for that far.”

Cara agreed with that idea. She dismounted and handed him the reins to Bo’s horse. Scratch took his left foot out of the stirrup and let her use it to swing up behind him. When she was settled down behind the saddle and had her arms around his waist, he heeled his mount into motion again and started off, leading Bo’s horse.

Cara told him which way to go. This was still wooded, hilly country, although not as rugged as it would be farther west, where the Gentry gang’s old hideout was located. It took them about an hour to reach O’Bar, which turned out to be a one-street settlement with a couple of blocks of businesses and a few dozen houses scattered around its outskirts. Scratch spotted a church steeple that stuck up on the other side of some cottonwood and Post oak trees lining the banks of a creek just west of town.

“You see a blacksmith shop?” Cara asked anxiously.

Scratch nodded to a building on the left side of the street. It had double doors that stood open, and smoke came from a chimney in the middle of the roof.

Scratch reined to a halt in front of the doors. Cara slid down from the horse first, then he dismounted, too, as a stocky man with rusty hair and a close-cropped beard emerged from the building.

“Got a horse with a loose shoe that picked up a rock,” Scratch said. “I got the rock out, but the shoe still needs work. Reckon you can take care of it for us?”

“Not a problem,” the blacksmith replied with a nod. “I got one job to finish up first, but I can get to it in a little while. That be all right?”

Scratch turned to look at Cara, but she wasn’t there. He stiffened in surprise for a second before he spotted her walking across the street. He nodded to the blacksmith and said, “Yeah, that’ll be fine, thanks,” and started after her.

She was headed for a squat building made of red sandstone. The place had a tiled roof that was a darker shade of red. A sign on the overhang above the flat, flagstone porch proclaimed the place to be the RED TOP CAFÉ AND SALOON. Several horses were tied at the hitch racks in front of the porch.

Scratch’s long legs allowed him to catch up to Cara before she reached the café.

“I thought you didn’t want to call attention to yourself,” he said quietly.

“We’re already here anyway,” she said. “I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to get a meal that amounted to more than just bacon and biscuits.”

“Well, that’s not a bad idea,” Scratch admitted.

He opened the door, and they stepped into warmth that was thick with the delicious aromas of food cooking. The Red Top was more saloon than café, he saw. There was a lunch counter to the left that formed an L with the long side of it running toward the back of the low-ceilinged room and serving as a bar. The right-hand wall had several booths with leather-covered seats, and round tables were scattered over the open area between the wall and the bar. A poker game with four cowboys playing was going on at one of those tables.

A couple of punchers were at the bar nursing mugs of beer, while two men sat at the lunch counter with plates of food in front of them. Out of habit, Scratch quickly scanned the faces of all the men in the place. He didn’t see anybody he recognized, which came as no surprise. He had never been to O’Bar before, leastways that he could remember.

The patrons glanced at the newcomers, curious as anybody would be about strangers in their midst, and several of the cowboys took a second, longer, more appreciative look at Cara. Scratch didn’t think that any of them seemed to recognize her. Like all young men, they were just interested in the sight of a pretty girl.

They probably thought he was her grandfather, Scratch told himself. He didn’t care one way or the other. He didn’t intend for them to stay in O’Bar any longer than they had to in order to get that horseshoe fixed.

Cara sat down on a stool at the lunch counter. Scratch took the stool beside her. A short, burly man with salt-and-pepper hair rested thick-fingered hands on the counter and said, “Howdy, folks. What can I do y’all for?”

Cara gave him a dazzling smile.

“I’d love a nice juicy steak with all the trimmin’s,” she said.

The counterman grinned back at her.

“I reckon we can do that for y’all,” he said. “How about you, old-timer?”

Considering the gray in the man’s hair, Scratch didn’t think he was all that much older than the hombre, but he let it pass and said, “A steak sounds good to me, too.”

“Comin’ up,” the counterman said with a nod. He shouldered his way through a swinging door into the kitchen, which let out even more appetizing odors into the air.

Scratch leaned closer to Cara and said quietly, “If the idea was for you not to attract much attention, you ain’t goin’ about it the right way.”

He nodded toward the cowboys watching them.

Cara gave a toss of her head that made her mass of blond hair swirl enticingly around her shoulders.

“Oh, them?” she said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t even notice it that much anymore. Men have been lookin’ at me like that since I was fourteen.”

Scratch didn’t believe for a second that she didn’t notice the attention. She saw it, all right, and she liked it. But that wasn’t important at the moment. They would eat their meals, pick up Bo’s horse when that shoe had been repaired or replaced, and then shake off the dust of O’Bar’s single street as quickly as possible.

At least, that was the plan. But one of the poker players at the table threw in his hand in disgust, announced, “I’m out,” and scraped his chair back. Cocking his Stetson at a jaunty angle, he sauntered toward the lunch counter.

And all Scratch had to do was look at him to know that trouble was walking toward them.