The Gun Fight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Two fifteen. She stood in the leaden heat of the sun, shivering fitfully while she watched the shape of her husband dwindle away. She stayed there until he was gone from her sight. Then, slowly, with the tread of a very old and very tired woman, she walked back to the house.

She shuddered as she stepped into the relative coolness of the kitchen and her eyes moved slowly around the room as if she were searching for something.

In the middle of clearing the table, she suddenly pushed aside the stack of dishes and sank down heavily on a chair. She sat there, shivering still, feeling the waves of coldness run through her body. We’ll have to move now—the thought assailed her—we can’t possibly stay here with a murder on our conscience; we just can’t.

Her right forefinger traced a straggly and invisible pattern on the rough table top and her unblinking eyes watched the finger moving.

Suddenly, her head jerked up and she felt her heartbeat catch. A horse coming in.

Julia pushed up with a muttering sound of excitement in her throat. He was coming back; he wasn’t going into town! Her footsteps clicked rapidly across the kitchen floor and she jerked open the top half of the Dutch door.

It was like being drained of all her energy in an instant. Dumbly, she stood there, watching Merv Linken as he rode over to the bunk house, reined up, and dismounted. When he’d gone in, she turned away from the door slowly, unable to control the awful sinking in her stomach.

A moment later, she was running across the hard earth toward the bunk house, her blond hair fluttering across her temples.

Merv looked up in surprise as he bandaged his right wrist.

“Ma’m?” he asked.

She stood panting in the open doorway. “Will you hitch up the buckboard for me, Merv?” she asked breathlessly.

“Why . . . sure, Miz Benton,” he said.

“What, what happened to your wrist?” she asked vaguely.

“Snagged it on some barbed wire,” he said. “It’s nothin’.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “Will . . . you do it for me right away, Merv?” she asked. “I have to get into—”

From the way the skin tightened over his leathery face, Julia realized suddenly that he knew.

“I just passed him,” Merv said grimly. “He didn’t say nothin’ to me. Nothin’ at all. Didn’t even look at me.”

Abruptly, he tore off the end of the clean rag he was bandaging his wrist with and started for the door without another question.

“I’ll have her ready for you in a jiffy,” he told her.

Ten minutes later, she was driving out of the ranch on the lurching, rattling buckboard, headed for Kellville.

For her husband.