Open Country Read online

  “He isn’t scary like the other one,” Penny added, sending a shy grin in the man’s direction.

  Molly gently pulled the curious child back in her seat. “What other one?” she asked, trying to sound unconcerned.

  “The ugly one. He was watching us too.”

  Watching us? Skin prickling, Molly looked around. “When? Here, on the train?”

  “By the kitty in the window. ’Member the kitty in the window?” Penny bounced her heels against the front of the bench seat and smiled. “I like kitties.”

  Molly vaguely recalled a tabby dozing in the display window of a general store in . . . where was that? Omaha? But she hadn’t noticed anyone watching them. “Is that the only time you’ve seen him?”

  “He was in the town with the pretty red rocks too. He waved at me, but I didn’t wave back.”

  He followed us to Utah?

  “I didn’t like him.” Reaching up, Penny twisted a curl around her finger as she often did when she was anxious. “He looked like a candle.”

  “A candle?”

  “His face was all melted. He was scary.”

  Melted? Was he old? Did he have a burn scar? Molly thought of all the faces she’d seen in the last weeks, but none stuck out. She had tried to be vigilant in case Fletcher had come after them, but what if he had sent trackers instead? The thought was so unsettling it was a moment before she could draw in a full breath.

  “I had a kitty once, but he went dead.” Penny peered up through her flyaway blond hair. “Can I have another one, Aunt Molly? I promise I won’t sneeze.”

  “Perhaps. We’ll see.”

  What if someone had followed them this far? What if he was on the train even now? Nervously Molly glanced at the other passengers then froze when she found the bearded man staring at her again. Suspicion blossomed in her mind.

  Several times that morning she had looked up to find his assessing gaze on her. At first, she had thought nothing of it. They sat facing each other, after all. Since the man was apparently too large to fit comfortably into the narrow forward-facing passenger seats, he had taken the bench at the front of the car. It was natural that their gazes might cross occasionally. But after years of being invisible and for the last three weeks trying desperately to attract as little notice as possible, Molly found it disconcerting to be the object of such interest, idle though it might be. Could he be a tracker sent by Fletcher?

  The man looked away, but Molly continued to study him.

  He wore a thick shearling jacket, so she couldn’t see if he wore a gun. But those work-worn hands resting on his knees hinted that he earned his living doing more than just waving a pistol about. And his face, despite the low hat and concealing beard, didn’t seem particularly threatening, although that dark stare was a bit unnerving.

  Turning her attention to the window, she tried to remember what she knew about him. She had first seen him that morning when the train had stopped in Sierra Blanca to fill the tender with water, and she and the children had gotten out to stretch their legs. He had been supervising the loading of some sort of machinery onto a flat car. The men assisting seemed to know him, as did the conductor, who had stopped to chat with him when he’d passed through the coach earlier. That meant the bearded man had reason to be here other than to track her and the children. It was simply coincidence that they were on the same train. That, and nothing more.

  Letting out a breath of relief, she glanced at the children. On her left, wearing his usual scowl and chewing his thumbnail, Charlie stared morosely out at the west Texas landscape bouncing by. On her right, Penny dozed, her thumb stuck in her mouth. It was a habit she had resumed of late and indicated she battled the same troubling fears that Charlie did. That they all did.

  Hopefully, soon it would be over and they would be starting a new life in California. She would find employment—either as an assistant to one of her father’s medical colleagues, or in a clinic or hospital—and then they could cease this erratic flight. If she only knew what it was they were running from and why, maybe she could find a better way to protect them. But Nellie had been so weak and distraught the night Molly had spirited the children away from Savannah, Molly hadn’t questioned her. Now she wished she had.

  Feeling the weight of exhaustion pulling her down, Molly tipped her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. How long had they been traveling? Two weeks? Three?

  The children had hardly spoken at first. Confused and terrified, they hadn’t understood why they’d had to depart in such a hurry or why they’d had to leave their mother behind. Penny still didn’t understand, but Charlie did. He had lost so much in his eight years, it made him fearful of what might be taken from him next. Because of it, he trusted no one. Not even her.

  When she opened her eyes, Molly’s gaze fell on her nephew. She had no experience with children. She didn’t know what Penny and Charlie wanted or needed or expected, and her inadequacy terrified her. But she loved them with all her heart and hoped to find a way to reach them and gain their trust. They were all that was left of her family now—probably the only children she would ever have—and she was the only thing that stood between them and Fletcher and whatever threat he posed. She was resolved to protect them at any cost.

  Moved by concern for her troubled nephew, Molly reached over to stroke the fall of auburn hair from Charlie’s furrowed brow.

  He jerked away.

  Molly let her hand fall back to her lap. “Charlie,” she said, and waited for him to look at her. When he did, she saw fear in his eyes, and more anger than any child should ever carry. “Why are you so angry?”

  He stared silently at the back of the bench in front of him, his lips pressed in a tight, thin line.

  “I know you’re upset about your mother.”

  His head whipped toward her. “Why didn’t you save her? You’re supposed to be a nurse. You should have made her better.”

  “I tried, Charlie. I wanted to help her. More than anything in the world.”

  He glared at her for a moment more, then the fight seemed to drain out of him. “It doesn’t matter,” he said and turned toward the window. “The monster would have gotten her anyway.”

  The monster again. Molly sighed. How often over the last weeks had she awakened to her nephew’s screaming night terrors? “There is no monster, Charlie,” she told him as she had so many times. “It’s just a bad dream.”

  Charlie continued to stare out the window, a wall of silence between them.

  With a sense of defeat, Molly looked down to see that her hands had curled into tight fists. With effort, she opened them, forcing her fingers to straighten one by one until they lay flat against her thighs. At least she had control over her fingers, she thought wryly, even though everything else in her life seemed to be spinning into chaos.

  A distant voice rose. More shouts, then footsteps pounded overhead as someone raced across the roof of the passenger car toward the rear. A moment later, metal squealed on metal so loudly the children covered their ears. The brakes abruptly took hold, throwing the car into such a violent lurch Charlie fell against the window frame and Penny almost tumbled off the seat before Molly caught her.

  Suddenly the train began bucking like a wild thing. A woman screamed. Men’s voices rose in alarm. The screech of metal grew deafening, and acrid smoke seeped through the rear doors from beneath the back platform where the brakes were.

  “What’s happening?” Charlie cried, clinging to the armrests as the car rocked and shuddered.

  “I don’t know,” Molly shouted over Penny’s wails. “Hold on!”

  Another lurch threw Penny out of her arms and onto the floor. Molly reached for her and was almost knocked to her knees when a falling passenger slammed into her shoulder.

  “Penny!” Molly shouted, scrabbling for a handhold, terrified the child would be trampled or smothered. But before she could reach her, big hands scooped the shrieking child from the tangle of passengers and thrust her into Molly’s ar
ms. A flash of dark brown eyes, then the bearded man stumbled over thrashing bodies and charged into the smoke billowing at the back landing. The car rocked so hard windows broke and valises flew from the overhead racks. The screams and shouts and noise of the squealing brakes was deafening. Then with a crack as loud as a gunshot, something tore loose from the undercarriage at the rear. Feet braced against the seat in front of her, her arms wrapped tightly around the wailing children, Molly looked back out the shattered rear window to see the last three cars of the train topple off the tracks in a thunderous roar of splintering wood. Immediately their car shot forward so violently her head cracked against the backrest, before their coach rammed into the car in front of it, and shuddered to a stop.

  Dizzy from the blow to her head, Molly ran trembling hands over the terrified children. “Are you hurt? Are you all right?” Charlie nodded and swiped a sleeve at a small smear of blood on his chin. Penny tearfully held up her arm, showing a scrape on her elbow. “I’ll tend that as soon as we get off,” Molly assured her, so relieved her voice wobbled. “Hold tight onto my hands.” Working their way through the chaos of shaken passengers milling about in the smoke, Molly managed to keep a grip on the children and get them out of the car. By then, men had beaten back the flames where the brakes had caught fire beneath the rear platform, and other men were pawing through the wreckage of the baggage car, looking for survivors. Once she made certain the children were unharmed, Molly settled them at a safe distance from the wreckage, then went back to help where she could.

  Most of the injuries were relatively minor—bruises, scrapes, a few broken bones and cuts from flying glass. But three people were missing, and it took an hour for the men digging through the rubble to find them. Both the conductor and a brakeman were dead. The third man was barely alive. The bearded man.

  An hour later, after loading the dead, the injured, and the rest of the passengers into the less damaged of the two passengers cars, the train continued on, finally limping into El Paso several hours later.

  Luckily, word of the catastrophe had already reached town, and a railroad representative named Harkness, the local physician—a gaunt man with a dark patch over one eye—and several townspeople led by a Reverend Beckworth and his wife, Effie, were waiting at the depot to meet them. While the Beckworths herded the battered passengers to their nearby church, and the undertaker carted off the dead men, the physician, Dr. Murray, had the injured man carried directly to his infirmary on Front Street.

  “Not that I can do him any good,” Molly overheard him say to the nervous railroad representative. “Poor bastard will probably be dead by nightfall.”

  “Christ.” Harkness wiped a handkerchief over his sweating brow as he studied a column of figures in a small tablet. “This will cost the railroad a goddamn fortune. Two already dead, and another on the way. That’s three hundred each in death payments to their families. And I haven’t even added up the cost of repairs or what we’ll have to settle on the injured. Christ.”

  After assuring the Beckworths he would come to the church as soon as he had finished with the bearded man at the infirmary, Dr. Murray hurried down the street, leaving Harkness muttering and scratching numbers into his book.

  Molly and the children followed the other passengers to the church. Again, she helped where she could. As she stitched and bandaged, Harkness’s words kept circling in her mind. Three hundred. Not much for a life, but enough for a new start. A widow could live a long time on three hundred dollars.

  As soon as the doctor came into the church, Molly settled the children in the rectory under Effie Beckworth’s watchful eye, and ducked out the back door.

  An idea had come to her—a despicable idea—but she was desperate. And if she had to do something despicable to keep the children safe, she gladly would.

  Unless she was too late and the bearded man was already dead.

  She found Dr. Murray’s infirmary easily enough. After slipping through the side door, she paused in the shadowed hallway, listening. Outside, the chaos continued—dogs barking, men shouting, the clang of the fire bell. But inside, all was quiet. She started down the hall, checking doors as she went.

  The doctor’s living quarters were on one side of the house while the infirmary rooms opened along a long hall heading toward the back. Praying Dr. Murray would remain at the church awhile longer, Molly moved silently toward the medical rooms in the rear.

  The familiar odors of unguents and balms and chemical solutions wafted over her, pulling her backward in time. For a moment she thought she heard Papa’s voice reassuring a patient then realized it was a groan coming from one of the two rooms at the end of the hall. The door on the right was closed. The one on the left stood open.

  She peered inside.

  It was deserted and dark, the single window shaded by a thin curtain. A desk faced the door. Two chairs stood before it, their slatted backs at rigid attention as if braced for bad news. Against one wall stood an examination table partially hidden by a privacy screen; against the other, an overflowing bookcase.

  Not the room she sought.

  She moved to the door across the hall. As she neared, she heard a rhythmic “shushing” sound, which she recognized as labored breathing.

  She cracked open the door.

  Afternoon sunshine reflected off the glass-fronted cabinet on the east wall, the shelves of which held medical paraphernalia and varying sizes of brown medicine bottles with glass stoppers and white labels. In the corner beside it stood a straight chair next to a spindly wooden stand with a chipped washbowl on top and a basket of soiled towels below. Perpendicular to the back wall and separated by a small cabinet with a lamp were two cots.

  One was empty.

  In the other lay the man the doctor said was dying—the man who could save her and the children. The bearded man. Her heart pounding so hard she could hear the rush of arterial blood past her ears, Molly approached his bed.

  Dr. Murray had done a halfway job of tending the obvious injuries. Bandaged and wrapped, but no stitching, and the patient still wore his trousers and boots. Leaning over the bed, Molly quickly assessed his condition.

  He appeared to be unconscious. Beneath the beard, his face was swollen and bruised. A bloody bandage, held in place by wide gauze strips, covered the left side of his head. A deep laceration, she guessed. Or possibly a concussion, if not a fracture of the skull. Gauze strips also swathed his bare chest, tufts of dark hair poking through the stretched cloth. His shallow breathing indicated a rib injury, but the absence of a pink froth on his lips told her his lungs hadn’t been punctured. More bandages covered his left forearm. Judging by the distorted shape and the amount of blood that had soaked through the wrappings, he probably had a compound fracture. The hand below it was swollen and discolored. She saw no wedding band or evidence he had worn one recently.

  Good. It would only complicate matters if he had a wife somewhere.

  The thought shamed her. She pushed it aside, and trying to ignore the smell of blood and sweat and chemical compounds, she bent over him, needing to look into the face of the man she was about to deceive in the vilest way.

  Seeing him up close, she realized that without all the hair he might have been handsome, although it was difficult to be certain with all the swelling and bruising. Dark brows, a wide, stern mouth, a strong nose marred by a small lump of scar tissue along the bridge that indicated a long-healed break. His eyes were closed beneath dark lashes spiky with dried blood, but she remembered they were brown.

  She felt a shiver of unease. She didn’t know if he was aware of her or not . . . if he was staring back at her through those slitted eyes or not. The thought made her heartbeat quicken.

  Taking a step back, she let her gaze drift down the long length of his body.

  He was bigger than she had thought—dwarfing the cot, his booted feet extending well beyond the low foot rail. The boots were well made, with rounded toes and sloped heels. A horseman’s boots. Over denim trousers, he
wore a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle. On his right hip, facing forward, hung an empty holster with back-to-back R’s burned into it like a brand.

  Right-handed. Also good. If he lost his left arm, he could still function.

  The absurdity of that caught her unaware, and a sound escaped her throat. Almost a laugh, but not quite. The sound of hysteria. She pressed fingertips to her lips to stifle it. The doctor said he was dying. What would it matter if he left this world with one arm, or two?

  But what if he survives?

  The thought bounced through her mind, spinning out other thoughts like stones cast from beneath a racing wheel.

  What if he woke up and realized what she’d done? He was a powerful man, strong enough to have lived this long despite his injuries. What if—

  No, don’t think it!

  Furious that she had let her emotions get away from her, Molly pressed a hand against her churning stomach and struggled to bring the panic under control. He was dying. He probably wouldn’t last the night. He would never know.

  He. He who?

  What had the conductor called him? Wilkes? Weller? She had to know. She couldn’t do this without at least knowing the poor man’s name—who he was, how he lived, where he was going.

  With his heavy shoulders and muscular arms, he had the look of a man more accustomed to the plow than a horse. But those weren’t a farmer’s boots, and a farmer rarely wore a gun on his belt. Maybe he was just another anonymous cowboy. She hoped so. She hoped he was a loner with no home, no family, no one to come around asking questions.

  Was he kind? Was he loved? Would he be mourned?

  Sickened by the thought of what she was about to do to this innocent man—the same man who had saved Penny from being trampled on the train—Molly swallowed hard against the sudden thickness in her throat. Gently she brushed a lock of blood-crusted hair from his bandaged forehead. He didn’t appear much older than she. Early thirties. Too young to die.

  Another absurd thought. She had seen enough death to know the young died as easily as the old, and fairness had nothing to do with it. Perhaps she’d lost the capacity for grief. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. All that was important was that she get enough money to keep her and the children moving west.