The Touch of Fire Read online

  The marshal considered that. Another damn puzzle. “Now, why should that matter to you?”

  “It doesn’t,” Rafe said grimly. He shrugged his wide shoulders, trying to ease the pressure on the joints. The rope was tight, and securely knotted. There was no way he could slip out of it.

  Atwater continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “You’ve killed so many men, what would one more matter to a bastard like you? Pardon me, ma’am. You’ve left quite a string of dead men behind you, startin’ with that poor Tilghman feller back in New York. Supposed to be a friend of yours, at that.”

  “He didn’t kill Tench,” Annie protested. Her mind felt paralyzed. She thought she should be doing some-thing, but she didn’t know what. Atwater had sat down about fifteen feet from Rafe, still holding that shotgun with both hammers jacked back, ready to shoot. He seemed to be considering killing Rafe right now and saving himself the trouble of taking him back to jail. He wouldn’t receive a bounty, of course, since he was a marshal, but by his lights justice would have been served. Why go to the trouble of a trial? “He was framed. This isn’t about Tench at all.”

  “Don’t matter,” Atwater said. “He’s killed enough since then. Reckon I could add Trahern to your list, too, McCay, but I didn’t much like the bastard. Pardon me, ma’am.”

  “Rafe didn’t kill Trahern, either,” Annie said. She was totally without color, even her lips were white.

  “Annie, shut up!” Rafe snapped, but he might as well have saved his breath.

  “I killed him,” she said softly.

  Atwater’s eyebrows rose. “Do tell.”

  She was twisting her hands, and suddenly wished violently that she had Rafe’s spare pistol in her skirt pocket right now. “He was going to ambush Rafe,” she said in an agonized tone. “I had a pistol in my pocket... I’d never fired a weapon before. I couldn’t pull the hammer back when I tried . . . but then he was going to shoot and somehow I did shoot it, I don’t know how, while it was still in my pocket. It caught my skirt on fire. I killed him,” she said again.

  “She didn’t do it,” Rafe said sharply. “She’s just trying to take the blame for me. I did it.”

  Atwater was getting damn tired of this. He didn’t like it when outlaws turned out to have noble streaks. Tarnished his image of them.

  Not that he hadn’t known women to try to take the blame for something their men had done; the law was going to treat a woman different than it would a man in most cases. Few women ever actually went to prison. But in this case he didn’t think the doc was trying to take the blame for something McCay had done, because that tale of her skirt catching fire just wasn’t something anyone would make up. No, McCay was the one trying to take the blame, because he was afraid for the doc.

  But now the doc had confessed to killing a man, and that annoyed him, because as an officer of the law he was expected to do something about it. He considered it for a minute, then shrugged. “Sounds like an accident to me. Like I said, I didn’t think much of the bastard. Pardon me, ma’am.”

  Rafe closed his eyes with relief. Atwater scowled.

  Annie scrambled closer, her eyes both earnest and desperate. Atwater cocked his head warningly, and lifted the shotgun. Off to the side, Jacali muttered a dire threat if he harmed the white magic woman.

  “None of this is about Tench,” Annie said. “Tench was just an excuse.” Atwater turned his full attention on her, and she ignored the way Rafe was glaring at her. She suspected he thought it was useless to try to persuade Atwater, though perhaps he did feel the knowledge would endanger the marshal’s life too. Rafe’s streak of gallantry could take her by surprise, running side by side as it did with his steely implacability when he’d made up his mind to do something.

  She started at the beginning. As she told how it had all happened, the improbability of it struck her and she almost faltered. How could anyone believe such a tale? Even the most trusting of persons would need to see the documents Rafe had locked away in a bank vault, and Atwater didn’t look trusting at all. He was glaring at Annie, then at Rafe, as if even listening was an insult to his intelligence. His drooping eyelid drooped even more.

  When she finished he stared at her in silence for a full minute, then grunted. The gaze he turned on Rafe was baleful. “I hate to have to listen to bullshit like that,” he barked. “Pardon me, ma’am.”

  Rafe merely glared back, his jaw set and his mouth a thin, grim line.

  “The reason I hate to listen to it,” Atwater continued, “is that liars try to sound reasonable. No point in lying if no one’s goin’ to believe you. So when somebody tells me something that no self-respectin’ liar would ever come up with, that makes me curious. I purely hate to be curious about somethin’. Interferes with my sleep. Now, there ain’t no doubt you done killed yourself a bunch of men in the last four years, but if what the doc here says is true then I’d have to consider it self-defense. And I did wonder just who this Tench feller was that he’d be worth the ten thousand dollar price on your head, seein’ as how I’d never heard of him if he was supposed to be so all-fired important. That’s a mite curious in itself.”

  Annie swallowed hard, not daring to look at Rafe. The marshal seemed to be thinking out loud, and she didn’t want to interrupt him. Hope surged wildly through her, making her dizzy. Dear God, please let him believe her!

  “So now I’ve got all these curious things naggin’ at me. What in hell am I supposed to do about it? Pardon me, ma’am. The law says you’re a murderer, McCay, and as a lawman I’m supposed to bring you in. The doc says there’s some people after you paid to make sure you don’t ever make it to trial. Now, I figure I’m paid to make sure justice is served, but now I’m not so sure I’d be servin’ justice if I bring you in. Not to say that I could do it,” he said dryly, eyeing the big Apache warrior who was standing outside again, still holding the rifle and glaring at them with black basilisk eyes. It looked like the Indians weren’t taking too kindly to McCay being tied up. He turned back to Rafe. “Why’d you spend so long helpin’ these Indians? I wouldn’t’ve caught you if you hadn’t stopped.”

  Annie drew in an agonized breath. Rafe wanted to stomp Atwater for distressing her. “They needed help,” he said curtly.

  Atwater rubbed his jaw. Probably the doctor had persuaded him, and now she was all tore up about it. He looked at the black-bearded outlaw again and saw the anger in those funny-looking eyes. Well, he’d seen it before. Something about women could sweeten the hardest man, and this rough gunslick was definitely sweet on the doc. She was pleasant on the eye, for certain, but it was more than that. Those big dark eyes of hers made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach, an old trail hound like him. If he were twenty years younger, he might get all testy on her behalf too, especially if she ever looked at him the way she’d been looking at McCay.

  Well, hell, here he was faced with a dilemma. Not only did that tale of hers intrigue him, but when added to the other little things that had bothered him, like there being such an unusually large bounty and the evidence of his own eyes that McCay wasn’t the cold-blooded killer his reputation made him out to be, he had to consider the possibility that the wild story just might be true. He’d give it even odds, which meant that to serve justice he had to check it out, something easier said than done. He sighed; just as well he hadn’t signed on as a marshal because it was an easy job.

  Even getting out of this camp could prove to be a mite tetchy. That big warrior was scowling, and brandishing his rifle. It wouldn’t do to get him riled.

  Atwater made his decision. He sighed wearily as he got to his feet. Now his life was all complicated again, and he suspected it was going to get even worse.

  He stalked over to Rafe and slipped his knife from his belt. Annie struggled to her feet, biting back a protest. “These Apaches look a bit testy,” Atwater said. “Maybe they don’t like you bein’ tied up, but maybe they don’t like whites, period. Hard to tell. On the chance that what they’re objecting to is the rop