“Yer using my name,” he says.
I guess I am. I take one of his arms and guide it behind my neck. “Just stand with me, all right?” I push to my feet, and he manages to aid in the process. I am too short to properly assist him, and so most of his weight ends up slumped into me, threatening to push me over, his feet dragging clumsily through the snow as we make for the house.
“I know this is part of the plan,” I mutter as we walk, “but it doesn’t look very promising.”
“It’ll pan out. You’ll see.”
“All I see is the infamous Rose Kid looking beat to hell.”
“And ain’t that what you always wanted?” He cocks his head toward me, and the brim of his hat skims my forehead. “To see me suffering and hurt?”
I jerk my gaze back to the house. “I never said that.”
“You’ll hang for this,” he says, mimicking my voice with an uncanny likeness. “That’s what you said in the coach. I know that rope you were making were meant for my neck.”
“You held me against my will then.”
“And now?”
There’s an anguished tone to his voice. Perhaps it is the result of being beaten so badly. Perhaps it is also desperation, a need to have someone validate the good that exists in him, despite all the bad he has done. Whatever it is, I can’t ignore it, and I foolishly look him in the eye.
The one not swollen shut doesn’t appear hollow or lifeless, but deliriously hopeful.
And now things are different.
This is the answer he is waiting for, and I can’t give it to him. Things are indeed different, but not in the way he hopes. Against all odds, I trust him somewhat. But not wholly, and I don’t know if I ever could. Not after he attempted to rob me at gunpoint. Not after that trip in the stagecoach. I cannot forget these things, and he should never forget that I intended to strangle him with a rope made of my own undergarments.
If he longs for forgiveness, I can give that. But I fear he is looking for more.
“That’s what I figured,” he says suddenly. “I’ll see myself in.”
He withdraws his arm from my neck and wearily ascends the stoop. He did not feel warm when he was beside me, but as he steps into the house, I feel his absence, the winter air cold and piercing where our bodies had touched.
Kate fills a bowl with water, and after she’s helped Reece sponge most of the blood from his face and neck, I stuff a sock with snow and hand it over. He applies it to his swollen eye. There’s a nasty gash above it that may need some needle and thread, but it’s hard to tell with his skin so puffed up.
When Jesse comes in from dealing with Silver, we all sit at the kitchen table and Reece tells us what happened. Luther Rose took the bait, but not before Reece took a beating.
Jesse begins talking about Sunday—what time he and Reece should ride to town, if they should travel together or separate, how they plan to take the gang out on the train. Reece suggests that Jesse remain hidden, in a cargo car if possible. After meeting up with the gang, Reece could then lead them into a surprise ambush.
“You can’t do it, Jesse,” Kate says suddenly, her eyes glossy in the firelight.
“Course I can,” he argues. “It’s a good, smart con. Damn near foolproof.”
“Maybe it’s better to just tip off the Law, let ’em know the Riders’ll be on the train.”
“And risk ’em screwing it up and Rose getting away? Nohow. That puts Reece at risk, too.”
I nod in agreement. If even one member of the gang gets away, they’ll know Reece crossed them. They’ll make good on the offer to torture his poor mother, and then they’ll kill him, too, if they manage to find him again. Plus, they have Jesse’s name now, which means the Coltons are indefinitely at risk. Even still, Kate is shaking her head like a spooked child.
“No. I won’t have it.”
“Kate . . .” Jesse reaches for her.
“You can’t,” she repeats, slapping the table. “I won’t let you go risk yer life when it ain’t you Rose wants.”
Reece and I glance at each other quickly, then back to Kate.
“What the devil are you talking about?” Reece asks, but I think I might know. In fact, I feel foolish that I hadn’t considered it before.
Everything she said to me that day she taught me to handle the rifle . . . How her youth was founded on acting before thinking, how her brashness cost lives and loss, how Nate sounds so much like Kate, and how that person is now dead. Because that part of her died. She left it behind.
“There never was a gunslinger,” I say quietly. “It was you, Kate. You killed Waylan Rose.”
“Guilty.” Her lip quivers, caught between a smile and tears.
“But you were . . . what? Eighteen?” Reece balks.
“Is it so hard to believe a girl mighta bested Waylan Rose and his boys?” Kate snaps. “Yer look of shock says yes. I walked into the sheriff’s office in Phoenix a decade back and told ’em the Rose Riders were dead. It was them that chose to see a young man in my place, to assume I were a hired gun. And I never corrected the rumors. Why would I? I wanted to stay hidden, and that was easiest when I were just some sad orphaned girl.”
I don’t doubt any of it. She is brash and bold, quick enough with her rifle and sharp enough to not miss, certainly not one to be trifled with. I imagine she was only more tenacious as a kid, when she did not carry life inside her and sought only revenge for her father’s murder.
“Kate, I ain’t exactly innocent,” Jesse says. “I helped.”
“But I pulled the trigger—”
“Wait,” Reece cuts in. “Kate told me she’d seen the rose mark carved on her father, and also yer brother. If’n she didn’t hire you to be her gunslinger, how’d yer brother get caught up with Rose?”
“My father were killed for a journal that showed the way to a rich gold mine,” Kate explains, hanging her head slightly. “I went to Jesse’s father for help, only he’d passed on. Once Jesse knew I were chasing Rose toward a mine, him and his brother offered their help so long as they could take some of the prize.”
“Only Will never wanted that gold,” Jesse says.
“Is this the same gold you offered to pay me with?” Reece says.
“Yeah, and it’s just as well that you don’t want it,” Kate says. “It ain’t clean money. Too much blood and hate surrounding it. Might even be cursed. Like I said, we don’t touch it if we can manage.”
I recline in my chair, trying to digest this development. No reporter on earth could ask for a better story. This is an epic—lost gold and a female gunslinger and a quest for revenge that catches up with her ten years later, when the Rose Kid finds his boss’s brother’s killer, but instead of seeking retribution, the Kid turns on his own to help the enemy and thereby win his freedom. It sounds like the stuff of fiction, the kind of tale that would have townsfolk talking and a paper going back for reprints.
“Do you think Rose knows the Coltons have the gold?” I ask Reece.