“Now come on, Reece. Get up. I’ll bring the horse.”
“I can’t even sit.” He looks up at the sky, his breathing labored. Reaching blindly, he finds my hand, threads his fingers through mine. “Charlotte, I want you to tell the story, all right? ’Bout the Rose Kid. And how he died here today. But how he became Reece Murphy again first. Can you do that?”
I blink back tears. “Of course.”
He squeezes my hand and I squeeze back.
“Please go help Jesse,” he says when I don’t move. “No one else gets to die ’cus of me. No one.”
I see the argument he’s making, I do. Jesse needs help and has only a shoulder wound. Reece has been shot in the gut, and I know how deadly stomach wounds can be. With the rough state of the trail, it’s about an hour back to the hideout, less if I ride at a good clip, but he’ll only slow me down. It’s lose one of them or potentially lose them both. Still, I try to lug him to a sitting position. He’s too heavy. I put his arm behind my shoulder and try to stand as I did that day in the snow. I can’t move him even an inch.
“I’ll return with help,” I say. I’m not certain Kate will be strong enough for the ride, not after twelve hours of hard labor, but that is a problem for when I reach the house. “Just hold on till I get back.”
“All right, Charlotte Vaughn,” he grits out. “If you say so.”
I am unfair to Silver, urging her constantly faster up the trail. I catch up to Jesse about halfway to the house; he’s slumped over in the saddle and barely conscious. I grab hold of Rebel’s lead and guide the mare on.
By the time we enter the clearing, Jesse is fading fast, and Kate comes shuffling to help. We manage to lug him into the house, where he goes straight onto the kitchen table. I rock William while Kate sees to the injury. Probably she has experience with gunshot wounds. She’s a bit slow on her feet, but she sterilizes some tools from her sewing kit and uses them to dig out the bullet. It’s not the bullet that often kills folk, she tells me, but infection. She pulls out a small square of fabric—a bit of Jesse’s shirt torn free and dragged into the wound by the force of the shot. Then she goes about bandaging his shoulder. It’s likely he’ll lose use of the arm or, at best, experience limited mobility, but Kate’s confident he’ll live. “And what need’s he got to lasso a bull no more? The rail’s killing the ranching industry. This just puts him outta his misery quicker.” She says it all jokingly, but there’s a pained look in her eyes. I figure it doesn’t matter much if your livelihood is stripped from you by injury or chance or fate; it still hurts all the same.
We move Jesse to the second bedroom, and as his eyes wink shut in sleep, I turn to Kate.
“We have to go back for Reece.”
“He’s alive?”
I quickly tell her about the shootout, how Reece shot Rose but also took a bullet to the stomach in the process. “I couldn’t move him on my own. I need another set of hands.”
Kate glances at Jesse. Their future is bright now. Because Reece took care of Rose, they no longer have to live in fear. She understands the complexity of the situation—how Reece brought this tragedy to her door but also kept it at bay—because in the end, she simply nods.
I do not know how she finds the strength to sit in the saddle. But she leaves William sleeping snugly beside Jesse and mounts Silver without a protest. I take Jesse’s horse, and we ride.
Kate quickly falls behind. She can’t fly at the same speed as I can, not after all she’s been through, but so long as she makes it to the rails, all will be well.
When the tracks come into view, both bodies are gone. So are the Rose Riders’ horses that followed me originally.
At first I think I have seen it wrong. It is hard to tell what is shrub or rock at a distance, but then I’m down in the valley, pacing the place where it happened beneath the late afternoon sun, and they are nowhere to be found.
I stare at their blood in the dirt. Rose’s is thick and dark in the place he’d fallen. Reece’s is not as prominent where he lay, but there are dribs and drabs showing that his body moved over near Rose’s, then disappeared. The entire area is awash with boot prints and the markings of hooves. And then there are the marks of a wagon, arriving from and disappearing in the same direction—toward Prescott.
Oh God.
I know what happened. The train arrived in town. Passengers spoke of a fight that took place onboard. Maybe someone peering from a window even saw two figures resembling Luther Rose and the Rose Kid leaping from the train. A posse was assembled, and they rode this way to chase the outlaws.
There is no sign of a struggle in the dirt.
Reece was too weak to put up a fight. The Law came while I was gone, and they took him. They took him, and now he’ll hang.
Chapter Fifty-One
* * *
Charlotte
I shout a frantic farewell to Kate and am immediately back in the saddle, riding for Prescott as fast as Rebel will take me.
I don’t know what I intend to do. It is unlikely that anyone will listen to my word compared with everything the Territory believes to be true about the outlaw known as Reece Murphy, but I know I have to try.
I make excellent time on the open plains, following the rail, but twilight is falling by the time I enter the city. My seat is numb from the saddle. The bandage on my burnt hand feels wet, too. I never bothered to grab gloves when leaving the Coltons’, and I would not be surprised to learn that my palm is now bleeding. I don’t stop to check. Riding directly to the sheriff’s office, I come upon a throng of people huddled out front, their incessant chatter punctuated by a striking hammer. At the rear of the group, a cameraman is breaking down a tripod stand.
“What happened here?” I ask him.
“Three Rose Riders are dead, Luther Rose and the Rose Kid among them.”
My heart drops. “Are you sure?”
“I better be! I just took the picture for the paper. They had the coffins propped up on the hitching post and everything.” He points for emphasis, and through the dispersing crowd I get my first unobstructed view of the sheriff’s office.
Three coffins lie on the ground. Two are sealed shut, and a man is hunched over the third, putting the final nail in place.
And that’s when I see it—Reece’s pompous, broad-brimmed, Montana-pinched dark felt hat resting atop one of the coffins.
“It can’t be,” I mutter.
“You sound like half the town.” The photographer chuckles. “I reckon some folk believed those devils would never be in the ground, but the Law won today. About time, really.”
He keeps prattling, but I’ve already turned away, unable to watch as the coffins are loaded onto a wagon.