Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) - Mickey Spillane (classic novels .TXT) 📗

He felt silly, all of a sudden. And a hypocrite—what right did he have being jealous of that black cowboy, after sitting in a love seat with Victoria Hammond?

“Listen,” York said, holding his hands up in surrender, doing his best to sound reasonable, “just try to keep this from exploding for a few days. Raymond Parker is working behind the scenes on this mess, and—”

She frowned. “Parker? How? What does he have in mind?”

“He didn’t share everything with me.” And most of what Parker had shared with Caleb, the businessman wanted the sheriff to keep to himself.

“For now,” York told her, and almost settled a hand on her shoulder, “tell your man Jackson to send some scouts ahead, through the brush and trees on the east side of the creek. They need to keep out of sight, but confirm that the Hammond woman has withdrawn her men.”

“And if she hasn’t?”

“Send a rider to town and let me know, at once. I’ll get right on putting a posse together.”

Her expression was damn near mocking. “Of Trinidad town folk?”

He waved that off. “No. I’ll do what you and Victoria Hammond did—go to Las Vegas and come back with some dangerous dregs.”

“Funny way of keeping the peace.”

“It’s not a solution I’m partial to, but it’s what I’ve got.”

Her eyes tightened again, yet her expression softened, and her voice had hurt in it when she asked, “Caleb . . . why?”

“Why what?”

Now anger came out. “Why did you side against me in this?”

He sucked in air and let it right back out. “Damn it, woman! You talked me into keeping this job and the badge that came with it. Hell, I have two of the damn things now! If I had scurried to your feet like a lap dog, would you have liked it? Loved me for it? Or would you have lost all respect for me?”

She had no answer.

“I’ll say good night then,” he said, and tugged on his hat. He began to go, but paused and said, “Will you promise me one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll let the men do the fighting.”

She smiled. “Would you love me for it? Or would you lose all respect for me?”

Now he had no answer.

But he went back to her, and kissed her pretty mouth, gently, and so quick she couldn’t return it or refuse it.

Not much of a kiss, in the scheme of things, but as he rode back to Trinidad it occurred to him how much more it meant than that show of passion another woman had forced on him.

* * *

Victoria Hammond supervised in her kitchen, but she was not cooking up a feast, at least not literally.

After all, she wasn’t even wearing an apron. Instead, the dark-eyed beauty was in black, if no longer in mourning; rather, she was decked out in a black leather vest over a black shirt above black gaucho-style pants. High on her right hip rode a Colt Single Action .45 with mother-of-pearl grips boasting an eagle and snake pattern; her heavy Mexican-style leather holster was beautifully tooled and stamped with a floral design.

Few hostesses in the Southwest were more distinctively turned out.

Feast or not, something in this kitchen was cooking, all right, and she did have a chef of sorts, who was sitting midpoint at the eight-foot rustic Mexican table, as were several interested students. Three soup bowls and a larger serving bowl were set out in a horizontal row in front of him. One soup bowl contained a serving of black powder, another shimmered with viscous glue, and the third collected some shreds of tree bark. The larger bowl was empty.

The chef—more like a chief, in his faded blue army jacket, red silk bandanna, and with that ebony hair, parted in the middle, braids to his shoulders—was handsome enough to stir things in Victoria. Those ice-blue eyes, the high cheekbones, and that square jaw—he was a living bronze statue created by a master sculptor. Yet they called this man a kid.

The Chiricahua Kid.

Seated at the table with the Apache were the other two dangerous men the late Clay Colman had hired in Las Vegas: Dave Carson, boyish and skimpily mustached with close-set eyes, making him look dumber than he was; and Billy Bassett, lean and heavily mustached, older than any of the rest of her crop of riders.

“You’re the leader now, Mr. Bassett,” she had told him, after she learned of Colman’s fate at the hands of Caleb York.

“In my mind,” Bassett admitted, “I always was.”

They’d been talking in the library, Victoria behind the desk, the gunhand before her like a soldier reporting to a general.

She asked, “You scouted the position?”

Bassett nodded. “There’s a rise behind the bunkhouse and barn. Not much of one, but enough. Job can be done from there.”

“You took the Indian with you?”

“I did.”

“His appraisal?”

A shrug. “Said it looked okay.”

“Elaborate praise, coming from him.”

“Don’t say much, it’s true.”

The other person at the kitchen table, watching the Kid prepare for what was to come, was her middle son, Pierce. He was wearing an outfit he’d bought back home in Colorado, to prepare for the Circle G and what he saw as his new role as a genuine man of the West—a buckskin jacket with fringed sleeves and matching buckskin trousers and buckskin moccasins.

She did not know whether to laugh or cry.

But at least he was trying. He’d done well for her, arranging at her request the meeting—ambush, really— with Colman at the cemetery; it was Colman who’d fumbled that.

Tonight would be a chance for Pierce to learn about himself. And for Victoria to learn about him, for better or worse.

Bassett, an interested pupil, said, “This the way you savages burned out settlers?”

“Some time,” the Indian affirmed. “Mainly for making signal at night.”

The Kid poured the bowl of gloppy glue into the bigger bowl, then dumped in the gunpowder, like he was overpeppering a stew. With his right hand, he stirred the mixture briefly, then rubbed the residue on