was looking for an advantage. He thought he saw it in Young’s apparent carelessness and eased his hand down to his pistol. But Young had drawn his sight and now he saw the hand lift with the pistol. As both of them stared death in the face, Sack flipped up his coat in reach for his gun.
With the aim on Cactus fixed, Young had only to shift his pistol on Sack. Rifle and pistol spoke in unison. The bullet knocked the gun out of Sack’s hand. The rifle slug tore through Cactus’s hat crown, causing him to drop the pistol in a hurry.
The girl stared incredulously. When Young looked at her again, she seemed baffled. In her mind, despite rising anger and resentment, was something she could not help liking. Though a pair of eyes and sandy hair at the temples were all she saw above the bandana, she sensed the rest. And the bold careless attention he favored her with appealed to her as much as it angered her.
He was making a motion for the passengers to re-enter the stage. All obeyed except Sack and the girl. And she was about to raise a foot to the step when Young asked her name.
“Bonnie McQueen,” she said sharply. “Who are you?”
“The Sacaton Kid,” he replied. When she made no motion to get into the stage, he said, “Bonnie McQueen!” A cold light flickered across his eyes, then fell away into an amused expression. “Bonnie McQueen,” he said again, as though the name meant something to him. He looked at the sack across his saddle.
On it was written what he already knew: A. T. McQUEEN, QUEENY MINE. McQueen, rich and powerful, was the big man of the ’Frisco Valley and the mining town. To Young West, he was something else.
“So you’re McQueen’s daughter,” he said in a slow drawl that sounded like discovery. A light laugh sounded. “This is more than I anticipated, ma’am.”
Her mouth had a pretty quirk to it and there was a singular attraction in her every movement. “Why don’t you move on while you can?” she said, staring daggers at him.
Sack spoke up. “Maybe you’d like to hand over the payroll sack, young feller. We’ll give you a good start.”
There was a cogent quality in Sack’s words. It emanated from his tone of voice and steady eyes and Young knew he was listening to a good proposition. There were a few men like Sack in the West. They stood firmly for law and order, fought for it. But the proposition wasn’t for Young. He said so.
“Better listen to him,” Bonnie said. “They’ll bury the Sacaton Kid without bothering to ask who you really are.”
“Now that could be, Bonnie,” Young replied. “But aren’t you thinking about your father’s money?”
“He can spare all you took.”
“Sure. And a lot more, I hear. But we don’t want the big gun of the Valley robbed, do we? So just tell me where to return it.”
“The A-T Ranch!” she said, not to be outdone by him. “Say around nine tomorrow night. We’ll all be up waiting for you.”
Her sarcasm tickled him. He chuckled and said, “I’ll be seeing you, Bonnie.”
He spurred his pony and raced off. Looking back, he saw Sack’s hand fly up with a glint of metal in it. A shot and a close whine followed. But Young had seen more:
Bonnie’s hand struck Sack’s arm to deflect the aim.
Young rode north at a lazy gait, on past the stage stop and toward Cactus Flat, where night overtook him. A faint ghostly light etched the scenes about him, tipped the yucca and beargrass on the ridges like a memory of frost. A firebrand burned away up in the timber belt for an instant He looked ahead and saw it repeated. Indian telegraph. The Apache was harmless at night.
The stars were low and heavy, and Bonnie’s eyes continued to dig into his. Maybe the stars in his head were the ones he had seen burning brightly in her eyes. He had not expected her to stay with him all the way across Cactus Flat. But she watched his every move as he dipped down to the serpentine curves of the road and stared across the dark expanse where the upthrust of rock marked the opening of Big Dry Canyon. Stopping his horse, he looked into the night and considered his future with unwelcome seriousness.
The heavens, the girl, or the canyon, or all combined, evoked in him an innate wisdom all his own and yet no part of him. He was balancing the things that made up his life—purpose and a finely calculated sense of vengeance—against what was anchored behind a woman’s eyes. The ultimate goal was lost, tossed about in the ambivalence of his feelings, and he knew anger and resentment at the softer and finer instincts of his being.
He could not argue against purpose. What brought him out here was an unyielding thing. A woman’s eyes could wait.
He nudged the horse with a foot and rode on north, up toward A. T. McQueen’s country.
Bonnie knew somehow that she was working on the robber. She smiled up at the same stars he was seeing, urging him on with unspoken words. And like a woman she took a great delight in shaping his course even at a distance. She seemed to know that his fascinated look of the afternoon was still as fresh in his mind as in her memory. Some law of the universe made it so.
She ate supper at the stage stop, then climbed into the stage again. Cactus thought it best to travel at night. The news of the massacre of two prospectors up on Gutache Mesa influenced his decision. The Apache never struck at night.
As the coach rolled on and the other four passengers either slept or suffered the bumps in silence, Bonnie’s mind wandered off aimlessly to her own life prior to this day; to her future. She looked back on her twenty-one years, seeing the West, cattle, horses, mines, and Indians. She had teethed on Indian talk. She rode a horse with easy grace. She played the organ, fashioned her own dresses and hats, ran the big McQueen house on the ranch as her mother had taught her to do before her death two years back, and even made decisions in the absence of her father and his manager, Luke Mason. She felt the full responsibility of the big A-T Ranch, enough to realize that she shouldn’t have left it to go gallivanting down at Las Cruces for Lucy Summer’s ball. But she had had fun. The Army officers danced divinely. She would not soon forget Captain Corday, or Lieutenant Dana, who was returning to Fort Mangus. In a way she was glad to be on the road home instead of waiting over for the ball at Fort Bayard tomorrow night. And Luke Mason would be glad also.
There! The thought of Luke brought her up sharply. She and Luke were engaged to be married, though no date had been set for a wedding. She looked thoughtfully out of the window at the stars winking on and off over the ragged edges of the Mogollons. In her mind, Luke was standing alongside Lieutenant Dana and a man whose full face she had never seen, the Sacaton Kid.
Luke was tall, suave, educated; from Denver. He knew finance and mining. The Sacaton Kid was a bandit. Dana, grim and sullen, was a soldier. Tame Luke loved comfort. The Kid, like Dana, probably slept outdoors, saddle for pillow. Luke took her for granted. His air was that of a man who, supposed to make a good marriage, had all but tied the knot. He drank and gambled in a quiet reserved manner that said, “Good policy to do so.” What kind of game did the Kid play? Like he shot; like Dana fought?
Three men.
The green flashed behind her eyes. She would meet Luke Mason with a show of independence. Maybe she would exercise a catty streak and tell him how the Army officers slid across the dance floor with her as though they had moonlight in their veins.
She slept a little, opened her eyes, slept some
