pushed her behind him as a big miner with a long, scraggly black beard stopped a few feet away, his face plum-colored with anger.
“My name is Barstow. What the hell’s going on here?” he rumbled. “That’s a redskin.”
“She’s a scout for our post,” Gib said, keeping his voice low and calm.
“Right nice scalp she’s got,” a second miner crowed, his eyes shining with excitement. “Why, I could get thirty dollars for it.”
Gib’s hand moved to the pistol. “Don’t even think about it, men,” he warned them. “She’s been hired by the army.”
The black-bearded miner spat to one side. “Don’t make no difference. Who the hell do you think you are, bringing one of those bastards up here?” He waved his hairy arm at Kuchana. “You boys in blue think you can rub our noses in it. Hell, you don’t get up here often enough. Just two days ago a bunch of renegade Apaches robbed Bob King’s mine of two mules.”
The murmurs of the gathering miners joined the confrontation. McCoy turned to Kuchana. In Apache he told her, “Get in that building and stay there. These men aren’t going to listen to reason.”
Her eyes narrowed on the miner with the black beard. “I will not run like a coward and leave you here to fight alone.”
Gib wanted to strangle her. “I said, get the hell in there and don’t give me an argument. These men mean business.”
“No.”
Frustrated, Gib returned his attention to the ten miners who stood in a small, tense group in front of them. Damn Kuchana for disobeying his orders. But what had he expected? She was a warrior, and he’d never seen one run yet from a battle. It was then, in those seconds before Barstow lifted his rifle, that Gib realized just how very much Kuchana meant to him. The festering situation had ripped away all his defenses against his feelings toward her. He loved her. God, how could it have happened so quickly?
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