as the horses neighed. Wheels slid, no longer rolling. The occupants bounced around like beads in a baby’s rattle.
As the skinny artist slid off the center bench with a thud, his bottles clanking, Anna leaned toward the window. Dust clouded the air, obscuring the road.
Selina grabbed her and tugged her back.
“We’re being robbed,” the miner said tightly.
They all sat still as stones as the driver replied in that same foreign tongue. They’d very nearly made it to Stockton without any of the incidents they’d been warned about: no scalping by marauding Indians, no breaking a wheel and being stranded dying of thirst in the desert, no toppling over and floating downstream in one of the many waterways they’d forded.
The preacher began a prayer, but the soldier shushed him.
The miner held up a hand. “He says he has accomplices in the rocks. If we don’t get out, they’ll shoot, but if we cooperate, no one will get hurt.”
He squinted and tilted his head as he strained to listen to the exchange. “He says he’s looking for a man who cheated him in Santa Fe, but if he’s not on the stage, he has no affair with the rest of us.”
Anna looked at the men one by one. The wide-eyed farm boys gripped each other’s hands, and the soldier glowered at the silently praying preacher, while the artist carefully moved off the floor. None of them lowered their eyes or reddened with shame, nor were any of them likely to have been in Santa Fe lately, except the miner.
“Did you?” Anna asked their translator.
He shook his head. “I didn’t cheat no one. Not in Santa Fe, not anywhere.”
“Ain’t me,” said the oldest farm boy. “I ain’t been to Santa Fe ever.”
“I was fighting until three months ago,” the soldier said. The pinned empty sleeve of his shirt moved as if to point out he’d been in a hospital until coming on this trip.
“He wants the passengers to get out,” the miner said.
Anna got up from her seat and opened the door. “Soon as he sees the man he’s looking for isn’t here—”
Selina grabbed a fistful of her skirt and yanked, and Anna landed back on the seat. She couldn’t risk ripping her only good dress, a dress Olivia had painstakingly made over from the stash of her mother’s old gowns. It wasn’t as if Olivia were there to sew the green silk back together again with her perfect tiny stitches. No, she was in Colorado with her mail-order suitor—likely her husband by now.
“It’s just a ruse to get us out so he can take our valuables.” The artist pressed his case of paints to his chest.
The driver shouted back.
“What did he say?” demanded Selina.
The miner held up his hand again. “He asked for the name of the man who cheated him.”
There was a pause, and the robber yelled.
“He says the name doesn’t matter. It was like as not false.”
The sound of scrabbling above her head had Anna looking up as if a skylight might materialize to allow her a view through the roof panel. She hated not being able to see what was going on.
“The coachman told him if he put his weapons down on the ground, he’d let the male passengers disembark to be inspected,” said their translator.
“I wish he would speak in English,” muttered the preacher.
“Filthy Mexicans,” the one-armed soldier mumbled.
Anna flinched. It was too close to the “dirty Irish” or “white Negro” epithets hurled at poor immigrant families like hers. Were those of Spanish descent looked down upon, too? Did they have to deal with the equivalent of NINA attitudes?
“We should just get out and get this over with,” blustered the oldest farm boy. He put his hand under his coat and swung out the door. Gunmetal glinted under the edge of his jacket.
Her throat tightened.
“Hands up!” came the shout. This time in perfect English.
“Well, if he knows English, why isn’t he using it?” the preacher asked.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” hissed the miner. “No one’s been hurt yet.”
The farm boy slowly raised his hands. His two brothers followed him outside, then the preacher with his Bible. The artist clinked his way out the door.
The miner and the soldier exchanged looks, then checked their revolvers. With their weapons tucked in the back of their pants, they climbed out. Unable to stand not seeing what was going on, Anna followed. Selina was half dragged, since she’d never let go of Anna’s skirts. The preacher reached to hand them down.
There was a low call from above. “Ladies, get behind the stage and get down.”
Anna looked up the road where the robber’s voice had come from. A large boulder shielded him, but the bandit focused on her.
A cold chill ran down her spine, and her hands tingled.
Perhaps he wasn’t looking for a man who’d cheated him, after all.
A shot blasted from the roof. A mule kick to the center of her chest wouldn’t have jolted her more. She’d heard guns fired plenty of times, even fired them herself, but never at a man.
The robber raised his rifle and aimed. Passengers dived for the dirt. Pistols came out. The preacher knocked off her picture hat as he pushed her toward the rear of the stage.
The artist covered his head and hit the ground as the miner, the one-armed soldier and the two oldest farm boys fired.
The robber wheeled his horse all the way behind the massive boulder. Bullets pelted the stone and dirt where he’d been. Selina jerked Anna down to her knees.
A pfft overhead made Anna duck; then she twisted to look up.
A lasso swung through the air. The loop swirled around the outrider’s shoulders. The rope tightened, and the rifle flipped out of his hands. The line snapped taut, toppling the man backward off the stagecoach.
The outrider hung in the air for the longest time. His hands wagged like flippers, the rope restraining his flails.
His gun thudded in the dirt, and the lassoed guard thumped down with a grunt. The panicked horses dragged the stagecoach forward, the locked wheels scoring the earth.
The rope from the fallen outrider led behind the stage to a man on a horse. A multicolored cape hid his lower face, and he was working swiftly to uncoil the line from his saddle horn.
“Anna.” Selina tugged her.
The man looked directly at Anna.
It felt as if time had slowed to a trickle as she met his dark eyes. He stared back at her, and his hands
