Pretty, but Dangerous Book 2

Whenever the curse loosened its grip, Sam worked as a bounty hunter.

It was hard work, poorly paid once the expenses were counted. Feed for his horse, cartridges, hotel beds, replacement boots, and the blacksmith's price soon swallowed a reward. Sometimes he spent three weeks following a wanted man across dry country, only to discover that the fellow had crossed into another territory or died of fever before Sam could lay hands on him.

He brought his prisoners back alive.

That rule had cost him blood, sleep and more than one easy payday. A dead outlaw could be slung across a saddle. A living one needed watching every minute. Prisoners lied, begged, feigned sickness and waited for the moment their captor nodded off beside the fire.

But Sam had once ridden with men who decided for themselves who deserved to die. He had helped burn a Native settlement and called it necessary.

He no longer trusted that word.

Now he delivered the accused to a sheriff and let a court determine their guilt. If the verdict ended with a rope and a short drop, that was the law's business. He would not shoot a fleeing man merely to save himself another difficult day.

Living as a woman on the frontier made every difficult day harder.

Some sheriffs laughed when he presented a wanted notice. Others demanded to speak to the man who had really made the capture. Hotel clerks assumed he wanted customers, not a room. Men blocked doorways, caught his wrist or mistook a refusal for an invitation to persuade him.

He learned to watch their hands.

He learned which saloons had a second exit, which boarding houses locked their doors properly, and which stablemen tended his horse without asking what else a pretty woman might offer in payment.

On the trail, no one helped.

He hauled water, gathered fuel, and wrestled a saddle onto his horse, his shoulders already aching from the previous day. Rain soaked his blankets. Alkali dust worked into his clothes and rubbed his skin raw. In winter, his fingers cracked until gripping the reins hurt; in summer, sweat dried white along the seams of his shirt.

His monthly bleeding could begin fifty miles from a decent bed. He carried folded cloths in an oilskin packet, washed them when he could find clean water, and endured the cramps because stopping meant losing a trail. Once, feverish and exhausted, he spent an afternoon crouched beside a muddy creek trying to clean himself while his shackled prisoner complained about the delay.

Sam had pointed towards the water.

"You're welcome to fetch some."

The man had fallen silent.

Yet the ordinary hardships were easier than waiting for the curse.

Even when no one demanded anything of him, he could never quite rest.

A headache might be thirst—or the beginning of a summons. A distant scream might belong to a nightmare—or to somebody whose suffering he was about to witness. He slept lightly, waking at the creak of a floorboard or a horse shifting outside. Whenever he bought supplies, he bought enough to leave at once.

He stopped promising himself a week off.

Tonight might be the night.

Sometimes he sat before a plate of food too tired to lift his fork, listening inwardly for something he dreaded hearing. Sometimes he woke from an innocent dream with his heart pounding, then lay furious in the dark because even his sleep had become another place where he waited.

He had begun to understand that the curse did not need to hurt him every hour.

Knowing it could was enough.

The next summons came in a narrow bunk above a livery stable.

Sam had returned that afternoon with a horse thief after nine days on the trail. His wrists were bruised, his thighs rubbed sore, and he had eaten little besides beans, hard bread and coffee boiled until it tasted of the pot.

He intended to sleep until noon.

Instead, sometime after midnight, he dreamed of wagons.

A canvas cover burned against a black sky. A mule screamed in its traces. Men rode between the stranded vehicles, firing at people who had already dropped their weapons.

The attackers had painted their faces and dressed themselves to resemble Native warriors.

But one wore polished cavalry boots beneath his leggings.

Another shouted to his companions in a whiskey-thick voice.

Sam saw a woman trying to pull someone beneath a wagon. He saw a rifle rise. Then the dream changed: soldiers moving through a different settlement, families driven from their homes, possessions left beside cold cooking fires.

Land taken.

Blame placed where the killers had intended.

Sam woke with a cry caught in his throat.

For a moment, the stable loft seemed full of smoke.

He pressed his palms against his eyes. The pain behind them pulsed with each heartbeat, and beneath it came the familiar certainty: a direction, a place, harm left unfinished.

"No," he whispered. "Give me one night."

The pressure sharpened.

Below him, his horse stamped in its stall.

Sam sat on the edge of the bunk until he could stand without swaying. Then he pulled on his boots.

By dawn, he was riding again.

The journey took four days.

Cold rain followed him across the open country, turning the trail into a sucking mire. He dismounted on the steep stretches to spare his horse and walked with mud dragging at his boots. At a swollen creek, he waited half a day for the water to fall, shivering beneath a blanket that never properly dried.

Each time he shut his eyes, he saw the burning wagon.

Each time he woke, the pain was there.

By the time he reached town, he had developed a cough and could scarcely remember the last time he'd slept uninterrupted.

The place looked prosperous from a distance. New lumber fronts stood beside older adobe buildings. Freight wagons crowded the street. Survey stakes marked the ground beyond the stock pens, and men in clean coats discussed the railway over cigars.

Closer in, prosperity smelled of horse manure, coal smoke and stagnant water in the gutters.

Sam booked a small room in a hotel whose clerk required payment in advance.

He climbed the stairs, bolted the door and stood motionless beside the washstand.

There was a bed.

For several seconds, he could think of nothing else.

Then the pain tightened behind his eyes.

"All right," he muttered.

He washed with water gone cold in the pitcher and unpacked the only respectable dress he owned. It was dark blue, carefully mended, with a neckline suitable for an evening in a saloon. He brushed the dust from it, pinned up his hair and studied his tired face in the spotted mirror.

The woman looking back at him appeared older than she had a month before.

He strapped a small revolver beneath his skirt, checked that he could reach it while seated, and went downstairs.

The saloon was crowded with cattlemen, freight drivers, and men hoping to grow rich without working much.

Lamplight shone through tobacco smoke. A piano struggled against the noise of conversation. Behind the bar, glasses stood beside a jar of pickled eggs, and someone had spat tobacco juice close enough to the stove to make it hiss.

Sam took a seat where he could see the door.

He bought one drink and made it last.

Men were often willing to explain a town to a pretty stranger. With a little encouragement, they explained far more than they meant to.

He listened to complaints about grazing rights, boasts about land purchases and jokes about the recent removal of the Native families.

Whenever a hand wandered towards him, he moved it away.

One man tried twice.

Sam caught his wrist and held his gaze.

"You've mistaken my patience."

Something in his voice persuaded the man to leave.

By closing time, Sam had a name.

Silas Vane.

Vane owned three ranches, two brothels and the largest hotel in town. He had also bought an extraordinary amount of land shortly after the wagon raid—land whose frightened owners had sold cheaply, and land vacated after the cavalry drove its Native occupants away.

The railway would pass through it.

Vane expected to sell access, water and ground at whatever price the company could bear.

The killings had been an investment.

Sam spent the next week gathering proof.

He spoke to a wheelwright who had repaired a raider's wagon. He found a stable boy who remembered horses arriving with paint still smeared on their saddles. A wounded survivor described a familiar voice among the attackers, though the sheriff had refused to write it down.

Sam recorded every name.

At night, he broke into offices.

One window opened above a privy roof. Another required an hour of patient work with a thin knife while dogs barked in the neighbouring yard. He searched desks by the light of a shuttered lantern, fingers stiff with cold, stopping whenever footsteps passed outside.

The first safe defeated him.

The second yielded only account books.

On the third night, he found a key hidden beneath a drawer and opened a strongbox containing deeds, payments and correspondence.

There were dates.

Amounts.

Names of men who had received money before the raid and more afterwards.

A government land agent had arranged the transfers. The sheriff had been paid to discourage questions. Several councillors had purchased small interests through relatives.

Sam copied what he could and took the most important papers.

By then, exhaustion had made him clumsy.

He dropped his pencil twice. He forgot whether he had checked a door. One afternoon, he fell asleep sitting on his hotel bed with a boot in his hand and woke convinced that someone had entered the room.

Nobody had.

He checked the lock anyway.

Then he checked it again.

Vane's men caught up with him at the livery.

Sam had just tightened his saddle girth when he noticed that the stable boy had disappeared.

Two men stood at the entrance. A third emerged beside the feed room.

"Mr Vane would like a word," the nearest said.

Sam kept one hand on the saddle.

"He can write."

The man smiled and reached beneath his coat.

Sam moved first.

The shot struck the doorpost beside the man's head, showering him with splinters. Sam hauled his horse between himself and the other gunmen, scrambled into the saddle and drove out through the rear gate.

He took a bullet through the loose cloth of his sleeve.

For the next six miles, he rode bent low, expecting every crack behind him to be the shot that finally found its mark.

Only when his horse began to stumble did he slow.

He dismounted in a dry wash and led the trembling animal into cover.

"I know," he whispered, resting his forehead against its neck. "I'm sorry."

He wanted to lie down.

Instead, he checked the papers beneath his coat.

They were still there.

Getting the evidence before the governor took longer than stealing it.

Sam endured suspicious clerks, unanswered messages and a deputy who suggested that a woman travelling alone with accusations against respectable men might wish to reconsider her position.

He put Vane's letters on the desk.

"Read those before you advise me."

Eventually, someone did.

A territorial investigator accompanied him back to town. Witnesses gave statements outside the sheriff's hearing. They arrested the surviving raiders separately, and one began talking when he realised Vane had no intention of protecting him.

The documents supported the witnesses.

The witnesses supported one another.

Vane's purchases were challenged. The land agent was detained. The sheriff surrendered his badge, and an interim sheriff arrived with deputies who owed Vane nothing.

The town would need another council too.

Sam watched Vane being led towards the jail.

He felt no sudden triumph.

He was thinking of the wagon.

Of the voices in his dream.

Of another settlement, years before, where he had carried a torch.

Clearing the Native community's name did not restore everything.

The soldiers withdrew without offering the apology Sam thought they owed. Families returned to damaged homes, with livestock still missing. Some came back to graves. Others found neighbours who still looked at them with suspicion, unwilling to surrender a lie they had repeated so confidently.

The surviving settlers returned too.

The railway company now faced people whose claims could no longer be quietly erased. They would have to negotiate agreements for the track, the water, and the land.

Sam stayed until an independent lawyer arrived to represent the displaced families. He left copies of the evidence with several people.

He had learned how easily a single document could disappear.

On his last morning, a woman whose brother had died during the forced removal thanked him.

Sam looked down at the reins in his hands.

"I should have come sooner."

"You came," she said.

He could not tell her why.

The pressure in his head lifted as he rode beyond the final fence.

For the first time in weeks, he heard only the creak of saddle leather, the faint jingle of his horse's bit and the wind moving through dry grass.

He stopped beneath a cottonwood beside a creek.

His hands shook when he tried to loosen the girth.

He had remained upright through the danger, the journey and the testimony. Now that the summons had released him, his body seemed unable to carry another hour.

He fed his horse before feeding himself.

Then he spread his blanket beneath the tree and lay down in his boots.

Sleep came heavily, without dreams.

When he woke, the sun was low.

For a little while, he stayed put. His shoulder ached. His feet throbbed. He needed clean clothes, a proper meal and several days in a bed.

Somewhere ahead, another wanted notice would be posted. Another prisoner to bring back alive. Enough money, perhaps, to replace his worn saddle blanket.

And sometime after that, the curse would call.

Sam listened to the quiet until he caught himself doing it.

Waiting again.

He rose slowly, packed his blanket and mounted.

The western sky burned red above the plains. He watched it for a moment, then turned his horse towards the next town.