Love’s Sweet Revenge(146)

“Pa, I’m staying here with you,” Lloyd told him. “Me and Evie and Brian. One of the men can go to the house and get my gear. Katie knows where everything is, and the men know where my saddle is. Thank God my own horse was in the other barn and plenty more outside. The men can have everything ready by the crack of dawn. I’ll tell Cole to try to find Midnight. You have to stay calm and think this out. The way you went after Evie in Oklahoma just about killed you. You didn’t eat, and you didn’t sleep for days. Dixie thought you were dying, and so did I. If you repeat what happened then, it will kill you this time, and if ever my mom needed you, it’s going to be after this. You can’t die finding her, and you can’t risk going to jail or getting yourself hung. Get that through your head!”

Jake remained turned away. “My God, Evie, this has to be hard on you. Brian, too.”

“We’ll get through it, Daddy. I’m a lot stronger now. And maybe…” She wiped at sudden tears. “Maybe it won’t be…as bad. I’ll be here for Mother when you get her back.”

Jake just shook his head. “She’s twenty-four years older than you, Evie. When you’re older…” Sometimes things…hurt more. “And what happened to you…there is no comparing any of it. It never should have happened in the first place! You could have died, and so could your mother. She’s so…fragile. And in the end, this all comes back to me!”

He turned and walked past them into the kitchen to start loading his repeater and his shotgun. “Lloyd, you tell the men that as far as the outside world is concerned, we went after more rustlers. I don’t want your mother’s name mentioned in any of this. We couldn’t keep Evie’s name out of the news because the whole town of Guthrie knew what happened, but this is right here on the ranch, and it’s going to stay right here on the ranch! I don’t think your mother could take that kind of publicity…not that kind. You make sure the men understand that.” He glanced over at the boys. “Do you boys understand what I’m saying? We’re going after rustlers.”

The boys nodded.

“Your grandmother is a beautiful, proud woman who can be just as…sophisticated and refined…as the best of them. She’s smart…and she’s…” Jake began angrily ramming cartridges into his repeater. “Hell, she…taught me like a kid who’d never been to school. She used to teach me words I called fancy. She actually made me enjoy learning new words. She took a worthless, no-good outlaw and showed him…”

He glanced at a fresh loaf of Randy’s homemade bread sitting near the stove.

“Evie, she’s so…small. But she…stood right up to me.” He kept shoving bullets into the repeater. “When she took that bullet out of me all those years ago, she hid my guns. Can you believe that? She hid my guns, and no matter…how much I threatened her…she wouldn’t tell me where they were.”

He angrily retracted the repeater so a bullet would be in the chamber, then set it down and opened the shotgun. “I found my guns…in a potato bin, and when she came in and saw me holding them…” He smiled through tears as he shoved slugs into the shotgun. “Her beautiful eyes…got so big…and then she just…looked at me…and I knew I was falling in love…but I also knew nothing worse could happen to her than for a man like me to love her.”

He slammed the shotgun closed. “And I was fucking right!” He took one of his .44s from its holster and checked to be sure it was fully loaded. “And right now, I don’t much care if I go to prison or the gallows. I’m getting my wife back, and no man who touches her wrongly is going to live to talk about it!” He got up, shoving the gun back into the holster. “And Brad Buckley isn’t going to die easy! If he thinks me slamming that rifle butt into his chest and breaking his breastbone was bad, he’ll find out that was like a slap on the hand compared to what I’ll do to him if he’s…” He couldn’t finish. “I’ll have him wishing he was never born!”





Thirty-seven


“I ain’t never seen nobody who looked more dangerous than Jake right now,” Vance Kelly said quietly to Cole.

It was barely light enough to see. Cole, Terrel, Rodriguez, and Vance rode out with Jake and Lloyd. Both grandsons and Ben were also with them, and Jake had asked Brian to come along in case Randy or one of the men should need medical help.

“He was pretty wild-looking that day he beat Clem for insultin’ his wife,” Cole answered. “This is gonna be a hell of a lot worse.”