Outlaw Hearts(193)
“You can both come. Bring your bag, Brian. Jake’s been hurt, and he’s even sicker than the last time I was here! The guard says you can look at him. I don’t trust the prison doctor.”
Brian and Evie climbed down, and Brian tied the buggy horse. They followed the guard inside, and Evie shivered at the cold dampness of the place, wondering if all the cells were this cold. They were led through a narrow hallway to a door where a man in a suit waited for them.
“Mrs. Harkner.” The man nodded.
Miranda folded her arms. She had met the warden a few times before, and there were no good feelings between them. She saw the look of anger mixed with worry in his dark eyes. He was a short, balding man, with a hard mouth and a round, fat face. It irritated her that he obviously ate well, while most of the prisoners looked malnourished after several months in his prison. “Warden Pruett,” she acknowledged. “What has happened to my husband?”
The man glanced at Evie and Brian, then back at Miranda. “I trust you will keep your word, about not spreading lies and rumors about this place?”
“I will. But I’m not so sure I can keep quiet about the truth,” Miranda answered boldly. “What is the truth, Mr. Pruett?”
The man sighed, putting his hands on his hips. “The truth is your husband brought this on himself. I was about to put him here in the medical ward anyway because of his cough and fever, but he went into a rage yesterday, tore bunks apart, broke a stool to pieces, threw a chamber pot at the guards and showered them with the filth in it. He had to be stopped before he hurt the other man in his cell or hurt himself.”
“Stopped? What did your guards do to him? He’s fifty-three years old, for God’s sake!”
Pruett scowled. “Look, Mrs. Harkner, when your husband loses his temper, he fights like a twenty-three-year-old! I have a few guards with split lips and cracked ribs to prove it! It took six men to get him under control, and the only way they could do it was to beat him into unconsciousness. I’m sorry, but they had no choice. He’s come around a little, but he’s in pretty bad shape. If you’ll keep quiet about this, I’ll let your son-in-law here take a look at him, and I’ll allow you to stay with him through the night, if you like.”
Miranda put a hand to her chest, feeling literal pain. Jake, sick and beaten. She struggled against tears. “I would like that very much. What brought this on, Mr. Pruett?”
The man ran a hand over his balding head. “I’m not sure. We brought in a new prisoner to his cell yesterday. The man apparently had some news about your son Lloyd.”
“Lloyd!” Evie stepped closer. “What about him? Can we talk to this other prisoner?”
“We’ll see. All I know is what he told me—that he’d told Jake he’d seen Lloyd along the Outlaw Trail, at Brown’s Park, I think. Said Lloyd was drinking heavily, wearing his father’s guns. He shot two men in two separate gunfights and he might be riding with rustlers. Your father just went kind of crazy then, yelling for the guards, demanding he be let out so he could go to his son.”
“My God,” Miranda whispered, turning to Evie. “It’s all the things he dreaded most, that Lloyd would turn to the kind of life he once led.” She closed her eyes. “With Jess gone, he must feel he’s the only one who could find and help Lloyd now. He’ll want to stop him before it’s too late for him. He must feel so helpless, so desperate.”
“He’s going to have to live with it or be chained in solitary,” Pruett told her. He opened the door to a long, narrow room with ten cots in it. Only three of the cots were occupied. A guard stood at the other end of the room. “He’s in the third bed over there.”
Miranda hurried inside, her whole body aching with dread, for both her son and Jake. Lloyd! Her little boy, that was how she still thought of him, her precious son. She could still remember vividly the look on Jake’s face when he first held him, the desperation in his eyes when he made her promise never to tell his son about his past. What a terrible mistake that had been! Now Lloyd was out there risking being shot, drinking heavily. It wasn’t the Lloyd she had always known, her sweet, trusting, loving son. If only he hadn’t lost Beth on top of everything else. He might have been all right if not for that.
She drew in her breath and made a little choking sound at the sight of Jake, his face bruised and swollen. “Oh, God, Brian, look at him! God only knows where else he’s hurt.”
Brian quickly moved to Jake’s bedside and opened his medical bag. He pulled the covers away to see the man was shirtless. His arms and chest were covered with bruises, but Brian noticed with a bit of surprise that Jake’s body still had a hard, lean look to it, the chest and arms of a much younger man. He’d never met his notorious father-in-law. He was a big man, dark. There were several scars on his body. He’d heard about some of them, how Jake’s own father had put that scar on his neck, that there were more on his back from belt-whippings. He had laughed and shaken his head when Miranda told him and Evie how the first time she’d met the man she’d shot him. There was the scar from that wound, on his lower left side.