A chilly spring wind rushed past her as the dark clouds from the west finally moved overhead. A wisp of her honey-blond hair came loose from the bun into which it was twisted, and she quickly pushed it up under her bonnet. A light spray of misty rain tickled her face, and she slapped the reins, anxious to get into town before a harder rain might begin to fall. Within minutes, increasingly bigger drops of rain began to make dark spots in the dry dirt road. She held the reins in one hand and reached behind the seat to pull out a rubber cape, managing to shake it open and fling it over her head and shoulders well enough to protect most of her person from a steady rainfall.
“Damn weather,” she mumbled. Why did the rain have to wait until she made a trip to town? “Hurry it up, you two,” she shouted to the horses. “Don’t be so lazy!”
***
Jake drew his buckskin horse to a slower walk to avoid splattering mud from the street onto the horse’s belly and his own knee-high leather boots and denim pants. He pulled his canvas slicker closer around him and ducked his head, and rainwater ran off his leather hat onto the black hair of the horse’s mane and on down its dun-colored coat. The animal snorted and tossed its head.
“Relax, Outlaw,” Jake said softly to the animal. “A few more minutes and I’ll have us both out of this rain—a good livery for you and a bath and a shave for me.” He looked toward a saloon, its doors closed to the fresh morning. “Later tonight maybe I’ll find a good card game and end up in the bed of a woman bought with my winnings.”
If Kansas City allows prostitutes to solicit openly, he thought. He wondered if he was crazy coming to such a civilized place. He was dangerously close to Missouri, where he knew posters had been tacked up showing drawings of his face and offering a reward for his capture. Thank goodness the drawings were not very good. In a large, busy town like this, a man could usually mix in better and be less noticed than in a smaller town, and Lord knew he needed to get himself some supplies and get a couple days’ rest before heading west.
The still mostly unsettled land beyond the western border of Kansas seemed the only place now for a man like him. He knew other men with whom he had ridden and robbed and raided were heading in the same direction, into a lawless land where a man could live by the gun and not worry about prison. The only thing that had kept his own neck from a noose was the utter chaos the country seemed to have fallen into since the war ended. Times had been ripe the past year for hitting banks and trains and finding other ways of making easy money, and he had plenty now—enough to head west and maybe find a way to lead a normal life, if that was possible for a man who’d lived as he had. At thirty years old, he figured maybe it was time, but then life had never seemed to present the opportunity.
Maybe he could start a ranch, or some kind of business. If he could just get through Kansas, he’d be all right. He wondered if it might be best to head south first, to Indian Territory, then head west. The tangled wilds of Indian country were great protection for an outlaw, and most of the Indians themselves didn’t mind putting up a stranger, for a bottle of whiskey or a little money. He’d hidden out there plenty of times in the past.
He drew Outlaw to a halt in front of a dry-goods store, noticing a little slip of a woman tying two draft horses to a hitching post. Her head was tucked under a rubber cape and she didn’t see him. He watched her curiously, wondering how someone so small managed to handle two such big horses and the beat-up, awkward supply wagon they pulled. The woman rushed into the store, and Jake grinned and dismounted, his brown leather boots squishing into the mud. He tied Outlaw and patted the animal’s neck. “I won’t be too long, boy.”
He looked around before going inside, still with the uncomfortable suspicion that he was being followed. He had considered circling back a couple of days earlier and maybe lying in wait for whoever might be on his tail, but he was sick of camping out on the cold ground and had been anxious to reach town. Now he wondered if the call of a warm bath and a soft bed had caused him to be a little too careless. If someone was following him, maybe they were waiting for him to hit a town this size, where people would see a public confrontation and it would be harder for him to get away.
He ducked his head to get more water off his hat before stepping up onto the boardwalk in front of the store. An old man was just leaving the store, and he nodded to Jake, then stepped back a little when he noticed the revolvers that hung low on Jake’s hips. The old man glanced over at Outlaw, seeing the Winchester repeating rifle and the shotgun that rested in their boots on either side of the horse.