Outlaw Hearts(68)

He embraced her, pressing her close, wondering if he had completely lost his mind. What the hell was it this woman did to him? Ever since meeting her it seemed like he hardly knew himself anymore, or maybe he was just beginning to find the real Jake Harkner. Whatever it was she did to him, he didn’t seem to be able to fight it. He bent his head and kissed her hair.

“Maybe we can find a preacher or somebody at Fort Laramie who can marry us,” he told her.

“I’d like that.” He hugged her even tighter, and she felt him trembling. “It’s all right to let that young boy cry, Jake. He’s been holding things inside for a lot of years.” He grasped her hair, and she felt his body jerk in a sob.

“I love you, Randy Hayes,” he wept.

“And I love you, Jake Harkner. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see. God means for us to be together.”





Part Two


Woman with the golden hair,

You are my sunlight.

You are my joy.

You are my comfort in the night.

Now we walk together as one;

So much love I have never known.

We have laughed and cried and learned together.

You have brought me up from the darkness

Of despair and loneliness.

Woman with the golden hair,

You are my peace.





Eleven


Bill Kennedy threw in his cards and finished his drink. He picked up another five-dollar bill and added it to the pot at the center of the table for the next game. “I don’t like this paper money,” he grumbled. “A man don’t hardly see gold or silver coins ever since the war.”

“Banks got ’em,” Juan Hidalgo answered, a hinting smile added to the words.

Kennedy stuck a new wad of tobacco into his mouth, saying nothing, but giving Juan a knowing look. After the bank robbery in St. Louis a few months back, money was running low again. Fancy guns, prime horses, women, and whiskey could cost a man a lot. Part of the money he played cards with now had come from a settler family in northern Kansas that he and his men had attacked and robbed a week ago. They all had had a good time with the struggling, begging wife of the farmer before Juan had silenced her with his knife.

Juan dealt another round of cards, and Kennedy thought how the Mexican was damn near “artistic” with that big bowie he wore strapped to his belt. The ugly scar that ran from the man’s left eye across his nose and lips and on down his chin was clear evidence he had lived by that knife for a long time. He was a dark, ugly, evil-looking man that Kennedy himself would be afraid of if he didn’t know him better.

“Lotta banks out west,” Juan spoke up, adding to the ante. “Lotta gold and silver.”

Kennedy gave him a warning look. He and his gang of eight men had taken a chance coming back into civilization as wanted men. They were holed up in an abandoned shack outside of Omaha, had come into town to gamble and spend their winnings on whores and whiskey. For over two months they had searched for Jake Harkner down in Indian Territory, where many Creek and Cherokee knew him. None had seen him. Kennedy didn’t believe Jake was dead. A bullet from a little derringer like the one he’d been told the woman back in Kansas City had used wasn’t generally powerful enough to kill a man as big as Jake.

Besides, Jake was too mean to die from being shot by a woman. He chuckled to himself at the thought as he picked up his cards. Jake Harkner, shot by a woman! How he would have loved to have seen that, and to have been there to finish the man off. Now the fact remained that Jake was likely still alive somewhere, and he was not going to rest easy until he found him and let Juan use his knife on him for stealing that pretty young girl away from them before they were through with her.

One of the strangers he was playing cards with opened a bid with two dollars. Kennedy turned and spit toward a spittoon, the brown saliva missing and sliding down the side of the brass container. He shrugged and picked up his two new cards, thinking maybe it was time to move on. Juan and the other men had been itching to head west, where they would be less likely to be recognized and where there was no law.

They had all agreed that west was the best place to be now that the war was over and the law would try harder to find them; but they had lingered too long in Indian Territory, and now it was too late in the summer to try to get all the way to California or even to Nevada. They would leave in the spring, but he didn’t like the idea of going without finding Jake first. The sonofabitch was good with those guns of his. In the shoot-out over that girl, Jake had killed Kennedy’s own stepbrother and Juan’s best friend, along with four other gang members. He still suffered pain from a bullet Jake had left in his right thigh, and several of the other men with him had been wounded. Jake was good, all right, but if he could be found and surprised, things wouldn’t turn out the same. Jake Harkner would be begging for his life.