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“What’d your mother say in her letter?”
“I don’t know.” Her cheeks flushed red. “I never read it.” She stalked away from him, calling over her shoulder, “I’m going to see what’s keeping Will.”
Breaking off a chunk of bread from the loaf at his side, Caleb opted to appease his growling stomach while he waited for Jennie and Will to return. He ripped off a smaller piece of bread and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t regret telling Jennie about Liza, despite the sadness it still stirred inside him. Rather than pitying him, she’d shown sympathy. At least before she’d gotten mad and left.
Caleb ate another bite of bread as he thought over what Jennie had told him. He was honored she would share as much as she had about her own past, but it concerned him, too. He’d grown comfortable with only having to be responsible for himself, and he didn’t like the idea of having people dependent on him again. It left too much potential for disappointment, and loss. Life was a whole lot simpler on his own.
Chapter Six
Caleb crept through the grayish mist of the nightmare, the voices of the two stage robbers arguing somewhere unseen ahead of him. He felt none of the anticipation he had that fateful day a year and a half ago when he’d discovered the final two members of the gang who’d robbed Liza’s stage were together again. In the dream he felt only dread at what he knew was coming.
He moved toward the cabin and peered through the dirty window. The two men hunkered around the small fire, their weapons neglected on the nearby table. Brandishing his revolvers Caleb slipped silently to the door. He paused, the hatred he felt for these men thrumming as hard as his heartbeat. Lifting his boot, he kicked in the door and rushed inside.
“You’re both under arrest!”
One of the men scrambled up and tossed his chair at Caleb. Caleb leaped out of the way but the split-second distraction allowed the man to lunge through the back window with a horrific crash of glass. Caleb fired a shot, hitting the man in the foot, but he still escaped.
“Get down on the floor,” Caleb barked at the other bandit.
“Blaine,” he screamed as he lowered himself to his knees and put his hands in the air. “You gutless coward, get back here!”
Keeping one gun trained on the man, Caleb stuck the other in his holster and reached for his rope. He approached the bandit. “Don’t worry about your partner. I’ll find him, too.”
The man scowled, then hung his head.
Caleb tossed the loop in his rope over the man’s head and waist, but just as he prepared to tighten it, the bandit leaped up, slashing at the air with a knife. The rope fell to the floor.
“Put the knife down,” Caleb shouted as he jumped back to avoid the blade. “I don’t want to take you in to the sheriff dead.”
“I ain’t going no other way.”
The man rushed him, his arm cocked. Caleb backed up and felt the wall hit his shoulders. He was cornered. He dropped to his knees as the man came at him, hoping to throw the bandit off balance, but Caleb found himself wrestled to the floor.
Caleb tried to work his gun free from the man’s weight, but his arms were quickly growing tired from keeping the knife at bay. The blade inched nearer to his skin.
The bandit grinned, releasing foul breath into Caleb’s sweaty face. “So long, sonny,” he hissed.
Caleb put all his remaining strength into wrenching his arm loose. He angled his gun against the man’s shirt and squeezed the trigger. The bandit’s eyes flew open wide in shock before he crumpled onto Caleb’s chest, dead.
At this point the dream whisked Caleb away from the horror of the cabin to the sheriff’s crowded office.
“It was self-defense, Mr. Johnson,” the sheriff said. “No judge would convict you otherwise.”
“Self-defense,” Caleb repeated, if only to convince himself. “Self-defense.”
* * *
“Caleb? Caleb, wake up.”
Grabbing his guns, Caleb jerked upright in his bedroll. In the moonlight he saw Jennie crouched next to him.
“It’s all right,” she said, drawing her coat tighter around herself. “I think you were having a dream. You kept muttering something.”
“I—I’m sorry to wake you.” He rubbed at his eyes to clear the sleep from them.
Her shoulders rose and fell. “I couldn’t really sleep. I wanted to...” She ducked her head, her next words directed at the dirt. “I wanted to apologize for my...behavior earlier. I don’t like talking about my mother leaving, but it wasn’t right to lash out at you, either.”
“Apology accepted.” He steeled himself against the questions she would likely ask about his dream, but to his relief, she moved back to her makeshift bed. Caleb glanced at Will. The boy snored softly from his cocoon of blankets. At least he hadn’t awakened him. “You going back to sleep?”
Jennie slipped into her bedroll, but she shook her head. “You?”
“Not yet.” He needed to occupy his mind with something else, instead of the haunting images of his nightmare. Sometimes he’d had it twice in the same night. “You mind if I stoke the fire? It sure is chilly.”
“Go ahead.” Wrapping her arms around her blanketed knees, Jennie rested her chin on her legs as Caleb built the fire into a small but steady flame. “So does your family live around here?”
Caleb poked at the fire with a stick. “No. My folks live on a farm up north, in the Salt Lake Valley.”
“What are you doing down here then?”
“Earning money. I want to have my own freight business.”
She shifted closer to the fire. “Weren’t there any jobs up north?”
“There were.” He stared into the dancing flames. “I couldn’t stay up there, though. Not with Liza gone.”
“Were your parents sad to see you go?”
“Sad, yes, but more disappointed.”
He sensed Jennie watching him. “Surely they understood your grief?”
“In a way.” He let his stick grow black at the end and then pulled it out of the heat. “But I don’t think they knew what to do about me. I quit farming the piece of land they’d given me—me and Liza. I quit going to church, like I told you. The memories of her were everywhere, and one day, I couldn’t stand it anymore.” A shadow of that desperation filled him and he clenched his jaw against it. “I went and told them I was leaving. Told them I knew I made a lousy farmer and I wanted to do something else with my life.”
“Do they like the idea of you having your own freight business?”
“I think Pa’s disappointed that I didn’t stick with farming, but really I don’t know if they care what I do as long as I’m working hard at something and helping others. What they really want is for me to come home. But that’s not going to happen. It’s time for me to make my own way.”
Jennie bobbed her head in agreement. “I can relate to that—deciding to make your own way and not wanting others to step in. That’s why I didn’t want you paying for the candy I ruined in the mercantile seven months ago.”
The candy? He studied her, her red hair brighter in the firelight, her brown eyes peering back at him. “You were the woman in the store?”
“I didn’t want to feel beholden to you.”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it. But I’d say we’re just about even, since you gave me a job. That was definitely worth the money to pay for the candy. And to see you smile.”
She