Shotgun Bride by Linda Lael Miller Page B

help much.
    A broken strongbox lay in the middle of the carnage, and for some reason it put Jeb in mind of the Triple M brand burned into the tree on the squatters’ place a few days before. He’d have bet, though he was operating on pure instinct and not much else, that the two occurrences were connected.
    “Charlie,” Rafe said through his mask, beckoning to one of the men. “Ride back to that homestead we passed this morning and see if you can borrow a few shovels. Mitch, you head for town. Get a wire off to the fort first thing, and make sure Kade’s told directly.” He paused, scanned the blue sky grimly. “We’re going to have to lay these men to rest right here. It might take the army a while to find us, and the bodies can’t be left for the scavengers.”
    Jeb swung down from the saddle, resigned to the grim task at hand, and approached one of the fallen men. He and Rafe and the hands remaining after Mitch and Charlie had gone checked each soldier for any sign of life and found nothing.
    By the time Charlie got back, the homesteader jostling alongside in a buckboard, they’d laid the corpses out in a neat row, doing their best to keep the flies away by swinging mesquite branches over them like fans. They’d gotten used to the smell, insofar as that was possible, and lowered their bandannas to hang around their necks. A small heap of personal mementos lay atop a large, flat rock—battered little booklike frames containing images of wives and children, mostly, held shut by ribbons, worn colorless by carrying, a clutch of thin pages torn out of a Bible, letters from home, a watch, somehow overlooked by the killers, engraved with the man’s name.
    “Brings back memories of the war,” Zeke Bryant commented, his eyes fixed on a battalion of ghosts. He’d been a hand on the Triple M for as long as Jeb could remember, and he was a tough old soldier, a veteran of the Confederacy, known for solitary ways and playing lonesome strains on a harmonica. “Wish I had me some whiskey.”
    “So do I,” Rafe agreed, taking off his hat to shove a hand through his hair. Jeb noticed that Rafe’s gaze kept straying to the strongbox. “There’s work to be done,” Rafe said finally, after another of the long, silent periods of reflection to which he was given. “Let’s get to it.”
    They took four shovels from the homesteader’s wagon, and spent the rest of the afternoon burying the dead. Not much was said during that time, but Jeb did plenty of thinking about the fragility of life, and he knew the others did, too.
    “It’s a hell of a thing to see folks come to an end like that,” Jeb reflected, as they rode back toward the ranch, with the night bearing down hard and a dozen fresh graves behind them, many unmarked and painfully isolated. The photographs and other leavings were tucked away in Rafe’s saddlebags for safekeeping and would be turned over to the army when the time came.
    Rafe set his jaw. “Here’s the worst of it,” he replied. “That might not have been the end. I reckon it could well be a beginning, instead.” He let Jeb ponder that awhile, Rafe did, and then he told Jeb what the loss of that money might mean for the Triple M.

Chapter 20
     
     
    B aking the pies turned out to be a bigger project than anticipated, fraught with early failures, for two full days had passed when they finally turned up, arranged in a tidy row on Kade’s desk. He’d come back to the office after making the rounds to see that the town was settling down for a peaceful night, and there they were.
    He hung up his hat, though he didn’t take off his gun belt, and went straight for the coffeepot. Having set all day, the stuff was beyond even his ability to tolerate, and he started a fresh batch.
    He was a mite hungry, so he wandered over to inspect the spread. Each woman had marked her own work in some way, one by stabbing her name into the crust with the tines of a fork. He smiled at that. Jeanette. He wondered if