LITMIR.BIZ

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he shouted, but it was lost in the crowd noise. He stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled as loudly as he could. That worked.

      Ignoring Wash’s whispered “Thank God,” Jason began to marshal the crowd, sending families scrambling for the gate in the town wall, sending single men running for their guns, and urging the drivers to hitch their horses in a hurry and instructing them to move with all due haste.

      “Circle your wagons around the well inside the walls,” he shouted. “Apache! Apache coming in fast!”

      He hoped Wash was dead wrong, but the truth was that there was a dust cloud to the south, a dust cloud that was rapidly approaching Fury.

      “Come on!” he shouted as he helped a small boy, dusty and crying for his mother, to his feet, then quickly hoisted him over his shoulder. “Hurry up, folks! Move it!”

      3

      Upon reaching the big south gate of the town, Jason ran through it and dropped the crying boy. He leapt up on Megan’s horse, which was still tied to a nearby hitching post, and galloped back outside again through the stampede of men, women, children, and wagons coming swiftly toward him and the gate.

      He paused only a moment to direct the first wagon driver toward the well, then spun outside the mass of the wagons to get a look at the horizon.

      They were closer now. Almost close enough to make out individuals without the aid of binoculars, and through his mind raced the image of his sister, out at the MacDonald place. He prayed that she was all right, that she’d hidden, or that the braves were too intent on reaching the town and the wagons to bother with a meager homestead.

      His thoughts were broken by a shouted “Jason!” coming from up the street. It was Ward Wanamaker, running toward him down the center of West Main, his gun drawn. Since Jenny had married and moved out, Ward had been renting her room. Jason believed in keeping his deputy close at hand.

      “See to the wagons,” Jason shouted to Ward, then wheeled his mount back across the square to Dr. Morelli’s door. He didn’t have to knock, let alone dismount. Morelli was hurrying out the door when he got there.

      “Apache!” Jason shouted, as if that one word were the answer to every question Morelli could possibly ask.

      Apparently, it was. And in reply, the doctor nodded quickly and reached back inside the door for his rifle and his medical bag. “Get your wife and kids to the center of the square,” were Jason’s final words before he wheeled the horse once more and headed up toward Cohen’s Hardware. If those Indians made it over the wall, he didn’t want the first screams to come from Olympia and Doc’s kids, let alone Saul and Rachael Cohen’s.

      Once he skidded Megan’s mount to a halt and tossed the reins around the rail, he banged at the glass out front of Salmon Kendall’s Mercantile until Salmon’s head appeared at the bottom of the steps. Then Jason made a sign—fingers for feathers—at the back of his head.

      The mayor’s expression changed immediately, and he started shouting for his wife and kids to get the heck downstairs. Jason took off for the Cohens’ store, next door. He figured they were probably both out like snuffed candles, but he had to get both of them and their kids downstairs. Even with the outside wall—and the walls of their house—between them and the Apache, nobody should be upstairs right now. Jason knew what just one flaming arrow could do if it hit the right spot on a roof.

      And so did Saul Cohen. If he hadn’t been knocked out on Doc Morelli’s joy juice at the moment, Saul would have moved his family downstairs long ago, and be out here on the street, helping Jason.

      Jason unlocked, then pushed in the front door, and raced past shelves bulging with nail kegs and ready-made hinges and bolts and screws, pushed past a display of hammers and saws and awls, and took the stairs two at a time.

      “I tell you, I’m pretty sure they passed us by,” Matt said from atop the ladder. His ear—attached to a head full of red hair as fiery as his sister’s—was still pressed to the floorboards above him, and his attractive brow was still knotted with concentration.

      Below, on the dirt floor of the hidey-hole beneath the main room of their home, sat Jenny Fury, now Jenny MacDonald. Her long, slender legs were crossed Indian-style, and her arms were crossed, too. She didn’t answer him.

      Everything about her body posture said, “No.”

      Actually, everything about it said, “Go to hell,” but that flew past Matt’s understanding. As did most everything about his wife.

      Jenny had learned that he didn’t care. He didn’t care about much of anything that didn’t concern him directly and personally and right now. His wife was not one of those things.

      In a louder tone, he said, “Jenny, did you hear me? I said I’m pretty sure—”

      She pursed her lips and hissed a short, “Shh!” at him. The idiot. Didn’t he know they could be up there right now, one of their heathen ears pressed to the other side of that floorboard?

      Her hands gripped her arms tighter, and she felt herself shiver. Oh, how she wished she’d gone into town with Megan this morning! She would have liked to have seen her brother Jason one more time, if this was indeed her day to die….

      Matt, now silent, came back down the ladder, unhooked the lantern, and carried it over. He sat down beside her, the lantern light washing over his hair and face before the dust kicked up by his boots rose to momentarily obscure his features. He coughed halfheartedly into his hands, then scrubbed his furrowed brow with manicured fingertips.

      Jenny saw his hands tremble. He was scared. Not just scared of the Indians, scared of everything.

      Perhaps even a little frightened of her.

      She bit back the smile that threatened to pop out. Now was not the time for grinning like a fool. But she had suddenly realized why her husband could be—and usually was—such an ass. She supposed he was like a cur dog who snapped and growled at the person who tried to feed it. What had happened to make him so afraid?

      She shook her head. It didn’t matter. She supposed it didn’t even matter what had spooked him so bad, probably when he was just a kid. Probably something to do with that father of his.

      But it didn’t matter. What mattered, right at this particular moment, was keeping him from opening that trapdoor until she was absolutely positive that the danger had passed.

      And she wasn’t sure.

      Not yet.

      Having gotten a doped and unconscious Saul and an equally drugged Rachael down the stairs and into the store’s back room, Jason gave their boys firm orders to stay put and stay down, and left them all in the store room before he started for the saloon.

      Outside, the town square rang with gunfire, and Jason was narrowly missed by an arrow, which instead of clipping him in the neck, buried itself in the side of Cohen’s Hardware. The roof of Reverend Milcher’s church was already afire, he noticed as he made his way along the sidewalk.

      Nobody was putting that out, but he saw that Ward Wanamaker was passing buckets along a line to the roof of the livery stable, which was also ablaze. Several of the newcomers were also helping with the stable, leading animals out and hitching them across the way, north of the town square.

      Somebody had best see to the church, he thought as he ducked into the saloon.

      “Jason!” shrieked Abigail, peeking over the bar top.

      “Down!” he shouted back, and her head disappeared behind the bar like a pond turtle’s into its shell.

      Rollie Biggston, the Cockney from California with whom Abigail was now in business, had vacated com pletely, but Gil Collins was at the window, watching the top of the wall and shooting any poor savage who managed to climb to the top. So far as Jason could tell, no Indian had yet made it over alive.

      “Good

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