By afternoon, he was exhausted and he collapsed on their still unmade bed and slept. He’d have to telegraph Dr. Henry Blair tomorrow morning and tell the man to keep Blair there until he could come and get her.
He was wakened by a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“Westfield! Wake up.”
Sluggishly, Lee turned over to see Kane Taggert standing over him, the man’s face showing anger. In his hand was a piece of paper. “Where’s your wife?”
Lee sat up, ran his hand through his hair. “I think she may have left me,” he said. It was of no use trying to conceal the truth. Soon, the entire town would know.
“That’s what I thought. Look at this.”
He thrust a dirty, torn piece of paper into Lee’s hands. On it, in primitive block letters, was the message:
WE HAVE YOUR WIFE. LEAVE $50,000 AT TIPPING ROCK TOMORROW. YOU DON’T SHE DIES.
“Houston?” Leander asked. “I’ll get my gun and go with you. Do you know who has her? Have you told the sheriff yet?”
“Wait a minute,” Kane said, lowering his big form to sit on the bed. “Houston’s fine. Me and her’ve been gone since the weddin’. We just got back this mornin’, and this was on my desk with a lot of other mail.”
Lee stood as if lightning had struck him. “Then they have Blair. I’ll get the sheriff or…That man’ll never find her. I’ll go by myself and—.”
“Hold on a minute. We got to think about this. When I got back this mornin’, there was a man to see me, a man that’d come down from Denver, and on the way here he was robbed by a new gang that seems to wanta make their headquarters outside Chandler. This little man was real upset, sayin’ that all Westerners were outlaws and that they even captured women. It seems he’d heard one of the men that came ridin’ up durin’ the robbery say that they’d got ‘her.’ That could mean your wife.”
Leander was changing clothes, into denim pants, chaps, a heavy cotton shirt, and a gun on the belt at his hips. Some of his original fury was leaving him and he was beginning to think. “Where was the man held up? I’ll start there.”
Kane rose and Lee gave only a glance at the man’s heavy work clothes. “I figure this is my fight, too. They want my money, and it’s my wife they think they got.” He looked at Lee out of the corner of his eye. “When I saw this note and realized that it was Blair that they had, I figured this town would have been turned upside down lookin’ for her but, as far as I can tell, don’t nobody know she’s missin’. I think there’s some reason you wanta keep quiet about this.”
Lee started to tell him that he didn’t want her many friends upset, but he didn’t. “Yeah,” he said, nodding, “there’s a reason.” He waited, but Taggert said nothing more. “You know how to use a gun? How to ride?”
Kane gave a grunt that sounded somewhat like a bear. “Houston ain’t civilized me that much. And don’t forget that I grew up here. I know this area, and I have an idea where their hideout is. Twenty miles north of here is a box canyon that’s almost hidden from the outside. You could walk past it and not even see it. I got caught in there in a flash flood once.”
For a moment, Lee hesitated. He didn’t know this man, didn’t know if he could be trusted or not. For years, he’d heard stories about the illegal means Kane had used to obtain his money, that nothing else mattered to the man but money. But here he was telling Lee that he was willing to help—and willing to respect Lee’s right to keep secret whatever he wanted kept secret.
Lee tied the holster of the gun to his leg. “You got a gun with you?”
“I got enough for a small army outside on my horse, and I also got the fifty grand they want. I’d rather give the money away than risk shootin’ around a lady,” he said, grinning. “After all, she did wanta marry me a couple of days ago.”
At first, Lee didn’t remember what he meant, but then exchanged grins with him. “I’m glad it worked out the way it did.”
Kane ran his hand over his chin and seemed to be laughing at some private joke. “Me, too. More glad than you know.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were saddled, their bags packed with food, and on the trail out of town. Lee had left a message with the operator to tell his father that he’d gone to see about Mrs. Smith. Lee didn’t even listen to the operator’s murmurs of sympathy about the poor Smith family.
Once outside the town limits, they rode hard, Lee’s big horse eating up the miles. Kane’s animal was a magnificent beast that carried the two hundred and fifty pounds or so of the man with relative ease. Lee’s only thoughts were of Blair, and he hoped she was safe and unharmed.
Blair struggled again against the ropes that held her to the heavy oak chair. Once, she’d managed to escape, so they’d tied her to a chair, and yesterday she’d managed to turn the chair over, but before she could get untangled from it, that woman had come into the room and ordered the chair to be nailed to the floor. Blair sat there for hour after hour and watched the woman as she gave orders to her men.
She was called Françoise and she was the leader of the outlaws. She was tall and pretty, slim, with long black hair that she obviously took an Inordinate pride in, wore a gun belted about her hips, and was smarter than all the men who rode with her put together.
And Blair knew immediately that this was the woman Leander loved.
Everything fit what Reed had said. She was French, speaking with an accent so heavy that at times her men had difficulty understanding her, and she was involved in something that Lee could not approve of. Blair couldn’t help feeling her opinion of Lee fall somewhat because he loved a woman who was capable of such dishonesty.
She sat in that hard chair and watched the woman with unconcealed hostility. Because of her, she’d never have her husband to herself, she’d never be able to erase the past from his mind. Maybe men liked the glamour of being in love with a criminal. Maybe Leander wanted to nurse his broken heart all his life.
The woman stood in front of her for a moment and watched Blair’s eyes blazing above the gag. Then she pulled a chair from under an old table and sat across from her.
“Jimmy, remove the cloth,” she said to the big bodyguard who was always with her. She said it as, “Jeemy, remove zee cloth.”