The Lady and the Lawman Read online

  The Lady and the Lawman

  The Kincaid Family Series: Book One

  Joyce Brandon

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1987 by Joyce Brandon

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition July 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-903-0>

  Also by Joyce Brandon

  After Eden

  The Kincaid Family Series

  The Lady and the Robber Baron

  The Lady and the Outlaw

  Adobe Palace

  Novels are always about relationships, so this book is lovingly dedicated to my husband, John C. Brandon (1922-2005), and our children, Robert Kevin Firestine, Suzanne Lonelle Satragni, John Lee Brandon (1948-2010), and Brian Mark Brandon. From these five precious seeds—along with their spouses, ex-spouses, children, step-children, grandchildren, and step-grandchildren—have come countless plots and subplots. Also to my brother, Charlie Miller; my sister, Ann Hall; my double-cousin, Dap Gene Parker; my foster daughter, Kristina Lynn Wilson; my step-father Joe L. Shannon; and my grandchildren in order of their appearance: Thomas Madison, Brittany Carter, Rebecka Davis, Dylan Zapf, and Caleb Zapf in Suzie’s family; Brandi Firestine, Tyson Freer, Brittan Freer, Holly Beck, and Takoda Freer in Bob’s family; Santos Sanchez, Nicholas Sanchez, Stephanie Sanchez, and Dominic Sanchez in Mark’s family; James Wilson, Jeffery Wilson, Isaac Paradise, and Jeffery Wilson Jr. in Kristina’s family; and Katie Fairburn in John Lee’s family. I am very grateful to each and every one of you.

  Chapter One

  Thursday, March 11, 1880

  Hostile men lined both sides of the street in the small border town. With one foot on the ground, the other on the bottom step of the stagecoach, Angie hesitated and looked at the man called Shotgun.

  “Don’t worry none, ma’am. ’Tain’t you they’re after. It’s him,” he said, tilting his head to the south.

  Angie tried to peer around the stagecoach, but its wide body and the way it angled in toward the buildings obstructed her view. “Who?”

  Displaying crooked tobacco-stained teeth, Shotgun grinned and cut a plug off his chewing tobacco. “Hombre de verdad, the grissel heels call him. The man with the lethal eyes.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t look behind you, ma’am. ’Tain’t a sight for the likes of yourself.”

  Angie turned immediately and walked around the heavily laden stagecoach. Her bicycle hung on the back of the wagon. She had seven items of luggage, including valises, a camera wagon, and camera boxes, but the bicycle caused the most complaint among the men who loaded and unloaded the stage. As if this one safety bicycle threatened the horse in its own domain.

  Coming down the middle of the wide, deeply rutted road, a long line of horses—manned and unmanned—kicked up a red cloud that settled slowly over the faded wooden buildings on both sides of the street. Angie frowned. Not one lethal eye in sight. Each rider’s face seemed lost under dirt, beard stubble, and the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat.

  Then she saw the reason for the consternation and hostility on the faces of the townspeople. From the third rider back, almost every other horse carried a body or two tied over the saddle.

  “What happened?”

  “Reckon he happened. Hombre de verdad. Reckon he caught up to that passel of hot iron hombres running a maverick factory along the border.”

  Angie had been gone from the territory for four years but knew he meant rustlers. Grissel heels were old-timers.

  The ragged column, led by a wide-shouldered man on a big chestnut, moved steadily forward. Angie counted seventeen riders and twenty-three bodies. Dead men hung across saddles like bags of dirty laundry. One man—taller than the others and draped across a squatty, black and white piebald mare—dangled one arm precariously in front of the horse’s back hoof. Angie expected the horse to step on the man’s hand, but each time the horse’s hoof came down, the hand was a scant inch ahead of it. Blood ran down the side of the man’s face and into his hair.

  Death confused Angie. Part of her wanted to get closer to those rigid bodies and part of her was horrified and wanted only to look away, to be sick. As a child she had poked and prodded a dead wren as if its little stiff body could explain the secret of death. Part of her still wanted to run over and examine that gangling dead man—to lift his head and look into his eyes in the hope that some answer would be there.

  Clutching her throat, lest she throw up, Angie turned to Shotgun. “Which one is hombre de verdad?”

  “Ridin’ point. The lanky feller straddling the big chestnut.”

  Angie tried to see beneath the trail dust this man who aroused such hostility but saw only dirt, beard stubble, and the distorting effects of deep, slanting shadows.

  “Would you get my crate down,” she asked, her gaze still fixed on the column of men—alive and dead. “That one.” Angie pointed from memory at the spot where the Scenographe—a small lightweight camera with a walking stick tripod, relatively easy to assemble and shoot with—lay strapped to the top of the stage. She yearned for the Hale but feared Shotgun’s good humor, such as it was, could not be stretched to unloading a wagon, tripod, and a big, heavy camera.

  Shotgun popped the plug of tobacco into his mouth and laboriously climbed back up onto the stagecoach.

  “How long will we be here?” she asked.

  “Couple of hours anyways, until they either sober up the driver or find another one.”

  She hoped they sobered up the doctor as well. Angie had ridden in with an army doctor who took furtive nips from his flask, three soldiers who snored, and a heavyset woman who asked questions that Angie could not answer in an acceptable manner. Angie had no children or husband to testify to her womanliness. She had no chaperon to attest to her virtuousness. She was on the Arizona-Mexico border in a little dust mote called Nogales, assigned there by questionable publishers—notorious for their woman’s suffrage efforts. Angie had failed every test of respectability the stout woman put forth. She’d suspected that even her brown traveling gown and bonnet didn’t have a reputable enough look to it. Perhaps the rust ruching on the collar displayed a penchant for frivolous adornment or a lack of sincerity.

  The riders drew almost even with the stagecoach.

  “How can he kill all those men and get away with it? He did kill them?” she asked.

  “Him or his helpers. Them’s riders from the Stokey ranch, the Bar S. Kincaid gets away with jest about any danged thing he wants. He’s the law in these here parts.”

  “The law?”

  “Arizona ranger. The worst son of a bi…bi…biscuit you’d ever want to lock horns with.”

  Angie took the box that Shotgun handed down to her and stepped back inside the stagecoach so she could sit down, unpack the camera, and assemble it on its tripod. Shotgun was probably trying to impress her. Westerners had an almost irresistible urge to haze pilgrims, to dazzle them with slang and nonchalance. He could not know she had grown up on this miserable frontier.

  Camera assembled, Angie climbed out. The rangers stopped their horses on the east side of the road. A northeast wind, so slight as to go unnoticed until thi
s moment, carried the sickly sweet smell of the dead men to Angie’s nostrils. Grimacing, fighting the almost irresistible buckling of her knees, Angie carried the Scenographe to a spot upwind that afforded a view of the rangers and the men lining the sidewalk in front of the saloon.

  Townsmen on the west side crossed the road to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their friends. No one spoke, but the tension was so thick she smelled it the way she had smelled lightning as a child. Angie knew—by riding into town this way, loaded down with what must be dead friends and relatives of these townsmen—the ranger had issued a challenge and drawn the line.

  Silent, curious men glared at Kincaid. Kincaid looked from face to face, lifted off his tan-colored hat to reveal damp black hair—mashed down but so wiry it was already springing up—and dragged his shirt-sleeve across his forehead. A fine Sharps rifle nestled in his saddle sheath. A forty-five rode low on his thigh. Tied down for action, Laramee would say.

  “Hotter’n blazes out there,” Kincaid said sociably, running his fingers through his stiff hair. He had one of those raspy voices that some men had, and the sound of it, so unexpectedly rich and attractive, eased down inside Angie like warm liquid.

  Up close and with his hat off, Kincaid made a striking picture: tall and rangy and a little slope-shouldered, his blue denim breeches tucked into dusty knee-high black boots, he looked hewn from mahogany. Some Moorish ancestor had surely altered his family tree.

  To her keen artist’s eye, his brick-brown face hid more than it showed. As an avid student of human form, Angie was fascinated by the energy he exuded. His careful, amiable facade reminded her of a pile of embers that concealed its smoldering heat inside.

  Men grumbled in low tones, but the lawman ignored the buzz. He turned to the man sitting the sorrel next to him.

  “Take the bodies of Stokey’s men over to the church and put ’em in the shade. Dump the rustlers on the sidewalk. And leave ’em there.”

  An angry murmur from the crowd caused Angie to duck under the cape and peer through the lens of the Scenographe. A fight was about to erupt. Kincaid had sixteen men with him. Close to fifty men stood on the sidewalk. She focused on Kincaid—tall and lithe in the saddle—tripped the shutter, pulled out the plate, and shoved it into the plate holder she had hung around her neck.

  Kincaid turned and looked at her for the first time. Angie brushed hair out of her eyes. She had taken her bonnet off, and the cape had a way of working the hairs loose so they frayed out around her face.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. A smile twinkled in his eyes.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you.”

  “I’m taking pictures.”

  “For what?”

  “For a picture book of the Arizona Territory.”

  The smile moved down to his mouth and created inch-long dimples at the corners. Kincaid’s finely sculpted features fit together in an appealing, thoroughly masculine face dominated by expressive black brows and piercing blue eyes with the luminosity of stained glass windows. He had the kind of smile—probably learned at a young age—that could mask anything or promise the world.

  Kincaid shook his head. “So you’re that famous George Barnard I’ve heard so much about,” he drawled, bringing a leg up and crossing it over his saddle so he could lean his elbow on it. Laramee had a habit of sitting the saddle like that on occasion, usually when he was fooling around or tired.

  Angie flushed with a combination of emotions. She wasn’t a George Barnard yet, but she would be. Barnard had become famous for his hallmark photographs of the Civil War. He impressed Angie far more than Kincaid could guess, because Barnard had taken his pictures before the gelatine dry plate process was invented. He had to coat his plate in the field, take his picture, and then develop his plate immediately. He had to cart far more equipment with him, including a portable dark tent.

  “Well, ma’am, I sure wouldn’t want to interfere with history being recorded, but do you think you could wait till I’ve had a bath, a shave, and maybe a cold beer before you take my picture?”

  Angie slid a treated plate out of the box, loaded it into the camera, and smiled. “If the men at Valley Forge had insisted on waiting for a hot bath and a cup of coffee before they were photographed, Mr. Kincaid, our country would have lost a very valuable part of its heritage to vanity.”

  Apparently amused by Angie’s standing up to the ranger, men on the sidewalk chuckled. Kincaid grinned, then laughed, and everyone joined in.

  When the uproar subsided a little, the man beside Kincaid said, “See, Lieutenant, that’s what’s been holding us back. Your danged vanity.” That caused another round of laughter, then someone remembered the dead men, and a hush fell over the crowd.

  “Well, snap away then, ma’am. Shore wouldn’t want to cheat this territory of its heritage.” He started to dismount.

  “Why are you dumping those poor, unfortunate men on the sidewalk?” Angie asked loudly. Her voice shook with emotion as she viewed the bodies draped over the tired-looking horses.

  The smile died away. With a grimace Kincaid settled back into the saddle, which creaked in the sudden silence following her remark. For one moment he looked utterly bleak. “I had to watch ’em die, ma’am,” he said tersely, his voice loud enough for all to hear. “Now they can see ’em dead. Maybe some youngster swinging too wide a loop’ll get the message.”

  As if daring them to protest, Kincaid’s steely blue eyes swept the faces of the men lined up on the sidewalk. No one spoke up. The townspeople looked at one another, at Angie, and at the dead men, but no one looked at Kincaid.

  Hardly an hour had gone by, barely time to drink a cold sarsaparilla and take a birdbath in a bowl of water, but Kincaid had gotten into more trouble, Angie reflected. He was about to engage in a gunfight with a man he hadn’t even known an hour ago—if rumor could be trusted.

  And she was going to photograph it. Angie adjusted the heavy, awkward Hale camera on its wagon tripod and glanced back at the lawman who leaned against the building across the street from her.

  Angie had prevailed upon Shotgun to unload the Hale. Assembled, the Hale sat atop a tripod screwed onto a miniature flatbed wagon. She had designed the wagon herself and hired a carpenter to build it. They had tinkered with the design until she’d gotten exactly what she wanted.

  She had chosen the Hale in spite of its awkwardness and bulk because it alone could cover the size area she needed to capture the whole scene and to provide the size pictures she wanted for the book. And it had a faster shutter—one-thirtieth of a second exposure instead of the slower one twenty-fifth of a second on the Scenographe.

  Generally a shooting would not have occasioned much interest from Angie. Personally, she held violence in low regard, but when she’d been commissioned by Trumbull and Maxwell’s Weekly to take the photographs for a picture book of the Arizona Territory and its pioneering inhabitants, she’d altered her views. Now every event in Arizona took on new meaning.

  Johnny Winchester, the man Kincaid waited for, was rumored to have seventeen notches on his gun handle—not counting greasers or Indians. Winchester waited in the saloon at the end of the rutted road.

  Angie glanced at the saloon and prayed Winchester wouldn’t come out yet. She wanted to get both gunmen in one picture. She was gambling on Kincaid being the winner. She’d angle the camera to get a front view of Winchester. Both cameras should have been set up, but it was too late. Kincaid looked impatient enough to drag Winchester outside right now.

  She had exposed four plates of Kincaid, carefully noncommittal, in slightly different poses, as he waited. Now the ranger stepped out into the sun and looked up the street at the saloon. Angie took a profile shot of him. At the click of the shutter Kincaid’s sturdy head swung back around, and he narrowed his eyes at her. Piercing and hard, his gaze flicked over her, and the distinctive heat of anxiety that had crept into her earlier flooded her again. In that instant Angie understood his nickname. She lifted the corne
rs of her lips to signal her good intentions, raised her hands in surrender, and stepped away from her camera. The ranger quirked one corner of his mouth in a wry look of grim satisfaction and dismissed her. Angie flushed at the realization that she had backed down so easily.

  Using both hands, Lance cocked his Stetson down over his eyes to block out the sun’s glare. Sweat trickled down the middle of his chest. It was as hot as a fire in a pepper mill, but he was used to heat. Weren’t for the heat, he wouldn’t know he was in Arizona.

  Except for the pesky photographer—one of those big-eyed, idealistic young women, thin and fragile of limb and intensely purposeful of spirit—a skinny red-haired kid, and a small brown dog chasing its own tail, the street, tracked by a thousand deep ruts, simmered, vacant under the blazing sun.

  Lance looked back at the girl. A big-eyed skinny girl could almost always get and keep his attention, no matter how busy he was. The girl’s pale blond hair was pulled back in a bun on her slim neck. A light film of wispy hairs framed her face. She kept ducking under the black cape and popping out. Each time her hair looked a little more frayed. What was a pretty little thing like her doing pulling a contraption like that in a place like this? She’d look more at home lifting a crystal goblet in Delmonico’s or Sherry’s in New York City.

  Three half-drunk prospectors stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of the tobacco store. From inside the nearest store, men placed bets on the gunfight. No matter which way it went, someone would be the better for it.

  Farther south, in an upstairs room of the town’s only two-story building, Ben Thompson waited. Motionless, rifle across his knees, Ben watched every movement on the street below. He and Cal McNulty had driven the wagon into Nogales to find Kincaid. They were part of Kincaid’s band of six rangers working out of a chuck-wagon office that rolled around the countryside, poking and prying, flushing out whiskey peddlers, bootleggers, horse thieves, and rustlers. The wagon served as their traveling headquarters—office, arsenal, kitchen, and jail. They had wired McNamara to let him know where they were, and McNamara had fired back a telegram saying to tell Kincaid when he came back from Mexico how pissed McNamara was with him. McNamara always assumed the worst when Kincaid got near the border. And he was usually right. Lines on paper didn’t mean much to Kincaid. He’d just swear he didn’t know where the hell he was, and there weren’t many men who’d call him on it. Except McNamara always seemed to know what was going on. Probably right this minute the Scot was having a conniption fit, what with one of his best men about to get shot at.