He came to a rise and, in the moonlight, he could see a buggy to his right and what could be a posse of men to his left. It looked as if Blair were riding into the men who meant to arrest her—and he was half a mile away.
Chapter 34
Leander kicked the horse, started yelling, fired his pistol, grabbed a rifle from the scabbard on the horse and began firing it, all at the same time. The poor horse, terrified of the strange rider and all the noise and gunpowder, bolted forward, tearing across the moonlit countryside at breakneck speed. Lee wanted to draw attention to himself, to get the posse’s mind off his wife.
He succeeded.
When a few “stray” bullets landed a foot away from the lead horse of the posse, all the men halted, trying to control their horses, and giving Lee the precious minutes he needed to reach Blair before they did.
As it was, they all met at the same time. One glance at the sheriff’s solemn face and Lee knew that what LeGault had said was true—they’d come to see if one of the Chandlers had indeed been involved in a robbery.
“Damn you!” Lee yelled at Blair as he pulled back on the horse’s reins and dismounted, slapping the horse’s rump to head it back toward the lights of town. “I can’t trust you out of my sight for a minute.” He climbed into the buggy, grabbed the reins from her and looked up at the sheriff. “Let a woman have her own carriage, and it’s no telling how much trouble she’ll get into. And this is the worst. Always doing things for other people, never taking into account her own safety.”
The sheriff studied Lee for a long moment, a moment so long that Lee began to sweat.
“Boy, you oughta take care of your wife,” the sheriff said solemnly. “Or somebody else might.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee said. “I’ll have her taken care of by morning.”
“Six hours, Leander. I’ll give you six hours, and then I might be that somebody.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee said, and felt like crying, he was so grateful. “It won’t take me that long, sir.” He snapped the reins and moved the buggy off the road, heading it back toward the freight office.
Once they were on the road, Blair spoke for the first time. “So you did come, after all. How did you find out the delivery was tonight?”
Lee didn’t look at her. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut. Your silence may stop me from blistering your rear end and keeping you tied inside the house for the rest of your life.”
“Me? Me!” she gasped, holding onto the side of the carriage. “I was just filling in for you. I hoped that if I took over for you once, you’d see the misery you put me through.”
“Took over for me!” He turned toward her, and his eyes were blazing with rage. “Do you think I was stealing securities? That I was working with LeGault?”
“What else could you be doing? You don’t make any money as a doctor, but you can afford all the medical equipment and the house and the expenses for me, and you come home with bullet wounds and…” She stopped as Lee halted the buggy fairly close to the dark freight office.
He jumped down. “Get down and let’s see what LeGault planted on you.”
As Blair moved, Lee opened the compartment in the back of the buggy and withdrew a small wooden chest and opened it, withdrawing large pieces of floridly engraved paper. He held them up to one of the two carriage lanterns. “Not only were you stealing, but these belong to Taggert and the Chandler National Bank. You could have bankrupted half the town.”
Blair took a moment to realize what he was saying, and when it hit her, she sat down on the running board of the carriage. “Oh, Lee, I had no idea. I just thought—.”
He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her up. “We don’t have time for remorse now. We have to see what LeGault did inside there. Get your bag.” He unhooked a lantern from the carriage and began to run, Blair on his heels, her heavy medical bag in her hand.
There was only one entrance into the dark freight office, and as they entered, they saw the big, empty safe standing open, a body before it. Since neither the electric lines nor the telephone lines extended this far out of town, they had to keep the lantern lit.
Lee reached the man first. “It’s Ted Hinkel. He’s alive, but he’s been hit on the head pretty hard.”
Blair reached into her bag and withdrew the smelling salts. “If you weren’t working with LeGault, where were you?”
Lee gave a big sigh as he took the salts. “I thought I could save you from yourself, but I guess I can’t. I didn’t tell you what I was doing, because I feared that you’d do some fool thing like this. The truth is, for some time now I’ve been sneaking unionists into the coal camps.”
“Unionists?” she said blankly. “But LeGault—.”
“How could you believe I’d have anything to do with a criminal like him? You yourself said that he hated me. I guess he found out about the unionists, figured I’d never tell you what I was doing and used what he knew to make you work for him. If you got the securities out of town, great; if you didn’t, even better; he’d have repaid me for sending him to prison.”
“But the money…,” Blair began as she moved the lantern closer to Ted’s head. She was unable to comprehend what Lee was saying.
Lee was frowning at the inert young man as he tried to revive him. “How did somebody like me fall for somebody like you? I was raised to believe that how much money a man made was his business and his alone. My mother was from a very rich family, and I’m certainly not one of the richest men in America like Taggert, but I have more than enough. I even told you that.”
“Yes, but the clinic cost so much.”
Lee gritted his teeth and moved Ted upright. “If we ever get out of this, I’ll show you my assets. I could afford twenty clinics.”
“Oh,” Blair said, and handed him carbolic and a cloth to clean the wound on Ted’s head. “So I’ve just stolen…How much have I stolen?”
“One million dollars.”
The bottle of carbolic dropped from her hand, but Lee caught it. “How did you know, and why was the sheriff there, and what was the talk of six hours about?”
“Houston sensed you were in danger and Mary Catherine found out where you’d last been seen. LeGault turned you in to the sheriff, and the sheriff’s given me six hours to get the securities back before anyone knows they were stolen. Come on, Ted, wake up!”
Blair put her face in her hands. “Oh, Lee, I’ve made a mess of everything.”
He barely glanced at her, as his concern was with the young man now. “That you have, sweetheart.”
“Do you think I’ll go to jail?”
“Not if we can get the securities back.”
“And how do you plan to do that? Say, ‘By the way, Ted, I found this outside’?”
“No, I…” His eyes lit. “He’s coming to. Give me your underdrawers.”
“Lee! Now’s not the time—.”
“I have some rope, and I’ll use your drawers as a sling and lower the chest down the chimney. You have to convince Ted he saved it and the crooks never even got away with it.”
Without another word, Blair stood, dropped her drawers, handed them to Lee, then sat and took Ted’s head in her lap as Lee went outside.
“Ted! What happened?” she said, holding the salts under his nose.
“The station was robbed,” he said, sitting up, his hand to his head. “I have to call Mr.—.”
“You have to sit down,” she said, helping him to stand, then almost pushing him into a chair. “I have to look at that cut.”
“But I have to tell—.”
“Here!” Blair put a stinging antiseptic on the cut, and the new pain weakened the young man enough that he leaned back in the chair. “Tell me what happened,” she said.
“Two men came in and held a gun to my head. One of them, the little one, knew the combination to the safe.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Blair could see something white appearing in the fireplace. “Turn this way toward the
light. What happened then?”
“I just stood there while the little one opened the safe and took out a chest. I don’t know what was in it. Then, somebody hit me on the head, and the next thing I knew, I woke up and you were here. Blair-Houston, I have to call—.”
“That couldn’t be all of the story. You must have put up a great struggle.”
“But I didn’t, I—.”
“Ted, I want you to lie down on the floor for a minute or two. I’m worried about that cut. You’ve lost a lot of blood. Yes, that’s right, stretch out behind that cabinet. I need to clean my instruments.”
Blair ran to the fireplace, grabbed the white drawers and the rope off the chest and stuffed them into her medical case. “I think you’ll be all right now, Ted. Why don’t you come in here and get your gun, and I’ll drive you to the sheriff’s?”
Ted, with his hand to his head, walked haltingly around the cabinet, then stood staring in disbelief. “That’s it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The chest they stole. There it is. How long has it been here?”
“It was here when I came in. Do you mean the robbers didn’t take it, after all? Gee, Ted, I know you said you put up a struggle, but you were being modest. Do you mean you prevented them from stealing the chest?”
“I…I don’t know. I thought—.”
“There’s the evidence. You must have saved it. Ted, you’re a hero.”
“I’m not so sure. I seem to remember—.”
“With a crack like that on your head, you’re sure to be fuzzy, but the evidence is right here before us. Why don’t we lock it in the safe, and I’ll ride to the nearest telephone and get the sheriff out here? And the newspaper. They’ll want to hear about this.”
“I…I guess so.” He straightened his shoulders. “Sure, why not?”
Blair put the chest in the safe, locked the door, helped Ted to a chair, then ran outside. Lee grabbed her hand and they ran to the buggy together. It was only a mile to the nearest telephone, and Lee suspected the sheriff had been waiting.
Lee put down the receiver, thanked the bartender for the use and went outside to where Blair waited for him in the buggy.
“Is it really over?” she asked, leaning back.
“The sheriff said LeGault and a very small man—who I suspect is Françoise—got on the tram for Denver an hour ago. I don’t think we’ll see them for a while.”
“And all along it was unionists,” she murmured. “You know, Lee, I have some ideas about the unions in the coal mines, too. Maybe together we could—.”
“Over my dead body!” he said, snapping the reins.
“What am I supposed to do? Stay home and darn your socks?”
“You’re not bad at darning socks, and I like knowing where you are.”
“Like you’ve known for the last couple of weeks?”
“Yeah, I rather like a wife who—.”
“Let me tell you, doctor, if you think I’m going to read one more book about a simpering heroine or plan one more dinner, you’re out of your mind. Saturday morning, I’m going back to my clinic and see to my patients.”
“Saturday? What about today? Why don’t I just drop you off there and you can go right to work?”
“Because I’m spending today in bed with my husband. I have a lot of lost time to make up for.”
Lee gave her a quick, startled look, then grinned. “Hijah!” he yelled to the horse. “School’s out and Teacher wants to play.”
It was Blair’s turn to look startled. “You did know!”
But Lee only grinned and winked at her.
The Breathtaking Bestsellers of
JUDE DEVERAUX
AN ANGEL FOR EMILY
THE AWAKENING
THE BLESSING
THE CONQUEST
THE DUCHESS
ETERNITY
FOREVER…
THE HEIRESS
THE INVITATION
A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR
LEGEND
THE MAIDEN
MOUNTAIN LAUREL
THE MULBERRY TREE
THE PRINCESS
THE RAIDER
REMEMBRANCE
THE SUMMERHOUSE
SWEETBRIAR
SWEET LIAR
THE TAMING
TEMPTATION
THE TEMPTRESS
WISHES
Jude Deveraux, Twin of Fire
(Series: Chandler Twins # 1)
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