Chris hit the floor, her hand going to the corner of her bleeding mouth.
Dysan advanced on her, and Chris scooted backward on the floor.
It was just as Dysan reached her and had his hand raised to strike her again that Tynan sprang from his chair and grabbed Dysan about the neck, a small knife held to the evil man’s throat. “I think it’s time that you pick on someone your own size,” Tynan said.
With that, Ty spun the man around and slammed a right fist into his face.
Dysan went down on the nearest chair and hit the floor next to Chris. Tynan didn’t give him time to regain his breath before he was on him again. “You coward!” Tynan said under his breath as he grabbed Dysan and began to beat him.
Chris got up and tried to stop Tynan from killing the man, but Tynan was so angry that she couldn’t make him hear her. She kept watching the door, fearing that any minute, one of the guards would come in and take them back to the cellar. They had to get out now while they had the chance.
She jumped on Tynan’s back, hoping that her weight would have some effect on him.
Tynan shrugged her off and, again, Chris went skidding across the floor. It was a long moment before Tynan realized what he’d done. He dropped Dysan, allowing the man to slide down the wall to the floor in a bloody heap while he went after Chris.
“That was a fool thing to do,” he said, lifting her up from the floor.
Chris shook her head to clear it. “We have to get out of here while we can. What took you so long to get loose?”
“Have you ever sawed through half-inch ropes with a pen knife? And you didn’t look like you were in any misery. Maybe you want to stay here with Dysan rather than escaping with me? Maybe you two can still merge empires once you get rid of the cowboy.”
“Could you go into a jealous rage later? I’d like to get out of here and we still have to get past the guards and the dogs outside.”
After helping her to stand, Tynan went to Dysan and hauled him up. “You’re going with us and if the dogs get too near, I’ll throw you to them. Chris, hand me that piece of rope.”
As Tynan tied Dysan, Chris looked out the window. “What do you think our chances are? There are guards everywhere.”
“I’m hoping that Pilar and Prescott got away.”
“They didn’t. They’re in the cellar now,” Dysan said before Tynan put a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket across Dysan’s mouth.
“Then we have to get them out,” Chris said, heading toward the door which led to the stairs into the cellar.
Tynan shoved Dysan against the wall and grabbed Chris’s arm. “What makes you believe him? If they’re locked up, then after I get you out safely, I’ll come back for them—alone. You understand me?”
“Because you’ll go back to jail if I’m not safe? Pilar and Asher don’t matter to you, do they?”
Tynan closed his eyes a moment, then turned back to Dysan and began to search him, removing a small derringer from inside his coat pocket. “All right, let’s go. Chris, I’m taking him out the window first, then I want you to follow us when it’s safe.” He paused a moment, looking at her. “And I want you to swear to me that you won’t do anything stupid like try to get back into the house to find the others. You understand?”
Chris nodded, but she was thinking about Pilar and Asher hidden away in the cellar. Wouldn’t it be better if the two of them tried to get them out, instead of Tynan coming back alone later?
“Chris!” Tynan hissed at her as he stood outside the window. Dysan was giving him trouble so Tynan cuffed him once on the side of the head.
There was a low brick wall in the back of the house, a place for flowers and kitchen herbs. Ty crouched down behind the wall, forcing Dysan down in front of him. He kept turning to look at Chris, as if he expected her to disappear and he wanted to be able to go after her as quickly as possible.
They were at the end of the wall when Ty stopped and put his head up. The forest was several yards away and Chris could hear men talking nearby on the other side of the wall and the dogs in the distance. It would probably be only minutes before the guards found them.
Tynan leaned back against the wall and checked Dysan’s derringer to make sure it was loaded. “Chris, I want you to stay behind us. I’m going to use Dysan as a shield and get us to the forest. You think you can do that? I don’t want any more trouble than I already have. No going back for the others.”
It was obvious that he hadn’t believed her when she’d said that she would obey him.
Tynan looked toward the forest for a moment then back at Dysan. “And you give me any trouble and I’ll blow your head off.”
“All right, let’s go,” he said, grabbing Dysan and pulling him upright.
They left the safety of the wall and stepped into the open ground—but they stopped there because no one was even interested in them. They could see about a dozen guards, one with four dogs on a leash, but not one eye was turned in their direction. The guards were frozen where they stood, staring at something around the corner of the house.
Chris could hear bells in the distance.
“Get back!” Tynan said to Chris, shoving Dysan back toward the wall.
“What is it?” Chris asked.
“I think it’s a peddler’s wagon,” Ty said. “Pilar used to work on one. If it is them, then we’ll do better to leave with them. The dogs will smell our trail in the forest in no time.”
“But how do we get out? We can’t just walk to the wagon. And what do we do with him?”
“We leave him here, then we make our way toward the front of the house. We’ll figure out a way to make Prescott see us.”
Chris watched as Tynan tied one of Dysan’s ankles to a spike in the top of the brick wall, allowing the rope to fall only enough so that Dysan wasn’t dangling, but he was very uncomfortable. “Something tells me that I ought to kill you now,” Ty said under his breath. “I think you’re going to be nothing but trouble and there’ll come a time when I’ll regret having missed my chance.” He looked up at Chris. “You ready?”
“Ty, are you sure it’s Asher and Pilar? Maybe it’s really a peddler’s wagon and they’re actually locked in the cellar.”
Ty didn’t answer but grabbed her arm and pushed her back toward the house. Looking inside the window he made sure no one was about then climbed inside and helped Chris after him.
She followed him as he led her through the house, keeping her back to the walls as he instructed her, while he checked each room they passed for signs of a guard. Once, he slipped inside a room and Chris heard a dull thud, as if a body were hitting the floor, then he returned to the hall and motioned for her to follow him.
Chris didn’t question how he came to know the plan of the house so well, but just trusted him. He stopped in a bedroom at the far end of the house.
“It’s Pilar, all right,” he said after looking out the window. “She’s on top of the wagon dancing, and Prescott is driving. I don’t know how much longer we have before they get tired of watching her. On second thought, considering what Pilar’s wearing, we may have the rest of the week.”
He turned back to Chris. “How fast can you run?”
“I…I don’t know. If someone’s chasing me, I guess I can run rather quickly.”
“I’m going to create a diversion and I want you to climb out the window and run to the wagon and get in the back. Think you can do that?”
“But what about you? I can’t go off and leave you.”
“After the way you were kissing Dysan, what do you care about me?”
“Dysan?” she asked, bewildered. “I was trying to get a knife from the box. I had to divert him. Tynan, are you jealous?”
“Definitely not. Now, are you going to get out there or are you going to waste time and maybe get us all killed?”
She nodded at him, but she didn’t like it. She hoped he wasn’t going to do something that would get him caught again. She didn’t think Dysan would be so ea
sy to overpower the second time.
“Good girl,” he said and started to turn away, but then abruptly turned back and pulled her into his arms. His kiss was hard and quick, so quick, in fact, he only undid three buttons, but it was a kiss filled with feeling. He released her as abruptly as he’d taken her. “I’ll be all right,” he said over his shoulder. “You just get yourself out of here when you hear the gunshots.”
It seemed to Chris that it was the longest few minutes of her life while she waited for Tynan to begin firing. She crouched below the window and peeped out to see the tall, gaudily painted peddler’s wagon surrounded by men with rifles over their shoulders. On top of the wagon was Pilar, dressed in odd, voluminous trousers of pale blue silk and a tiny top of matching silk. It was apparent that the costume hadn’t been made for someone of Pilar’s dimensions because the fabric strained everywhere, threatening to split apart at any moment. Chris guessed that that was half of the men’s fascination with her—the hope that the garment would give way while they were watching.
While Chris was watching Pilar undulate, there suddenly came the sound of gunfire from the back of the house and the guards’ reaction was instantaneous. They all took off running toward the sound.
Chris lost no time climbing out the window and running across the lawn to open the back of the wagon and climb inside. She heard Pilar yell down to Asher, on the wagon’s seat, “She’s in,” then the wagon started off at a breakneck speed.
Chris grabbed the side of the wagon and tried to hold her balance. The wagon was full of merchandise, from bolts of cloth to pots and pans to farm tools, nearly all of it fastened down so it couldn’t fly about when the wagon moved.
The back door of the wagon flew open just as Chris regained her balance. As she reached forward to close it, she saw that they were traveling away from Dysan’s big house.
“No!” she gasped, but there was no one in the back of the wagon to hear her.
If she was to get Asher to turn around, she had to do something and do it fast. Fighting the rocking of the wagon, she began to climb over the boxes that were stacked toward the front, grabbing a small handled axe off the wall as she moved.
It took three swings before the axe went through the front partition and came out uncomfortably close to Asher’s right ear.
He turned to look at her in disbelief as she used her feet to kick the rest of the way through the thin wood. “You have to go back,” she yelled at Asher. “You can’t leave Tynan back there.”
Pilar hung down from the top. “She’s right,” she shouted over the sound of the horses. “We have to get Tynan out.”
“Then I’ll go back but you two women stay here,” Asher said even as he was halting the horses.
“No!” the women screamed at him in unison.
Asher didn’t say another word as he flicked the whip over the horses and headed back toward Dysan’s house.
Chapter Twenty-one
Chris held on for her life while Asher drove the wagon back over the ground they’d just covered. Their only hope of rescuing Tynan was that Dysan hadn’t been discovered yet and his men didn’t know that the peddler’s wagon was involved in the escape.
Above her head, she could hear Pilar singing and making noise to attract attention.
“Cover this hole,” Asher yelled as he whipped the horses harder.
With unsteady feet, falling several times, Chris managed to hang a piece of cloth over the hole she’d made in the front of the wagon. Just as she’d caught the edges of the cloth on a piece of splintered wood, Asher called, “I see him and he’s running toward us. Oh Lord. Get down! Both of you women get down,” he yelled as the first shots rang out.
Chris, with her heart pounding, flattened herself on the floor of the wagon—or as close to the floor as she could get with all the merchandise scattered about. Overhead, she heard Pilar hit the roof very hard, almost as if she’d fallen. Immediately the gunfire increased to a torrent.
Inching forward on her belly, she pushed one of the wagon doors open. Tynan was running down the road with men and dogs on his heels, the men firing their rifles as they ran. The bullets were hitting the back of the wagon at a regular rate, some of them whizzing inches over Chris’s head.
She moved closer to the door and stretched her hand out toward Tynan. “Come on,” she yelled. “Come on.”
Ty yelled something back to her but the blood was pounding so hard in her ears that she didn’t understand what he was saying.
“You’ll never get out of jail,” she screamed at him.
It was then that one of the bullets hit Ty in the leg. He faltered and she thought he was going to fall but he kept on coming.
Chris made a dive through the merchandise, one box that was sliding across the space hit her hard in the side, but she continued until she reached the front and stuck her head out to Asher and bellowed for him to slow down, that Tynan had been shot and couldn’t run.
Then she went back to the rear of the wagon to put her hand out to Ty. Asher couldn’t slow down much or Dysan’s men would catch them.
Tynan reached the wagon and Chris’s hand just as the dogs reached Ty’s heels. She helped to pull him into the wagon as Ty yelled to Asher to get the hell out of there. Ty had to shake one dog off his ankle even as the wagon bounded forward, leaving Dysan’s men standing where they were.
Immediately, Chris started examining the gunshot wound on Ty’s right thigh.
“Do you know if Prescott has horses ready?” he shouted to her over the noise of the wagon.
“I don’t know anything. Ty, you’re bleeding a lot.”
“There’s a place we can go. How is Pilar? Is she still on top?”
“Yes and I haven’t heard a sound from her since the first shot.”
Tynan frowned. “Have you got something to tie around this to stop the bleeding? It’ll take us a good four hours to get where we can rest.”
“Yes, of course I can, but, Ty, you need a doctor.”
“About three of Dysan’s men need an undertaker. Why did you come back? Why didn’t you get out of here while you could?”
“We came back to save your ungrateful hide,” she said as she tore off a long strip of her petticoat and began to bind his leg.
She’d barely finished tying his wound when Asher brought them to a halt that nearly sent Chris and Ty flying out the back door. Within seconds, Ash was at the back door.
“I have horses waiting. Pilar said there was an old man you knew who had a camp near here and you could lead us to him.”
“How is she?” Ty asked.
Asher climbed to the top of the wagon and after a long, long moment of suspense, yelled down that she had been shot.
Ty, his wounded leg stiff in front of him, maneuvered himself out of the wagon. “How bad?” he asked quietly as he stood on the ground.
“She’s alive but she’s bleeding a great deal.”
Chris was already climbing the little ladder that was attached to the side of the wagon and making her way up to Pilar. She gasped when she saw the woman. Pilar looked to be laying in a pool of blood, and her face was completely white.
“Ty,” Chris called down, “she’s wounded in her shoulder and she’s unconscious. Her heartbeat is strong but she’s weak. Can you help us get her down?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently.
Chris worked as quickly as she could, wadding cloth against the wound and trying to tie it, but the location made a tourniquet impossible. The thud Chris heard on the roof must have been Pilar falling after she’d been shot. The guards had taken aim at the easiest target: the woman on the top of the wagon.
“We’ll get her down to Ty,” Chris said to Asher when she had Pilar taken care of as best she could. “Help him all you can as he’s wounded too,” she whispered.
Ty caught Pilar and held her then began walking with her to the waiting horses, the blood seeping from his leg, his forehead covered with sweat.
“Give her to me,” Asher s
aid, taking Pilar in his arms. “You lead.”
Tynan merely nodded as he handed Pilar’s inert body to Asher and started toward the horses. “There’s some rough terrain ahead of us, but I don’t think they’ll be able to follow us. I don’t want any heroics, you understand, Chris? If I tell you to go on ahead, I expect you to do it, you understand?”
“I can follow sensible orders. Shall we ride before Dysan’s men find us standing here?”
Asher mounted, then Ty put Pilar in the saddle before him, so that he was holding her in place. “You think you can hold her?” Ty asked and there was a sadness in his voice that Chris was sure came from not being able to take care of her himself.
Within seconds, both she and Ty were mounted and they started to ride.
He was right when he’d said that it would be a difficult trip. They went straight up for a while, then across a boggy area that sucked at the horses’ feet, then across several of Washington’s cold, swift streams. For about a mile, they walked the horses through the water, hiding their trail from their pursuers.
Chris kept looking back at Pilar, whose eyes were still closed as Asher held onto her. She looked even paler.
“Watch where you’re going,” Tynan said in a tight-lipped way that told how much he was worried.
Once, they heard the dogs on a ridge above them and they moved their horses into the shelter of trees near a sharp rapids in the water. Chris’s horse slipped but Tynan caught the reins and pulled her back to safety.
When the men and dogs were gone, they rode down the stream into the forest, going the opposite direction of their hunters.
It was nearly dark when Tynan stopped his horse and stiffly dismounted. “Wait here for me. He won’t want any visitors.”
“Who won’t?” Chris asked but Tynan had already slipped into the trees and didn’t answer her.
“The old man.” It was a ragged whisper from Pilar. “Could I have some water?”
Quickly, Chris dismounted and removed her canteen from the back of the horse. Asher held it to Pilar’s lips while Chris examined Pilar’s wound. The bleeding had stopped, but she didn’t look as if she had much strength left.