“What could be more important than gold?” Rose posed. The tone of his voice made it sound as if he had suspicions of what was in the box.
Flynn looked up at him critically. Rose was frowning down at the box, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed. He didn’t appear to be playing games. “Any ideas?”
Rose’s eyes shifted to meet his. He worked his jaw back and forth and shrugged. “I might have one or two.”
“Care to share?”
Rose studied him for a time, then sighed and nodded. “Several months back I met with a man in Denver. The government man we saw in St. Louis, in fact. Baird. He wanted someone to steal something for him, an Indian artifact the Army was trying to recover from a burial.”
“Did you steal it?”
“No, Marshal Flynn, I refused and the man tried to kill me, just like I told you,” Rose said heatedly. “I am not a thief, and I am not a hired gun, no matter the low opinions you may have of me.”
Flynn held up his hand to soothe him. “Okay, okay. How’d you get away?”
“An earthquake.”
Flynn narrowed his eyes and peered at Rose. “An earthquake?” he finally repeated dubiously. “What, you just keep those lying around ’til you need one?”
“Don’t be glib, Marshal Flynn. It doesn’t suit you.”
Flynn snorted and waved his hand through the air. “So you used a handily timed earthquake to escape from this government man who tried to kill you. Go on.”
Rose glared at him. “You remember what I said out on the plains? About the Santee searching for something they called the ‘terrible stone’? I believe Baird was looking for the same thing. He told me I had knowledge of the object he was seeking.” He frowned at the box.
“What could possibly make you think this is the same thing?”
“That man we saw with Cage, the big man. His name is Bat Stringer. He was at that same meeting. If he’s here, it has to do with what Baird was after. And it wasn’t gold,” Rose said pointedly. “And to be honest, that’s the only object I can think of that I have special knowledge of.”
Flynn pondered the lead lining the box and the nails and the heavy-duty padlock.
“The Santee spoke of it with something like fear. At first I thought it some sort of religious trinket, something spiritual to lift and unite their tribes. But now, I believe I was wrong. I believe they viewed it as a weapon,” Rose said in a hushed voice. “And whatever power they believed it had, someone else obviously believed it too or they wouldn’t be after it.”
Flynn looked back up at him and nodded in understanding. Whatever was in that box was probably either very valuable or dangerous. Or both. Regardless, it didn’t need to fall into the hands of the wrong people.
“Search those soldiers, see if one of ’em has a key,” he told Rose as he stood and went to hunt through the darker corners of the big room.
Stringer sat at one of the dining tables in the large salon, scowling at the doorway. Finding Cage here had been a stroke of pure luck, an opportunity Stringer didn’t intend to overlook. But his good mood had swiftly gone downhill with the discovery that Dusty Rose was on this boat as well. Of all the people in all the wide world to step into his path, he’d stumbled over the one person who might be able to figure out what he was doing.
The idea that Rose had teamed up with Cage made his blood boil. It was even worse when he considered that Cage may well have been in Denver with Rose when they’d had the meeting with Baird, despite what the marshal had said about how long they’d known each other.
Stringer gritted his teeth.
“Cap?”
“What?” Stringer snapped as Alvarado approached.
“Things still running to plan?” Alvarado asked as he knelt at Stringer’s side.
Stringer glared at him.
Alvarado cleared his throat. “If Rose is down there with that—”
“I’m well aware,” Stringer snapped. “We’ll just have to make certain he doesn’t leave this river alive.”
Alvarado nodded and moved away, obviously sensing Stringer’s mood and knowing not to cross him.
Stringer’s eyes strayed to Cage, who lay on the floor where Stringer had left him. He was torn over what to do with his old companion. On one hand, he wanted to tear him limb from limb and drag him across the bottom of the river. But on the other, Stringer admitted to himself that he was still just happy to see him.
Cage must have felt his eyes on him, because he turned his head just slightly and cut his gaze at him. They locked eyes unflinchingly, and Stringer sat wondering what he would do with him when the time came.
If only Cage would come back to him, it would save him the trouble of having to kill him. Stringer didn’t know if he could forgive him, but he was more likely to do that than pull the trigger.
A quick search produced no key to the padlock, but Rose and Flynn had managed to open several of the large crates of gold to investigate their contents. They’d been slightly nonplussed to find nothing but rocks and debris inside.
“We have ten crates of rock and one box of mystery content,” Rose surmised. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked down at the rocks within one of the crates. “I think I’ve lost the thread, Marshal Flynn.”
“You and me both,” Flynn muttered. He was still staring at the little box, confounded by the way it was secured.
“Marshal.”
“What?”
“We have no gold,” Rose pointed out.
Flynn nodded, frowning as he stood. They had no gold to exchange. They could try to pass off a crate as their ransom, but Flynn wasn’t fooling himself into thinking that would work. Not anymore.
“Are you done pondering this over now? There is no other choice. I’m tired of being on the defensive,” Rose said in frustration as Flynn distractedly tried to listen for any sounds of approach. “We need to move, Flynn.”
Flynn gazed at him dubiously. “You plan to pick them off one by one? Without warning? You want to sneak around and kill them all?”
“It’s called guerilla warfare, Marshal.” Rose put out his cigarette on the wood of the crate under him and slid the remainder into his pocket. “You Americans should know something about it.”
“Hmm.”
“During the Napoleonic Wars the Spanish knew they were outgunned, so they took to going about in small bands and undermining the larger French forces by attacking strategically and without warning. I believe we should learn from their ingenuity.”
“Why the hell can’t you speak plain English?” Flynn asked in frustration. He stared at Rose and scowled mightily.
“What I’m saying, Marshal Flynn, is they’ve obviously split up searching for us,” Rose explained patiently. “They’ll be easy to take by surprise if they’re in smaller groups and isolated, and since they’re men like you, they won’t be expecting us to attack.”
“Men like me?” Flynn bristled and turned to square up against Rose.
“I mean, they’re Americans,” Rose said without responding to Flynn’s obvious ire. “Westerners. They expect us to stand up and wave our hands and say ‘Here we are, please shoot us so we can die honorably!’ You said we were doing this my way, remember? And my way is to go about this in as dastardly and underhanded a manner as possible.”
Flynn stared at him, wondering if he was trying to be funny, or if he just didn’t see the irony in that statement. Flynn didn’t think Rose was joking, though. “I don’t like it.”
“I understand, Marshal. It’s a wild and wooly western thing, right? Cowboy honor? The Rattlesnake Code? Always warn before you strike?”
Flynn nodded and shifted from foot to foot, scowling heavily. There was a difference between the rules of war and the rules of upholding the law.
“Believe me, I do understand that,” Rose said grimly. “I live by it. The people who come after me looking to make a name for themselves? They don’t. I always have to be aware of an ambush, and in learning how others would do them,
I myself have learned a great deal about ambushing. And I would like to remind you of the exception to that little unspoken rule of the plains. They’re here to kill us. They’re out there hunting us as we speak, with every intention of gunning us down, with or without warning. If they don’t expect us to be firing back, then that isn’t our concern. The code doesn’t account for stupid.”
Flynn frowned and pursed his lips. There was a certain seductive logic to that. He wondered if that was how Rose’s mind worked all the time. With cold, twisting logic, absent of morals or emotions. He wondered if that was how he lived with the things he did, by convincing himself it was right.
“I’m not going to lie and say it’s the easy way. What I don’t like the thought of is Cage and Marshal Washington lying dead because we were too honorable to do anything about it.” Rose stood and slid his new hat onto his head. It was a dark-brown felt with a wide, low brim. Rose had curled it until the sides had rolled up and the front hung low over his eyes. The effect was impressive, with the shadow always covering his already black eyes. It suited him quite well, much better than the bowler had.
“Ain’t supposed to wear another man’s hat. Don’t you know that?”
“I don’t think he’ll come looking for it,” Rose drawled with a nod of his head at the dead man he had taken the hat from. They’d left the hijackers where they’d fallen, lying dead in their own blood. The soldiers who’d been guarding the cargo, they had covered with empty burlap sacks. They lay lined up in a row that reminded Flynn far too much of his time in the wars. He looked over at them and grimaced, turning his head away again.
“You can stay here,” Rose offered. “But I’m more likely to succeed if you’re with me.”
Flynn stared at the hat on top of Rose’s head, then down to meet the man’s eyes.
“No one would think less of you for protecting the government’s hard-earned rocks. Marshal Washington certainly wouldn’t.”
Flynn gritted his teeth, his temper surging. “I’m going after Wash,” he whispered.
“Good,” Rose said happily. He picked up his shotgun and loaded three more shells into it. He closed it, the sound reverberating ominously throughout the large room. He took several long strides toward the door and brushed past Flynn as he stepped out into the hall. “Let’s burn the breeze, Marshal!”
Cage lay on the floor and peered at the few men left guarding the passengers. Where were the rest of Stringer’s boys? If they were out looking for Gabriel and Flynn, then when the shooting had started down below, they should have heard it and returned to investigate. That was, of course, unless Stringer’s plans called for there to be shooting down below and none of the other men searching the boat thought it odd.
Cage decided with a sickening, sinking feeling that the reason no one had returned from the search was because they had all known to expect the gunfire. Those guards down in that hold with the gold had been slaughtered, and that had been the plan all along. The passengers, Cage knew, would be next.
“I swear, Cage, I think you were put on this ship just to vex me,” Stringer uttered.
Cage craned his head to watch him warily. It was odd to hear Stringer call him by the name few men had known him by in that life. Stringer had known it, but he’d preferred to merely call him Boss. Cage couldn’t help but think to himself that he had done very little to vex anyone on this ship. He hadn’t really done much of anything but bleed, in fact.
Stringer stalked over to the bar where all the weapons from the passengers had been placed, and he picked up two Colts. He emptied one cylinder in each piece. Stringer had always sawed off the trigger guards of his guns to make his draw faster, but any man with a lick of sense knew that made your guns just that much more likely to shoot off your own toes. To guard against that, like so many men did, Stringer never loaded the cylinder that would be fired first. Even with the borrowed guns and their intact trigger guards, he didn’t seem willing to go around half-cocked.
Cage didn’t think it was the best idea to remove rounds, but he certainly wasn’t going to point out that Stringer might want all the ammunition he could get his hands on going up against Gabriel. Stringer stuffed the guns into his belt and turned around. He met Cage’s eyes from under the brim of his hat, and Cage caught his breath. Stringer had always been impressive to look at, to say the least, especially when he was riled.
Stringer stalked over to him, and Cage instinctively shied away when he got closer, expecting another blow. It didn’t come, though. Instead Stringer knelt near him. Not close enough for Cage to reach him or do any damage to him, but close enough to speak in a voice that couldn’t be overheard. “Pick your side now, Boss,” he said, hoarse and grave. “You can still come back to us.”
Cage’s heart was hammering in his chest as he maintained eye contact with a man he had once cared for. He breathed out slowly, trying to calm himself, and his eyes flickered uncertainly. Stringer nodded at him eagerly, seeing the indecision and trying to urge him into his choice.
Cage met his eyes for a long, tense moment of fighting within himself. He knew, deep down, that he could never go back. And he knew that he didn’t truly want to go back. The cold hard truth of the matter was that he’d risked his life to leave a year ago, and he’d forfeit his life tonight if he needed to. He wouldn’t go back. Stringer knew that too, whether he wanted to admit it or not. Cage stared at him with a hint of pity, and then he very deliberately looked away.
Flynn was trusting Rose’s instincts more than he wanted to as they crept through the lower levels of the ship. Rose was certain there would be men in the boiler room, stationed to set dynamite and then wait for the word from their boss to light it. He insisted they needed to be rid of them first to ensure that the boat didn’t catch fire.
Flynn wasn’t entirely convinced that there even was any dynamite, but he was smart enough to know when he was out of his element. He was a straight shooter; confronting trouble and standing it down, that was how he worked. This kind of thing, this guerilla warfare Rose had spoken of, was not something he knew how to do.
“How many men you think they got?” Flynn whispered as they moved.
“We’ve killed six already. We’ve seen five more. Taking into account that we may have seen one or two of them twice, that’s still probably eight to ten they brought with them. An operation like this, with prisoners to keep in control and crates of fake gold to heft? I’d say they have twice that.”
“Twenty men?” Flynn murmured in disbelief.
“You know your maths, Marshal, consider me impressed,” Rose said in a sarcastic, flat tone.
Flynn ignored it. “How did they expect to split that little box twenty ways?”
“They didn’t,” Rose said grimly. “If the expendable men didn’t get themselves killed in the act, then Stringer probably planned to kill them and dump them in the river in the end, anyway.”
“That’s cold.”
“That’s smart.”
Flynn glanced at the man warily and then returned his attention to the corridor they were following.
They came to a door with a wooden sign over it indicating the boiler room, and Rose pointed to it and then put his finger to his lips. Flynn nodded and removed one of his guns slowly, making no noise. They could clearly hear two voices coming from within the room. Flynn took a moment to wonder if these were innocent ship’s crew they were about to attack, but the conversation soon answered his question for him.
“Would you put out your damn cigarette! Gonna blow us sky-high, you idiot.”
Flynn met Rose’s eyes and saw the shootist point at the door and roll his eyes. “Expendable,” Rose mouthed.
Flynn pursed his lips. These men had obviously been sent to replace the engineer and his crew to keep the steamer moving.
Rose held up his hand and got Flynn’s attention. “Ready?” he whispered as he held a large hunting knife up.
Flynn nodded.
“Quiet first. Then the guns if they’re necess
ary. We don’t want anyone alerted to the fact we’ve taken this room.”
“Or blowing up the coal with gun powder?”
“That too.”
Flynn nodded again and licked his lips, holstering his gun and drawing his hunting knife from its sheath. He was decent at a knife toss. Dusty Rose, he had heard, was better. After what he’d seen up above, Flynn was willing to believe it. But he had never seen anyone throw a knife as large as the one Rose had lifted from one of the dead guards, not with any accuracy or effectiveness anyway. It would just become a large, ungainly projectile as soon as it left his hand, akin to throwing a boot at someone and hoping the hard edge hit them.
Throwing knives were usually small, and the balance had to be perfect. Flynn knew how to throw his own knife because he’d handled it for years and knew it as well as he did his guns. He knew how far away he had to be and how he had to grip it in order to keep it from rotating more than twice before it hit its target. He wouldn’t know how to begin with the pig sticker Rose now clutched by the handle like a spear.
Rose moved to the half-open door and kicked it open. From behind him, Flynn saw two men within the room, bent near the opening to the coal bunker, working to spread coal through the chute. They both lunged to their feet, coal and powder scattering on the ground in front of them, and reached for their guns as Rose entered the room. Rose tossed the large knife as he moved, throwing it underhanded with a flick of his wrist.
The knife sailed through the air with just a single spin and sank into the chest of one of the men. The other man drew his gun as Rose ducked. Flynn followed directly behind him, tossing his own knife over Rose’s shoulder. The knife gave four smooth whooshing sounds and then hit home, striking the man in the shoulder before he could get off a shot. He dropped his gun and clutched at the knife sticking out of his arm, looking at Flynn and Rose in a mixture of horror and anger.
Flynn drew his gun, but Rose stood again before he could fire. He tackled the injured man and sent them both sprawling into the stack of loose coal spilling out of the chute to the coal bunker next door. Flynn kept his gun trained on them, just in case, but Rose seemed to know how to handle himself just fine without Flynn’s help. He yanked the knife from the man’s shoulder, slapping his free hand over the unfortunate’s mouth so he couldn’t scream. He then jammed the knife under the sternum, twisted it, and drove it deeper as the man bucked and writhed beneath him.