Dave and his friends, dressed in warpaint and buckskins, broke into the researcher’s camp in the middle of the night, tied him to a tree, then danced around the campfire for an hour.When they were done with that, they blindfolded him and marched him through the woods for a few hours before trussing him to the back of a horse.Once they had him off the mountain, they drove him to Butte, stripped him down to his underwear, and left him on the front steps of a church just before dawn.
Huck frowned when Adam finished.“What if he goes to the police?”
“Cliff Peterson’s on it.Bottom line, he’s a crazy Canadian who was already found wandering from heatstroke once before.Now he’s parading around town in his tighty-whities.He hasn’t had a bath in at least a month, and he’s ranting about bank robbers and hostile Indians in the mountains.Cliff will see to it that he spends a few days in the hospital for a psych evaluation.Then he’s headed back to Canada with a recommendation to his university that he shift his studies from grizzlies to field mice.”
“Nice,” Benny said, nodding approval.“That explains where Dave was this morning.But what was the deal with the Indian raid on the town?”
Adam rubbed the back of his neck.“I haven’t quite figured that one out yet.I mean, Dave and his friends were pretty riled up about the plan to blow up the safe, and they can get carried away when they’re mad.They gave us that raid for free, and that isn’t like them.”
“You don’t think they really meant to burn the town to the ground, do you?”
Everyone thought about that.
“Nah,” Adam said, after a few minutes of silence, but he didn’t sound certain.He turned to Jayce.“Did I hear you say you plan to marry Malika?”
Way to divert attention, Adam.
“Run it past Leon,” Adam advised him.Leon handled the fine print on their contracts.“If she wants to marry you, and she’s happy about it, then by rights we’ve kept her out of trouble, we’ve fulfilled the terms of her adventure, and we won’t have to pay the money back.”
Jayce wasn’t sure they could honestly claim they’d kept her out of trouble, especially considering the town was on fire only that morning, but he’d let Leon quibble about the semantics.
He had to get Malika’s brother’s permission.
And he suspected that the twenty-five million dollars was going to continue being a problem.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jayce
Jayce found AdeelJiroji in the cemetery behind the church.He was using a Peacemaker for target practice and plinking tin cans off the fence.The only person in Burning Scrub who owned a real Peacemaker that used real bullets was Mavis, meaning she must have loaned it to him.
Jayce didn’t know why she would loan Adeel a weapon, since she was aware he was going to ask him for Malika’s hand.Seeing how good his aim was didn’t raise Jayce’s confidence that this conversation would be well received.
No sense in wasting time.
“I want to marry Malika,” he said.
“Why would you want to do that?”Adeel asked.
Another can jerked, then flipped off the rail.
Jayce had thought the statement was self-explanatory.He felt like a complete idiot for having to express his feelings for her out loud, to her brother.
“Because I love her,” he said.
“Yes, yes.She’s beautiful, she’s exciting, she’s all the things American men love in a woman.”Adeel dismissed Jayce’s affections with impatience.“But can you afford her?”
“I believe so.Yes.She’s surprisingly low maintenance,” Jayce said.
It helped that she thought he was poor, but his was a level of poverty she believed she could endure because of her hardy ancestry.
“I mean,” Adeel said patiently, “can you afford to pay mahr for her?”He checked the gun’s chamber and reached in his pocket, withdrawing more bullets.
“You’re going to have to help me out, here,” Jayce said.“I have no idea how much a mahr is worth.”He was used to buying horses, not women.
He didn’t dare say it.
Adeel looked thoughtful.
