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Mayhem!
The stagecoach driver wasted no time making a wide, shaky turn with the stagecoach.
When Nicole realized that she wasn’t going to be taken to Tyler City after all, she stuck her head out the window and shouted at the driver.
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“Stop!” she cried. “Please turn back. You must go on to Tyler City! You can’t leave those who are alive there stranded. You must go and help them. My…parents…are there. Please?”
“Not on your life, lady,” the driver shouted back at her. The stagecoach was now headed away from the burning inferno behind them. “Get your head back inside! Shut your mouth! I’m not ready to lose my scalp. Don’t you know it’s Injuns that are responsible for what’s happened there.”
Realizing that nothing she said would convince the driver to go to Tyler City, she knew that all that she could do now was try to convince him to stop and lend her a horse so that she could ride there, herself.
While she had lived with her aunt Dot and uncle Zeb in St. Louis, her uncle had taught her how to ride, and she was now as good as any cowpoke who might challenge her to a race.
“If you won’t take me to Tyler City, please at least lend me a horse so that I can go there myself,” Nicole shouted.
Her hair blew around her face and whipped against her cheeks.
She brushed it aside as she waited for either the driver or the guard to answer her.
The man who had warned of the devastation up ahead had already raced off to safety.
“Please, oh, please, at least do that for me,” Nicole cried when the men still didn’t respond to her. “My mother and father are in Tyler City. In fact, it’s my father’s town, established by him, and named after our family.”
That drew the driver’s attention.
He gave her a strange, pitying look, then drew the horses to a shuddering halt.
Nicole saw this as a positive sign. She grabbed her reticule and hurried out the coach just as the driver jumped down to stand beside her.
“It’s your scalp, lady,” he said, nervously shuffling his feet. “Guess I can spare one horse if’n you can cough up enough money to pay for it.”
Her heart pounding, Nicole opened the reticule and grabbed a handful of coins. “That’s all I have with me,” she said, searching the man’s dark eyes as she held the coins toward him in the palm of her hand. “Please say it’s enough. I truly must go and see how my parents are.”
He stared for a moment longer into her eyes, looked at the coins, then shrugged and took the money.
As he shoved the coins into his front right breeches pocket, he hurried to the team of horses.
“I think you’re mighty foolish,” he said, as he finally separated a brown mare from the others. “It’s no skin off’n my back whatever you do, for the horses don’t belong to me, but the stagecoach company. I’ll just tell ’em this mare was stole by a bunch of Injun renegades.”
He placed a bridle and reins on the horse and led it to Nicole. “I think you should think again about what you’re going to do,” he said, before handing the reins over to her. “It sounds like bad trouble in that town.”
“I know,” Nicole murmured. She swallowed hard and glanced at her bag of belongings lashed to the top of the stagecoach. In it were her teaching certificate as well as other things precious to her.
She started to mount the horse, bareback, but stopped when the man who rode with the stagecoach as its guard pitched Nicole a rifle and a small leather bag of ammunition.
“I wouldn’t sleep nights if’n I hadn’t given you something to protect yourself with,” he said thickly. “I just wish you’d reconsider.”
The driver came with a saddle that he carried with him on his trips, secured it to the horse, and then got Nicole’s travel bag and attached it at the side of the saddle.
“You are too kind,” Nicole said as she opened her bag and wedged the rifle into it, with only the butt sticking up in the air.
She hurriedly mounted the mare, gave the men a quivering smile, then rode off in the direction of the black, rolling smoke.
She was afraid that she might already be too late to help her parents.
Her jaw tightened when she thought of something else.
