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“Even a smart man won’t suspect a woman of robbing a bank and killing two men,” muttered Cromwell.
At the end of the alley, Margaret turned the buggy up a side street and then headed west toward the town limits. Cromwell took off the wolfskin coat and draped it over his lap to cover the blood that soaked his sweater. He slipped the Colt into one of his cowboy boots and sat back, trying to keep his mind clear by ignoring the throbbing pain in his side.
BELL HAD instructed Sheriff Pardee that he would fire a shot as a signal if the bandit made his appearance. But Pardee knew there was trouble when he heard five shots, some of them muffled like the distant dynamite charge in a nearby mine. He rushed into the street from a hardware store where he had been hiding, fearful that the woman he’d seen walk into the bank might have been shot by the bandit.
Seeing him running toward the bank, four of his deputies leaped from their hiding places and rushed after him, while a fifth deputy ran to the railroad depot to alert Curtis. With his single-action Smith & Wesson drawn and the hammer pulled back, Pardee burst through the door of the bank. At first, he didn’t see anyone. Irvine was lying out of sight, behind the teller’s cage, and Bell was down on the other side of the desk. Then he came around the cage, saw the Van Dorn agent sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood. He checked to make sure Irvine was dead before he entered the office and found Bell.
“Is he a goner?” asked one of his deputies, a great bear of a man with a huge stomach bulging over pants with suspenders stretched to their limits, who stood poised with a sawed-off shotgun at the ready.
“The bullet only creased his skull,” answered Pardee. “He’s still alive.”
“What about the woman?”
Pardee’s mind did not register for a moment. Then it hit him. “The woman who came into the bank before the gunshots?”
“That one.”
“She must have been abducted by the bandit.”
“But we saw no one else enter the bank before or after her.”
Pardee stood up in confusion and disbelief. It took all his imagination to believe a woman was the Butcher Bandit.
“The bandit must have entered through the back door.”
“I don’t know, Sheriff,” said the deputy, scratching his chin. “The door should have been locked from the inside, like it always is.”
Pardee rushed over to the rear door and found it unlocked. He jerked it open and peered up and down the alley but saw no one. “Hell’s fire,” he muttered. “She got away.”
“She can’t get far,” said the deputy.
“Round up the men!” snapped Pardee. He motioned to another deputy, who was standing at the entran
ce of the bank. “Get Doc Madison. Tell him the Van Dorn agent is down with a head wound and to get over to the bank double-quick.” Pardee knelt down and quickly examined Bell again. “Also tell him there looks like there’s a bullet in the agent’s leg.”
The deputy was no sooner out the door than Pardee was on his heels, running toward his horse tied to the hitching post in front of his office. It didn’t seem possible, he thought, that everything had gone so terribly wrong. Only then did it begin to strike him that the bandit was a man disguised as a woman and that the poor widow he and his wife had taken in was an accomplice.
AS SOON as they left the city limits of Telluride and passed the road leading to the mines of Ophir to the south, Margaret gave the horse the whip and urged it to run through the canyon and down the road heading west toward Montrose. During the ten minutes since they left the bank, Cromwell had time to think. He pointed to a break in the trees that led to a bridge over the San Miguel River. It was an overgrown access road used by the railroad for maintenance crews repairing the track.
“Get off the road,” Jacob said to Margaret. “Go over the bridge and head down the track bed.”
She turned and looked at him. “I thought you said they’d never be suspicious of two women in a buggy?”
“That was before it occurred to me that the sheriff and his deputies were watching the bank.”
“That goes without saying, but what does it have to do with our escape?”
“Don’t you see, dear sister? I was the last one to enter the bank and never came out. If what you say is true, Pardee is no fool. He must have put two and two together by now and is looking for both of us. But he’ll never think to search for us riding over the track bed. He’ll be certain we took the road.”
“And if he doesn’t find us, what do you think he’ll do then?”
“He’ll backtrack, thinking that we hid out in the trees while he and his posse rode past. By then, we’ll be on a train out of Montrose, dressed as two men.”
As usual, Cromwell was miles ahead of his pursuers when it came to matching wits. Though he was disheartened that Bell had out-smarted him in laying a well-conceived trap, he gained a certain amount of satisfaction believing he had killed the famous Van Dorn agent.
Just as he had predicted, the sheriff and his posse charged down the road that was out of sight of the railroad tracks in the trees and, not finding any sign of their quarry, had doubled back toward Telluride. It was a bumpy ride over the railroad ties, but it was compensated for by knowing that Pardee had been hoodwinked and would end up empty-handed.
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