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The minutes passed and Chris began to grow anxious. What was taking him so long? Maybe John’s sister wasn’t there. Maybe—
Her thoughts stopped as she heard gunshots from the end of town where Tynan had gone. She stood.
“There’s no need for you to get upset,” said the freightman from behind his big desk. “Somebody’s always shootin’ at somebody in this town. You just sit there and rest.”
But Chris couldn’t rest as she leaned toward the window to see farther out.
Her breath stopped as she saw what she feared: Tynan was riding hell bent for leather down the street, two men on horseback chasing him, their guns blazing. With wide eyes, she watched him approach, then turned to the freightman. “May I borrow this?” she asked, taking a rifle from a cabinet on the wall.
Before the man could grasp what she was doing, Chris walked out the door, fell to one knee on the porch, propped her left arm on her raised knee and took aim. She dropped the first man behind Tynan with a shot in his shoulder, and was aiming for the second when Ty turned his horse and rode straight for her. There was a ramp in front of the freight office for rolling barrels and now Ty rode his horse straight up it.
Chris stood, stepped back a bit and when Ty bent and stretched his arm out to her, she caught it, put her foot on his in the stirrup and hauled herself up into the saddle behind him. Ty didn’t slow his pace as he went thundering through the freight office, past open mouthed workers, and out the back, down the ramp.
It took longer for the men following to go around the freight office, and Chris heard the scream of the horse as the one man who tried to follow them misjudged the distance and went flying off the side of the freight dock.
Chris hung onto Tynan with all her might, her hair coming unpinned and flying out behind her, her body plastered to his. He leaned forward on his horse and she went with him. There were bullets coming at them but they were traveling too fast to be in range—and the men were shooting from the back of horses so their aim wasn’t that good—or at least Chris hoped it wasn’t.
When they reached the edge of the rain forest, Tynan didn’t slow down, but kept on at a breakneck speed for a few hundred yards. Suddenly, he halted the horse, turned, grabbed Chris and lowered her to the ground. He dismounted behind her.
“Now we disappear,” he said, taking the horse’s reins and Chris’s hand. He motioned for her to climb down into a tangle of vines. She clambered down so fast, she skidded half the way. “Persuading” the horse was another matter and Ty did it with a series of quiet-voiced threats that made Chris’s eyes widen. No sooner had he gotten the animal into the ravine and pulled vines over their heads to cover them than three men came down the trail after them.
Ty held his hand on the horse’s nose to keep it from making a sound while Chris stood close to him, both of them looking up through the vines at the men.
“We’ve lost them,” one of the men said.
“Yeah and we lost four of our men on the way in. Lanier’s not gonna like this.”
“Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps. If they went in here, they won’t come out alive. Ain’t nothin’ but ghosts in this place.”
The first man snorted. “Lanier pays you to shoot ghosts. Come on, let’s go back to the freight office. Maybe the girl left somethin’ there.”
Chris held her breath as the men left and only released it when she could hear them no more. With a sigh, she leaned against the bank and looked at Ty. “How did they know you?”
“Somebody saw us leaving Lanier’s house and she recognized me.”
“She?”
“I think she’s a maid of Lanier’s. Anyway, she told Lanier I was the one who took you, so when he found your letter, he was looking for me too. But I did get the story to the doc’s wife.”
Chris grinned. Now that they were safe, she was beginning to feel euphoric. “I wonder if those freight men have closed their mouths yet? I couldn’t believe it when I realized you were bringing that horse straight on through the building.”
Ty’s eyes twinkled. “I could have taken a paddle to you when you walked out there and started shooting. You should have stayed inside, then when I was out of town, with everybody following me, you could have ridden away, safe and sound. Where’d you learn to shoot like that, anyway?”
“My father. That poor freight man. One minute I’m so ill I can barely sit up and the next—”
“And the next you’re leaping onto a horse behind me. Chris, you were great!” He laughed, taking her shoulders and giving her a hard kiss of joy on her mouth.
Blinking, wide-eyed, Chris looked up at him. When he’d kissed her, a spark of pure, undiluted fire had run through her. “Oh,” she whispered and moved toward him.
He released her shoulders as if they burned him, then turned his back on her. “I got to get this horse out of here and we’d better get back before Prescott misses us,” he mumbled.
Chris felt a little lost, not sure what she’d done wrong. He’d seemed so pleased with her, so happy a moment ago, and he’d kissed her. Not a kiss of passion, but one of friendship, between two people who’d shared a great deal, but when she’d shown interest in him, he’d moved away.
Glancing down at her body, she wondered if maybe she wasn’t appealing to him. All her life she’d been told she was pretty, but her curves were subtle, not exaggerated as was the fashion.
“The maid at Mr. Lanier’s who recognized you, was her name Elsie?”
“Yeah,” he said under his breath, his back still to her. “You leave first and I’ll come later.”
