The Barefoot Bride by Johnston Joan

Author:Johnston, Joan [Johnston, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2009-01-21T06:00:00+00:00

“That damned Masked Marauder has been at it again!”

Drake Bassett kicked at one of several broken whiskey kegs that littered the ground. Pike Hardesty had brought him up to the butte overlooking town to see for himself the damage that had been done. Drake was used to opposition; he had learned how to crush it. But this Masked Marauder was turning out to be as hard to pin down as campfire smoke.

The man Bassett had hired to sell whiskey to the Blackf eet lay on the grass groaning. He hadn't been shot—just forced to drink a great deal of the alcohol-turpentine-tar mixture he'd been selling. The poor sot might have been better off dead, Bassett thought. The whiskey concoction had blinded him.

“Get him into town and see if Doc Ken-drick can do anything for him,” Bassett told his henchman.

Pike leaned against a scrub juniper, cleaning his teeth with a broken twig. “Sure, boss. Whatever you say.”

“I want you to find a way to stop this Marauder,” Bassett said. “He's costing me a fortune, dumping whiskey faster than I can make it. I'm paying you for protection, Pike. If you can't do the job, I'll get someone who can.”

Pike scratched the stubble under his chin with the twig he'd been using on his teeth. “Just can't figure out who this Marauder fella could be,” he said. “Isn't a man in town I can name with the balls to do a thing like this.”

“It's damned certain somebody was here. I want him caught.”

“That Masked Marauder don't hang around long enough to get caught,” Pike protested.

“That's your problem,” Bassett said. “Clean up this mess. And I don't want to see that ugly face of yours again until you've come up with a way to get rid of that damned Masked Marauder!”

The instant Patch saw her father drive up in the buggy, she sought out Whit. He was just pulling his suspenders up over his shoulders after leaving the outhouse when Patch intercepted him. “Come on. It's time.”

In the bright light of day, Whit had begun having doubts. He dragged his feet as she hauled him toward the buckboard. “I'm not so sure—”

“Look, when I talked to you last night, you said you wanted to run away. Now do you, or don't you?”

Whit's brow furrowed. “I do. But I've been thinking. Maybe I need to plan some more. What if I get hungry on the trip?”

“I'll pack you a tin full of sandwiches and some dried apples. That ought to hold you till the steamboat's a fair distance from Fort Benton. Then you can let the captain know you're on board and work your way to St. Louis.”

Whit thought of the severe punishment for a stowaway on board a sailing ship and wondered if the same treatment applied on the river.

“Do you want to stay here in Montana for the rest of your life?” Patch asked.

“No.”

“Then what are we waiting for? I thought you wanted to be a sailor—and get back to the sea,” she taunted.

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