Stella Star of the Plains by Jade Behr & Blue Huxley

Author:Jade Behr & Blue Huxley [Behr, Jade & Huxley, Blue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Jade Books
Published: 2023-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

John Foxwell jerked from the impact and staggered back, looking down at his coat to see a deep red appear and spread across his shoulder.

Immediately he lunged for her and wrested the gun from her hand. Then he pulled her up and was shoving her toward the outer door when it opened, and a man entered the lean-to. He was ugly and rough-looking, with a big gut and a shaggy black beard.

“Bill!” came Wanda’s frantic cry, from the room above them.

“We gotta go,” Foxwell hissed, clutching his wound.

“Make one peep and I’ll break your jaw,” Blackbeard told her, taking a firm grip on her upper arm. She looked down and saw Tex lying on the floor.

Once outside in the frigid dark, Blackbeard said in a low voice, “The fire will buy us some time to get away.”

“Good thinking,” Foxwell said, sounding impressed. “Did you get the farmer?”

“While he was milking the cow,” he confirmed, with a chuckle.

Stella felt sick. As he pulled her after him, her eyes were on the barn. She could see light through the spaces around the door, and smoke was starting to seep out from under the roof. How long after the fire was eventually put out, and Bill discovered dead, would anyone think to look for her?

“Smart girl, staying quiet,” Blackbeard praised her as they reached the end of the drive. Two horses were tied to the fence. “Keep being smart and you might live a few more days.”

“Stop talking to her,” Foxwell advised tightly. “Let’s get this over with.”

Blackbeard mounted his horse, and with Foxwell’s one-armed help, pulled Stella up to sit behind him. He gathered her hands in front of him and tied her wrists together so that she was pressed against his back.

I’m going to freeze, she thought, shivering in her blouse.

“Wait,” Foxwell ordered. “Put a blanket around her, or something. She freezes to death, she can’t marry him, and we get nothing.”

The words were spoken bitterly, as though he were angry with her for having the nerve to shoot him, and wanted to let her know how little he valued her life.

But all Stella heard was marry him. The words echoed ominously in her head. Foxwell was not kidnapping her to marry her for her land. He was working for someone else.

A thin woolen blanket was put around her back and pulled up over her hair, and she clutched the ends of it in her bound hands and reflected darkly that now it would take slightly longer for her fingers to be frostbitten.

Blackbeard kicked his horse’s sides, and they were off. Stella squeezed her eyes shut and hoped she would see the farm again one day, but chances of that seemed pretty slim just then.

They rode hard for over an hour, and then Blackbeard reined in his horse and when John Foxwell, five or six yards ahead, turned in the saddle to see what the hold up was, Blackbeard shot at him.

Foxwell’s horse was shifting around impatiently, however, and the shot went wide.

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