McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [71]
Sorrowful belly-crawled his way out from under the wagon, looked around carefully. Tillie laughed, and the sound was beautiful to Lorelei, even with all their lives in danger.
John leaned over the edge of the ravine. “Are you women through shootin’?” he asked, glowering.
“Yes, sir,” Melina called back, shading her eyes with one hand. She’d lost her hat somewhere along the way, and her dark hair was coming down from its pins, tumbling around her shoulders.
“Well, good,” John said. “Let’s hope the Comanches didn’t hear it!”
“Oh, my Lord,” Lorelei whispered.
“Holt’s gonna be good and mad,” Tillie confided, grinning.
Lorelei found a flat rock and sat down. She’d rather deal with an angry Holt McKettrick than a Comanche raiding party, but not by much.
THEY FOUND the rancher first, lying on his back next to the horse trough, with an arrow jutting from his chest. He’d been scalped, and the flies were already gathering.
“Christ,” Rafe said.
Holt got down off Traveler and crouched to lay the backs of his fingers to the man’s throat, though he knew he wouldn’t find a pulse. The pit of his stomach quivered, and he swallowed the bile that rushed into the back of his throat. Riding with the Rangers, he’d seen a hundred of these raids if he’d seen one. But it wasn’t the sort of thing a man ever got used to.
Kahill, the Captain and one of the other men approached the blazing house, and Kahill peered through the open doorway, his bandana pressed to his face. They all reeled away, coughing from the smoke.
“There’s a woman in there, and two little girls,” Kahill said, then retched in the dirt. The Captain looked haunted.
Holt rushed for the door and was met with a wall of heat. Before the flames forced him back, he saw the bodies. The woman still gripped a pistol in one charred hand; he knew she’d shot the children and then herself. Given what Holt knew about Comanches, he didn’t blame her.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said, as Rafe met him in the middle of the yard and handed him a canteen.
Kahill staggered to the trough and splashed his face with water. Then he looked at the dead rancher and took to retching again.
“What do we do now?” Rafe asked quietly, watching Holt drink. “Go after them?”
“Not with three women and a wagon slowing us down,” Holt said, wiping his mouth. “And we sure as hell can’t leave them in that ravine.”
Rafe scanned the small homestead. If there’d been horses or a milk cow, the Comanches had helped themselves to them. The shed was still standing, though.
“Better have a look in there,” Holt said.
“Might be a shovel,” Rafe agreed, frowning. “We have to bury these folks.”
Holt wanted to say there wasn’t time, because there wasn’t, but he knew they couldn’t leave the bodies. He turned to Kahill, who was gray around the mouth.
“Take a couple of men and go back for the others,” he said. “We’ll spend the night here.”
Kahill nodded and mounted up. Rafe pushed open the creaky shed door as the three men rode out at a gallop. He and Holt both peered inside. Holt blinked, unable to see anything at first.
Moment by moment, he made out a barrel, then a stack of wood and tools hanging on the far wall. There was a wheelbarrow, too, and a flash of movement inside it.
“What the hell?” Rafe whispered.
Holt stepped over the high threshold, walked over to the wheelbarrow and looked inside.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, and broke into a grin.
CHAPTER 24
THE BABY WAS NAKED, except for a diaper fashioned from a piece of scrap calico. It gurgled, kicking both feet and clutching at the air with plump little fists, and its head bristled with a thatch of fine, wheat-colored hair, curly and moist with sweat.
“It’s a kid,” Rafe said, sounding confounded.
“I gathered that much,” Holt replied. “You pick it up. You’ve been around babies.”
Rafe hesitated, just the same. Then he rubbed his big hands together, as though the task required friction,