This Loving Land - Dorothy Garlock [94]
There was silence. Jack never moved nor showed the least expression. Ellen took a deep breath and clung tighter to the porch post. Jesse, listening in the house, felt his muscles tighten.
Travis continued. “Got nothing to say, Jack? Don’t you want to know how come the Keep belongs to me? No? Well, I’ll tell you anyhow.” His eyes swept from Tom to Jack to his mother. He was enjoying this. He felt stimulated, his pulses raced as they did when he was subduing a fighting woman. He let a minute go by, while the tension mounted. Then he laughed.
“What’s bad news for you is good news for me, Jack. A day or two ago we come onto old Slater’s body up in the hills. He’d been done in by the Apaches. Looked like he’d been dead for a day or two. The buzzards had already picked his eyes out.” He paused and looked at his mother’s shocked face. “You know what that means, don’t you, Mama? McLean land goes to blood McLeans. The Keep belongs to me. Slater’s got no other blood kin. Ain’t that right, Mama?”
Ellen’s face turned deathly white, her breath almost left her. She clung frantically to the porch post as her suddenly limp legs refused to hold her. Oh, my God! she thought. Oh, Travis, my darling boy, you didn’t finish the job. We’ve let him live, again! Her head buzzed and her eyes refused to focus. She wasn’t sure if she had uttered the words aloud.
“Jesse!” she screamed. “Jesse!” She looked frantically around. Jesse would know what to do, he would make things right. Jesse always took care of things.
Jesse came out the door the instant Ellen called him. She ran to him and clutched at him, her face a mask of anguish.
“Jesse! Do something!” she sobbed.
The hate he felt for Travis boiled up in his throat like bile. He was rotten to the core, he had known it for years, and now, at last, he had tripped himself up. He put Ellen from him, moved over a pace, and faced Travis.
“What the hell are you up to?” The cold voice whipped Travis like a lash.
The question that was posed in that confident, hated voice, was the key that opened the coffer of feelings that had been building inside Travis for years. The rage, humiliation and resentment for all the times he had come out second best to this man foamed up inside him. This was the moment to end it. It had to be now. He couldn’t live another day, breathe the same air, walk on the same earth as this arrogant bastard. His nostrils flared and his heart pounded. Hell, he could beat him at a draw. Hadn’t Bushy Red said he was pretty good? What was Jesse, anyway, but a stray pup his mother had picked up.
Ellen read the expression on her son’s face and called out frantically.
“Travis! No! You behave, now!”
“Shut up, Mama!”
“Move out of the way, Ellen,” Jesse said calmly.
“No, Travis! You mind me!”
“I said to shut up, Mama!”
“Jesse will fix it . . . please, Travis!”
Travis took a step forward, his eyes glued on Jesse. “You bastard! You goddamn bastard!” The words were a strangled snarl.
His head suddenly thrust forward and his right hand dropped. At that instant, Ellen sprang in front of Jesse. Jesse’s own gun was up, but Ellen was in the line of fire. He saw her body jerk as the bullet hit her, spinning her around. A second shot was fired a split second after the first. Jesse didn’t see Travis’s body fall or Tom Treloar’s smoking gun swing to cover the other men. He caught Ellen’s falling body.
He stood numbly, holding Ellen in his arms. Travis lay sprawled on his back where Tom’s bullet had slammed him. The blond hair was gone from the top of his head, blood and brains drained out onto the ground.
Summer and Sadie had run out onto the porch. They stood there in horrified silence.
Ellen lifted her head from Jesse’s shoulder and looked down at the front of her dress.
“Am I hurt, Jesse? I don’t feel anything.”
For an instant, he rested his cheek against her forehead, then looked anxiously into her face. Her eyelids drooped.
“Ellen?” he whispered