He figured Cyrus wouldn’t actually shoot him any more than Colt would draw his knife from the sheath slung across his back and slice his cousin’s tongue in half.
Still, the threat deserved a response, so he reached over his shoulder and fingered the hilt of the long Arkansas Toothpick.
The last hot breath of summer settled upon the ranch. Dust covered everything from the rotting boards of the front porch to a saddle dangling over the corral fence. Even the flies spinning about manure piles seemed coated with it.
In the twelve years since he’d walked away from his boyhood home, nothing had changed. Colt glanced about the run-down buildings that made up the Broken Brand. Today, just as they had throughout his childhood, derelict-looking relatives lounged on the bunkhouse porch rolling and smoking cigarettes. They yawned, stretched and ignored the chores that would make the ranch a fit place to live.
“Pappy Travers ain’t even moldering yet and you’re lighting out again.” Cyrus took a long step forward and glared up into Colt’s face. “T’ain’t right for you to cast aside family obligation.”
He hadn’t cast aside family obligation. If he had, he’d have brought the law with him to oust out this gang of thieves. Seeing his pappy properly buried was the only thing that had brought him home...that and the old ladies.
“You take the job of head outlaw,” Colt told his cousin, returning the glare. “I don’t want it.”
Great-aunt Tillie was sitting in the buckboard only a few feet from where the two cousins faced off. “Colt never was the outlaw you are,” she called now. “It’s you your Uncle Travers would pick to lead the family.”
“Poor little Colt was such a good boy, not a bit like his daddy,” his grandmother’s voice twittered, birdlike, from her perch beside Aunt Tillie on the wagon bench.
“All due respect, Old Aunties,” Cyrus said to them. “Colt Wesson’s got a blood obligation to lead us in crime. It’s been so since Grandpappy Travers’s day.”
Colt Wesson had cut his baby teeth on the bitter taste of blood obligation. He’d have accepted that obligation if it hadn’t involved robbing innocent folks of what they had worked hard to earn.
“My only obligation is to take Aunt Tillie and my grandmother away from here.”
Hot wind blew a hank of hair into his eyes. He turned, then lifted his foot to step onto the buckboard.
A hand grabbed his collar, dragging him backward. From the corner of his vision he saw uncles and cousins leap off the porch and run toward the brewing fight.
Colt reached behind him, grabbed Cyrus’s collar then bent over at the waist. His cousin flipped, landing in the dirt with a grunt.
Quicker than Colt could step away, Cyrus tripped him with a boot hook to the back of the knee.
He and his cousin rolled about in the dirt, toward the barn then the house. They exchanged a mouthful of cusswords before they each felt the crack of a cane on their backsides.
Aunt Tillie, having climbed down from her seat on the wagon, stood over them, poking the stick that she had never really needed for walking, in Cyrus’s belly, then Colt’s.
The two men broke apart, sitting on their rumps in the dirt like shamefaced children. Great-aunt Tillie had always been the peacemaker between brothers and cousins. Although she was now elderly, and they were grown men, it didn’t make a difference.
“Cyrus,” she said with a frown, “you will apologize to your cousin.”
“Shouldn’t have jumped you from behind,” he mumbled. “Still doesn’t change the fact that you ought to snatch a bride and bring her home, just the way it’s always been done. Time you took your rightful place and made your pappy proud for once.”
The last thing he intended to do was make the man who had named him after firearms proud.
Colt stood up warily. Cyrus did the same. They might have gone at each other again had Aunt Tillie’s cane not been swinging.
“Colt,” Great-aunt Tillie said, “you will apologize to your cousin for throwing him on the ground.”
“I’m sorry for that, Cyrus.” He wasn’t, not a bit. His cousin would have been insulted had he reacted peacefully. But since Aunt Tillie set great store by a handshake, he stuck out his fist. “Just so you know, if the day comes that I do take a wife, I won’t need to kidnap her...and I won’t bring her here.”
“Colty, dear,” his grandmother said with a chuckle and a smile, “a lady does want a bit of romance. I was all aflutter when Grandpappy Travers tossed me across his saddle.”
The real story was that she nearly shot him through the heart. But Colt wouldn’t point that out to Grannie Rose, since she was fairly glowing with the inaccurate memory.
To his knowledge, the only woman to come willingly to the Broken Brand had been Great-aunt Tillie. She’d charged the ranch in the dead of night with a six-shooter blazing, intending to bring her sister home. The trouble was, by then Rose had fallen in love with Grandpappy.
Great-aunt Tillie had stayed on ever since, watching over Rose and teaching each new generation of children to read. For an ignorant outlaw gang, the Traverses were well-read.
“Come on.” He took his trim, straight-backed great-aunt by the elbow. “It’s time to go.”
“It was time fifty-six years ago,” she stated with a glare at the assembled Traverses. “Whichever one of you that takes over better make sure the children don’t run wild. Make them learn their letters.”
Colt lifted Aunt Tillie onto the buckboard seat even though she could have climbed up on her own. Seventy-six years looked easy on her.
He climbed up after her, picked up the reins then clicked to the horses.
He drove a slow circle about the yard while Aunt Tillie scowled at one and all and Grannie Rose blew kisses.
Colt hoped he was doing the right thing by taking the women from the only home they had known for most of their lives, but, damn it...the place was barely fit for pigs.
“You’ll rue the day, Colt Wesson!” he heard Cyrus call out behind him. “A man can’t set aside his kin!”
* * *
Holly Jane Munroe sat at a lace-covered table and stared out the window of her shop, The Sweet Treat. Balancing a knife in her fingers, she whirled a curlicue on the top of the cake she was frosting without even having to look at it.
She sighed and wished that Billy Folsom wasn’t standing in front of the bank, staring back at her. He twirled his hat in his fingers, brushed a strand of curly hair from his forehead then tugged the tips of his heavy black mustache.
With an inhalation big enough to be noticeable from across the road, he stepped off the boardwalk. The poor fellow looked nervous; clearly buying a sweet treat was not the first thought on his mind.
There was nothing to be done about it, then, but to hurry behind the counter, setting row upon row of cookies, chocolates and pies between them.
And smile—she owed her swain that much, since he likely didn’t want to be ringing the tinkling bell over her front door any more than she wanted him to be.
“Good afternoon, Billy.” She hoped the smile would conceal her feeling that the sooner he was gone the better.
Billy was handsome...he was young. At twenty-one years old he was only two years her junior. The Folsoms had sent far worse her way over the past few months.
“Miss Holly Jane,” he stated with a nod of his head. He wiped his damp brow with his sleeve. “I’ve come to... Well, that is, I’m here to—”
Billy crushed his hat in both of his fists. He inhaled a huge lungful of air.
“Will