Lonely Rancher Knocked And Said “I Was Told You Need A Rancher The Widow Saw His Daughter Behind His

Chapter 10

The attack, when it came, was swift and brutal, and it did not come at the barn.

Gideon was in the corral when he heard Cami scream, and he was already running, rifle in hand, heart in his throat, before the sound had finished dying. He burst into the house and stopped dead.

Deke Rawlins stood in the middle of the kitchen, one arm locked around Cami’s waist, a knife against her throat. Two men held Eleanor between them, her wrists bound behind her, her eyes wild with fury and terror over the gag they had shoved between her teeth.

“Evening, Whitaker.” Rawlins was almost pleasant. “Had a feeling you’d come running.”

Gideon let the rifle stay pointed at the floor. His voice was steady, which cost him more than any shot he had ever fired. “Let her go. Your fight is with me.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. See, you all know too much now. You and the old man’s widow, poking around in business you’ve got no call in.” The blade caught the lamplight, and Cami made a small, strangled sound. “So here’s what happens. You’re going to hand over that notebook and any other evidence you’ve been collecting, and then we’re all going to take a ride together. The three of you, the canyon, a very sad story about predators and a long fall. It’s been done before.”

Gideon’s mind was running through angles and odds, and none of them came out good. Then, over the pounding of his own heart, he heard it: the sound of horses again, coming fast, moving hard. Rawlins heard it too, and the pleasantness curdled.

“Sounds like we’re out of time,” Rawlins said. “The notebook. Now. Or I start cutting.”

“It’s in the house. Kitchen cupboard, behind the dishes.”

“Get it,” Rawlins ordered one of his men. The man returned at a run with the leather-bound notebook, and Rawlins flipped it open, glanced at the pages, and smiled. “There it is. Now we—”

The back door of the house exploded inward. Marshal Corbin came through first, gun drawn, and behind him Ephraim Fuller and a dozen armed neighbors, and the room filled with the thunder of order being shouted and men being seized. Rawlins’s men, overwhelmed, threw their weapons down; but Rawlins was not the surrendering kind.

In the confusion, Gideon moved. He moved the way he had moved a hundred times in his lawman years, and his fist connected with Rawlins’s knife hand, and the blade went spinning away as Cami twisted free and flung herself, sobbing, into Eleanor’s arms. Rawlins went for his gun, and Gideon was faster — they went to the floor together, grappling, crashing against the wall. Rawlins was bigger, heavier, but Gideon fought with the fury of a man who had lost one family already and would not lose another, and they rolled across the floorboards, each trying to find an angle, a purchase, an end.

A shot rang out.

The room went still. Rawlins jerked, a look of stupid surprise crossing his face. He looked down at the spreading stain on his shirtfront, then up at Gideon, who stood over him holding the smoking revolver he had drawn from Rawlins’s own holster in the wrestle.

“You shot me,” Rawlins gasped.

“You threatened my daughter.”

Rawlins’s mouth worked, but nothing more came out. He fell to his knees, then forward, and was dead before he hit the floor.

The barn-turned-room erupted. Marshal Corbin moved in, loud and clear: “Self-defense! Everyone saw it — the man was holding a knife to a child’s throat. Self-defense, and hold your fire!”

One of Rawlins’s men, seeking any mercy he could buy, began talking before the marshal had even holstered his pistol. It was all Beaumont — the burnings, the threats, the fences, the killing of Oscar Reyes. Beaumont had ordered it all, and he could prove it, names and orders and payments, if they would just keep him breathing long enough to tell it.

“Will you testify to that?” Corbin asked.

The man nodded frantically. “Just keep me alive, Marshal.”

Gideon knelt beside Eleanor and Cami, gathering them both against him, and they were shaking, all three of them, but they were together. “It’s over,” he said into their hair. “It’s over. You’re safe now.”

“Is he dead?” Cami whispered, not looking at the body.

“Yes, sunshine. He can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“Good,” she said fiercely, and then the fierceness broke, and she burst into hard, heaving tears against his chest, and Eleanor held them both as the marshals’ men cleared the room and the neighbors stood guard over the prisoners.

Later, Corbin found Gideon at the door, the recovered notebook in his hand. “What Martinez died for, this will put Beaumont away for good. With the witness, it’s more than enough — federal marshals will be very interested.” He paused. “You did good tonight, Whitaker. Your lawman instinct saved lives.”

“I’m no lawman, Marshal. Just a rancher who protects his family.”

Corbin almost smiled. “If you say so. But if you ever want that badge back—”

“Thanks. But no.” Gideon looked across the yard, where Eleanor stood with Cami wrapped in a blanket, and the new barn rose against the paling sky. “I’ve found where I belong.”

And when the sun came up over the ranch, painting the world in the colors of relief, the three of them stood together and watched the empire of a man who had thought himself untouchable begin to crumble. “What happens now?” Eleanor asked.

“Now we live.” Gideon pulled them closer. “We raise cattle and children. We build something good on this land.”

“Together?” Cami asked, small and hopeful.

“Together,” he said, meeting Eleanor’s eyes over the top of the child’s head — because that was what she was now, their child, just as surely as the three of them were a family.

The war was over. And for the first time in a long time, the healing could begin.