Frontier Lady (Lone Star Legacy Book #1) Read online

  Lone Star Legacy

  Book One

  Frontier Lady

  Judith Pella

  Copyright © 1994 by Judith Pella

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-6297-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Cover illustration by Joe Nordstrom

  The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.

  To

  Michael Phillips,

  Friend, brother in Christ, and mentor.

  “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his

  friends.”

  John 15:13

  Thank you, Mike, for being so generous with your talents, your wisdom, and

  your encouragement.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1: Stoner’s Crossing

  Part 2: The Company of Outlaws

  Part 3: Broken Wing

  Part 4: Wind Rider

  Part 5: Squaw Lady

  Part 6: Surrender

  Part 7: New Beginnings

  About the Author

  Books by Judith Pella

  Back Cover

  Part 1

  Stoner’s Crossing

  1

  They were building a gallows in Stoner’s Crossing. The two men commissioned for the job perspired and grumbled as they set nail to wood under the searing Texas sun. The temperature was no less than a hundred degrees on that midsummer day. A brilliant yellow sun reflected against the stark blue of the sky.

  Wiping a grimy red handkerchief across his damp brow, the older of the two builders, a man with more gray in his tangled hair and beard than brown, stood back and surveyed the results of his labors.

  “Should be done on time,” he observed.

  “They better have that free whiskey for us when we’re done, that’s all I can say,” replied the younger fellow.

  They would earn two dollars each and a bottle of whiskey for their work—no less than a king’s ransom to the ne’er-do-well drifters. But they could have commanded any price for the nefarious task, since they were the only ones in the dusty, ramshackle excuse for a town who had the stomach for it.

  Having arrived in Stoner’s Crossing only a few days earlier, they had never known Leonard Stoner. To them he was but a victim, murdered in the prime of life. To them, his killer should pay for the crime by hanging. That was the law. They didn’t know the victim; they didn’t know his murderer, and they didn’t much care about either. Still, they were not completely heartless.

  The older man mopped his drenched brow again. “You know, Tom, I don’t feel altogether settled about taking that there money.”

  “Me neither, Wash.”

  “Wash,” otherwise known as Eli Washburn, slowly shook his head as he aimed his hammer at another nail. “I reckon someone was bound to take it, though, if it weren’t us.”

  “I suppose you’re right there.”

  “You ever hanged anyone, Tom?” Without waiting for an answer, the older man continued. “It ain’t a pretty sight. I seen tough frontiersmen carry on sorely aforehand. It ain’t easy sticking your neck through that noose.”

  Momentarily sobered by Washburn’s unpleasant statement, both men fell silent.

  The steady clank-thud of their hammering dominated the stifling air, without even a flutter of a breeze to dull the haunting sound. Oddly, the town was quiet just then, the two or three hundred residents, apparently occupied indoors, showing no interest in the solitary activity around the ominous wooden structure. Occasionally the sound of a snorting horse or a raised voice at one of the saloons penetrated the silence, but for the most part only the tattoo of the hammer and the grunts of the workmen broke the grim quiet.

  The sun arched higher in the sky, its movement almost visible, if anyone had the kind of mystical vision that could peer directly into that blazing light. But even a blind man could feel the sun’s inevitable climb toward its apex.

  High noon.

  That hour would not pass this day without note. The cloistered citizens of the town would surely not neglect to attend the upcoming event. Even if their hands must stay free of actual blood, their curiosity was another thing. It had to be appeased.

  Like the no-account vagrants they had hired to do their dirty work, the residents of Stoner’s Crossing wondered. Some had seen a hanging before. Some had even participated. Often, in that untamed wilderness, the affair involved nothing more than pitching a sturdy rope over a stout tree branch and then kicking the victim’s horse out from under him. The scions of law were often too far removed to await that nebulous thing easterners labeled “due process.” The rope and the gun were often the only law an honest man had available to him this far west of the Mississippi. One could not be fainthearted. Too many who had let a desperado walk away from a crime later ended up receiving a bullet in the back as thanks.

  Hangings were not uncommon, but trials were. In fact, the recent trial in Stoner’s Crossing was somewhat of an anomaly in this lawless land. But that’s how Caleb Stoner had wanted it—all nice and legal. And Caleb usually got his way. It was his town, after all.

  Shading his eyes with a calloused hand, Tom gazed up at the sky.

  “I figure that there sun’s as high as she’s going to get.”

  Washburn pounded the final nail into the structure.

  “Yeah. Told you we’d finish.”

  The two dirty drifters scrutinized their work once more. Fifteen feet high, the gallows had taken them nearly two days to build, and was a handsome piece of work. The steps were even, except for one near the top, where an ill-placed nail had split the wood, leaving it rough across the center. It shouldn’t pose a problem, though. Most folks climbing a gallows were moving slow enough. The framing was strong, too. Washburn gave it a couple of heavy-handed blows to be sure. It wouldn’t do to have the thing crashing down prematurely. He’d seen something like that happen once, only it had been a tree branch, and the criminal managed to escape in the confusion that followed.

  Tom hauled a sandbag up the steps. It weighed only about fifty pounds and wouldn’t be a true test of the structure’s soundness, though Washburn didn’t think it would have to take much more stress than that. They only needed to test the trapdoor. For this procedure the two men tied the bag to the rope Washburn had already fastened around the crossbar of the framing. Tugging at the rope, Washburn pulled the bag to the top.

  Washburn wondered why they were going through all this trouble. A tree and a horse would have served as well, even if it would have meant he’d be out two dollars and the bottle of spirits. He decided the sheriff must have figured these unusual circumstances warranted a more formal approach.

  “Let ‘er go!” Tom yelled.
r />   Washburn released the rope. In a flash, a mere twinkling, it was over. The bag fell smoothly, with a dusty thud, through the trap. Everything worked fine. You couldn’t have found a better gallows, even in New York City.

  Tom set down his hammer and strode over to the sheriff’s office to tell them everything was ready.

  But the older drifter didn’t look entirely satisfied with his work. He let his eyes roam over the structure as if looking for some flaw, almost hoping he’d find one, forcing a postponement of the imminent event. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t squeamish. He’d fought Indians and Mexicans and grizzly bears; spilled enough blood, both his own and that of others, to know it wasn’t that. But there was one thing he hadn’t done before and, old and seasoned as he was, he still couldn’t say if he had the stomach for it.

  Washburn squeezed the moisture from his handkerchief, and retying it around his sunburned neck, turned to his assistant who had just returned.

  “You know, Tom, I ain’t never—”

  But his words were cut off as all at once the stifling midday air began to stir with voices and movement.

  They were coming now, the sheriff and his deputy with their prisoner sandwiched between them.

  The prisoner was a woman.

  She was barely twenty years old—so young, yet years of strife clung to her as closely as the sultry air. She walked with a sure step, her shoulders hitched back, her chin, despite its delicate line, firm and proud.

  It was time for the hanging to begin.

  2

  Her frame was slight compared to the two men walking on either side of her, but somehow she gave the appearance of towering over them, as if she, not her captors, were in control. The two men gripped her arms, but obviously not because she needed their support. If her knees trembled at all on this her last journey in life, she gave no outward evidence of it. She appeared ready to meet her fate—indeed, almost eager to do so, in spite of the pallor of her skin that seemed but a continuation of her colorless gray muslin dress.

  The sheriff, now striding grimly at her side, had been amazed at her calm demeanor. She had spoken not a word all day, mostly sitting very straight and prim on the edge of the cot in her cell, with her slim hands folded in her lap. She ate her last meal with meticulous care, finishing every crumb. Sheriff Pollard had known men, hardened outlaws, who couldn’t even choke down a cup of coffee on their execution day. But the woman ate as if it meant something more than just appeasing her hunger. She ate as if she defied even her appetite to accuse her of weakness. Pollard would never have expected it of her, being the genteel eastern-bred woman that she was, although he supposed he’d had a few previous hints of what kind of woman might be inside that feminine frame. She had behaved the same way during the trial, too. Never once did she break down, never shedding a single tear, even with her family and neighbors accusing her like they did.

  And more than that, she never showed a shred of remorse for her deed.

  The jury had been unanimous in its decision. However, Pollard had to admit that finding twelve objective jurors was no easy task. Caleb Stoner owned the town and everything and everyone in it. But, in the sheriff’s opinion, the evidence was pretty incriminating all by itself, and that’s what he had testified to the court. She’d been found standing over her murdered husband’s body with Leonard’s Colt 44 in her hand. If her own father had been on the jury, he couldn’t have argued with that kind of evidence.

  When the judge, a circuit rider from Austin, asked her, “Did you kill your husband?” she had replied with a single quiet word: “No.”

  She hadn’t said much more than that through the whole of the trial, and she just didn’t sound convincing enough. Almost every criminal denied his guilt. No one ever listened much to denials unless they were accompanied with ample emphasis and insistence.

  Pollard did not take well to hanging women. But he figured a woman ought to be grateful to hang rather than spend time in some state prison—a living death for anyone, much less a lady like Mrs. Stoner.

  Still, Pollard remembered when she had come west two years ago. The way Pollard heard it, her father and brother had been killed early on in the war and she had been left alone. Because of some connection between the two families, Caleb got her to come west from Virginia in order to marry his eldest son, Leonard. She arrived in the spring of ’63, at a time when it was no easy matter to travel through the South. Pollard didn’t know what could have driven her to make such a trip in the middle of a war, but then again, it wasn’t any of the sheriff’s business. Anyway, regions more to the west, Texas especially, avoided most of the heavy fighting that ended up devastating the South. Stoner himself managed to avoid even what fighting there was. His younger boys were too young to be expected to join the Rebel army, and he was essentially too old. His eldest son, Leonard, he contrived to get into a Home Guard unit that had been formed to protect the state from the ever-present threat of Indian attack. Thus he had been able to maintain his place as a loyal Texan and a Confederate, while at the same time cushioning himself in the event the South lost their cause. Now that the war was over and Texas was being “reconstructed” by the North, Stoner’s fancy fence-straddling was serving him well.

  Of course, avoiding national political struggles didn’t spare him any personal troubles. The Stoners had enough “civil war” right in their own house. How much of it was on account of the girl, the sheriff didn’t exactly know, but it sure hadn’t begun with her arrival. Maybe she was just like the slavery issue in the war. The war didn’t start because of it, but it was the match that lit the fuse. That’s how he thought Mrs. Stoner was.

  Sheriff Pollard had been on hand that first day she had arrived on the stage from Austin. Caleb and his sons didn’t even come to meet her; they sent one of their hired hands. On first glance Pollard thought she looked rather fragile, surrounded as she was by her stark black mourning clothes. But her skin showed the high color of one acquainted with the out-of-doors. Beneath the bright prairie sun, the few strands of hair escaping the confines of her black bonnet looked like pure gold. Even then she had seemed in command of herself, despite the natural apprehensions of coming to a new place. She was a beautiful girl, but sitting as she was, so straight and solemn, she seemed beautiful like an ancient statue, not like a real flesh-and-blood woman. Maybe if she had smiled …

  But Pollard never did recall seeing Mrs. Stoner smile. It would have done wonders for those blue eyes of hers. They were like the kind of sparkling blue pools you didn’t often see in Texas—only most of the time hers looked as if they had been caught in an early frost. It was those eyes, however, that first indicated what was inside that solemn young woman. When Caleb’s man stopped the wagon to drop off the mail he had picked up in the capital, Pollard got a good look at her eyes and immediately forgot his initial assessment of her as a frail southern belle. One look, once you got past the sadness, gave the sheriff a hint that this lady, for all her beauty, all her femininity, was made of steel.

  He had never known her to be harsh or mean or even hard. To his knowledge, she was always as soft-spoken, as dainty, as gentle as any woman he’d ever known. Whatever could make a woman like that gun down her own husband, Pollard didn’t know, though enough had come out in the trial to convince the jury that she was unhappy in her marriage. But unhappy enough to kill to escape it?

  That’s what the jury thought.

  Pollard wasn’t sure. If only she hadn’t been found standing over the body like that.

  Still, Pollard had tried to make a case for self-defense, but no one would listen to him. Since Stoner had been unarmed and shot in the back … well, there were some things you just couldn’t fight. In the end, the decision wasn’t his, anyway. He was just the sheriff. His job was not to convict the guilty but to carry out what was decided by others. That’s what he had to do now, though he didn’t especially like it.

  They were halfway to the gallows. Glancing around, Pollard noted that the residents of Ston
er’s Crossing were beginning to show their faces. Word had spread quickly that it was time and, like rats crawling from holes, the people were coming. Alone, or by twos and threes, they crept toward the place of execution. The spectators were all men. What few women there were in town would not breach propriety by venturing out to watch, though some of them had raised damning enough voices against the accused during the trial.

  By the time the prisoner and her escorts reached the gallows’ steps, some fifty or sixty had gathered to witness the proceedings. The crowd was quiet and subdued; the festive air that often accompanied such an occasion was absent.

  Pollard paused and scanned the throng for one important face. Not finding it, he turned to his deputy on the prisoner’s left side.

  “Doc, you hear anything from Caleb?”

  “I did not. He should be here.” The man called “Doc” also perused the gathering, but to no avail. An annoyed grimace flickered across his face. Doc Barrows was not only the town’s sometime deputy, but also its physician, barber, dentist, undertaker, and preacher. He had a very busy schedule and wasn’t happy about a delay, even if it was caused by Caleb Stoner himself. Doc considered himself indispensable enough to be able to show some backbone toward Caleb, at least when the man was absent in body.

  Pollard shuffled his feet, indecisive. He figured Caleb would have been at this hanging, not only early, but with an eager relish. Maybe he was planning on making some grand entrance, although the sheriff saw no point in that now. It would be just like Caleb to use this as another means to further enforce his hold on the town. Squinting, Pollard glanced up toward the sun and muttered a curse under his breath. On top of everything else he didn’t fancy standing around in the heat. But then Caleb did like to see his people sweat, didn’t he?

  He heard the wagon, raising a cloud of dust as it approached. It was Caleb, all right, with his son Laban at his side.

  Mrs. Stoner turned to watch the wagon, too. Her impassive expression did not change except perhaps to grow somewhat harder around the edges. If you could read nothing else in that woman’s stony countenance, thought the sheriff, hatred, at least, was clearly present as she beheld her father-in-law.