Free Foxfire Bride by Maggie Osborne Page B

scrape off her load."
    The mule succeeded. The top pack busted loose and dropped, but that wasn't the worst of it. When the mule pushed to her feet and trotted farther down the valley, gold coins bounced out of the pannier.
    Not trusting his eyes, Tanner grabbed the spyglass from his saddlebags. Son of a bitch. The pannier and one of the bank bags had been pierced by the Indian boy's arrow. He knew about that. The hole had seemed harmless enough for the last couple of days, but it hadn't withstood the mule's rolling. The spyglass revealed that the hole was now a tear and leaking gold coins with every step the mule took.
    "All right," Fox said after a minute. By now Tanner knew that she slapped her thigh with her hat when she was angry and frustrated. Sun blazed on her hair. "You and your men go after the money mule," she said to Tanner. "Me and Peaches will chase down the other five. If you finish first, come and give us a hand. Are you happy with that plan?"
    At the moment he wasn't happy about anything. The damned mule was scattering twenty-dollar gold pieces over a wide area. "Let's get the mule first," he ordered Hanratty and Brown, "then we'll pick up the coins."
    It took them forty-five minutes to corner and capture the money mule, and would have been impossible, in Tanner's opinion, if there hadn't been three of them doing it. At the end of the chase he was hot, sweating, and had decided that he'd never hated an animal as much as he hated that mule.
    "I'd shoot the damned thing," Hanratty said, wiping his forehead with his bandanna, "except she'd figure out a way to get my gun before I could pull the fricking trigger."
    Brown nodded. "My daddy had a mule. She was smarter than all the horses put together."
    Tanner could believe it. Sliding to the ground, he approached the mule and took a close look at the pannier. The frame was busted. The tear in the canvas side panel had lengthened to eight inches. There were gold coins scattered over several acres.
    He was thinking about shooting the mule himself when Fox rode up and swung off her mustang. "I'll stake her right here," she said, passing him with a hammer and a metal spike. "Peaches will collect her once he gets the others settled down."
    "You and Peaches caught the other five?" Tanner asked, struggling to keep his voice level. After he spotted the mules about a half mile away, he turned back to Fox. It would never have occurred to him to carry a hammer and metal spikes in his saddlebags.
    "Peaches is chasing down the last of them. The others are staked with enough rope to allow grazing."
    For the first time it registered on Tanner that she was wearing glasses with blue lenses to protect her eyes from the sunlight. As hard as he tried he couldn't recall if she'd worn the glasses yesterday. What he wanted to know more than that was how she and Peaches had caught five mules while he, Hanratty, and Brown were making fools of themselves chasing one. He decided he didn't want to know badly enough to ask.
    She took off the glasses and scanned the valley searching for sunlight bouncing off gold. It wasn't hard to spot. "There's no easy way to do this," she said finally. "I'll get some pots and then we'll all go treasure hunting." She gave Tanner a shrug. "Meanwhile, you might want to stitch up that tear."
    "I suppose you've got a needle and thread in there, too," he said, watching her stow the hammer in her saddlebags.
    She produced a heavy needle and thin cord, gave them to him, then rode off to fetch containers for the coins. He narrowed his eyes and watched her fiery braid swinging across the back of her poncho.
    "Nothing I hate more than an uppity woman," Hanratty said. To underscore the point he spit on the ground then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
    Brown took a swig from his canteen. "What you hate is getting bested by a woman. I didn't see you catching five mules."
    "I'm getting tired of your mouth," Hanratty snarled, swinging off his horse. He started