Free Bachelor's Puzzle by Judith Pella Page B

this?” she asked quietly.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It is suddenly happening very fast. I n six months someone could be married to that minister. It could be you, sis.”
    Rather than turn pink as Maggie thought she would, Ellie turned white.
    “S-six months!” She shook her head. “He’s a minister, Mags. He wouldn’t move that fast?”
    But that final sentence was a question, a rather desperate question at that.

SEVEN
    The old nag was lame, limping along as if she was going to collapse at any moment. Zack was tempted to get off and walk the pitiful beast. He was far enough out of town so that he could be fairly certain Cutter hadn’t discovered his tracks—not yet, at least.
    But it was still hard not to feel the press of urgency upon him. For the last several days he’d been trapped like a rat in Portland, unable to leave because he had no money, no transportation, and because it seemed Beau Cutter was always just one step behind him. He’d been running and looking over his shoulder for days, and that feeling was hard to shake.
    Zack didn’t have a lot of qualms about stealing. I t wouldn’t be the first time, though he’d done so mostly for survival when he was younger. He didn’t want the law after him, as well as Beau, so he’d held off stealing a horse. Some still thought horse thieves ought to be hanged.
    At least he didn’t have to worry about the law where the shooting of Ron Sinclair was concerned. Cutter would have had too much explaining to do if he’d reported the shooting. Zack had learned two things about that melee in the alley. First, the passerby had been killed in the tussle, neck broken or something. Second, Sinclair was dead, too. The two bodies had been left in the alley, and the police drew the conclusion that the two had killed each other. There were many holes in that conclusion, such as the missing gun, but none seemed to implicate Zack. So the police were probably off his back. But Beau Cutter wasn’t going to rest until his friend’s killer was found.
    Zack finally got a break when he slipped into a livery stable to spend the night—that’s how he’d been existing the last few days, hiding in one hole or another. Anyway, in the back of the stable was the broken-down old nag, a sway-backed mare, long in the tooth and probably half blind. No one was going to miss her. They would probably raise more of a ruckus over the missing saddle, but Zack made sure he took the oldest one he could find.
    Zack was now ten miles northwest of Portland, traveling along back roads. The town of St. Helens was about twenty miles ahead. Maybe he could find a way to earn some traveling money there. The town was right on the Columbia River, and he hoped he could earn enough for passage on one of the boats heading to the coastal town of Astoria. That plan had risks, though, because Cutter worked the river trade and might have sent word ahead to have the port watched.
    Zack still thought his best bet was to eventually head south to San Francisco. He’d lived there longer than any place and had some connections there. The only reason he hadn’t headed in that direction in the first place was that he’d once mentioned to Cutter that he knew people there, so when he’d tried to take that road in one escape attempt, he had run into some of Cutter’s boys and had barely escaped with his life. Cutter would expect him to go to Frisco; therefore he had to do the unexpected. Once he had some cash, he could keep heading west from St. Helens to Astoria and then follow the coast down to California.
    He was mulling over all these possibilities when he spotted the riderless horse. A nice chestnut mare with a good saddle. He hobbled closer on his own nag, but the chestnut was skittish and backed off. Zack dismounted, tied his reins to a tree branch, then tried to approach the chestnut on foot.
    “Come on, girl,” he said soothingly. “I won’t hurt you.” He reached out a hand as if he held a nice lump