Free Anita Mills by Dangerous Page A

a cold tortilla, he added—“you’d better eat and enjoy the company while you’ve got it.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “I get off at Eagle Lake, in case you’ve forgotten.”
    It was a dispiriting thought, one she didn’t want to deal with just now. But no matter what, she wasn’t going to ask him to stay with her, she told herself. She wasn’t about to give him any power he could use against her. Instead, she took a small bite out of the fried tortilla. It was soggy with grease, but it was food for an empty stomach.

Chapter 6
    “She wasn’t there, Gib! I’m telling you she wasn’t there!” Lee Jackson all but shouted at Hannah. “You tell ’im, Charley—tell ’im there wasn’t any sign of the Howard girl!”
    “Gib, we looked the length of the whole damned train,” Pierce explained patiently. “She wasn’t on it.”
    “Hell, we even watched ’em get off to eat, and when we didn’t see her, Charley got on to look for her!” Jackson went on angrily. “I’m telling you there wasn’t no lone female there. There wasn’t but a couple of women on the whole danged thing! Doncha think we’d a told you if we’d found her?”
    “Maybe he’s kinda thinking you were wanting to keep her to yourselves,” Bob Simmons spoke up. “Maybe he’s thinking you could be planning to split it two ways instead of four.”
    “Is that what you think, Bob? That we’d cheat you?” Pierce demanded. “If that was the case, why the hell would we come back at all? Why wouldn’t we just grab ’er and run?”
    “I wasn’t meaning I thought it, Charley—I was saying maybe that’s what Gib was thinking,” Simmons said soothingly. “Hell, we’ve been in the saddle night and day now, and it ain’t easy to think straight like that. We’re all downright jumpy.”
    “Been like looking for the needle in the haystack,” Jackson muttered. “I knowed we oughta waited in San Angelo—said so even.”
    “She’s got to be on that train,” Gib reasoned. “She was on the Norfolk Star’ s passenger list coming into Galveston. And she sure as hell didn’t hire herself a buggy to travel halfway across Texas in.”
    “Looks like she’s vamoosed,” Jackson declared.
    “The word is vanished, Lee,”
    “Huh?”
    “It looks like she’s vanished”
    “Hell, I ain’t got book learning like you, Gib,” Jackson countered sarcastically. “But I’ve sure as hell got eyes! And there’s nothing wrong with Charley’s neither!”
    “All right, all right.” Gib Hannah ran his fingers through his hair, then rubbed the stubble on his face. “Look, there’s no sense in quarreling amongst ourselves. We missed her, that’s all. But we know she got off that steamer, and we know she stayed overnight at the Harris house—I saw the register myself. And according to the Harris woman, she asked for an early call to breakfast so she’d have time to make the train,” he recounted. “Damn.”
    “Maybe we shoulda waited until the agent got back to ask ’im,” Pierce offered.
    “There wasn’t time. Train’d been gone nigh to an hour by then, and the window was already shut down,” Simmons reminded him. “Hell, it wasn’t opening again until four o’clock, and by then, it’d a been too damn late to catch up at all.”
    “Something must’ve happened, and she didn’t get on the nine-fifteen—that’s got to be it, Gib,” Jackson insisted. “Ain’t no other way of explaining it.”
    “You said the Harris woman told you the Howard girl was real pretty—maybe something happened to her. I mean, there’s a lot of rough customers in a place like Indianola.”
    “It was a short walk in broad daylight,” Hannah snapped. “Somebody would’ve seen something, and the whole place would’ve known it.”
    Lee Jackson sighed. “All right, then, Gib—we ain’t got no brains between us—that’s what you’re saying, ain’t it?”
    “Yeah, Gib,” Charley said, “if you’re so damned smart, then