No Other Will Do (Ladies of Harper's Station #1)(65)

High.

She glared at the target and adjusted the angle of her rifle, no longer caring about the ache in her shoulder. She was going to hit that plank of wood.

“Lower your cheek to the stock this time,” Mal murmured close to her ear. “Use your dominant eye to sight the target. Don’t try to look through both.”

Emma pressed her cheek to the stock and focused on the sight at the end of her barrel then lined it up with the center of the target. She squeezed the trigger. The target wobbled. Her heart thumped a wild, excited rhythm. She lifted her cheek and stared at the old board in disbelief. She’d shot the top right corner clean off!

“Good job.” Mal’s hand rested on her left shoulder for a brief moment, just long enough for her pulse to ratchet up another notch. “Now do it again, and this time hit the paint.”

Determined to prove to him she could do just that, Emma gave a sharp nod and lifted the rifle back into place. But just as she fit the stock to her shoulder, a muffled gunshot rang out behind her. Far behind her. She turned.

“That came from town.” Malachi took off, sprinting toward the church even as the steeple bell rang out a warning.

Emma raced after him, not about to let him go alone. He slowed slightly at the front of the church and craned his neck up to peer at the bell tower.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled a single word. “Where?”

Emma doubted Aunt Bertie would be able to hear a thing with the bell donging so close to her head, but she leaned out the opening and gestured across the street anyway.

The station house.

Emma leapt toward home, but a firm grip on her arm brought her up short.

“No.” Mal scowled down at her, his eyes promising he’d give no quarter if she chose to disobey.

“That’s my home,” Emma protested, even as a touch of rationality cut through the haze of anger that had blotted out all else the instant she realized someone was in her house doing only God knew what. If she blindly rushed in, she’d no doubt play right into the outlaws’ hands. Mal was right. She had to think.

But the next thought to enter her mind had her struggling against Mal’s hold, desperate to do what she had just vowed not to. “What if he’s setting another fire?”

She had to get inside, stop whatever damage the fiend had planned. Everything her aunts owned was in that house. All the heirlooms they prized, their family heritage. Bertie’s needlework. Henry’s suffrage-tract collection. Things that could never be replaced. And the quilt! If it was destroyed, there’d be no hope of the sewing circle filling their quota in time.

Yet Mal refused to budge. His grip on her arm only tightened. “You run in there,” he growled, “you could get shot. Leave or die. Remember, Em? I’m not about to give him the chance to make good on that threat. Nothing in that house is worth your life.”

She hated that he was right. Hated that she was useless as day-old toast with the rifle she carried. Hated that she was a liability instead of an asset.

Hated that, the longer she argued with him, the greater the likelihood that the outlaws would escape.

She ceased her struggles. “Fine. I’ll stay.”

He eyed her skeptically.

“I promise. Now go.”



Mal had no choice but to trust her word. Thankfully, Emma was the trustworthy type. She hadn’t lied to him in all the years he’d known her, and he didn’t expect she’d start now. He prayed not, anyway.

“Keep the women back behind the church,” he instructed as he released his grip on her arm. “For all we know, he could have staked out a sniper position upstairs in the station house and is just waiting to start picking you all off as soon as you get within range. I’ll clear the building and let you know when it’s safe.”

Emma gave a sharp nod, then spun around and hurried back toward the growing crowd of females clustering along the edge of the church.

Mal headed the opposite way, not directly toward the station house, but veering into town. Someone had shot off a warning, and Mal’s money was on Porter. Find the freighter, and he’d find the information he needed to rout the outlaws.

But when he found Porter, the information the man shared was not at all what Malachi wished to hear.

“He’s gone,” Porter announced without preamble when Mal caught up to him out by the telegraph office. He was leading a limping Helios back toward the station-house barn. Porter looked none too steady himself. “Lit out right after I fired the signal shot. I tried to give chase, but the canny devil drove all the animals out of the corral. Took the main road, too, so picking out his tracks will be a nightmare unless you noticed something distinctive about the chestnut’s shoes the last time you went after the shooter.”

Mal slammed the flat of his hand against the plank siding of the telegraph office. He’d spent hours staring at tracks in the dirt and mud around the river. No nicks, chips, or identifying marks. The shoes had been easy enough to track in the countryside with no other hoofprints to compete for attention, but they’d be impossible to pick out on a well-traveled road.

He had one day to find the outlaws. One blessed day. And they’d slipped in and out of town right under his nose. For pity’s sake. He’d been in the barn not thirty minutes ago. They must have crept in the moment he left.

“One man or two?” Mal clipped out the question.