Kisses With KC (Cowboys and Angels Book 11)(25)

The horses drank, and the riders stretched their legs. KC turned in a full circle, admiring the land. His eyes stopped on a black hole in the side of the ravine. He hadn’t noticed any of the mountains in this whole area being prone to natural caves as the mountains in southwestern Colorado were. These mountains were solid rock, belched out by volcanoes eons ago.

“Have you got that spyglass on you, Eliza?” he asked.

She riffled through her saddle bag and handed it to him.

KC stepped under the shade of a small tree to keep the glare off the lens and held it to his eye directed at the cave. The entrance was in focus, and he saw a man with a gun raised in his direction. Immediately, he was knocked off balance as MayBelle rammed him just as a bullet plugged itself into the tree where his head had been a moment ago. In the fall, his head hit a rock, and the images before him divided, danced, and began to blur.

KC’s eyes struggled to open but without success. Even with his eyes closed, he saw the old prospector standing beside MayBelle. A shadowy man stood to his other side, his eyes flaming gold and his hands reaching for KC.

“Hold on there, Death. I won’t believe he’s dead until he’s all dead.” The old miner scrubbed his hand across his face in worry. “See there. His eyes are jiggling.”

Death’s hands paused.

KC’s lungs jerked with a full breath.

“Whew. I almost lost one,” the angel said to himself. He pulled his hat from his head and fanned it across his face. Panic crossed the man’s expression then, and he looked over his shoulder. Huge, shining golden wings flashed out behind him. “Whew. Still there.”

MayBelle brayed, and KC’s eyes opened.

When he came to, his head was in Eliza’s lap, and she was pressing her cool, wet hem to his face.

“You’re all right,” she cooed. “The bullet missed you, but your head took a spill on a rock. You bled something fierce, but head wounds are like that. It isn’t a deep cut, and the swelling went outward. It’s gonna hurt, though.”

Ellis was kneeling on his other side. “At first, we thought there were more shots and lay on the ground, but then we realized that the sound echoed around in this valley. I think whoever shot at you is gone.”

KC struggled to sit, then picked his hat up off the ground, tugging it over his head. Pain shot over his skull and down his neck. He immediately pulled it back off. He raised his hand to feel a large goose egg on the side of his head. It would be a few days before he wore a hat again.

His head still spun a bit, and it was a few minutes before he felt sure enough to stand. While he was sitting there, he thought about the man behind the rifle. He’d only seen him for a second. He thought it was one of the Holman boys, but he couldn’t be sure. It didn’t make sense that they’d be way out in these hills. This wasn’t anywhere near the properties he thought they were mixed up in taking. Still, it made sense to him to consider all options. If it had been a Holman, why was he here?

He stood and was able to remount his horse.

“We’ll go see my property another day,” Ellis said. “Let’s get you back.”

Although the Turley twins kept up friendly chatter, they often looked into the distance around them. KC could tell they were still worried about their safely. Their rifles were no longer in the scabbards but rested across their laps.



KC thought about one of the first lessons he’d received from a superior when he’d joined up with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency: people around him will get hurt because of what he did. No attachment was best.

When they went into the barn to take care of the horses, KC approached Eliza as Ellis walked his horse to his stall. “I think this homesteader business is getting more dangerous by the day. Please stay out of it. I don’t want you hurt.”

Eliza smiled and laid her hand on his cheek.

Ellis came back in. “I’ll take care of you horse for you, Eliza.”

KC saw tenderness and love between the Turleys every day in the simplest ways. These people were his family, or they soon would be. How was he going to protect them?

In bed that night, he took out his notebook and mapped out the homesteads along the road that led from Creede to Lake City. He marked the tracts as they were shown on the land office map, crossed out the ones that had been abandoned, and wrote in the names he’d learned from Eliza for as many as he could. According to the maps he’d seen at the Land Office, there were only four tracts of land that bordered the road to Lake City that Mr. Anders didn’t own yet. Two of them belonged to the Turleys, one to Louise and Grant Fillan, and one to Kirt Alpin.

The last owner was just a name to KC. He lived on the land just past Grant and Louise Fillan’s home on the way to Creede. Eliza didn’t know him. He’d settled long before the rest and proved up years before their family had arrived. She only remembered seeing him occasionally. She thought the rest of the time, he lived somewhere back east. KC decided to go out and pay a visit there the next evening to see what he could learn.

It had surprised him that a section also belonged to Archibald Grady. KC smelled a rat there. He’d never seen a homesteader wear silk pants and loiter all day in the saloon like Little Archie did. If he’d proved up on that homestead, KC bet it was through fraud. That man only had to get a couple of people to lie to the land officials, and he would have been given the deed to the land. He had more than enough money to pay for lies.