The Lone Sheriff

“Stay here,” he yelled over his shoulder.

“Try and make me!”

Damn fool woman. She’d get herself killed and he’d kick himself to hell and back. He wished he’d never laid eyes on her.

In the mail car, the white-faced clerk stood frozen, hands in the air, while a man with a bandanna covering the lower half of his face held a revolver on him with one hand and, with the other, hurled a canvas Wells Fargo bag through the open side door.

Maddie darted off to Jericho’s right, clutching a revolver.

“Get down!” he shouted. The young mail clerk dropped to the floor but Maddie went into a crouch and leveled her weapon at the robber.

“Hands up!” Her ordinarily genteel voice cut like cold steel.

The man straightened in surprise, then turned his gun toward the voice. Jericho sent a bullet zinging off the silver handle and the gun skidded across the floor in front of Maddie. She stopped it with her small black shoe and kicked it into a corner.

Three men on horseback waited outside the car. Maddie swung her pistol toward the opening and fired, winging one man. Another outlaw pointed his weapon at her but Jericho’s shot spun it out of his hand.

The mounted robbers began peppering the wall behind them with gunfire while the man inside ducked and began shoving more canvas bags out onto the ground.

A tall rider with a paunch walked his horse up to the car and took careful aim at Jericho, but before he could squeeze the trigger Maddie fired a shot that neatly spun his weapon out of his hand. Where had she learned to shoot like that?

Fat Man reined away. Maddie sent another bullet through his flapping black coattail.

The man inside skedaddled after the canvas bags, shoved one more off the car and then tumbled out onto the ground after it. He dove under his waiting horse. Jericho itched to shoot him, but with his left-handed aim off, he figured he’d kill the horse before he nailed the outlaw.

The three others hefted the canvas sacks behind their saddles, mounted and thundered off in a cloud of gray dust. The last man scrambled onto his horse and pounded after them.

Jericho raised his revolver to pick him off, but he was out of range.

Maddie put a shot through his hat, but he twisted in the saddle and fired back at her. She yelped.

The bullet tore through the sleeve of her shirtwaist, burning a path above her elbow. It felt like something scraping her skin with a white-hot knife.

Then there was nothing but dust, the audible prayers of the crouching mail clerk, the chuff of the train engine, and Jericho yelling at her.

“Dammit, Maddie, you’d think you’d be smart enough to stay out of the line of fire!” He leaped over the clerk and grabbed her arm. Right where it hurt.

She gritted her teeth. “If you do not let me go, Sheriff, I am going to shoot you, too!”

He snatched his hand away and stepped back, eyes narrowed. “Are you hurt?”

She lifted her arm and pointed to the black-rimmed hole in the sleeve. “Bullet burn.”

He opened his mouth again. She was sure he was going to yell at her some more, but she interrupted. “Sheriff,” she enunciated quietly.

“What?”

“Shut up.”

He looked dumbfounded. “What?”

“Be quiet. I am not seriously injured and I see that you are unharmed, as well.” She began to gather up the disordered mail bags.

“Hell,” Jericho muttered. “You’re not even shook up.”

She pocketed her pistol. “Stop complaining and help me.”

He looked at her as if he’d never seen her before. “How come you’re not shakin’ or cryin’ or something?”

Maddie straightened, gripping one corner of a heavy canvas bag. “Why should I be?”

Jericho shook his head. “How much do you figure they got away with?”

Maddie cocked her head. “How much?” She found she liked teasing him. It made his eyes even darker blue, and the way he was staring at her now caused a little flip-flop inside her chest.

“How much?” she repeated. “Well, to the best of my calculation—did I tell you I was a whiz at mathematics at school? Let’s see now...”

He planted himself within spitting distance and propped his good hand on his hip. “I’m waiting, dammit.”

“The amount of money—” she smiled into his glowering face “—is exactly zero.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me, zero. Nothing. Nada. Rien. Those Wells Fargo bags are decoys. The bank manager and I decided they would be filled with rocks, not gold.”

His eyes went even darker. “You mean this whole exercise was just a farce?”

Maddie straightened her skirt. “You could call it that, I suppose.”

“Then what the hell did we risk our lives for?”

“For observation.” She dropped the canvas bag in her hand, which landed with a clunk, and fished her notebook out of her pocket. Not her Pistol Pocket, he noted, but the Observation Notebook Pocket.

Jericho waited while she circled the pencil around like a branding iron. Part of him wanted to laugh. Another part of him wanted to wring her neck. He’d be damned if he’d risk getting shot for some damn decoys!

“Well,” she began, a note of relish in her voice. “We got a good look at the robbers, didn’t we? There are five of them.”

“We already knew that.”

“One of them,” she continued, “is lame. His leg is stiff.”

“And?”

“And one of them wore a bandanna from Carl Ness’s mercantile. I recognized the pattern and the color, a sort of pinky-red. Did you notice?”

Jericho said nothing. He had to admit she had sharp eyes and a keen mind. Her “observations” were valuable.

Dammit, anyway.