When the preacher had locked her up, she’d learned to wait in the darkness. Between midnight and dawn, the devil would unlock her door. She’d fight for as long as she could, then she’d try to numb her mind to what he did. But even through the numbness, she’d known she’d gone to hell and back with him in the blackness. At dawn, she’d wake bruised and alone. The preacher would come to get her, angry, he said, because the devil visited her. Sometimes he’d be in a hurry and only rant and rave about how evil she was, but other times, he’d try to help her by whipping the evil out of her.

Allie remembered days passing when she’d sleep in the cage, knowing that as soon as they reached the next town there would be another hotel and another visit.

Wes must not know of the evil of this place, or he wouldn’t have walked in without his guns drawn. Maybe if he were with her, the devil wouldn’t come. She watched his back as she slipped into the water and washed. He was a strange man, but one thing she knew, he wasn’t evil.

As soon as she was scrubbed, she pulled her clothes back on and moved to stand beside him.

‘‘You ready?’’ he asked in a voice that told her he’d almost fallen asleep in the chair.

She nodded.

He stood slowly and pulled the thin ribbon used to tie back the curtains from the window.

‘‘I thought I’d borrow this,’’ he said smiling, ‘‘to tie back your hair. We can’t very well go downstairs with it flying about.’’

Allie slid her hand to her knife but didn’t pull it from her boot as he looped the lace beneath her hair and tied it.

‘‘There.’’ He stepped back and seemed pleased with his work. ‘‘Shall we go downstairs?’’

He offered his hand.

Allie didn’t take it but let him guide her out of the room and down the stairs.

The lobby was empty except for the clerk behind the desk. He glanced up at Wes. ‘‘That old sheriff you’re looking for is in the saloon.’’

Wes thanked him with a casual salute.

‘‘If you want any supper, you’ll have to order it in there. Nowhere else to get food this late.’’ The clerk returned to his reading, not expecting an answer to his comments.

Wes slowly reached for Allie’s hand and placed it on his arm. ‘‘Shall we?’’ he asked as though they were a normal couple.

As always, she didn’t answer.

When they entered the saloon, Allie moved a little closer to Wes. He crossed to a lone man sitting at the back of an almost empty room.

‘‘Sheriff Hardy?’’ Wes asked as Allie peeked around him to see the old man.

Hardy ignored Wes’s outstretched hand as he stood slowly, staring wide-eyed at Allie.

‘‘Victoria,’’ he whispered. His eyes brimmed with tears. For a moment, he was somewhere far deep into the past and not with them. ‘‘Victoria,’’ he said again, with a love and a sorrow too great to fathom.

TWELVE

ALLIE WATCHED THE OLD MAN CAREFULLY. GRAYhair hung past his collar, and his eyes were the color of the whiskey he drank. He raised a hand, weathered with age, and lightly brushed her cheek as reality of the present straightened his stance.

‘‘I’m sorry.’’ He tried to pull his emotions back into a body and mind too fragile to hold them in check. ‘‘There for a moment I thought I was looking at a woman I knew fifty years ago. You’re her spittin’ image, girl.’’

Wes tried again. ‘‘You are Sheriff Maxwell Hardy.’’ The words were far more a statement than a question. ‘‘I’m Wes McLain.’’

The elderly man nodded. ‘‘I’m Max Hardy. Retired sheriff. I’m the one who sent you the letter. Thought it was a fool thing to do at the time. Never dreamed you’d answer so fast.’’

He paused and stared at Allie again. ‘‘We’ve been looking for a survivor of the Catlin clan for years. Everyone but me gave up long ago, but I still go over to the Rangers’ office in Austin and check the reports now and again. Hoping.’’

‘‘You found the message posted by my sister-in-law, Nichole McLain?’’ Wes pulled a chair out for Allie then motioned for her to sit down. He did the same as he waved the bartender for drinks.

‘‘I’ve followed a dozen dead-end trails looking for one child.’’ Hardy returned to his chair, but his gaze never left Allie’s face. ‘‘I was one of the men who found the burned settlement back in ’52. We’d had a skirmish with the Comanches near the Sabine River and figured they were still angry when they came across Catlin and his people. The bodies had been burned but, near as we could figure, one was missing. One child. We weren’t even sure if it was a boy called Jimmy or a girl called Allie. The Catlins had a kid every spring, regular as clockwork. Near as I remember, Jimmy wasn’t even a year older than Allie.’’

‘‘Then, if she’s a member of the Catlin family, her parents are dead?’’ Wes had hoped he’d find a parent still living who would take her in with loving arms.

‘‘She’s Allie Catlin,’’ Hardy whispered. ‘‘Looks just like her grandma did when I first saw Victoria. I’d been hired as a scout back before the Republic. We brought part of Austin’s original three hundred settlers from the San Marcos River to the lower part of the Lavaco. About a dozen families. They was all afraid of the Karankawas then, hadn’t met up with the Apaches and Comanches. Most of them were upper-class, educated people. They didn’t take to the hard life.’’

The old man leaned back in his chair as his mind slipped into the past. ‘‘I remember it being powerful hot that summer, with the river sluggish and trees so thick with Spanish moss you had to fight your way to the water. I was heading down for a drink when a little slip of a woman came running toward me yelling like she was about to be scalped by a war party.’’

Hardy laughed, a low rumbling kind of sound that comes from one who laughs little in life. ‘‘Well, with my gun in one hand and a knife in the other, I hurried to save her. But the little lady didn’t need saving. She was so mad she grabbed my gun and disappeared into the moss.

‘‘A minute later, I heard a shots. Then, before I could follow, she was out of the foliage trading my empty gun for my knife. This time, I followed only a few steps behind. The sight I saw when I reached the river is as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday. There sat Victoria Catlin, proclaimed as one of the fairest beauties in the South, straddling a gator. She was stabbing him with my knife like she was fighting for her life, but that old gator was already dead.’’

Hardy raised one bushy eyebrow and winked at Allie. ‘‘She was still swearing and steaming when I pulled her off the poor critter. It seems the alligators down by the river loved the settlers’ hunting dogs for dinner. Only this one made the mistake of eating Miss Victoria’s pet.’’

Wes smiled. ‘‘Sounds like she was quite a woman.’’ He couldn’t help but think of Allie sitting atop Vincent about to stab him.

Hardy shook his head. ‘‘Miss Victoria is quite a woman. Outlived so many husbands she had to enlarge the family plot. Never took a one of their names after the first. Always said it wasn’t worth changing her monogram for something as temporary as marriage. Bore six children by Catlin, three boys and three girls.

‘‘The girls all died before they were grown. James, her oldest, was killed in the raid in ’52, like I said. Darron died at Shiloh. Michael, her baby, is in his forties now, but he doesn’t cast much of a shadow as a man. I figured if I could ever find James’s one survivor, Victoria’s only grandchild, she might die thinking she’d done something worthwhile in this life. From the size of the bones, we figured either Allie or James Junior lived.

‘‘James told me once that he ordered his wife to send the children to the woods if trouble came. So I spent the best part of a week looking, but no child. By the time we caught up with the war party, they’d traded off any captives.’’

Allie listened without expression to the old man’s story, not allowing hope to grow within her. She’d lived through too much to believe anything good was about to happen. The man seemed to think she had a brother named James, but that didn’t sound familiar to her. She remembered a boy, but James or even Jimmy didn’t seem to fit as his name.

Hardy looked at her, his whiskey eyes liquid with unshed tears. ‘‘Will you go with me to see Miss Victoria tomorrow? I’d give half of the time I have left on earth to see her face when she looks at you.’’

She glanced at Wes, but he was staring down into the drink a bartender had brought him. Allie didn’t know what to do, but it seemed to matter so much to the old man that she nodded.

‘‘I’ll call for you at nine.’’ A touch of the manners he’d learned in youth laced through Maxwell Hardy’s voice. ‘‘Thank you, Miss Allyce Meghan Catlin. After all these years, a simple letter brought you home.’’

‘‘I’ll be coming along,’’ Wes interrupted. ‘‘Just to see that she’s left in safe hands. She’s been through a great deal. I promised her that much.’’

The old sheriff looked at Wes as if he were intruding. ‘‘All right, Mr. McLain. I’ll call for you both. The ranch is about a two-hour ride from here. I assume you have horses, but a bullet I took in the leg a few years back prevents me from riding in anything but a buggy.’’

Hardy stood and gathered his gloves and hat to leave. He downed the last of his liquor. ‘‘Don’t tell anyone else in town why you’re here. There are those who might give quite a lot to see that no grandchild of Victoria’s ever reaches her ranch.’’

He left without explaining.

Wes ordered two bowls of the new kind of stew, called chili, he’d learned to eat on trail drives. They didn’t say a word as they waited. Wes drank another shot of whiskey and Allie stared at her hands. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to get her hopes up. He’d heard stories of families rejecting captives who’d lived with the Indians. He’d even seen a father once turn his back on his two daughters after they’d been returned to civilization. They were better off dead and, as far as he was concerned, they were, the father had said. The girls had cried and clung to him, but he’d pulled away and left them without another word.