The Whippoorwill Trilogy - Sharon Sala Page 0,284

a nightmare, with the flames from his campfire highlighting the bone structure of her face. Her gaze was as steady as the gun she had aimed at his heart. But it was the bloodstains on her clothes and the glitter in her eyes that told him he would not see tomorrow.

“You!” Letty muttered, shocked to learn that it was George Mellin who she’d been trailing all along, and yet at the same time, it began to make a sick kind of sense.

She wanted him dead now—she wanted to see him take his last breath, just as she’d watched Eulis die. But she needed him to suffer, too—to know that his physical pain was as sharp as the one in her gut.

George was frozen in fear.

Letty knew he was scared, but it wasn’t enough. Without talking, she picked up another stick from the woodpile and threw it into the already blazing fire.

Again, the sparks flew outward, this time singeing George’s hair and skin, and burning more holes in his blanket. He cried out in pain and terror, and began to beat at the flames, when Letty stopped him with a warning.

“If you move again, I’ll shoot you where you sit.”

George’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“I’m on fire,” he cried.

“Not yet, you’re not… but you will be,” Letty promised.

George writhed beneath the blanket as a small fire began to spread near his feet.

“Please,” he begged. “You don’t understand. You shouldn’t a done what you did. No man deserves to be whipped like a dog in front of his friends.”

“No man does to his family, what you did, you bastard… you coward… you sorry-ass, back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch. But the flogging wasn’t about your wife, Alice. She’s a grown woman. The way I looked at it, she could have spoke up for herself. It was about your baby. She died in my arms. Died before she had a chance to live. That’s why I whipped your ass, and I’d do it again.”

George groaned. The hole in the blanket was burning a little larger as it continued to spread. He felt the heat catching onto his pant legs and knew it was just a matter of time before he burst into flames.

“Please,” he begged. “You can’t do this to a—”

Letty lifted the rifle to her shoulder.

“Shut up,” she said softly.

George groaned as his bladder gave way.

Letty took a step closer.

“You should have killed me, too,” she said softly, then pulled the trigger.

The scent of gunpowder was suddenly up her nose as the kick of the rifle made her stagger.

When the echo of the shot had faded away, George Mellin was still sitting, with the burning blanket in his lap and a bloody hole between his eyebrows.

She shuddered, and took several steps backward until she felt the bark of a tree at her back. She slid downward with a sigh; sitting flat on the ground, with the rifle at her feet.

A few yards away, the blanket finally burst into flames. She watched it catch on George’s pants, then his shirt, then watched his face disappear behind a column of swiftly rising smoke.

Mellin was aflame.

Nearby, his horse whinnied nervously. The smell of burning flesh sent it into a panic. It reared backward on the rope, then suddenly tore free from its tether and disappeared into the night at full gallop.

Robert Lee’s horse was lathered—its breathing hard and labored. Ever since he’d come off the mountain into the wide, verdant valley, he’d been riding in fear. When dark came, he began to fear he would ride past Letty’s body, lying somewhere out of sight in the grass. He couldn’t get the dark, blood-stained earth at the Potter house out of his mind, and kept imagining he could hear the sound of her screams.

Eulis Potter had been a good man—better than most. Robert Lee owed him in a way he’d never owed a man before. He’d been hired to protect the Potter mine, but had been unable to protect the Potters. That dug at him like a burr beneath the skin, pushing him on, when good sense bade him stop for the night.

He had been in the valley, for what seemed like hours, hearing nothing but the sounds of his horse’s breathing, and the steady rhythm of its hooves upon the ground. His body was tense, his eyes burning from trying to see what the night was hiding.

Only a short while earlier, he’d stopped long enough to water his horse at the creek, and mounted back up as soon as the