Read Online Pete (The Cowboys) by Leigh Greenwood - Free Book Online Page A

know if she’d ever sleep again if she had to be in the same bed with him. She didn’t know how Peter could have changed so drastically. He had never acted like that. She remembered more than once having to shake him hard to wake him up. This man had been wide awake and ready to fight in the space of a second. She had never known anybody could react so quickly.
    But there was something else that upset her. The nightmare. Peter had never had nightmares about Indians, never dreamed about them at all as far as she could remember. But most important of all, he didn’t hate Indians. He couldn’t. She was part Indian. It was for that reason Peter had agreed to marry her.
    Pete looked at Anne sleeping peacefully. He was tempted to wake her, tell her who he was and why he had come, but he changed his mind. She had probably been too scared to get much sleep last night. She had to be exhausted. His pulling a gun on her probably didn’t help. She’d looked petrified. He couldn’t explain to her that you had to sleep half awake to survive in a gold camp. Men had been killed for nothing more than their equipment and supplies. Only his watchfulness had kept him alive.
    He was certain this Peter Warren wouldn’t have done anything like that. He probably had to be shaken awake. From the way people acted, he must have been a real dolt. Pete hoped he didn’t run into an adult who remembered him clearly. He might be able to fool Anne—she couldn’t have been more than six or seven when she last saw Peter—but he’d never be able to fool an adult. Except for the color of their hair, they didn’t look all that much alike.
    Pete tiptoed to the bathroom. After years of shaving and washing in ice-cold streams, this was an unexpected luxury. He wondered how they kept the water from freezing in the winter. As he washed his face and put on his clothes, he turned his attention to the problem of finding the men who’d shot him and taken his saddlebags. The trail was old, the tracks lost in the welter of hoof prints made in the ten days since.
    He hadn’t found any hoofprints in or near the corral that matched the tracks he’d followed, but he was certain the men were here. Or close by. That bothered him. It made him certain that whoever had ordered Peter killed was also here at the ranch.
    Belser desperately wanted the ranch. Though he’d never seen Peter, he had declared right from the first that Pete was an imposter. The best possible way to know that would be to know you’d killed Peter, or had him killed. Pete wouldn’t mind proving Belser guilty of murder. The man was easy to dislike.
    But Pete had to face the fact that others at the ranch could have wanted Peter dead. Maybe the foreman feared he’d lose his job. Maybe someone in the vicinity other than Belser didn’t want Peter to inherit the ranch. After all, Belser could be involved with the rustling and his partners could want Peter dead so they could go on with their stealing. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but it was never wise to ignore any possibility.
    Whether he wanted to admit it or not, there was always the possibility that Anne was involved. After all, if Peter was the complete idiot everybody thought, maybe she didn’t want to be married to him. Maybe she wanted to inherit the ranch from her dead husband, then marry a man capable of holding the place against rustlers and greedy neighbors. Bill Mason looked like an obvious choice. Pete had discovered that the man’s wife had died a few years back, that Mason was known to be interested in marrying again. What would be better for both of them than to marry and combine their ranches? Mason gave the appearance of a man quite able to hold his own.
    But most likely Belser was the villain. If so, and if Anne was really married to Peter, she was in as much danger from Belser as her husband had been. Pete muttered several curses. He should have waited and taken the steamship down the Missouri. Then he wouldn’t have