To Hell and Back Read Online Free

the bars nearest him. She stuck a hand through the bars, tugged his neckerchief from around his neck, and dipped it into the water, and began dabbing gently at the raw, angry looking wound.
    “You’re going to have an awful headache,” she murmured to the unconscious man.
    Finally the flow of blood slowed. A few moments more and Hollander stirred. He made a sound low in his throat that would have passed completely unnoticed had he been laying even a foot further from her.  
    Then, suddenly, he bit off a curse and rolled into a sitting position on the cot. He cradled his head in both hands and blinked as if even the dim light the setting sun cast across the jail’s gloom was too bright.
    Amanda first stared at the dingy, blood-splattered pillow where his head had lain, then watched as he took in his surroundings in weighted silence. The curse he’d swallowed passed softly from his lips.
    “They say I killed Eddie, and you and I were in on the robbery.” Amanda decided he’d better know the facts, and quickly. “The banker, John Berglund, claims he shot you and winged the other man.”
    “Great,” Jake grumbled climbing to his feet, swaying a bit. “They get around to talking about a trial yet?”  
    Amanda blinked in surprise. “Why yes, yes they did. I think they intend to have one tonight. But we didn’t do anything,” she added quickly. “Surely you don’t believe they’ll . . . .”
    The trail-rider gave her a twisted grin.  
    “Lady, how long you been in these parts?”
    “Three months,” she answered with injured dignity. “Now sit down and let me finish cleaning that wound. It doesn’t look good.”
    Hollander glanced heavenward as if he might expect some help from that quarter, then winced at the pain the sudden movement brought to his throbbing head. He gingerly touched the fresh gouge where the skin was peeled back nearly all the way from bone. He’d seen it coming when he had first seen the banker’s face.
    The banker had been a part of it just as sure as the sun would rise in the morning. Hollander had seen it first in his eyes, then in the nod he had given to the leader of the trio to take along the dirty, trail-worn canvas bag containing the twenty thousand dollars. Until then the outlaws had taken no real notice of it. The little lady had almost saved it for him. She had been scared, but she had played it right, neither completely ignoring the sack, nor trying to hide it. But, as he suspected, Lord what a tenderfoot she was. Three months! And, she had learned nothing during those months, spending the entire time working in the sheltered safety of a bank. It was that way with the few women, town women anyway, who did not end up working in saloons or worse, but it left Jake with a hell of a problem.  
    Christ what a fix. Already the scanty facts, as Jake knew them, were falling into place. Long years of living, filled with bitter experience had exposed him to almost everything, and there was nothing new in a banker having a hand in robbing his own bank. The twist this time though was the position he found himself in because of it, and the woman right along with him.  
    He looked at her again. She was a beauty. Son-of-a-bitch if she wasn’t. That thick wavy black hair tumbling over her shoulders and those mysterious green eyes. Despite the character he saw in the firm set of her jaw, she was the greenest of greenhorns. And that dazzling beauty of hers would be nothing now but a burden. Worse, he feared it was going to be his to bear.
    “Well?” Amanda asked, an impatient note in her voice as a trickle of blood oozed from the wound running slowly over his temple and down his cheek to drip with a barely audible splat just outside the edge of his boot toe.
    “You think there’s something wrong, that the trial they’re going to give us won’t be fair, don’t you?”
    She was sober and downcast when he settled himself back on the cot near the bars, but that didn’t stop her from