A Wanted Man: A Stone Creek Novel
Linda Lael Miller
#1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller returns to Stone Creek with a sweeping tale of two strangers running from dangerous secretsThe past has a way of catching up with folks in Stone Creek, Arizona. But schoolmarm Lark Morgan and Marshal Rowdy Rhodes are determined to hide their secrets—and deny their instant attraction. That should be easy, since each suspects the other of living a lie….Yet Rowdy and Lark share one truth: both face real dangers. Like the gang of train robbers heading their way, men Ranger Sam O'Ballivan expects Rowdy to nab. And as past and current troubles collide, Rowdy and Lark must surrender their pride to the greatest power of all—undying love.“Another frontier romance loaded with hot lead, steamy sex and surprising plot twists.”—Publishers Weekly on A Wanted Man
#1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller returns to Stone Creek with a classic tale of two strangers running from dangerous secrets
The past has a way of catching up with folks in Stone Creek, Arizona. But schoolmarm Lark Morgan and Marshal Rowdy Rhodes are determined to hide their secrets—and deny their instant attraction. That should be easy, since each suspects the other of living a lie….
Yet Rowdy and Lark share one truth: both face real dangers. Such as the gang of train robbers heading their way, men Ranger Sam O’Ballivan expects Rowdy to nab. As past and current troubles collide, Rowdy and Lark must surrender their pride to the greatest power of all—undying love.
Praise for #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Linda Lael Miller
“Miller tugs at the heartstrings as few authors can.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This is a delightful addition to Miller’s Big Sky series. This author has a way with a phrase that is nigh-on poetic, and all of the snappy little interactions between the main and secondary characters make this story especially entertaining.”
—RT Book Reviews on Big Sky Mountain
“Miller’s down-home, easy-to-read style keeps the plot moving, and she includes…likable characters, picturesque descriptions and some very sweet pets.”
—Publishers Weekly on Big Sky Country
“After reading this book your heart will be so full of Christmas cheer you’ll want to stuff a copy in the stocking of every romance fan you know!”
—USATODAY.com Happy Ever After on A Lawman’s Christmas
“Miller’s attention to small details makes her stories a delight to read. With engaging characters and loveable animals, this second story in the Creed Cowboys trilogy is a sure hit for the legions of cowboy fans out there.”
—RT Book Reviews on Creed’s Honor
“A passionate love too long denied drives the action in this multifaceted, emotionally rich reunion story that overflows with breathtaking sexual chemistry.”
—Library Journal on McKettricks of Texas: Tate
“This is Western romance at its finest.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Man from Stone Creek
“Strong characterization and a vivid Western setting make for a fine historical romance.”
—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Choice
A Wanted Man: A Stone Creek Novel
Linda Lael Miller
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
I’m so excited you’re back in Stone Creek again! A Wanted Man is the story of two passionate people with secrets to keep. Rowdy Rhodes appeared very briefly in The Man from Stone Creek, and the first time he walked onto the stage of my mind, I knew he would have his own story. Rowdy is a fascinating enigma, an outlaw with honor, a fugitive with courage, a teller of truth whose whole life is basically a lie. Lark Morgan, the woman he didn’t plan on meeting, let alone loving, is guarding dangerous secrets of her own. So come along with Rowdy, Lark and me on a journey to Stone Creek as it was in the turbulent early years of the last century.
I would also like to tell you about the scholarship program that I finance—Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women, awarded to those seeking to improve their lot in life through education. You can find more information on my website, www.lindalaelmiller.com (http://www.lindalaelmiller.com).
Also, be sure to look out for a brand-new book coming in June, the start of a fresh trilogy set in Parable, Montana. Big Sky Summer is the story of Walker Parrish, handsome rodeo cowboy turned stock contractor, and Casey Elder, a fiery redheaded country and western singer. The secret they’re keeping will either bond them forever at the heart, or drive them apart. I can’t wait for you to mosey on back to Parable and step into their world!
Happy reading!
For Shaun Bleecker, who identifies so strongly with Rowdy—perhaps because he’s a hero, too.
Contents
Chapter 1 (#u4172ea23-bf25-5256-8e4c-57e8d1541cdb)
Chapter 2 (#ub91120af-2cbc-5dd9-826e-28c5c7e1fc1a)
Chapter 3 (#u3ea8ca0b-91b0-536e-9d00-f438d130dd5a)
Chapter 4 (#u37613701-5c10-5445-b65f-8b350ece4534)
Chapter 5 (#u1fd794e3-ed1f-5cf3-aebd-ddaf3c0d8ef2)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
1
Stone Creek, Arizona Territory
January, 1905
ROWDY RHODES LEANED BACK in the whorehouse bathtub, a cheroot jutting from between his teeth, and sighed as he waited for the chill of a high-country winter to seep out of his bones.
Jolene, an aging madam with pockmarked skin, three visible teeth and a bustle the size of the Sonoran Desert, sloshed another bucketful of steaming water at his feet. “I done seen everything now,” she told him, her eyes narrowed in lascivious speculation as she studied Rowdy’s submerged frame. “Ain’t nobody never brought a dog to my bathhouse before.”
Pardner, the old yellow hound, sat soaked and bewildered in the tub next to Rowdy’s. He’d gotten pretty scruffy on the long ride up from Haven, the dog had, and Rowdy meant to take him for barbering next. They could both do with a haircut, and Rowdy was itching for a shave.
Pardner was just plain itching.
“Always a first time,” Rowdy said, drawing on the cheroot and then blowing a smoke ring.
Jolene lingered, probably hoping to do less-hygienic business, but willing to settle for whatever conversation might come her way. “It’s one thing, you payin’ for clean water for yourself, but I don’t see how as it makes a difference to the dog.”
Rowdy grinned and blew another smoke ring. “We’ll be wanting steaks, soon as we’re dried off and decent, if you can scare them up,” he told Jolene. “Pardner likes his rare.”
“If that don’t beat all,” Jolene said, pondering the hound. “I can get steaks, all right, but they’ll cost you a pretty penny. And if you’ve a mind to pass the time upstairs with any of my girls, cowboy, your partner here will have to wait in the hall.”
Given that he was naked, and in a prone position, Rowdy didn’t see any profit in pointing out that he didn’t have truck with whores. His .44 was within easy reach, as always, but shooting a woman, saint or sinner, was outside the boundaries of his personal code. Unless, of course, she drew first.
“No time for idling with the ladies,” he said, feigning regret. He idled with plenty of ladies, whenever he got the chance, but he favored fine, upstanding widows.
“You lookin’ for ranch work?” Jolene asked, in no apparent hurry to rustle up the steaks.
“Maybe,” Rowdy answered. The truth was, he’d been summoned to Stone Creek by none other than Major John Blackstone and Sam O’Ballivan, an Arizona Ranger he’d chanced to encounter down south, a little over a year before, in the border town of Haven. He’d come partly because he and Pardner hadn’t had anything better to do, and because he was curious. And there were a few other reasons, too.
He suspected his pa was somewhere in these parts, up to his old tricks, for one.
“Try Sam O’Ballivan’s place,” Jolene said helpfully. “Sam’s a fair man, and he’s always hirin’ on hands to feed them cattle of his.”
Rowdy nodded. “Obliged,” he said.
“Not that you’re hurtin’ for money, if you can afford clean bathwater and a steak for a dog,” Jolene added.
“A man can always use money,” Rowdy allowed, wishing Jolene would order up the steaks, go back to riding herd over the drunks he’d seen out front in the saloon swilling whiskey, and leave him to bathe in peace.
Pardner gave a despairing whimper.
“Just bide there for a while,” Rowdy told him quietly.
Pardner huffed out a sigh and hunkered down to endure. He was a faithful old fella, Pardner was. He’d trotted alongside Rowdy’s horse for the first few miles out of Haven, but then he’d gotten footsore and come the rest of the way in the saddle. As they traveled north, the weather got colder, and they’d shared Rowdy’s dusty old canvas coat.
Remembering the looks they’d gotten from the townsfolk, him and Pardner, riding into town barely an hour before, Rowdy smiled. Even with a new and modern century underway, the Arizona Territory was still wild and woolly, and odd sights were plentiful. He wouldn’t have thought a man and a dog on the back of the same horse would attract so much notice.
“You run along and see to those steaks,” Rowdy told Jolene. Even with the bucketful of hot water she’d just poured into his tub, the bath was lukewarm, and there was cold air coming up through the cracks between the ancient, warped floorboards. He wanted to scrub himself down with the harsh yellow soap provided, dry off, and get into the clean duds he’d saved for the purpose.
Of course, Pardner needed sudsing, too, and Rowdy didn’t reckon even Jolene’s services extended quite that far.
Jolene hadn’t had her fill of visiting, that much was clear by her disgruntled aspect, but she lit out for the kitchen, just the same.
Rowdy finished his bath, dressed himself, then laundered Pardner as best he could. He was toweling the poor critter off with a burlap feed sack when he heard the sound of spurs chinking just outside the door.
Rowdy didn’t hold with the use of spurs, branding irons or barbed wire. Whenever he encountered any one of those three things, he bristled on the inside.
Out of habit he touched the handle of his .44, just to make sure it was on his left hip, where it ought to be.
Pardner bared his teeth and snarled when two drifters strolled in.
“Easy,” Rowdy told the animal, rising from a crouch to stand facing the strangers. One was short, and the other tall. Both were in sore need of a bath, not to mention the services of a dentist.
The short one looked Pardner over, scowling. His right hand eased toward the .45 in his holster.
Rowdy’s own .44 was in his hand so fast he might have willed it there, instead of drawing. “I wouldn’t,” he said affably.
“It’s a hell of a thing when a man’s expected to bathe himself in a dog’s water,” the taller one observed. He had a long, narrow face, full of sorrow, and thin brown hair that clung to the shape of his head, as if afraid of blowing away in a high wind.
“For an extra nickel,” Rowdy said, “you can have your own.”
The short man took a step toward Rowdy, and it was the tall one who reached out an arm and stopped him. “Me and Willie, here, we don’t want no trouble. We’re just lookin’ for hot water and women.”
Willie subsided, but he didn’t look too happy about it. Rowdy reckoned he’d have shot Pardner just for being there, if he’d had his druthers. Fortunately for him, his sidekick had interceded before it would have been necessary to put a bullet through his heart.
Pardner, who looked a sight with his fur all ruffled up and standing upright on his hide like quills on a porcupine, from the rubdown with a burlap sack, growled low and in earnest.
Yes, sir, Rowdy thought, looking down at him, he did want barbering.
“That dog bite?” Willie asked. A muscle twitched in the beard stubble along his right cheek. He carried himself like a man of little consequence determined to give another kind of impression.
“Only if provoked,” Rowdy answered mildly, slipping the .44 back into its holster. He was hungry, but he tarried, for it was his habit to take careful note of everyone he encountered, be they friend or foe. Pappy had taught him that, and it had proved a useful skill.
Just then Jolene trundled in with the littlest Chinaman Rowdy had ever seen trotting behind her. The sight put him in mind of a loaded barge cutting through the muddy Mississippi with a rowboat bobbing in its wake.
“Ten cents if you want clean water,” Jolene told the new arrivals, clearly relishing the prospect of ready commerce. “A nickel if you don’t mind secondhand.”
Willie and the sidekick didn’t look as though they were in a position to be too picky.
“A dime for a tub of hot water?” Willie demanded, aggrieved. “It’s plain robbery.”
The tall man took a tobacco sack from the inside pocket of his coat and dumped a pile of change into a palm. After counting out the coins carefully, he handed them over to Jolene.
“We’ll have the best of your services,” he said formally.
The Chinaman, strong for his size, nodded at a go-ahead from Jolene and turned Pardner’s tub over onto its side, so the water poured down through the gaps between the floorboards.
“I ain’t bathin’ in the same tub as no dog, Harlan,” Willie told his friend stoutly.
Harlan sighed. “Willie, sometimes you are a trial to my spirit,” he said. “That mutt was probably cleaner than you are before he even set foot in this place.”
“Them steaks are about ready,” Jolene informed Rowdy, giving Pardner a dark assessment. “I don’t reckon the dog could eat out back, instead of in my dining room?”
“You ‘don’t reckon’ right,” Rowdy said pleasantly. With cordial nods to Harlan and Willie, he made for the bathhouse door, Pardner right on his heels.
* * *
LARK MORGAN WATCHED slantwise from an upstairs window of Mrs. Porter’s Rooming House as the stranger strode across the road from Jolene Bell’s establishment to the barbershop, the dog walking close by his side.
The man wore a trail coat that could have used a good shaking out, and his hair, long enough to curl at the back of his collar, gleamed pale gold in the afternoon sunlight. His hat was battered, but of good quality, and the same could be said of his boots. While not necessarily a person of means, he was no ordinary saddle bum, either.
And that worried Lark more than anything else—except maybe the bulge low on his left hip, indicating that he was wearing a sidearm.
She frowned. Drew back from the window when the stranger suddenly turned, his gaze slicing to the very window she was peering out of, as surely as if he’d felt her watching him. Her heart rose into her throat and fluttered there.
A hand coming to rest on her arm made her start.
Ellie Lou Porter, her landlady, stepped back, her eyes wide. Mrs. Porter was a doelike creature, tiny and frail and painfully plain. Behind that unremarkable face, however, lurked a shrewd and very busy brain.
“I’m so sorry, Lark,” Mrs. Porter said, watching through the window as the stranger finally turned away and stepped into the barbershop, taking the dog with him. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Lark willed her heart to settle back into its ordinary place and beat properly. “You didn’t,” she lied. “I was just—distracted, and you caught me off guard.”
Mrs. Porter smiled knowingly. There wasn’t much that went on in or around Stone Creek, Lark had quickly learned, that escaped the woman’s scrutiny. “His name is Rowdy Rhodes,” she said, evidently speaking of the stranger who had just entered the barbershop. “As you may know, my cook, Mai Lee, is married to Jolene’s houseboy, and she carries a tale readily enough.” She paused, shuddering, though whether over Jolene or the houseboy, Lark had no way of knowing. “It’s got to be an alias, of course,” Mrs. Porter finished.
Lark was not reassured. If it hadn’t been against her better judgment, she’d have gone right down to the barbershop, a place where women were no more welcome than in her former husband’s gentleman’s club in Denver, and demanded that the stranger explain himself and his presence in her hiding place.
“Do you think he’s a gunslinger?” she asked, trying to sound merely interested. In her mind she was already packing her things, preparing to catch the first stagecoach out of Stone Creek, heading anywhere. Fast.
“Could be,” Mrs. Porter said thoughtfully. “Or he might be a lawman.”
“He’s probably just passing through.”
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Porter replied, her face draped in the patterned shadow of the lace curtains covering the hallway window.
“What makes you say that?” Lark wanted to know.
Mrs. Porter smiled. “It’s just a feeling I have,” she said. “Whoever he is, he’s got business around here. He moves like a man with a purpose he means to accomplish.”
Lark was further discomforted. She barely knew her landlady, but she’d ascertained at their first meeting that Mrs. Porter was alarmingly perceptive. Although the other woman hadn’t actually contradicted Lark’s well-rehearsed story that she was a maiden schoolteacher, she’d taken pointed notice of her new boarder’s velvet traveling suit, Parisian hat, costly trunk and matching reticules.
Stupid, Lark thought, remembering the day, a little over three months before, when she’d presented herself at Mrs. Porter’s door and inquired after a room. I should have worn calico, or bombazine.
Now, in light of the stranger’s arrival, she had more to worry about than her wardrobe, plainly more suited to the wife of a rich and powerful man than an underpaid schoolmarm. What if Autry had found her, at long last? What if he’d sent Rowdy Rhodes, or whoever he was, to drag her back to Denver or, worse yet, simply kill her?
Lark suppressed a shudder. Autry’s reach was long, and so was his memory. He was a man of savage pride, and he wouldn’t soon forget the humiliation she’d dealt him by the almost-unheard-of act of filing for a divorce. Denver society was probably still twittering over the scandal.
“Come downstairs, dear,” Mrs. Porter said, with unexpected gentleness. “I’ll brew us a nice pot of tea, and we’ll chat.”
Lark wanted to refuse the invitation—wished she’d said right away that she needed to work out lesson plans for the coming week, or shop for toiletries at the mercantile, or run some other Saturday errand, but she hadn’t. And she’d surely aroused Mrs. Porter’s assiduous curiosity by jumping at the touch of her hand.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling determinedly and under no illusion that Mrs. Porter wanted to “chat.” Lark knew she was a puzzle to her landlady, one the woman meant to solve. “That would be very nice. If I could just freshen up a little—”
Mrs. Porter nodded her acquiescence, returned Lark’s smile and descended the back stairway, into the kitchen.
Lark hurried into her room, shut the door and leaned against it, staring at her own reflection in the bureau mirror directly opposite. She’d dyed her fair hair a dark shade of chestnut, in an effort to disguise herself, but her brown eyes, once her greatest vanity, were her most distinguishing feature, and there had, of course, been nothing she could do about them. She supposed she might have purchased dark glasses and pretended to be blind, but her funds had been nearly exhausted by the time she reached Stone Creek, and she’d needed immediate employment. Even in an isolated place like that one, where teachers were hard to come by, nobody would have hired someone with such a hindrance and, besides, the illusion of blindness would have been almost impossible to sustain.
Keeping her hair dyed was hard enough.
She laid a hand to her bosom and forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. She mustn’t panic. Most likely Mr. Rhodes was merely passing through, whatever Mrs. Porter’s speculations to the contrary.
Lark smoothed her crisp black skirt, straightened the cameo at the throat of her white shirtwaist, patted her hair. She’d been reckless, keeping the clothes from her old life, and she should have changed her first name, too, as well as her last. Autry had taken everything else from her—her pride, her self-respect, her dignity. She’d fled with her favorite gowns, two weeks’ allowance, and the money he kept hidden in the humidor in his study.
A few garments and the name her mother had given her at birth seemed little enough to claim as her own.
After steadying herself as best she could, Lark walked decorously to the top of the stairs, glided down them and swept into Mrs. Porter’s spacious, homey kitchen. The huge black cookstove, with its shining chrome trim, radiated warmth, and the delicious scent of brewing tea filled the room.
“I’ve set out a plate of my lemon tarts,” Mrs. Porter said, with a nod to the offering in the center of the round oak table. “Mr. Porter loved them, you know.” She paused, sighed sadly. “Dear Mr. Porter.”
Lark assumed Mr. Porter was deceased, since Mrs. Porter always referred to him in the past tense, but there were signs of his presence all over the house. His hat still hung on a brass hook in the front entryway, for instance, and books with his name inscribed on the flyleaf lay open, here and there, as though he’d just been perusing them. A half-smoked cigar lay in the ashtray on his desk in the study, and his birthday—January 28—was noted on the wall calendar next to the pantry door.
Not quite daring to inquire after him, Lark simply nodded and helped herself to one of the tarts.
“Sit down and make yourself comfortable, dear,” Mrs. Porter urged. “One shouldn’t eat standing up. It’s bad for the digestion.”
Circumspectly Lark took a chair, careful to avoid Mr. Porter’s. Roomers came and went, but, as if by tacit agreement, no one ever sat in Mr. Porter’s place. At present, Lark was the only permanent boarder, although a traveling dry goods salesman occasionally took the large room adjoining the kitchen.
Secretly Lark coveted that room, because it had its own entrance, a brick fireplace, a desk and a small sitting area, but the price of it was beyond her means. Ironic, she reflected, since her weekly budget for freshly cut flowers to grace her dining room table back in Denver would have covered a month’s rent, with money to spare.
“Maybe he’s come to work on the railroad,” Mrs. Porter speculated suddenly.
Lark hoped the look on her face would pass for puzzlement, though it was actually apprehension. Had she realized the railroad was coming to Stone Creek, she wouldn’t even have gotten off the stagecoach at all, let alone taken a room and applied for the recently vacated teaching position at the town’s primitive little school. Indeed, she’d been settled in before she’d known, with the last of her funds spent to secure living quarters.
Mrs. Porter smiled brightly, setting two bone china teacups on the table with a merry little clatter. “I’m referring to Rowdy Rhodes, of course,” she explained, her tone cheerful, her eyes alert. “Mr. Porter always complained that I just say things, out of the clear blue sky, with no sort of preamble whatsoever.” She paused, frowning a little. “Yes, I’m sure he’s here to help build the railroad.”
“It’s quite all right,” Lark said. Everyone else in Stone Creek was excited at the prospect of train tracks and a depot linking them to such far-flung places as Flagstaff and Phoenix; the economic benefits were considerable. To Lark, however, the coming of the railroad meant disaster, because Autry owned it. By spring, the countryside would be crawling with his minions and henchmen—he might even show up himself.
Just the thought of that made her shiver.
Mrs. Porter sat down, then poured tea from the lovely pot, which matched the cups and saucers. Looking at the delicate objects, Lark was seized by a sudden and poignant yearning for the life she’d left behind. Unfortunately, that life had included Autry Whitman, and had therefore been untenable.
“How are things going at school?” Mrs. Porter asked companionably, but the questions she really wanted to ask were visible in her eyes.
Who are you, really?
Where did you come from?
And why are you so frightened all the time?
A part of Lark would have loved to answer those questions with stark honesty. Her secrets were a very heavy burden indeed, and Mrs. Porter, while an obvious gossip, was a friendly woman with motherly ways.
“Little Lydia Fairmont is finally learning to write her letters properly,” Lark said, glad of the change of subject. “She’s a bright child, but she has a great deal of trouble with penmanship.”
Mrs. Porter sighed and stared into her teacup. “Mr. Porter loved to read,” she said. “And he wrote a very fine hand. Copperplate, you know. Quite elegant.”
“I’m sure he did,” Lark replied, saddened. Then, tentatively, she ventured, “You must miss him very much.”
Mrs. Porter’s spine straightened. “He’s gone,” she said, almost tersely, “and that’s the end of it.”
Feeling put in her place, Lark busied herself stirring more milk into her tea. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
Mrs. Porter patted her hand, her touch light and cool. The house was large, and it was cold, except for the kitchen, since the fireplaces in the parlor and dining room were never lit. When she wasn’t at school, where there was a potbelly stove and plenty of wood, Lark either shivered in her room, bundled in a quilt or read at the table where she was sitting now.
There had been no snow since before Christmas, but the weather was bitter, just the same. Would the winter never end? Though spring would surely bring trouble, Lark longed for it with helpless desperation.
“No need to apologize, dear,” Mrs. Porter said graciously. “Have another lemon tart.”
Lark, who had been hungry ever since she’d fled Denver, did not hesitate to accept the offered refreshment.
The back door opened, and Mai Lee, Mrs. Porter’s cook, dashed in, a shawl pulled tightly around her head and shoulders. She carried a grocery basket over one arm, with a plucked chicken inside, its head lolling over one side.
“Make supper, chop-chop,” Mai Lee said.
“Have some tea first,” Mrs. Porter told the woman kindly. “You look chilled to the bone.”
“No, no,” Mai Lee answered, hanging up her shawl and setting the basket decisively on the worktable next to the stove. “Stand here. Be warm. Cook chicken.”
Mrs. Porter rose from her chair, fetched another china cup and saucer from the breakfront, with its curvy glass doors, and poured tea, adding generous portions of sugar and milk. “Drink this,” she told Mai Lee, “or you’ll catch your death.”
Dutifully Mai Lee accepted the tea, only to set it aside and grab the dead chicken by its neck. “I tell man at mercantile, chop off head,” she announced. “But he no do.” Her eyes glowed with excitement. “On way there, I see Rowdy Rhodes in barbershop. He getting haircut. Dog getting haircut, too. Horse at livery stable, plenty of grain.”
Mrs. Porter sat down again, poured herself more tea and took a tart, nibbling delicately at the edge. “Mai Lee,” she said appreciatively, “it will be the Lord’s own wonder if I don’t lose you to the newspaper one of these days. You’d be a very good reporter.”
“I no read or write,” Mai Lee lamented good-naturedly, spreading her hands wide for emphasis before slamming the chicken down on the chopping board to whack off its head with one sure stroke of the butcher knife. “Cannot be reporter.”
“How did you know Mr. Rhodes’s horse was at the livery stable, let alone how much grain it receives?” Mrs. Porter asked, both amused and avidly curious.
Mai Lee frowned as she worked her way through the intricacies of the question, put to her in a language that was not her own. “I hear man talking outside barbershop,” she said finally. “He work at stable.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Porter said. “What else did you learn about Mr. Rhodes?”
Mai Lee giggled. She might have been sixteen—or sixty. Lark couldn’t tell by her appearance, and it was the same with her husband, who joined her each night, late, to share a narrow bed in the nook beneath the main staircase, and was invariably gone by daylight. Both of them were ageless.
From the limited amount of information she’d been able to gather, Lark surmised that the couple was saving practically every cent they earned to buy a little plot of land and raise vegetables for sale to the growing community.
“He handsome,” Mai Lee confided, when she’d recovered from her girlish mirth. “Eyes blue, like sky. Hair golden. Smile—” here, she laid a hand to her flat little chest “—make knees bend.”
“He smiled at you?” Lark asked, and could have chewed up her tongue and swallowed it for revealing any interest at all.
Mrs. Porter looked at her, clearly intrigued.
Mai Lee began hacking the chicken into pieces and nodded. “Through window of barbershop. I look. He wink at me.” She giggled again. “Not tell husband.”
The pit of Lark’s stomach did a peculiar little flip. She’d seen Mr. Rhodes only from a distance; he might have been handsome, as Mai Lee claimed, or ugly as the floor of a henhouse. And what did she care, either way, if he winked at women?
It only went to prove he was a rounder and a rascal.
With luck, he’d move on, and she’d never have to make his acquaintance at all.
Unless, of course, Autry had paid him to track her down.
Suddenly Lark was as cold as if she’d been sitting outside, under a bare-limbed oak tree, instead of smack in the middle of Mrs. Porter’s cozy kitchen.
Mai Lee proceeded to build up the fire in the cookstove, then placed a skillet on top and lobbed in a spoonful of lard. She peeled potatoes while the pan heated, a model of brisk efficiency, and politely spurned Lark’s offer to help.
Mrs. Porter sat in companionable silence, sipping her tea and flipping through that week’s copy of the Stone Creek Courier. Lark set the table for three, while the aroma of frying chicken filled the kitchen. Steam veiled the windows.
Lark picked up a book, a favorite she’d owned since childhood, and buried herself in the story. She’d read it countless times, but she never tired of the tale, in which a young woman, fallen upon hard and grievous times, offered herself up as a mail-order bride, married a taciturn farmer, slowly won his heart and bore his children.
The knock at the back door brought her sharply back to ordinary reality.
“Now who could that be?” Mrs. Porter mused, moving to answer.
A blast of frigid air rushed into the room.
And there in the open doorway stood Rowdy Rhodes, in his long, black coat, freshly shaven and barbered, holding his hat in one hand. Mai Lee had been right about his blue eyes and his smile.
Lark was glad she was sitting down.
“I heard you might have rooms to let,” he said, and though he was addressing Mrs. Porter, his gaze strayed immediately to Lark. A slight frown creased the space between his brows. “Of course, you’d have to let my dog stay, too.”
The yellow hound ambled past him as if it had lived in that house forever, sniffed the air, which was redolent with frying chicken, and marched himself over to the stove, where he lay down with a weary, grateful sigh.
Mrs. Porter, Lark thought, with frantic relief, was a fastidious housekeeper, and she would never allow a dog. She would surely turn Mr. Rhodes away.
“It’s two dollars a week,” Mrs. Porter said instead, casting a glance back at Lark. “Normal price is $1.50, but, with the dog—”
Rhodes smiled again, once he’d shifted his attention back to the landlady. “Sounds fair,” he said. “Mr. Sam O’Ballivan will vouch for me, if there’s any question of my character.”
“Come in,” Mrs. Porter fussed, fond as a mother welcoming home a prodigal son, heretofore despaired of. “Supper’s just about ready.”
No, Lark thought desperately.
The dog sighed again, very contentedly, and closed its eyes.
Mai Lee stepped over the animal to turn the chicken with a meat fork and then poke at the potatoes boiling in a kettle. She kept stealing glances at Rhodes.
“I’ll show you your room and get a fire going in there,” Mrs. Porter said, only then closing the door against the bite of a winter evening. “Land sakes, it’s been cold lately. I do hope you haven’t traveled far in this weather.”
Lark stood up, meaning to express vigorous dissent, and sat down again when words failed her.
Mr. Rhodes, who had yet to extend the courtesy of offering his name, noted the standing and sitting, and responded with a slight and crooked grin.
The pit of Lark’s stomach fluttered.
Mrs. Porter led the new boarder straight to the room at the back, with its fireplace and outside door and lovely writing desk. The dog got up and lumbered after them.
For a moment, Lark was so stricken by jealousy that she forgot she might be in grave peril. Then, her native practicality emerged. Even presuming Mr. Rhodes was not in Autry’s employ, he was a stranger, and he carried a gun. He could murder them all in their beds.
Mai Lee set another place at the table.
Voices sounded from the next room. Lark discerned that Mrs. Porter had undertaken to lay a fire, and Mr. Rhodes had promptly assumed the task.
Lark stood up, intending to dash upstairs and lock herself in her room until she had a chance to speak privately with Mrs. Porter, but Rhodes reappeared before she could make another move. She dropped back into her chair and was treated to a second look of amusement from the lodger.
Indignant color surged into Lark’s face.
Mrs. Porter prattled like a smitten schoolgirl, offering Mr. Rhodes a tart and running on about how it was good to have a man in the house again, what with poor, dear Mr. Porter gone and all. Why, the world was going straight to Hades, if he’d pardon her language, and on a greased track, too.
Rhodes crossed to the table, took one of the tarts and bit into it, studying Lark with his summer-blue eyes as he chewed. He’d left his coat behind in his room, and the gun belt with it, but Lark was scarcely comforted.
He could be a paid assassin.
He could be an outlaw, or a bank robber.
And whatever his name was, Lark would have bet a year’s salary it wasn’t Rowdy Rhodes.
2
PAYTON YARBRO—Jack Payton to anybody who asked—sat with one booted foot braced against a windowsill, in the apartment back of Ruby’s Saloon and Poker House in Flagstaff, smoking a cheroot and pondering the sorry state of the train robbing business in general and his feckless sons in particular.
He had six of them, at least that he knew of. Wyatt was the eldest—he’d be thirty-five on his next birthday, sometime in April, though Payton was damned if he could recall the exact date. Then came Nicholas, followed in short order by Ethan and Levi, who were twins, then Robert and, like a caboose, young Gideon, who’d just turned sixteen. He’d come along late, like an afterthought, and Miranda had died giving him life.
Payton tried not to hold it against the boy—it purely wasn’t his fault—but sometimes, when a melancholy mood struck, he couldn’t help it.
She’d driven her ducks to a poor pond marrying up with Payton Yarbro, Miranda had. Five of her sons were wanted by the law, and the sixth, Gideon, was likely to get himself into trouble first chance he got. Like as not, that opportunity wouldn’t be long in coming, for Gideon, like his brothers, was a spirited lad, half again too smart for his own good, hotheaded and reckless. By necessity the boy already lived, without knowing, under a partial alias—went by the surname of Payton.
Robert—he’d been Miranda’s favorite, and she’d called him Rob, after some swashbuckling fellow in a book—used his nickname and a moniker meant to stick in Payton’s craw.
There was no telling what the others had come to by now.
Maybe Miranda’s prayers had been answered, and they’d all married and settled down to live upstanding, law-abiding lives.
Of course, the odds were better that they’d been hanged or gotten themselves killed in a gunfight over a woman or a game of cards, out behind some whiskey palace.
Payton sighed. At least he knew where Gideon was—sulking in the saloon, where Ruby had set him the task of raking the sawdust clean of cigar butts, peanut shells and spittle. Wyatt and the others, well, if they were alive at all, could be just about anyplace. Scattered to the winds, his boys.
Miranda, God rest her valiant soul, was probably rolling over in her grave. She’d been a good, churchgoing woman, hardworking and faithful—at least, so far as Payton knew—with a Bible verse at the ready to suit just about any situation. She’d never given up hope that her sons would find the straight-and-narrow path and follow it, despite all contradictory evidence.
She’d called it faith.
Payton called it foolish sentiment.
How she’d ever fallen in love with and married the likes of him—and borne him six sons into the bargain—was a mystery to be solved by better minds than his.
She’d stayed with him, too, Miranda had, even with another man ready to offer for her, if she’d been free. She’d died wearing his narrow gold wedding band and honoring the vows they’d made in front of a circuit preacher nine months and five minutes before Wyatt had come along.
Pity he hadn’t lived up to her example.
He shifted in his chair, wished he could shut the window against the bitter chill of that Sunday afternoon, shut his mind against his thoughts, too, but Ruby was a stickler for fresh air, and the memories clung to him like stall muck to a boot heel.
Ruby didn’t countenance pipes, cigars or cheroots in her private quarters, for all that the saloon and card room were always roiling with a blue-gray cloud of tobacco smoke. She was a complex woman, Ruby—she’d joined a brothel when she was Gideon’s age, and now she was a former madam, retaining an interest in the sinful enterprises of gambling and the purveyance of strong spirits.
For all her hard history, she was still beautiful and, ironic as it seemed, as fine a woman, in her own way, as Miranda Wyatt Yarbro had ever been.
Both of them had had the remarkable misfortune of crossing paths with him. He and Ruby had never married, but she’d given him a child, too. Ten years back, she’d been delivered of a daughter. Little Rose.
Payton’s throat tightened at the recollection of the child. Redheaded, like her mother, she’d been smart and energetic and sweet, too, for all her bent to mischief. She’d been run down by a wagon when she was just four, chasing a kitten into the street out in front of the saloon, and they’d had to bury her outside the churchyard fence, in unsanctified ground.
Innocent as the flower she was named for, Rose had, after all, been a whore’s daughter.
Behind him the door creaked open. Instinctively Payton stiffened and went for his gun, though a part of him knew who was there. In the end, he didn’t draw.
“I told you not to smoke in here, Jack Payton,” Ruby said. “It makes the place smell like—”
He flipped the cheroot out through the window, stood and shoved down the sash. Turned, grinning, to face the second of the two women he’d loved in his fifty-seven years of life. “Like a saloon?” he finished for her.
She pulled a face. “Don’t go wasting your charming smiles on me,” she warned. “I see right through them. And besides, I know full well you’ll light up again, as soon as I turn my back.”
Come evening, Ruby would be resplendent in one of her trademark silk gowns, all of them some shade of crimson or scarlet. She’d paint up her face and deck herself out in jewels she’d earned the hard way. For now, though, she wore practical calico, and around her scrubbed face her dark auburn hair billowed, soft and fragrant with the lilac water she always brushed through it before pinning it up in the morning.
Looking at her, Payton felt a familiar pinch in some deep, unexplored region of his heart. She deserved a better man than he was, just as Miranda had.
“There’s a young fella out front, asking after you,” Ruby said.
Payton raised an eyebrow, instantly wary. “He didn’t offer his name?”
“Didn’t have to,” Ruby answered, with a slight sigh. “He’s one of your boys. I knew that by looking at him.”
Something quickened inside Payton, a combination of hope and alarm. “I reckon you’d better send him in,” he said.
Ruby nodded, but she looked thoughtful. “How do you suppose he knew where to find you, Jack?”
Payton spread his hands. “No idea,” he answered, wondering which one of his elder sons was about to walk through that doorway. “Did Gideon see him?”
“No,” Ruby replied, still frowning. “I sent him to fetch the mail a little while ago. I could say you’re not here—”
Payton shook his head. “No,” he said.
Ruby took a last long, worried look at him, then opened the door and went out, closing it crisply behind her.
Payton drew a deep breath, let it out slow and easy, and straightened his string tie. Tugged at the bottom of his gray silk vest, too.
There was a light rap at the door, and then it swung inward on its hinges.
Payton squared his shoulders, regretted that he hadn’t taken the time to throw back a slug of whiskey, just to steady himself.
“Well, Rob,” he said, when his next-youngest son stood on the threshold, “it’s good to see you again.”
* * *
“I’LL JUST BET IT IS,” Rowdy replied dryly, setting his hat aside on a table just inside the room. “It’s been a few years.” He’d left Pardner back in Stone Creek, in Mrs. Porter’s care, and bought new clothes for the occasion.
Fact was, though, he’d looked forward to several funerals more than he had to this meeting.
“Come in and sit down,” Payton Yarbro said, as if he meant it. But his ice-blue eyes were shrewd and watchful, and a muscle ticked in his jaw, under the stubble of a new beard. He still cut a fine figure, Pa did. He must have been pushing sixty, but he looked younger, despite the gray in his hair and the meager promise of an expanding middle.
And he still wore a .45 on his right hip.
Rowdy hesitated a moment, then steeled himself and walked full into the room, waited until his pa sat down in one of the chairs facing the cold brick fireplace before taking the other.
“What are you doing in this part of the country?” Payton asked, settling back and resting the side of one foot on the opposite knee. “Last I knew, there was a price on your head. You still wanted?”
“Still wanted,” Rowdy said. “Thanks to you.”
“I didn’t force you to help rob those trains,” the old man argued, taking a cheroot from a silver box on a side table, clamping it between his teeth and striking a match on the sole of his boot to light it. “You were hell-bent to join up, as I recall.”
Rowdy didn’t reply.
“How’d you find me?” Payton wanted to know, and though he put the question casually, the look in his eyes belied his easy tone. Shaking out the match, he leaned forward to toss it into the grate.
“I had a letter from Wyatt while I was still down in Haven. That’s—”
“I know where Haven is,” Payton said, sounding exasperated. “Little shit hole of a place just this side of the Mexican border. And what the hell was Wyatt thinking, to put news like that down on paper for anybody to see?”
“He didn’t use your real name, nor his. And he wrote to say he was in prison. He mentioned that someone he knew had seen you in Flagstaff, running a faro table at Ruby’s Saloon.” Rowdy paused, solemn at the mention of Wyatt. He’d been the brother Rowdy’d looked up to, the one he’d wanted to be like. “The letter must have been forwarded four or five times before it caught up to me.”
“What were you doing in Haven?”
“Passing through,” Rowdy said, reining in his temper. Whenever he got within shouting distance of his pa, he always wanted to fight.
“Wyatt’s in prison?”
“Last I heard,” Rowdy replied. “The letter was dated two years back, so he might be out by now.”
“Or dead,” Payton mused, and he had the decency to look troubled by the possibility, though he probably didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to Wyatt or any of the rest of them. He’d never cared much about anybody but himself.
“If Wyatt was dead,” Rowdy said evenly, “I’d know it.”
“How?”
Rowdy’s jaw was clenched. He released it by conscious effort. “I just would.”
“You ever hear from Nick or Levi or Ethan?”
“No,” Rowdy said. “I guess Gideon’s still at home.” He looked around. “If you can call the back end of a brothel home,” he added.
“Don’t you get smart with me, boy,” Payton warned. “I can still whup you and three others like you without breaking a sweat. Anyhow, this ain’t a brothel. Ruby and me, we’re honest saloonkeepers.”
An involuntary grin tilted one side of Rowdy’s mouth. “Whatever you say, old man.”
“You look fit,” Payton allowed, though grudgingly. He was a stubborn old rooster, and sparing with his approval. “You ever get hitched? Sire me a grandbaby or two?”
Rowdy wanted to avert his eyes, but he didn’t. He waited a moment or two, letting his silence serve as all the answer he was willing to give, then countered with a question of his own. “You still robbing trains, Pappy?”
Payton hated to be called Pappy, which was why Rowdy had addressed him that way, but he had to give the old bastard credit for self-control. The only reaction was a reddening above the collar of his tidy white shirt. “Now why would you make a rude inquiry like that?”
Rowdy thought before he spoke, even though he’d planned what he would say all during the two-hour ride over from Stone Creek. He’d left Haven, where he’d drifted into a job as town marshal, for two main reasons—first, because he’d gotten that cryptic telegram from Sam O’Ballivan and Major Blackstone, summoning him north for a meeting in the lobby of the Territorial Hotel, and second, because a Wanted poster had landed on his desk with his real name and description printed on it.
He was taking a chance, continuing his acquaintance with O’Ballivan. Rowdy believed in hiding in plain sight, moving on when his feet itched, with most folks none the wiser for knowing him.
Sam O’Ballivan wasn’t most folks.
“I need to know if you’re still robbing trains, Pa,” Rowdy reiterated. “The railroad’s laying tracks from here to Stone Creek, and then all the way down to Phoenix. I’m hoping it’s a coincidence that you’re here in Flagstaff and two trains have been boarded and looted, not ten miles from here, in the past six months.”
Payton drew on his cheroot and blew a smoke ring. “You find religion or something?” he hedged. “Or maybe you’re just looking to make an extra dollar or two by riding my coattails.”
Rowdy leaned forward in his chair, lowered his voice. “Listen to me, Pa,” he said. “I came to Stone Creek because I was asked to, by two Arizona Rangers. I don’t know for sure what they want with me, but I’ve got a hunch it has to do with the railroad coming in. Most likely the territorial governor is putting some pressure on them to put an end to the robberies. If folks don’t feel it’s safe to settle and do business here, the men back in Washington might not be willing to grant statehood.”
Payton’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed. “What the hell do you care if Arizona ever becomes a state? You’re an outlaw. There’s a price on your head, Rob. You can’t afford to cozy up with rangers!”
“If Sam O’Ballivan had me figured for an outlaw, he’d have tried to arrest me by now.”
Payton went pale as limestone in a creek-bed. “Sam O’Ballivan?”
“I see you know him,” Rowdy observed.
“Hell, everybody in the territory knows him!”
“He’s a good man,” Rowdy said.
“He’s a ranger,” Payton returned. His hands tightened like talons on the arms of his chair, and he looked as though he might bolt out of it, crash through the window and hit the ground running. “First, last and always, Sam O’Ballivan is an Arizona Ranger. You have truck with him, and you’re likely to find yourself dangling at the end of a rope!”
Rowdy looked around, spotted a decanter half-filled with liquor, and got up to pour a dose for the old man.
“Drink this,” he ordered, holding out the squat glass. “And calm down. Otherwise, you’re likely to bust a blood vessel or something.”
Payton clutched the glass, and his hand shook a little as he raised it to his lips, closing his eyes almost reverently, like a man taking a sacrament. He swallowed, shuddered, opened his eyes again.
“You bring the rangers down on me, boy,” Payton said, when he’d recovered enough to speak, “and I’ll die in a jail cell. It’ll be on your head.”
“I came here to warn you,” Rowdy replied, hooking his thumbs under his gun belt. “That’s more than you would have done for me. From here on out, you’re on your own—Pappy.”
With that, Rowdy figured his business was concluded. He turned and made for the door. Took his hat from the fancy three-legged table, held it in one hand.
Payton hoisted himself out of his chair and turned to face Rowdy. “You don’t owe me any favors, boy. I won’t argue that you do. But if you have an honorable bone in your body, you’ll ride out of here and keep on going, without a parting word to Sam O’Ballivan or anybody else.”
Rowdy put his hat on, laid a hand on the fancy glass doorknob. “You’re right, Pa. I don’t owe you any favors. And I’m not going anyplace until I’ve heard Sam out. If you don’t want him coming after you, don’t rob any more trains.”
“I gave that up a long time ago.”
All of a sudden, the backs of Rowdy’s eyes burned, and his throat drew in tight. He didn’t know what he’d expected—it had been five years since he’d ridden with his pa’s gang—but it wasn’t this, whatever this was. “For your sake, I hope that’s the gospel truth. At the same time, your word and two cents would buy me a cheap cigar.”
“I guess we understand each other then.”
Rowdy nodded glumly. “One more thing,” he said, his voice coming out hoarse. He oughtn’t to linger, he knew that, but he did it just the same. “Is Gideon all right?”
“He’s fine.”
“You haven’t brought him into the family business, then?”
“He’s only sixteen, Rob.”
“I was fourteen, the first time I rode with you.”
“I’m a different man than I was then,” Payton said. Now that the whiskey had hit his bloodstream, he was his familiar, cocky self. “Older. Wiser. And one hell of a lot sadder.”
Rowdy didn’t reply to that. He simply nodded, opened the door and went out. He looked neither to the right nor the left as he strode through the saloon beyond. The swinging doors crashed against the outside walls when he struck them hard with the palms of both hands.
* * *
GIDEON PAYTON CROUCHED beside the small grave outside the picket fence surrounding the churchyard. The monument was white marble, the finest to be had, and there were no dates, no Bible verses or lines of mournful poetry—only two plain words, chiseled into Gideon’s heart as well as the stone.
“Our Rose.”
In the ten years since his sister had died, Gideon had visited this spot under the spreading limbs of an oak tree on all but a handful of days. He’d been a child himself when Rose was killed, only six, but the memory was as vivid as the town surrounding him now, the people coming and going in wagons and on horseback out there in the street, the bell tolling in the little steeple of yonder church.
In spring and summer he brought her flowers, usually stolen from someone’s garden. In the fall the leaves of the great oak blanketed the long-since-sunken mound in glorious shades of crimson and russet and yellow and gold. In winter he offered trinkets—a bright bottle cap, a woman’s ear bob found on a sidewalk, a colorful stone from the banks of Oak Creek. Sometimes he read to her out loud from a storybook.
Rose had loved stories, but he hadn’t known how to read yet when she was living.
He supposed he ought to have gotten over the loss of her by now, since he was sixteen and almost a man, but some wounds never heal, no matter what the preachers said.
Today Gideon laid a letter at the base of Rose’s headstone.
“It’s from a college back east,” he told her quietly. “Pa went and signed me up for it.” He paused, frowned. “I don’t even like school that much, but I guess I’m good at it. Pa and Ruby say nothing worthwhile can come of my staying here, once I finish up my lesson-work this spring.”
A flicker of motion at the edge of Gideon’s vision interrupted his speech before he could get to the part that sorrowed him most—he knew he’d have to go, and that would mean he couldn’t pay Rose any visits for a long time.
A rider sat watching him from the road. His horse was a gelded pinto, and his boots were good, probably handmade in Mexico. He wore a hat pulled down low over his brow, and a pistol, butt forward, showed where he’d pushed back one side of his long black coat, so it caught behind the holster.
Gideon took in all those things in the space of an instant, but they weren’t what caught his attention. Something in the stranger’s countenance sent a thrill through Gideon, made him rise slowly to his full height.
The man resettled his hat, briefly revealing a head of straw-colored hair. Then he nudged the horse into motion with the heels of his boots and rode along the length of the picket fence.
“Strange place for a grave,” he said, drawing up close to where Gideon stood. His eyes were almost the same shade of blue as Pa’s were, Gideon noted, and his mouth was like his ma’s had been—still, but ready to smile. Not that Gideon rightly recollected his mother; she’d died when he was born, and he’d only seen one likeness of her, a faded old picture tucked between the pages of a Bible.
Gideon stiffened, gestured toward the cemetery flanking the small church. “Nobody in there’s got a better marker than my sister, Rose,” he told the rider. His heart was beating fast and, cold as it was, sweat tickled the skin between his shoulder blades.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” the stranger said quietly.
Gideon straightened his spine. He wasn’t afraid of the man. Standing on the ground, not sitting a horse, he’d be no taller than Gideon, but he was older, and seasoned, if the easy way he wore his gun was any indication. “I reckon there’s a lot you don’t know about me, mister,” he said, intrigued.
The rider grinned. “I know a little more than you probably think I do,” he said, shifting in the saddle, standing briefly in the stirrups as if to stretch his legs. “Your name is Gideon...Payton. You’re sixteen years old. Ponder it a bit, and you’ll realize that you’ve seen me before.”
That little hesitation before he said “Payton”—what did that mean?
And Gideon did recall a previous encounter, a shadowy glimpse that teased at the edges of his memory but wouldn’t show itself.
“Who are you?” he asked bluntly.
“I call myself Rowdy Rhodes,” the man answered. “And I’m your brother.”
Gideon had known he had brothers, but he hadn’t been able to get much more than that out of his pa. They were all older than he was, but he couldn’t have said how many of them there were, or recited their names with any certainty. Now one of them was sitting right in front of him.
“You call yourself Rowdy Rhodes? If you’re my brother, you ought to be a Payton, not a Rhodes. And what the hell kind of name is Rowdy, anyhow?”
Rhodes chuckled and leaned forward in the saddle, resting one forearm on the pommel. “One that suits me just fine,” he said. “Are you still in school, Gideon?”
Gideon glanced at the letter lying in front of Rose’s gravestone, and wished he hadn’t. Rhodes made him uneasy, with his watchful, knowing eyes, and yet Gideon wanted to know all about him. “I’ll be going away to college, come autumn.” He swallowed. “I mean to be an engineer. Maybe work for the railroad.”
“Now, that’s ironic,” Rhodes said wryly.
Gideon was affronted, though he didn’t know why. Felt like a rooster with its feathers ruffled. “I’m smart,” he said.
“I don’t doubt it,” Rhodes replied. He looked down at Rose’s grave, maybe noticed the letter, and the bottle caps, some of them rusting now, and the ear bobs and bits of frayed ribbon, with all the color weathered out of them. “How come they buried your sister out here, instead of in the churchyard, with the others?”
An old rage, all the worse for being helpless, surged up inside Gideon, stung the back of his throat like gall. “Because Ruby Hollister is her mother,” he said.
Again, Rhodes adjusted his hat. “But not yours.”
Gideon shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. And he waited. If Rhodes was his brother, like he claimed, let him prove it. Let him say Ma’s name.
He did, just as surely as if Gideon had demanded it of him aloud. “Your mother was Miranda Wyatt...Payton.”
There it was again, that little hitch between words, subtle but sharp as a tug on reins already drawn tight.
Gideon wanted to ask about it, but his audacity didn’t stretch quite that far. Rhodes’s manner was kindly enough, yet there was an invisible fence line behind it, enclosing places where it wouldn’t be wise to tread.
“You ever need any help,” Rhodes went on, when Gideon didn’t speak, “you’ll find me boarding at Mrs. Porter’s, over in Stone Creek.”
Gideon nodded. Stone Creek was a fair distance from Flagstaff, and he didn’t own a horse. Still, it was good knowing he could go there and expect some kind of welcome when he arrived.
Rhodes moved to rein his horse away, toward the road.
“Wait!” Gideon heard himself say.
The familiar stranger turned in the saddle, looked down at him.
“How many of you are there? Brothers, I mean?” Gideon blurted.
Rhodes smiled. “Five,” he answered. “Wyatt, Nick, Ethan, Levi and me.”
Gideon drew a step closer. “Are they Paytons?”
The answer was slow in coming. “No,” Rhodes said.
Gideon frowned. It was bad enough that he hadn’t known his own brothers’ Christian names. Now he wasn’t sure he knew who he was, either.
With a nod for a goodbye, Rhodes took to the road headed in the direction of Stone Creek.
Gideon watched him out of sight, half-sick with wondering. Then he bent, picked up the letter from the college in Pennsylvania, the only mail to come that day, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Without a fare-thee-well for Rose, he headed for Ruby’s place.
* * *
THE YELLOW DOG LAY in the doorway to Mr. Rhodes’s quarters as though guarding them, looking utterly bereft.
Lark, alone in the house because Mrs. Porter had gone to an all-day meeting at church and Mai Lee was off somewhere with her husband, Hon Sing, set aside the lesson plans she’d been drawing up, in preparation for the week to come, and regarded the animal with compassionate concern.
“He hasn’t left you—your master, I mean,” she told the dog.
Pardner, muzzle resting on his forepaws, gave a tiny whimper.
“Perhaps you’re hungry,” Lark said, getting up from her chair. Mr. Rhodes had given the creature table scraps the night before, with Mrs. Porter’s blessings, and he’d had leftover pancakes and a scrambled egg for breakfast.
While she certainly didn’t have the run of her landlady’s well-stocked larder, Lark had seen the heel of a ham in the pantry earlier, while seeking the tea canister.
But perhaps Mai Lee was saving the bit of ham for her hardworking husband. For all Lark knew, it might be the only thing Hon Sing had to eat.
No, she couldn’t give such a morsel to a dog.
In the end, she cut a slice of bread and buttered it generously, then tore it into smaller pieces. She was approaching Pardner with this sustenance when the kitchen door suddenly swung open and Mr. Rhodes strode in.
Pardner gave an explosive bark of jubilance and nearly trampled Lark in his rush to greet his master.
Mr. Rhodes bent, ruffled the dog’s ears, spoke gently to him and let him out the back door, following in his wake.
Lark, recognizing a prime opportunity to make herself scarce, stood frozen in the middle of Mrs. Porter’s kitchen floor instead, one hand filled with chunks of buttered bread.
Mrs. Porter returned before Mr. Rhodes reappeared, her cheeks pink from the cold and religious conviction. Beaming, she untied the wide black ribbons of her Sunday bonnet. “You missed an excellent sermon,” she told Lark. “All about the tortures of eternal damnation.”
“Sounds delightful,” Lark said mildly and with no trace of sarcasm, depositing Pardner’s refreshments on a chipped saucer and setting it on the floor. Having lived two years under Autry’s roof, she knew the highways and byways of hell, and had no desire to revisit the subject.
Mrs. Porter removed her woolen cloak and hung it on one of several pegs beside the door. “You really should consider the fate of your immortal soul,” she said.
The door opened again, and Pardner bounded in, his master behind him.
“Wouldn’t you say we should all consider the fate of our immortal souls, Mr. Rhodes?” Mrs. Porter inquired, looking for support.
“Rowdy,” Mr. Rhodes said. He watched Lark as he took off his hat and coat and hung them next to Mrs. Porter’s bonnet and cloak, probably noting the high color that burned in Lark’s cheeks.
His perusal made her uncomfortable, and yet she could not look away.
“Yes, indeed,” he told Mrs. Porter, in belated answer to her question. “I’ve run afoul of the devil myself, a time or two.”
If Lark had said such an outrageous thing, Mrs. Porter would have taken her to task for flippancy. Because Mr. Rhodes—Rowdy—had been the one to say it, she simply twittered.
It was galling, Lark thought, the way some women pandered to men—especially attractive ones, like the new boarder.
“You’re personally acquainted with the devil, Mr. Rhodes?” Lark asked archly, when Mrs. Porter went into the pantry for the makings of supper.
“He’s my pa,” Rowdy answered.
3
ROWDY RARELY LOOKED at Lark Morgan during the Sunday supper of hash, deftly made by Mrs. Porter since it was Mai Lee’s night off, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of her.
He should have been thinking about his pa or about Gideon or about the meeting with Sam O’Ballivan and Major Blackstone coming up the next morning.
Instead the mysterious woman sitting directly across the table from him, intermittently pushing her food around on her plate with the tines of her fork and eating as though she was half-starved, filled his mind.
She hadn’t told him anything about herself. What Rowdy knew, he’d gleaned from Mrs. Porter’s eager chatter.
Lark was a schoolteacher, never married, popular with her students.
She’d been in Stone Creek for three months, during which time she’d never sent or received a letter or a telegram, as far as Mrs. Porter could determine. And Mrs. Porter, Rowdy reckoned, could determine plenty.
Lark Morgan’s clothes gave the lie to a part of her story—they were costly, beyond the means of any schoolmarm Rowdy had ever heard of. He wasn’t convinced, either, that she’d never been married; there was a worldliness about her, as though she’d seen the seamy side of life, but an innocence, too. She’d been a witness to sin, he would have bet, but somehow she’d managed to hold her expensive skirts aside to avoid stepping in it.
Mentally Rowdy cataloged his other observations.
She’d dyed her hair—there was a slight dusting of gold at the roots.
Her dark eyes were luminous with secrets.
She was unquestionably brave.
And she was just as surely afraid. Even terrified at times.
He’d joshed her a little earlier, claiming the devil was his pa, and she’d flinched before she caught herself.
Could be she was a preacher’s daughter, and the devil was serious business to her. Some folks, Rowdy reckoned, paid so much mind to old Scratch and his doings that they never got past a nodding acquaintance with God.
Mrs. Porter finished her meal, setting her plate on the floor so Pardner could have at the leftovers, and set about brewing up a pot of coffee. A lot of people didn’t drink the stuff at night—said it kept them awake—but Rowdy thrived on it. Could consume a pot on his own and sleep like a pure-hearted saint until the dawn light pried at his eyelids.
Lark hesitated, then took a second helping of hash. She was a small thing, with a womanly shape, but Rowdy had seen ranch hands with a lesser appetite. He wondered what kind of hole she was trying to fill up with all that food.
His own hunger appeased, he excused himself from the table, noting the look of relief that flickered briefly in Lark’s eyes, and scraped what was left of his supper onto Pardner’s plate. When he returned to his chair, the pretty schoolmarm was clearly startled, bristling a little.
“I’ll clear away the dishes,” Rowdy said to Mrs. Porter, once she’d gotten the coffee started and showed signs of lingering to fuss and fiddle.
Mrs. Porter looked uncertain.
“It was a fine supper,” Rowdy told her. “And I’m obliged for it.”
The landlady’s eyes shone with pleasure. “I am a little weary,” she confessed girlishly, sparing nary a glance for Lark, who seemed torn between tarrying and rushing headlong for the back stairs. “Perhaps I shall retire a little early, leave you and Miss Morgan to get acquainted. Mai Lee and the mister ought to be home soon. I always leave the back door unlocked for them.”
Lark rankled visibly at the prospect of being alone with him, but she didn’t rise from the table. She’d put down her fork, and her hands were out of sight. Rowdy was pretty sure, from the tense set of her shoulders, that she was gripping the sides of her chair with all ten fingers.
Rowdy stood, out of deference to the older woman. “A good night to you, Mrs. Porter,” he said, gravely polite. “I’ll wait up for Mai Lee and her man and see that the door is locked before I turn in.”
Mrs. Porter nodded, flustered, mumbled a good-evening to Lark, and departed, pausing once on the stairs to look back, naked curiosity glittering in her eyes. Like as not, she’d wait in the upper hallway for a spell, eavesdropping.
Rowdy smiled at the idea. Sat down again.
Lark stared into her plate.
“I guess I’ll take Pardner out for a walk,” Rowdy said. “Maybe you’d do me the kindness of keeping us company, Miss Morgan?”
Lark’s gaze flew to his face. She bit her lower lip, then nodded reluctantly and got to her feet. He’d been right to suppose there was something she was itching to find out, but it was clearly a private matter, and she knew as well as he did that Mrs. Porter had an ear bent in their direction.
Together they cleared the table, setting the dishes and silverware in the cast-iron sink. Rowdy pushed the coffeepot to the back of the stove, so it wouldn’t boil over while they were out, and watched out of the corner of his eye as Lark took a cloak from the peg by the door and draped it around her shoulders. Pardner, eager for an outing, dashed from Rowdy to Lark to the door, exuberant at his good fortune.
Lark smiled and leaned to give the dog’s head a tentative pat.
Something stirred in Rowdy at the sight.
“Does he have a leash?” Lark asked, as Rowdy crossed the room to stand as close to her as convention allowed, donning his own hat and coat.
He smiled. A leash? She was from a city, then, and probably a large one, where respectable folks didn’t allow their dogs to run loose. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Pardner sticks pretty close to me, wherever we go. Wouldn’t even chase a rabbit unless I gave him leave, and I never have.”
Rowdy opened the door, braced himself against the chill of the night air, and went out first, so if there was trouble, he’d be a barrier between it and Lark Morgan.
Pardner slipped past them both but waited in the yard, turning in a circle or two in his impatience to be gone, until they caught up.
“Your name isn’t Rowdy Rhodes,” Lark said, in a rush of whispered words, the moment they all reached the wooden sidewalk.
Pardner proceeded to lift his leg against a lamppost up ahead, while Rowdy adjusted his hat. “And yours isn’t Lark Morgan,” he replied easily.
Lark reddened slightly under her high cheekbones. Lord, she was a beauty. Wasted as a small-town schoolmarm. She ought to be the queen of some country, he reckoned, or appear on a stage. “Lark is my name,” she argued.
“Maybe so,” he answered. “But ‘Morgan’ isn’t. You’re running from something—or somebody—aren’t you?”
She hesitated just long enough to convince Rowdy that his hunch was correct. “Why are you here, Mr. Rhodes?” she asked. “What brings you to a place like Stone Creek?”
“Business,” he said.
She stopped, right in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Rowdy to stop, too, and look back at her. “Am I that business, Mr. Rhodes? If...if someone hired you to find me—”
“Find you?” Rowdy asked, momentarily baffled. In the next moment it all came clear. “You think I came here looking for you?”
She gazed at him, at once stricken and defiant. She had the look of a woman fixing to lift her skirts, spin on one dainty heel and run for her life. At the same time, her chin jutted out, bespeaking stubbornness and pride and a fierce desire to mark out some ground for herself and hold it against all comers. “Did you?”
Rowdy shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said quietly. “I did not.”
Lark still didn’t move. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t,” Rowdy answered, keeping a little distance between them, so she wouldn’t spook. “But consider this. If I’d come to Stone Creek to fetch you away, Miss Morgan, you and me and Pardner, we’d be a ways down the trail by now, whether you wanted to go along or not.”
Her eyes flashed with indignation, but the slackening in her shoulders and the slight lowering of her chin said she was relieved, too. “You are insufferably confident, Mr. Rhodes,” she said.
He grinned, tugged at the brim of his hat. “Call me Rowdy,” he said. “I don’t commonly answer to ‘Mr. Rhodes.’”
“I’d wager that you don’t,” Lark said. “Because it isn’t your name. I’m sure of that much, at least.”
“You’re sure of a lot of things, I reckon,” Rowdy countered. “Miss Morgan.”
“Very well,” she retorted. “I’ll address you as Rowdy. It probably suits you. You’ve fooled Mrs. Porter with your fine manners and your flattery, that’s obvious, but you do not fool me.”
“You don’t fool me, either—Lark.” He waited for her to protest his use of her given name—it was a bold familiarity, according to convention—but she didn’t.
She came to walk at his side, between him and Mrs. Porter’s next-door neighbor’s picket fence. The glow of the streetlamps fell softly over her, catching in her hair, resting in the graceful folds of her cloak, fading as they passed into the pools of darkness in between light posts.
“Did your mother call you Rowdy?” she asked casually, while Pardner sniffed at a spot on the sidewalk.
“Yes,” Rowdy said, remembering. Miranda Yarbro had always used his nickname—except when she was angry. On those rare occasions, her lips would tighten, and she’d address him as Robert. When she was proud of him, she’d call him Rob.
“Bless my boy Rob,” she’d prayed, beside his bed, every night until he left home with his pa, at fourteen. “Make a godly man of him.”
Guilt ambushed him. He reckoned the good Lord had attempted to answer that gentle woman’s prayer, but he, Rowdy, hadn’t cooperated.
“Where do you hail from, Mr.—Rowdy?”
Grateful for the reprieve from his regrets, Rowdy smiled. “A farm in Iowa,” he said. “Where do you hail from, Lark?”
She didn’t reply right away.
“Fair is fair,” Rowdy prompted. “You asked me a question and I gave you an answer.”
“St. Louis,” she said. “I grew up in St. Louis.”
And you’ve been a lot of places since, Rowdy thought, but he kept the observation to himself. After all, he’d covered considerable territory himself, in the years between here and that faraway farm.
Pardner trotted back to them. Nuzzled Rowdy’s hand, then Lark’s.
To his surprise she gave a soft laugh.
“You are a dear,” she said fondly.
Rowdy was both amused and disturbed to realize he wished she’d been talking to him instead of the dog.
* * *
LARK WATCHED FROM the steps of the schoolhouse that Monday morning as Maddie O’Ballivan, carrying her infant son in one arm and steering his reluctant older brother, Terran, forward with the other, marched through the gate. Ben Blackstone, the major’s adopted child, followed glumly, his blond hair shining in the morning sunlight.
Behind the little procession sat a wagon with two familiar horses tied behind. It had been the sound of its approach that had caused Lark to interrupt the second-grade reading lesson and come out to investigate.
Class had begun an hour earlier, promptly at eight o’clock.
Lark had missed Ben and Terran right away, when she’d taken the daily attendance, and hoped they were merely late. It was a long ride in from the large cattle ranch Sam and Major Blackstone ran in partnership, and for all that those worthy men must have deemed the journey safe, there were perils that could befall a pair of youths along the way.
Wolves, driven down out of the hills by hunger, for one.
Outlaws and drifters for another.
“Go inside, both of you,” Maddie told the boys when she reached the base of the steps. Samuel, the baby, had begun to fuss inside his thick blanket, and Maddie bounced him a little, smiling up at Lark when Terran and Ben had slipped past her, on either side, to take their seats in the schoolroom.
“Rascals,” Maddie said, shaking her head and smiling a little. “They were planning to spend the day riding in the hills—I guess they didn’t figure on Sam and the major heading into town for a meeting half an hour after they left, and me following behind in the buckboard, meaning to lay in supplies at the mercantile.”
Maddie was a pretty woman, probably near to Lark’s own age, with thick chestnut hair tending to unruliness and eyes almost exactly the same color as fine brandy. Until the winter before, according to Mrs. Porter, Maddie had run a general store and post office in a wild place down south called Haven. She’d married Sam O’Ballivan after the whole town burned to the ground, and borne him a son last summer. Lark’s landlady claimed the ranger’s bride could render notes from a spinet that would make an angel weep, but she’d politely refused to play on Sunday mornings at Stone Creek Congregational. Said it was too far to travel, and she had her own ways of honoring the Lord’s Day.
Lark liked Maddie O’Ballivan, though they were little more than acquaintances, but she also envied her—envied her home, her obviously happy marriage and her children. Once, she’d fully expected to have all those things, too.
What a naive little twit she’d been, with a head full of silly dreams and foolish hopes.
“No harm done,” Lark said quietly, smiling back at Maddie. “I’ll give them each an essay to write.”
Maddie laughed, a rich, quiet sound born of some profound and private joy, patting the baby with a gloved hand as she looked up at Lark, her eyes kind but thoughtful. “You’re cold, standing out here. I’ll just untie Ben and Terran’s horses, so they’ll have a way home after school, and be on about my business.”
“I’ll send the boys out to do that,” Lark said, hugging herself against the chill. She hated to see Maddie go—she’d been lonely with only Mrs. Porter and Mai Lee for friends—but she had work to do, and she was shivering.
“Miss Morgan?” Maddie said, when Lark turned to summon Terran and Ben to see to their horses.
“Please,” Lark replied shyly, turning back. “Call me Lark.”
“I will,” Maddie said, pleased. “And of course you’ll call me Maddie. I was wondering if you might like to join Sam and me for supper on Friday evening. You could ride out to the ranch with the boys, after school’s out, or Sam could come and get you in the wagon.”
Lark flushed with pleasure; in Denver, as the wife of a powerful and wealthy man, she’d enjoyed an active social life. In Stone Creek, she was a spinster schoolmarm, and she probably roused plenty of speculation behind closed doors. Since she was a stranger and had all the wrong clothes for her station in life, folks seemed reticent around her. No one invited her anywhere, and she hadn’t thought it proper to attend community dances; she didn’t want the parents of her students thinking she was forward or looking for a husband.
“I’d like that,” she said. “But I don’t ride.”
Maddie smiled. “I’ll send Sam, then. Go inside now, before you freeze.”
Lark nodded and went back into the schoolhouse. She told Terran and Ben to go out and unhitch their horses, and they scrambled to obey.
“Miss Morgan?” A small hand tugged at the side of her skirt, and she looked down to see Lydia Fairmont holding up a page torn from her writing tablet. “I copied the words off the blackboard. Will you tell me if all my letters are headed whence they ought to go, please?”
* * *
AS AGREED, ROWDY met Sam and the major in the lobby of the small, rustic Territorial Hotel, the only such establishment in Stone Creek, just before nine o’clock that morning. He’d walked over with Pardner from Mrs. Porter’s, having left his horse at the livery stable the night before after returning from Flagstaff.
Both men stood when he entered, Sam looking fit and a little grim, though he had the peaceful eyes of a happily married man. Rowdy had never met the major, only seen him briefly when he’d come to Haven on sad business over a year before.
“Thanks for making the ride up here,” Sam said, sparing a slight smile for Pardner as he and Rowdy shook hands. “Good to know your sidekick is still with you.”
Rowdy nodded, then turned to the major, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a full head of white hair and a face like a Scottish banker.
“Major Blackstone,” Rowdy said respectfully.
“Call me John,” the major said, his voice deep and gruff.
“That would be an honor, sir,” Rowdy replied. Blackstone was a legend in the Arizona Territory and beyond—before signing on with the rangers, he’d led cavalry troops at Fort Yuma. In his spare time, he’d founded one of the biggest spreads that side of Texas, fit to rival the McKettrick ranch over near Indian Rock, and served two terms in the United States Senate.
Sam had told Rowdy some of these things back in Haven. Rowdy had made a point of finding out more after receiving the telegram.
They all sat down in straight-backed leather chairs pulled up close to the crackling blaze on the hearth of a large natural-rock fireplace. The lobby was otherwise empty and silent except for the ticking of a long-case clock. Pardner stuck close to Rowdy and lay down near his feet.
Rowdy saw Sam sit back, clearly taking his measure, and Pappy’s anxious words came back to him with an unexpected wallop. First, last and always, Sam O’Ballivan is an Arizona Ranger. You have truck with him, and you’re likely to find yourself dangling at the end of a rope.
“I guess you know the railroad is headed this way from Flagstaff,” the major ventured, after clearing his throat like a man preparing to make a speech.
Rowdy felt a quiver in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t fear, just a common-sense warning. “So I’ve heard,” he said moderately.
Sam finally spoke. “Maybe you know there’s been some trouble. A couple of train robberies out of Flagstaff.”
With just about anyone else, Rowdy might have feigned surprise. With Sam O’Ballivan the trick probably wouldn’t work. “Heard that, too,” he said.
“According to Sam here,” the major went on, “you made a pretty fair lawman, down there in Haven. Stayed on after the fire, and all that trouble with that gang of outlaws. Shows you’ve got some gumption.”
Rowdy did not respond. Blackstone and O’Ballivan had issued a summons, and he’d honored it. It was up to them to do the talking.
“We need your help,” Sam said forthrightly. “The major’s getting on in years, and I’ve got a wife and family to look after, along with a sizable herd of cattle.”
“What kind of help?” Rowdy asked.
“Rangering,” John Blackstone said.
Wait till Pappy hears this, Rowdy thought. Not that he’d get a chance to share the information in the immediate future. “Rangering,” he repeated.
“I can swear you in right now,” the major announced. “’Course, that part of things will have to be our secret. Pete Quincy, the town marshal, up and quit a month ago, and you’d be filling his job, far as the good people of Stone Creek are concerned. The job doesn’t pay worth a hill of beans, but it comes with a decent house and a lean-to barn behind the jail, and you can take your meals at Mrs. Porter’s if you aren’t disposed to cook.”
Rowdy swept the room with his gaze. The hotel seemed as empty as a carpetbagger’s heart, but if they looked around a few corners or behind the curtains, they’d probably find Mrs. Porter, or someone of her ilk, with ears sticking out like the doors of a stagecoach fixing to take on passengers.
Sam interpreted the glance correctly. “There’s nobody here,” he said.
“You seem mighty sure of that,” Rowdy replied easily.
“Cleared the place myself,” Sam answered.
Rowdy tried to imagine anybody staying when Sam O’Ballivan said “go,” and smiled. “All right, then,” he said. “If I understand this correctly, I’m to pose as the marshal, but I’ll really be working for the major, here.”
“John,” the major said firmly.
“John,” Rowdy repeated.
“You’ve got the right of it,” Sam said. “All the while, of course, you’ll be keeping your ear to the ground, same as John and I will, for anything that might lead us to this train-robbing outfit.”
Rowdy chose his words carefully. “Might not be an outfit,” he offered. “Could be random—drifters, or drunked-up cowpokes looking to get a grub stake.”
John and Sam exchanged glances, then Sam shook his head.
“No,” he said. “It’s not random. Both robberies were carefully planned, and carried out with an expertise that can only come with long experience. These men aren’t drifters—they’re too sophisticated for that. The first robbery was peaceable. They felled a couple of trees across the track, in a place where the engineer would be sure to see the obstruction soon enough to put the brakes on. But there was a railroad agent aboard the second train, and the robbers seemed to know him. Singled him out right away, and relieved him of his weapons. A passenger tried to intercede, and he was shot for his trouble. Might never regain the use of his right arm.”
“You suspect anybody in particular?” Rowdy asked lightly.
“All we’ve got is a hunch,” John said. “My gut tells me, this is Payton Yarbro and his boys.”
Rowdy did not react visibly to the name—he’d had too much practice at hiding his identity for that—but on the inside, things commenced to churning. “I haven’t heard anything about the Yarbros in a long time,” he said. “I guess I figured they’d scattered by now. Even gone out of business. The old man’s got to be getting pretty long in the tooth—might even be dead.”
Both Sam and John were silent, and the speculation in their eyes unnerved Rowdy. He realized that if he’d followed his first impulse, which was to pretend he’d never heard of the Yarbros, they’d have been suspicious. Not to know of the Yarbros would have been the same as not knowing who the James brothers were, or the Earps.
“It’s only fair to tell you,” Rowdy went on, “that I’ve got no experience tracking train robbers. I sort of stumbled into that marshaling job down in Haven, and just did what was there to do. I’ve been a ranch hand, mostly.”
Sam watched him for a long moment, and with an intensity that would have made anybody but a Yarbro squirm in his chair. On the off chance Sam knew that, Rowdy shifted slightly.
“Sam tells me you’re a good hand in a gunfight,” John said. “You could have lit out when things got rough in Haven, but you stayed on. Even helped with some of the rebuilding, along with wearing a badge. You’ve got the kind of grit we’re looking for.”
Rowdy’s hat rested in his lap. He turned it idly by the crown. “I’m not inclined to settle down permanently,” he said.
The major nodded once, decisively. “That’s your prerogative. Run the Yarbros to ground and ride out, if that’s what you want to do. We’d be glad to have you stay on in Stone Creek, though.”
Rowdy studied John Blackstone. “You sure do seem to think highly of me,” he remarked, “given that I’m a stranger to you, and all you’ve got to go on is my reputation.”
For the first time since the palaver had begun, Blackstone smiled. “I’d stake my life and everything I own on Sam O’Ballivan’s assessment of anybody’s character. I might not know you from Adam, but I sure as hell know Sam.”
Rowdy knew Sam, too, and that was what made him wary. He was a fast gun, maybe as fast as Rowdy was, and he had a fortitude rarely seen, even in the wild Arizona Territory. Of course, it was possible, too, that Sam had already pegged Rowdy for a Yarbro, and meant for him to lead them right to Pappy’s den.
A more prudent man would have taken his pa’s advice and ridden out, put as much distance between himself and Stone Creek as he could, pronto. Rowdy was a gambler at heart; he wanted to stay and see how the cards would fall, but that wasn’t his main reason for sitting in on this particular game.
He had another, even more intriguing puzzle to solve, and that was Lark Morgan, though there was no telling when she’d strike out for parts unknown.
Sam and the major sat waiting for him to announce his decision, though they probably already knew what it would be.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
“Good,” John replied, with the air of a man completing important business. “I’ll swear you in as marshal, and Sam’s got a badge in his pocket. You just remember, the rangering part is between us.”
“I might need a posse, if I’m going after a bunch of train robbers,” Rowdy said. Whatever his private differences with his pa, he had no intention of rounding the old man up for a stretch in the prison down in Yuma, or even a hangman’s noose, but he’d put on a show until he knew what was what.
There was an off chance, of course, that Payton had been telling the truth when he claimed he’d had no part in robbing those trains. Should time and some investigation bear him out, Rowdy would find the real culprits and bring them in.
“If a posse is called for,” Sam said, handing Rowdy a star-shaped badge, “we’ll get one up.”
When the major produced a battered copy of the New Testament, Rowdy didn’t hesitate to lay a hand on it. He wasn’t a believer—at least, not the usual kind—but his mother had been, and that made the oath a solemn matter.
Fortunately, there was nothing in it about handcuffing his own pa, or any of his brothers, not specifically, anyhow. He swore to uphold the law, and he’d do that—up to a certain point.
After the swearing in, the major went off on some errand over at the Stone Creek Bank, while Sam, Rowdy and Pardner headed for the jailhouse, down at the far end of the street.
Would have made more sense to put the marshal’s office in the center of town, where the saloons were and trouble was most likely to break out. Rowdy figured folks wanted a lawman around, but at a little distance, too.
The jailhouse was about like the old one in Haven, before it burned. One cell, a potbelly stove with a coffeepot on top, somebody’s old table to serve as a desk.
It was the cabin out back that surprised Rowdy a little. It had three rooms, a good fireplace and a cookstove to rival the one in Mrs. Porter’s kitchen. The floors were hardwood and the windows were sound, with no cracks around them to let in the winter wind. The bed had a good feather mattress and plenty of blankets, and there was a sink with a working pump. An indoor toilet and a stationary bathtub with a copper hot water tank and a wood-burning boiler under it raised the place to an unexpected level of luxury.
“The last marshal had a wife,” Sam explained simply. “Come on. I’ll show you the barn.”
Rowdy grinned. “I’d probably feel more at home out there,” he said. Back in Haven he’d slept on a cell cot, when there were no prisoners, and with a certain accommodating widow when there were.
“Maybe you’ll take a wife,” Sam said, making for the back door.
“Not likely,” Rowdy replied.
Sam chuckled. “I thought the same way once,” he said. “Then I met up with Maddie Chancelor.”
4
LARK AWAKENED with a start, heart pounding, afraid to open her eyes. She was certain she would see Autry Whitman looming over her bed if she did.
The room was frigid, and the fine sweat that had broken out all over her body in the midst of her nightmare exacerbated the chill stinging the marrow of her bones. She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, and raised one eyelid, every muscle in her body tensed to roll off the side of the mattress and grab for something, anything, to use as a weapon.
Autry wasn’t there.
Tears of relief clogged her throat and burned on her cheeks.
Autry wasn’t there.
She sat up, fumbled with the globe of the painted glass lamp on her bedside table, struck a match to the wick. Shadows rimmed in faint moonlight receded and then dissolved. According to the little porcelain clock she’d brought with her from St. Louis, it was after three in the morning.
Inwardly Lark groaned. She wasn’t going back to sleep.
After summoning all her inner fortitude, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. The wooden floor felt frosty under her bare feet, and, shivering, she thought with longing of the wood cookstove downstairs.
She would go down there, build up the fire, if it hadn’t gone out after Rowdy banked it for the night. Light another lamp and wait, as stalwartly as she could, for morning to come.
Lark grabbed up her wrapper—it was a thin silk, and therefore useless against the cold—and went out into the corridor, feeling her way along it in the gloom. She would have brought the lamp from her room, but it was heavy, and an heirloom Mrs. Porter prized. Breaking it might even be grounds for eviction, and Lark had nowhere to go.
She descended the back stairs as quietly as she could and gasped when she saw a man-shaped shadow over by the cookstove.
Autry?
Rowdy Rhodes stepped out of the darkness, moonlight from the window over the sink catching in his fair hair. He moved to the center of the room and lit the simple kerosene lantern on the table.
Lark laid a hand to her heart, which had seized like a broken gear in some machine, and silently commanded it to beat again.
“I’ve put some wood on the fire,” Rowdy said quietly, offering no apology for startling her. “Go on over and stand next to the stove.”
Lark dashed past him, huddled in the first reaching fingers of warmth, dancing a little, because the kitchen floor, like the one above stairs, was coated with a fine layer of frost.
Rowdy was fully clothed, right down to his boots.
“I th-thought you’d moved out,” Lark said. “Gone to live in the cottage behind the marshal’s office.” He’d told them about his new job at supper that evening, said he’d still be taking his evening meals at Mrs. Porter’s most nights.
He didn’t answer right away, but instead ducked into his quarters behind the kitchen and came out with a woolen blanket, which he draped around Lark’s shoulders. “I paid Mrs. Porter for a week’s lodging,” he said. “Since it wouldn’t be gentlemanly to ask for my two dollars back, I decided to stay on till I’d used it up.”
Pardner came, stretching and yawning, out of the back room. Nuzzled Lark’s right thigh with his nose and lay down close to the stove.
Rowdy dragged a chair over and eased Lark into it. Crouched to take her bare feet in his hands and chafe some warmth into them.
Lark knew she ought to pull away—it was unseemly to let a man touch her that way—but she couldn’t. It felt too good, and Rowdy’s callused fingers kindled a scary, blessed heat inside her, one she wouldn’t have wanted to explain to the school board.
“What are you doing up in the middle of the night?” Rowdy asked, leaving off the rubbing to tuck the blanket snugly beneath her feet. While he waited for Lark’s reply, he took a chunk of wood from the box, opened the stove door, and fed the growing blaze. Then he pulled the coffeepot over the heat.
“I sometimes have trouble sleeping,” Lark admitted, sounding a little choked. Her throat felt raw, and she wanted, for some unaccountable reason, to break down and weep. The man had done her a simple kindness, that was all. She was making far too much of it.
“Me, too,” Rowdy confessed, with good-natured resignation.
Heat began to surge audibly through the coffeepot. The stuff would be stout since the grounds had been steeping for hours, ever since supper.
Taking care not to make too much noise, Rowdy drew up another chair, placed it next to Lark’s.
“Makes a man wish for the south country,” he said. “It never gets this cold down around Phoenix and Tucson.”
Lark swallowed, nodded. The scent of very strong coffee laced the chilly air. “I ought to be used to it, after Denver,” she said, and then drew in a quick breath, as if to pull the words back into her mouth, hold them prisoner there, so they could never be said.
“Denver,” Rowdy mused, smiling a little. “I thought you said you came from St. Louis.”
“I did,” Lark said, her cheeks burning. What was the matter with her? She’d allowed this man to caress her bare feet. Then she’d slipped and mentioned Denver, a potentially disastrous revelation. “I was born there. In St. Louis, I mean.”
“Tell me about your folks,” Rowdy said. He left his chair, went to fetch two cups, and poured coffee for them both. Handed a cup to Lark.
She had all that time to plan her answer, but it still came out bristly. “My mother was widowed when I was seven. She and I moved in with my grandfather.” Lark locked her hands around her cup of coffee, savoring the warmth and the pungent aroma.
“Were you happy?”
Lark blinked. “Happy?”
Rowdy grinned. Took a sip of his coffee. Waited.
“I guess so,” Lark said, suddenly and profoundly aware that no one had ever asked her that question before. She hadn’t even asked it of herself, as far as she recollected. “We had a roof over our heads, and plenty to eat. Mama had a lot to do, running Grandfather’s house—he was a doctor and saw patients in a back room—but she loved me.”
“She never remarried?” Rowdy asked easily. At Lark’s puzzled expression, he prompted, “Your mother?”
Lark shook her head, telling herself to be wary but wanting to let words spill out of her, topsy-turvy, at the same time. “She was too busy to look for another husband. Men came courting at first, but I don’t think Mama ever encouraged any of them.”
“Is she still living?”
Lark swallowed again, even though she’d yet to drink any of her coffee. “No,” she said sadly. “She took a fever—probably caught it from one of Grandfather’s patients—and died when I was fourteen.”
“Did you stay on with your grandfather after that?”
Lark resented Rowdy’s questions and whatever it was inside her that seemed to compel her to answer them. “No. He sent me away to boarding school.”
“That sounds lonesome.”
Emotion welled up inside Lark unbidden. Made her sinuses ache and her voice come out sounding scraped and bruised. “It wasn’t,” she lied.
Rowdy sighed, spent some time meandering through his own thoughts.
Lark snuggled deeper into her blanket and tried not to remember boarding school. She’d loved the lessons and the plenitude of books and hated everything else about the place.
Pardner, slumbering at their feet, snored contentedly.
Rowdy chuckled at the sound. “At least he has a clear conscience,” he said easily.
“Don’t you?” Lark asked, feeling prickly again now that she was warming up a little. If Rowdy Rhodes was impugning her conscience, he had even more nerve than she’d already credited him with.
Rowdy leaned and added more wood to the fire. “I’ve done some things in my life that I wish I hadn’t,” he said.
Lark sighed. Why did he have to be so darn likable? She’d been a lot more comfortable around Rowdy Rhodes before he’d warmed her feet with his hands. “So have I,” she heard herself say.
They sat for a long time in a companionable, if slightly uncomfortable, silence.
“Maybe I’ll go someplace warm when I leave here,” Rowdy said presently.
So he was just passing through, as she’d suspected. And devoutly hoped.
Why, then, did the news fill her with sudden, poignant sorrow?
“Mrs. Porter will certainly be disappointed when you leave,” Lark said.
“But you’ll be relieved, won’t you, Lark?”
“Yes,” she replied quickly but without enough conviction.
Rowdy smiled to himself. “Why don’t you tell me what—or who—you’re so afraid of? Maybe I could help.”
“Why should you?”
“Because I’m the marshal, for one thing. And because I’m a human being, for another.”
Lark swallowed. “I don’t trust you,” she said.
“Well,” Rowdy sighed, taking up the poker, opening the stove door and stirring the fire inside, “that much is true, anyway.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“In a word, yes.”
Lark felt an inexplicable need to convince him. “I did grow up in St. Louis, in my grandfather’s home. I went to boarding school, too.”
“And you lived in Denver. Beyond those things, though, you’ve been lying through your pretty teeth.”
Lark was indignant, and she forcibly suppressed the little thrill that rose inside her at the compliment couched in his accusation, as she had the delicious, strangely urgent languor she’d felt when he touched her feet. “I cannot think why you’re interested in my personal affairs,” she said, as haughtily as she could.
“You’d have been better off not to be so secretive,” Rowdy observed. “When somebody presents a puzzle, I have to figure it out. It’s part of my nature, I guess.”
“Maybe you’re just nosy.”
He laughed, low and soft. Something quivered in resonance, low in Lark’s belly, like a piano string vibrating because the one next to it had been struck. “Maybe I am,” he agreed. “Nevertheless, there will come a day—or perhaps a night—when I know everything there is to know about you, Lark Morgan, and a few things you don’t even know about yourself.”
The implication, though subtle, was unmistakable. Lark was suddenly too warm, and would have thrown off the blanket if it hadn’t meant sitting in close proximity to Rowdy in a gossamer nightgown and a woefully inadequate matching wrapper.
An achy heat suffused her as she imagined herself—the images flooded her mind and body, quite against her will—naked beneath Rowdy Rhodes’s strong, agile frame.
Worse, he knew what she was thinking. She could tell by the look in his eyes and the amused way he quirked up one side of his mouth, not quite but almost grinning.
“You are the most audacious man I have ever encountered,” she said.
“I’m a few other things you’ve never encountered, too,” he drawled.
She stood up, swayed, flinched when Rowdy steadied her with one hand.
“Sit down,” he said, “before you trip over that blanket and take a header into the stove.”
“I don’t have to listen to—”
He tugged on the blanket, and she landed, not in her own chair, but square on his lap. For a moment she was too stunned to struggle. She simply stared at him.
“Just let me hold you,” he said.
If he’d made a move to kiss her, or touched her in any inappropriate place, she’d have had some way of defending herself. As it was, he simply wrapped his arms loosely around her and pressed her head to his shoulder with one gentle hand.
She was helpless against him.
He propped his chin on top of her head. “There, now,” he said soothingly.
Lark closed her eyes, bit her lower lip and fought back tears. Other men had held her, particularly Autry, but never in that undemanding way. No, never once in all her twenty-seven years.
Perhaps Rowdy knew that had he risen to his feet, carried her to his bed and made love to her, she wouldn’t have resisted him. Perhaps he didn’t.
Lark finally stopped shivering, relaxed against his hard chest, cosseted inside the blanket, and promptly fell asleep.
* * *
HE WOKE HER AT DAWN, figuring Mai Lee would be up and around soon, or Mrs. Porter.
It wouldn’t do for either of them to come upon such a scene.
Lark yawned and stretched, wreaking havoc with Rowdy’s senses—he hadn’t so much as closed his eyes since she’d landed on his lap, all soft and warm and woman scented.
He’d felt acquiescence in her, and been sorely tempted to bed her.
He knew she’d be responsive, give herself up to him with shy fervor. He knew precisely where to touch her, where to kiss her, how to set her ablaze with need.
He’d been a fool not to, and he’d suffered for his restraint.
She’d surely been with a man before.
And yet there was that troublesome, contradictory innocence about her.
With an inward sigh, he set her on her feet, held her firmly by the waist until, blinking and sleepy, she found her balance.
“Go,” he said hoarsely. “They’ll be awake soon, Mrs. Porter and the others.”
Lark bit her lower lip, hesitated, then hiked up the blanket and hot-footed it for the back stairs.
Rowdy stood up, groaned. He was hard as tamarack, and it would be a while before the raw wanting slackened.
Pardner got to his feet, went to the door and whimpered to be let out.
Rowdy didn’t bother to put on his coat and hat. He just worked the latch and opened the door, welcoming a rush of wind so cold that it made his eyes water.
Yes, sir.
A little fresh air was just what he needed.
* * *
UPSTAIRS, IN THE SAFETY of her room, Lark washed hastily and donned her primmest dress, the modest, high-collared black wool she’d been wearing when she’d fled Denver during a funeral. She’d feigned a headache, knowing Autry wouldn’t flaut convention by leaving the huge, stuffy church before the service was over, and asked his carriage driver to take her home.
Once there, she’d packed in a desperate rush and prevailed upon that same driver to deliver her to the railroad depot, claiming she’d just gotten word, by telegram, that her sister had taken gravely ill.
She’d been anxious all the way to the station. She knew the train schedules by heart, and if she missed the two-o’clock, she’d never escape. Moreover, Autry would realize she’d deceived him, and the consequences of that didn’t bear considering.
The carriage driver, the oldest retainer on Autry’s large household staff, might have been suspicious, but he hadn’t questioned her orders. He’d simply taken the most direct route to the depot, unloaded her belongings onto a porter’s cart, tipped his hat to her, and wished her Godspeed.
Now, standing in a boardinghouse room, trembling with cold and the fear stirred up by remembering, Lark considered filling a single reticule and running away again.
There wouldn’t be a stagecoach through town until Thursday morning, and she didn’t have the fare, but perhaps she could prevail upon someone, a freight driver or a peddler, for instance, to give her a ride to—where?
Flagstaff?
She sat down heavily on the edge of her bed. What would she do when she got to Flagstaff?
Perhaps she could pawn her cameo brooch there and buy passage on a train—
No, not a train.
Autry might have agents aboard, because of the recent robberies, to protect his financial interests. And any one of them might recognize her as the upstart wife who’d dared to fly the coop and add insult to injury by having divorce papers served upon her outraged husband only ten days after her departure.
Tears filled Lark’s eyes. She pinned the cherished cameo brooch, her mother’s most precious treasure, to the bodice of her dress. How could she part with it?
Besides, she didn’t want to run. She loved her pupils, loved seeing the light of understanding in their eyes when they suddenly grasped some new concept or idea, mastered some elusive skill. She loved Stone Creek, damnably cold though it was in winter and, anyway, she’d been invited to the O’Ballivans’ home for supper on Friday night.
She bit down hard on her lower lip. She’d behaved like a hussy, down there in the kitchen. Sat in Rowdy’s lap, like some...dancehall girl. And, dear God, at the slightest encouragement from him, she’d have gone willingly, even eagerly, to his bed.
He’d been so tender.
He’d been so strong.
And he’d as much as said, outright, that he’d have her.
Nevertheless, there will come a day—or perhaps a night—when I know everything there is to know about you, Lark Morgan, and a few things you don’t even know about yourself.
She blushed at the memory of his words and the way he’d said them.
He meant to seduce her, sooner or later, and he’d taken the first step in the process the night before, in Mrs. Porter’s kitchen.
What would be next?
A kiss? A caress?
Rowdy Rhodes was a patient man, that much was obvious. One by one, he would strip away her defenses, like garments.
If she stayed in Stone Creek, her downfall was inevitable.
She’d barely resisted him the night before, barely kept herself from lifting her head from his shoulder, finding his mouth with her own, kissing him, like some brazen trollop, some tramp—
Some saloon singer.
Lark gave an involuntary whimper.
Even now, at what should have been a safe distance, with Mrs. Porter and Mai Lee up and about, she wanted him.
Wanted his hands on her breasts, her hips, her thighs.
“Stop it!” she said aloud, squeezing her eyes shut.
After several minutes of deep, slow breathing, Lark regained some semblance of self-control.
A light rap sounded at her door. “Mai Lee has breakfast ready, dear,” Mrs. Porter called cheerfully. “And if you don’t hurry, you’ll be late for school.”
“Coming,” Lark called back, with an effort at equal good cheer. But her voice quavered a little.
The creaking of the front gate sent her scurrying to her window. She tugged aside the curtain and looked out.
Rowdy was just stepping onto the sidewalk, Pardner cavorting at his side.
She let out a long breath. At least she wouldn’t have to sit across the table from him, choking down her breakfast, pretending she hadn’t let him rub her feet the night before, hadn’t sat in his lap and felt so foolishly safe that she’d fallen asleep.
She watched from the window until she was sure Rowdy wouldn’t double back, then hurried downstairs with as much dignity as she could manage. Their two chairs, she was glad to see, were back in their usual places at the table, and there was no indication that either of them had been in the kitchen at all during the wee, scandalous hours of the morning.
Except for the two coffeecups sitting beside the sink.
Mai Lee looked at them curiously, then glanced at Lark, frowning a little.
Thankfully, Mrs. Porter didn’t seem to notice the stray cups. She took Lark’s cloak from the peg by the door, carried it over to the stove and draped it over a wooden rack alongside, so it would be warm when she wore it to the schoolhouse.
Lark’s eyes burned again.
“Rowdy suggested it,” Mrs. Porter explained brightly, smiling at Lark. “He said you’re uncommonly sensitive to the cold. He even said you might want to move into his room—once he’s gone to live in the new place, of course.” Here, she paused to blush girlishly. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. There’s no reason you couldn’t use the best quarters when they’re not rented.”
Lark straightened her spine. “Th-thank you,” she said.
“No reason at all,” Mrs. Porter prattled on, still caught up in her musings. Then, with a pointed glance at the clock, she added, “Hurry up, now. You’ll have to gobble your food and practically run to the schoolhouse as it is, if you’re going to ring the bell at eight o’clock.”
Lark nodded gratefully. She consumed a fried egg and a slice of toasted bread and drank her coffee so quickly that she burned her tongue. Mai Lee had packed her lunch in a lard tin, as she did every weekday morning, and set it on the counter nearest the back door. Mrs. Porter had made special arrangements with the school board, soon after Lark’s arrival in Stone Creek, when she realized her boarder was going without food between breakfast and the evening meal.
“I’ll be having supper with Maddie and Sam O’Ballivan this Friday night,” Lark said, out of courtesy and because she was a little proud of the invitation.
Mrs. Porter went still.
So did Mai Lee.
“Is something wrong?” Lark asked, carrying her plate and silverware to the sink, setting them on the drain board next to the cups she and Rowdy had used earlier. She was putting on her cloak before either of them answered.
“It’s just that nobody’s been invited out there since Sam brought Maddie home as his bride,” Mrs. Porter said, trying to smile but not quite succeeding.
“I’m sure they mean to entertain more once they’ve settled in,” Lark was quick to offer.
“It’s been over a year since Maddie came,” Mrs. Porter said uncertainly.
Lark assumed a confidential tone. “Terran and Ben tried to skip school yesterday,” she said, as though imparting a secret that must be guarded at all costs. “Maddie probably wants to speak to me about—disciplinary measures.”
Mrs. Porter brightened immediately. “I’m sure that’s it,” she said.
“Of course it is,” Lark replied briskly, grabbing up her lunch pail and reaching for the doorknob. “Naturally, I’d like you to keep this in strictest confidence.”
“Naturally,” Mrs. Porter said eagerly.
By the time school let out for the day, Lark figured, the news would probably be all over town.
* * *
ROWDY STOPPED OFF at the mercantile to order supplies, like coffee and sugar, and then picked up the pinto, who’d come with the name Paint, and installed him in the barn behind the marshal’s house. A supply of hay had already been laid in; probably Sam and the major’s doing.
Polishing his badge with the sleeve of his trail coat, Rowdy surveyed the yard, enclosed by chicken-wire fencing, and the land beyond it. There was a house back there, if it could be called that, since it leaned to one side and probably didn’t measure more than eight-by-eight. A cardboard sign, crudely lettered and attached to the door frame, proclaimed the place was for sale, with some scribbling underneath.
Rowdy decided to investigate, and Pardner went along, like he always did. If Rowdy’d gone through the gates of hell itself, he figured the dog probably would have followed.
The inside of that shack looked even worse than the outside. The stone fireplace was crumbling, and half the floorboards were missing. Those that remained were probably rotten.
He paused on the threshold, stopped Pardner with a movement of his knee when he would have ventured inside.
Rowdy stepped back, walked around the perimeter of the place, noted the overgrown vegetable garden, the teetering privy and the well. Returning to examine the cardboard For Sale sign, he noted from a scribbled addition that the whole place, a little under an acre, could be had for fifty dollars in back taxes.
He rubbed his chin, thinking about becoming a landowner.
He’d saved most of his pay while he was in Haven, so he was flush, and he’d developed a penchant for carpentry, helping to rebuild the burned-out town. He liked the smell of freshly planed lumber and the release of swinging a hammer or wielding a saw.
It was a fool’s notion, of course.
What could he do with an acre of ground?
And, anyhow, he planned to move on, once he’d gotten the truth of the train-robbing situation and unraveled the secrets behind Lark Morgan’s brown eyes.
Still, with the railroad headed in that direction, the land might make a good investment. He’d need something to fill his free time, since Stone Creek didn’t appear to be a hotbed of crime or social activity, and putting that shack to rights seemed like a sensible occupation.
Resolved, he went back to the jailhouse and built a fire in the potbelly stove. By the time he’d adjusted the damper and shifted the chimney pipe to close the gaps issuing little scallops of dusty smoke, the supplies had arrived from the general store.
He put a pot of coffee on to brew.
Pardner, meanwhile, padded into the single jail cell, jumped up on the cot inside and settled himself for a snooze.
Jolene Bell showed up before the coffee was through perking.
“I hope you’ll be a better lawman than old Pete Quincy was,” she said.
“I guess that remains to be seen,” Rowdy replied. He’d have offered her some of the coffee, but it was still raw and he only had one cup.
“I run a clean place,” Jolene told him, after working up her mettle for a few seconds. “My girls are all of legal age, and my whiskey ain’t watered down, neither.”
Rowdy bit the inside of his lip, so he wouldn’t grin. Obviously, Jolene was there on serious business. He’d learned a long time ago that if a woman had something to say, it was best to listen, whether she was the preacher’s wife or the local madam.
“Am I gonna have trouble with you?” she asked, frowning.
Rowdy hooked his thumbs in his gun belt. “Not unless any of your ‘girls’ are there against their will,” he said. “And I’ll be by to collect pistols, if I see more than a dozen horses tied up at your hitching rail.”
Jolene’s gaze slipped to the .44 on his left hip. “Might be some as protest a rule like that one,” she asserted.
“I don’t give a damn whether they protest or not,” Rowdy replied.
“Since when is there a law on the books that says cowboys got to surrender their sidearms afore they can do any drinkin’?”
“Since now,” Rowdy said. “They’ll get the guns back when they’re ready to ride out, sober.”
“I’d be interested to see how you plan to make that stick,” Jolene told him. “There’s a lot of big spreads around here. The cowboys work long, hard hours, and when they get paid, they like to come into town and have themselves a good time. They get pretty lively, sometimes—especially if there’s a dance down at the Cattleman’s Meeting Hall, like there is next Saturday night.”
“All the more reason,” Rowdy said, “to enforce the Rhodes Ordinance.”
“The Rhodes Ordinance? I ain’t never heard of it.” Her tiny eyes widened as revelation struck. “Say—that’s your name, ain’t it? Rhodes?”
“Yep,” Rowdy said.
“You can’t just go around makin’ laws and expectin’ the rest of us to abide by ’em,” Jolene protested, drawing herself up in righteous indignation.
“I imagine the town council will support it,” Rowdy replied.
“If that don’t beat all,” Jolene marveled. “Ol’ Quincy was a piece of work—I had to pay him fifty cents a week just to stay clear of my place—but I figure you just might be worse.”
Rowdy smiled. “I won’t be staying clear of your place,” he said. “I might even sit in on a hand of poker now and then.”
Jolene narrowed her eyes. “You gonna put any kind of nick in my pocketbook, Mr. Rowdy Rhodes-Ordinance?”
“Nope,” Rowdy said.
A slow grin spread across Jolene’s pockmarked, sallow face. “Well, now,” she said. “Looks like we’re all in for a time of it.”
“Looks that way,” Rowdy agreed affably. He cocked a thumb over his right shoulder. “Who do I talk to about buying the place on the other side of the back fence?”
Jolene told him, and half an hour later, he was a man of property.
5
PA’D SADDLED UP and gone off someplace, in the middle of the night. Bent over a book at his desk in the back of the big schoolroom, Gideon couldn’t take in the words he was supposed to be reading. He just kept remembering.
He’d awakened out of a sound sleep, hearing noises he thought were coming from the shed out behind the saloon, gotten up out of his bed, pulled on his clothes and boots, and headed out there to investigate.
And there was Pa, dressed to ride a distance, fastening his rifle scabbard to the saddle. His gelding, Samson, snorted and tossed his big head, eager to be away.
“You go on back inside, Gideon,” Pa’d said. He wore his round-brimmed hat, and there was a bandana tied loosely around his neck. Under his long coat, he wore a gun belt, with a holster on either side. The pearl handle of one of his .45s flashed in the gloom as he swung up onto the horse.
“Let me go along, Pa,” Gideon had said, at the edge of pleading. “I can get a horse over at the livery stable—”
“You stay here and look after Ruby,” Pa replied. He’d clamped an unlit cheroot between his strong, white teeth, and he shifted it from one side of his mouth to the other, looking as though he might ride Gideon down if he didn’t get out of the way.
If there’d ever been a woman who didn’t need looking after, it was Ruby Hollister. She kept a loaded shotgun behind the bar, and everybody in Flagstaff knew she wouldn’t hesitate to use it. No, sir. She would not be requiring Gideon’s protection.
“At least tell me where you’re off to, Pa,” Gideon had argued.
“That’s none of your never-mind,” Pa had answered, narrowing his chilly blue eyes with impatience. “Now, step aside.”
Gideon stood his ground for a long moment, but in the end, he couldn’t prevail against his pa’s hard stare. “When’ll you be back?” he’d asked.
Pa hadn’t said anything in response. He’d just nudged the gelding into motion with the heels of his boots—not the fancy ones he usually wore, Gideon noticed, but the light, supple kind, made for moving fast, but soled for hard going.
Gideon had moved out of the shed doorway, lest he be trampled, and Pa had bent low over the saddle to avoid knocking his head as he passed through.
He’d vanished into the darkness, the hooves of his horse beating on the hard dirt, the sound growing fainter as he gained the road.
When the cold of that winter night finally penetrated Gideon’s awareness, he’d gone inside. Shed his boots and lain down on top of his bed in his clothes, staring up at the ceiling, knowing he wasn’t going to sleep.
At breakfast, Ruby had been pale and unusually fidgety.
Gideon had been bursting with questions, but he hadn’t dared put a one of them to her. When Ruby didn’t want to talk, the devil and ten red-hot pitchforks couldn’t make her do it.
Now, sitting in the schoolroom, he felt restless, as though there were something else he ought to be doing, and wasn’t.
He thought about Rowdy, the brother he barely knew.
You ever need any help, you’ll find me boarding at Mrs. Porter’s, over in Stone Creek.
A hand came to rest on Gideon’s shoulder just as he was recalling that conversation for the hundredth time, nearly scaring him right out of his hide. He wasn’t commonly the jumpy sort, and it embarrassed him mightily, the way he’d started. He felt his neck and face go warm.
“You’re not concentrating, Gideon,” Miss Langston said good-naturedly, smiling down at him. She was about a thousand years old, short and square of build, a phenomenon that had confounded him until Ruby had explained the mysteries of a lady’s corset. “It’s too early for spring fever, but I’ll vow, you’re already afflicted.”
Gideon tried to smile, because he liked Miss Langston. She was briskly cordial, and never made sly remarks about Ruby or his pa, like a lot of folks did. And she’d attended Rose’s funeral, too, he remembered. Cried into a starched hanky with lace trim around the edges.
“I’ve got some trouble at home,” he confided, keeping his voice down so he wouldn’t have to fight later, out in the schoolyard. He’d never lost a one of those battles, but, as his pa liked to say, there was no shortage of idiots in the world. There was always somebody ready to take him on.
Pa’d had things to say about that, too.
Pa.
“You’d best go and see to things there, then,” Miss Langston said, kindly and quietly. When he hesitated, she prodded him with, “You’re excused, Gideon.”
He fairly knocked his chair over backward, getting to his feet.
You ever need help—
Did he need help? He didn’t know.
He couldn’t have explained why he felt so nervous and scared. Something was bad wrong, though. He was sure of it. The knowledge stung in his blood and buzzed in his brain.
He ignored the quizzical stares of the other pupils—they ranged from tiny girls in pigtails to farm boys strong as the mules they rode to town—and shot out of the schoolhouse, down the steps, across the yard. He vaulted over the picket fence and sprinted for the livery stable four streets over.
* * *
ROWDY PLACED AN ORDER down at the sawmill, bought a hammer, a keg of nails, and some other tools at the mercantile, paid extra to have them delivered, Pardner tagging along behind him. Then, figuring he ought to do some marshaling, since he was getting paid for it, he walked the length of Center Street, speaking quietly to folks as he passed, touching the brim of his hat to the ladies.
He looked in at the bank and the telegraph office, introduced himself and Pardner.
He counted the horses in front of the town’s three saloons, and went inside the last one, which happened to be Jolene Bell’s place.
“That your deputy?” a grizzled old-timer asked, leaning against the bar and grinning sparse-toothed down at Pardner, who was sniffing at the spittoon.
“Leave it,” Rowdy told the dog.
Pardner sighed and sat down in the filthy sawdust.
“Don’t see no badge on him,” quipped another of the local wits.
Rowdy smiled. “This is Pardner,” he said. “Guess he is my deputy.”
“He bite?” asked the skinny piano player, looking worried.
“Not unless he has just cause,” Rowdy answered.
The old-timer’s gaze went to Rowdy’s badge, then shifted to his .44. “You a southpaw, Marshal?”
“Nope,” Rowdy said, looking straight at the old man, but noticing everything and everybody at the far edges of his vision, too.
Always know what’s going on around you, boy. Ignorance ain’t bliss. It can be fatal. He’d been raised on those words of Pappy’s, drilled on them, the way some kids were made to learn verses from the Good Book.
“Gun’s backward in the holster,” the piano player pointed out helpfully.
Rowdy glanced down at it, as if surprised to find it such. In the same moment, he drew.
The old-timer whistled.
The piano player spun around on his seat and pounded out the first bars of a funeral march.
Rowdy shoved his .44 back in the holster.
“Come, dog,” he told Pardner, and they went back out, into the bright, silvery cold of the morning.
From there, Rowdy and Pardner proceeded to the Stone Creek schoolhouse. He didn’t have any official business there, but he thought he ought to familiarize himself with the place, just the same.
And he wouldn’t be averse to a glimpse of Lark, either.
The kids were out for recess, running in every direction and screaming their heads off in a frenzy of brief freedom, while Lark watched from the step, wrapped tightly in her cloak, her cheeks and the end of her nose red in the bitter weather.
She didn’t see Rowdy right away, so he took his time sizing things up.
The building itself was painted bright red, and it had a belfry with a heavy bronze bell inside, sending out the occasional faint metallic vibration as it contracted in the cold. There was a well near the front door, and an outhouse off to one side. A few horses and mules foraged at what was left of last summer’s grass—come the end of the school day, they’d be carrying Lark’s students back home to farms and ranches scattered hither and yon.
Pardner lifted himself onto his hind legs and put his forepaws against the whitewashed fence, probably wishing he could join in a running game or two.
“Sit,” Rowdy told him quietly.
He sat.
The dog’s movement must have caught Lark’s attention, because she spotted them then. Made an awning of one hand to shade her eyes from the bright, cool sun.
Rowdy grinned, waited there, on the outside of the fence, while she hesitated, made up her mind and swept toward him, her heavy black skirts trailing over the winter-bitten grass.
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